An Oral History

with

Michael McKinion

SSC History Project

Interviewer: Martin Oramous

2005
Biography

Mike McKinion is the Lead Operator for the Energy Management Control Systems at 

Stennis Space Center. He graduated from the University of Southern Mississippi with a 

Bachelor’s Degree in Mechanical Technology.

He began his career at Stennis Space Center with Pan American World Airways in 1981. 

During his career at SSC he served on the Acceptance Test Team for the first Utility 

Control System in 1983. Mike has also served on the ride-out crew for Hurricane George 

in 1998 and the Y2K Transition Team.
1

An Oral History

with

Michael McKinion

This is an interview by the Stennis Space Center History Office. The purpose of this 

interview is to document the story of key personnel during/after Hurricane Katrina at 

SSC. The interview is with Michael McKinion and is taking place on December 1, 2005. 

The interviewer is Martin Oramous. Also present are Paul Foerman and Shelia Reed.

MARTIN ORAMOUS: Tell us your name and your job position and go from there.

MICHAEL MCKINION: My name is Mike McKinion. I work for Mississippi Space 

Services here at the Stennis Space Center. My function during emergencies is a part of 

the Emergency Operations Group. I work on a console in the Emergency Operations 

Center with Don Griffith and a couple of other guys from our group. My normal duties 

are with the Energy Management and Control System. That’s kind of a nerve interface 

here at Stennis oriented toward facilities. Maybe that’s how I came to become called the 

“Operator” in the Emergency Operations Center. We do the hurricane activity several 

times a year. We’re pretty well versed at that. It’s pretty routine as far as the spin-up and 

activating the ride-out crews and the shelters. We expected that with Katrina. We talked 

about it Friday while the storm was well out into the Gulf. I believe we came in Saturday 

night or early Sunday morning. The ride-out crews did and started up from there and 

finished up the final preparations for Stennis, the tying down, the cleaning up and the 

preparing for the folks that normally come to evacuate. My place to go during hurricanes 

is already pretty well decided for me. It wasn’t a choice about evacuating and so forth.

We’re used to that part of it. We just weren’t used to the part where it actually came up

Coleman Avenue. We weren’t really expecting that but in kind of a way, I know I was. I 

had thought about the hurricane season for years. It always bothered me that we always 

seemed to miss. They can’t keep doing that forever. They certainly didn’t miss this time. 

MARTIN ORAMOUS: What is the biggest effort you have to make in preparing for a 

hurricane and was there anything done differently for Katrina once you realized it is 

coming up Coleman Avenue and it is a big one?

MICHAEL MCKINION: No, we really didn’t prepare any differently. My function in 

that spin-up to the hurricane activity is one mostly of communication with the managers 

and with all the Emergency Coordinators from the different agencies. A lot of e-mails go 

in and out as far as the status of Stennis and what condition are we in. Until the storm 

actually hit, it was just like we had done it 20 times in the past few years, same activity. 
2

In the EOC in B1100, you don’t really know what’s going on outside. You can’t really 

tell how bad the wind is blowing. You are kind of isolated from a lot of that. The 

television, it just looks like a big whirly thing on the T.V. It’s not very scary there. One 

thing that was different this year, we were able to watch from the EOC the security 

cameras around Stennis. That was a pretty big change there. We could zoom around the 

site and go look at different things and that gave us some feedback on what was going on. 

It was pretty routine up until the storm hit. It was just like all the others I have been 

involved with over the years. 

MARTIN ORAMOUS: Where do you live? How did you leave your residence or your 

family? Did they evacuate?

MICHAEL MCKINION: I live in Bay St. Louis. I came to find out that I was correct in 

thinking I lived on one of the higher points in the city. The topo map said my house is 

above 25 ft which there is not many houses in Bay St. Louis that are above 25 ft. Because 

I do work here, our plan is to evacuate to Stennis. My wife has come out here several 

times. Normally it is a pretty short stay. We spend a night, go home the next day. 

Everything is O.K. She stayed out here with me for 11 days this time. We made one or 

two trips to Bay St. Louis to check the property. We fared much better than many people. 

Our house was still there. We didn’t have rising water on our property. We lost the roof 

to our house so we did have some damage but we had something to go back to. A lot of 

people didn’t have anything to go back to. We did fairly well. There are three children. 

Two of those totally lost their house. The third had 4 or 5 ft of water in their house. So, 

that was pretty devastating to them. The reaction is as individual I guess as the people 

are. How people react and what they think and what they do and how if affects them, 

with some people it is pretty nonchalant and with some it’s just totally devastating. They

seem to be doing well. We are all camping out at our place right now. Laughter...

MARTIN ORAMOUS: During the storm you were in 1100 on the north end?

MICHAEL MCKINION: I was in B1100 during the storm. I was in the EOC that’s 

right off the lobby. That’s the 137C room right off the back corner of the lobby. There 

was a big rush of activity when the roof let go up there. I didn’t see it. I didn’t hear it. I 

just heard the people. I heard the big surge of activity outside the room, the radio traffic. 

We knew something was going on there. The folks in the EOC, they cautioned us when 

the eye came over Stennis not to go outside. Don’t go outside. The first thing you do is 

get up and walk outside and see what’s going on. The surprising things in addition to the 

debris, there was a lot of debris out behind the clinic is where we walked out the door. A 

lot of debris, a lot of things came off the roof and damaged vehicles and that kind of 

thing. The seagulls were the surprising thing, the amount of birds that were around. It was 

a thought that people never have. What do birds do when this thing happens? They get in 

the eye and they can’t get out. There were seagulls everywhere. We didn’t stay out too 

long. Actually, the eye was over us for quite a period but we stayed out about ten minutes 

and came back in. It was a new experience.
3

MARTIN ORAMOUS: What were the biggest challenges you faced? The eye has come 

through, the storm passes, you have got literally thousands of people on-site that aren’t

usually there even during a hurricane plus all the destruction. Where do you go from 

there?

