Hurricane Donna and the End of Marco’s Missile Tracking Station

What would happen if a Category Four hurricane struck a military tracking station filled with radar equipment, electronic instruments, and two enormous antennas that looked like billboards? The answer came during the early morning hours of September 10, 1960, when Hurricane Donna passed directly over Marco Island with winds exceeding 130 miles per hour; the wind gauge at the tracking station blew out, and Islanders heard that gusts were reportedly as high as 185 mph with a powerful storm surge creating extensive flooding ashore. 

At the time, Marco Island’s Site D-7 was one of the southern tracking stations of the Eglin Gulf Test Range. Approximately fifty electronic technicians worked there, monitoring missiles and remotely controlled aircraft flying hundreds of miles over the Gulf of Mexico. The station contained some of the most advanced electronic equipment then in use, but no one knew how it would survive one of nature’s most destructive forces. 

The damage surrounding the station was extensive. The heavy-duty chain-linked fence was flattened, the doors of the generator building were destroyed, and the storm surge picked up a one-ton spool of lead-sheathed cable and carried it several hundred yards inland. Yet, amazingly, the main buildings and their sensitive equipment remained largely intact. 

Why did the station survive when so much of Marco Island did not? 

The answer was in the way it had been constructed. The buildings were supported by concrete pilings driven approximately 120 feet into the ground until they reached solid rock. The floors had also been built high enough that most of the storm surge remained below the electronic equipment, as well as below other equipment that had been moved up to safeguard from flood waters. The Air Force had apparently decided that if it was going to place an expensive military installation on the edge of the Gulf of Mexico, it would not take any chances. 

Perhaps the greatest concern involved the station’s two enormous tropospheric scatter antennas. These large “billboard” antennas were designed to transmit radio signals far beyond the horizon, linking Marco Island with Site D-8 at Cudjoe Key in the Florida Keys. During Donna, they must have acted like giant sails in the hurricane winds. Yet when the storm passed, the antennas had maintained their alignment, an impressive accomplishment considering the damage around them. 

Across Caxambas Pass lived a man locally remembered as the “Hermit of Kice Island.” Randy Gilmore, the manager of the Marco Missile Tracking Station in 1960, never met the hermit, but later remarked that the man probably would have been safer during Hurricane Donna if he had taken shelter inside the radar building. The contrast was remarkable: on one side of the pass lived an isolated “hermit” named Joe Dickman who usually, while barefoot, collected, cleaned, and sold shells he found for a living. He resided for 31 years in a simple house he had built which was destroyed in Hurricane Donna; while only a short distance away, fifty technicians operated a highly sophisticated Cold War tracking station built strongly enough to withstand a direct hit from a major hurricane. Mr. Dickman was smart enough not to try to ride out Hurricane Donna at his beachfront house and moved to a friend’s house on higher elevation property in Caxambas, owned by Mr. and Mrs. Otter (now known as “Otter Mound”). 

The Tracking station was also built to operate without outside electrical service. Site D-7 had huge backup generators, and the Vitro Corporation crew was able to restore its own power, probably before much of Southwest Florida had electricity. Communications, however, were another matter. Telephone and electronic connections with the other tracking sites had been severed, leaving Marco Island temporarily isolated from the rest of the range. 

How could the crew report that the station had survived? 

Randy Gilmore described one of his “biggest hurdles was chopping a way into the site,” a result of the numerous Australian Pine Trees that had fallen due to their shallow root structure creating a dense tangled wall. Randy had no choice but to drive north to Site D-4, Anclote Point near Tarpon Springs, to personally report the condition of the Marco facility to his supervisor. The trip through hurricane-damaged Southwest Florida was difficult, and gasoline was almost impossible to find. At one point, he was fortunate enough to obtain fuel from what he described as a “jury-rigged gas pump.” He referred to his return to SW Florida as going back to “Donnaville.” 

Hurricane Donna also affected Randy Gilmore personally. No government housing was provided to the Tracking Station staff and the mobile home he and his wife, Hattie, had purchased at Harmony Shores in East Naples suffered extensive hurricane damage. Like many other residents of Southwest Florida, the people who operated the tracking station had to repair their homes while also restoring an important military installation. The Marco Missile Tracking Station was up and fully operational before Christmas of 1960, slightly over three months later.   

The Marco station had survived one of the worst hurricanes in Florida history. Unfortunately, it could not survive the changing needs of the United States Air Force. 

The primary reason for building the chain of southern tracking stations had been the BOMARC surface-to-air missile program. The BOMARC was designed to intercept enemy bombers at great distances before they reached American cities. On March 3, 1961, only six months after Hurricane Donna, an IM-99B BOMARC intercepted a target more than 400 miles away at an altitude of approximately 80,000 feet and was deemed a success. 

The missile program had reached its peak, but it was also nearing its conclusion. By August 1963, after approximately 150 launches of the BOMARC A and B models, the official testing program ended. Without the constant need to track BOMARC missiles flying south over the Gulf, it became increasingly difficult for the Air Force to justify the tremendous cost of maintaining large electronic installations along Florida’s coastline.  

At the same time, advances in computers, mathematical modeling, and airborne telemetry reduced the need for fixed tracking stations hundreds of miles down the Florida coast. Aircraft carrying electronic tracking equipment could now perform some of the work previously done by installations like Marco. The physical size of the Eglin Gulf Test Range would gradually be contracted back toward the Florida Panhandle. 

Meanwhile, the nature of American warfare was changing. As the United States’ involvement in Vietnam increased during the mid-1960s, Eglin Air Force Base turned its attention away from long-range bomber interception and toward the immediate problems faced by American pilots in Southeast Asia. 

One major concern involved Soviet-built surface-to-air missiles being used against American aircraft over North Vietnam. At Eglin, engineers developed electronic countermeasures that allowed pilots to confuse, jam, or evade enemy radar systems. Randy Gilmore explained: “Eglin’s mission changed to having pilots train against enemy radar simulators in preparation for Vietnam.” He also confirmed that the “story” that the Marco Missile Tracking Station was closed as part of negotiations during the Cuban Missile Crisis was not true.  

The southern stations were not all closed at once. Cudjoe Key, Site D-8, was deactivated first, followed by Marco Island’s Site D-7, and finally Anclote Point, Site D-4, while Port St. Joe, Site D-3, remained part of the Eglin range. 

Cudjoe Key would soon take on another remarkable military role. In November of 1962, Randy Gilmore had left Marco, lived back in the panhandle and had been promoted to the manager of the entire Eglin Gulf Test Range. He was involved in the Cudjoe site during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He remembers visiting the Cudjoe Key site during the crisis. “The Hawk Missile unit had been moved to the Keys. The Missile unit had barbed wire all around and warnings that anyone trespassing would be shot. Not long after, I went back and they had a sign saying, ‘Welcome to the Hawk Missile Battery.’ Of course, that was after the crisis was over.” After the Air Force left, the site was transferred to the Central Intelligence Agency, which used a large balloon-mounted radar system to monitor activity around Cuba. 

Marco Island’s Missile Tracking Station had no such second military career. Once its mission ended, the equipment was removed and the approximately twenty-acre site eventually disappeared into the growing development of the Island. The road leading to the station, once traveled by technicians keeping an eye out for rattlesnakes and gopher tortoises, became part of the developing Marco’s beachfront. The Deltona Corporation used the abandoned buildings for storage and the site for their concrete plant. Much later, in preparation for the development of the Marco site, the remaining rubble from the Tracking Station, including its pilings, were transported by barge out into the Gulf to make a fishing reef. Reportedly, “Johns Reef” is where the material is located. 

The closing of Site D-7 did not mean that the station had failed. In fact, the opposite was true. It had survived Hurricane Donna, successfully supported the BOMARC missile program, and performed the mission for which it had been built. The world around it had simply changed. But the Eglin Test Range over the Gulf still exists today, still in use, and operational.   

For a brief period during the Cold War, one of the most sophisticated electronic installations in Southwest Florida stood at the end of a quiet road on Marco Island. On one side of CaxambasPass lived a man who made his living collecting shells; on the other, technicians tracked supersonic missiles, operated computer-controlled radar, and transmitted information hundreds of miles across the Gulf. Few examples demonstrate how the isolated Marco Island of the early 1960s existed alongside some of the most advanced military technology in the world.