MICHAEL MCKINION: Well, that was the new part for us. We had never done that 

before. We hadn’t rehearsed that part of our plan. It was kind of a play it by ear type of 

thing. We had the ride-out crew. They were still here. They were doing well. We could 

cycle through shifts and keep somebody on the console all the time. The new group we 

had to interface with was the FEMA people. There was a group there that you didn’t 

know who they were or where they came from but they were here. There were a lot of 

things happening at Stennis that we hadn’t rehearsed. We didn’t know how to deal with a 

lot of that stuff. Those guys came and briefed us on basically their role here at Stennis. 

There was a lot of incoming traffic. There was a lot of traffic coming in the way of 18 

wheelers and tractor trailer rigs big vehicles under the FEMA contract. We learned a lot 

about that working with the security folks to determine where to send those vehicles. 

How to route them to the FEMA guys. Where were they located? We had to come up 

with some signage to put on the highway to help the truckers who were from Coast to 

Coast. They came from all over and they were looking for FEMA. We learned how to 

determine Stennis traffic versus FEMA traffic. That was the main thing there with getting 

that going.

The people from outside the disaster area were real helpful in the fact that they weren’t 

involved. It was kind of difficult because you were involved, the people here were 

involved because their homes were flooded or flatten or whatever the case may be so the 

folks that came in from outside the area were helpful in that regard because they were 

still kind of thinking clearly not that we weren’t but we had a lot of things to worry about 

during those days right after the storm. The primary thing that was a concern for most 

folks was the lack of fuel. The local stations were out of service, under water, no 

electricity so fuel was a big problem. On the other hand, people were trying to go to their 

home and see what it looked like. So, every time you drove you came back and you had 

that much less fuel in your car. That was a concern. We tried to encourage people to go in 

groups together to their homes and look and do whatever they could do. If there was 

nothing you could do, there was no need to go because you would be sitting on the side 

of the highway here in a day or two. 

The folks from out-of-state did a good job. I supposed they train in these type disaster 

responses. It is like running our hurricane drill. That’s pretty standard operation for those 

guys. They just look at it like work. It wasn’t a disaster to them, it was just work. They 

showed up and took it like that. For us here at Stennis, there were a lot of people to take 

care of and a lot of decisions being made. I have to give Don Griffith a lot of credit for 

that. He was totally overwhelmed and continued to hold his own with all the decisions he 

had to make. We certainly tried to help him every way we could. The crews that were out 

here, I don’t know how long everyone stayed but we stayed about 14 days or so before 

people started coming back to work in limited numbers. It was like a brand new day to 
4

them but it was like we were just worn to a nub after 14 days it was time to do something 

different. 

MARTIN ORAMOUS: How did the lack of power and the lack of communication 

affect Emergency Operations? 

MICHAEL MCKINION: That’s where we had the emergency crews, the ride-out crews 

and the electrical engineers. Those guys... we’ve got a lot of portable generator 

capability. We’ve got some fixed capability out at the test complex that can operate some 

generator power. They were making decisions as to what buildings to power up. Who had 

power and who didn’t have power, lift stations, how to get rid of the waste water, all of 

those kinds of things were things you had to deal with and they met every few hours to 

regroup and make sure we were working on the hottest priority of the moment and that 

changed every 3 or 4 hours something new would float to the top and would need to be 

taken care of. 

The Power Company, I don’t know the timeframe for restoring power to Stennis, but I 

think the Power Company had power back out to Stennis within 10 days maybe, two 

weeks. I don’t know the dates but it was pretty impressive that they were able to put 

power back out here to Stennis that quickly. That got the majority of our facilities back 

on commercial power and in turn reduced the stress on the fuel supply system because if 

you are running all of the generators, they use a lot more fuel than the power company 

does to keep these buildings under power. The fuel guys worked really hard to move fuel 

around in their tankers to keep the generators running. There was a lot of stress on the 

supply system in that regard. The warehouse system did above and beyond type work in 

dealing with the donations. Those were particular additional things that you didn’t really 

know how to deal with. You don’t know how you’ve got to stop and take the time to sort 

all that donated food or clothing or whatever it is. So, there was a lot of labor involved 

with that you had to expend to try and deal with that kind of thing.

MARTIN ORAMOUS: What did Emergency Operations have to move into as far as 

what you had to deal with? Were you trying to locate people? Was that part of your 

function?

MICHAEL MCKINION: The group upstairs, I don’t know who was in charge but I just 

thought of them as the group upstairs, I think it was Environmental Services Lab or Earth 

Research Lab, they had a Call Center and we worked with the communication guys. Once 

the phones came back up, the phones were off for quite a long period but once the phones 

came back up, the only way you could not hear a phone ringing is to not hang it up. If 

you hung it up, it would ring. So when you were talking to someone that was like you 

were on break. If you finished the conversation and hung up you just got to meet a new 

person. When we got the com guys to redirect the phones upstairs, they probably had a 

staff of maybe ten people answering phones that took a lot of pressure off the Emergency 

Operations Center. We were able to get back to our line of work and manage the 

Emergency a little bit better for Stennis. People would call, one the com techs, one of the 

computer techs, Terry called, and was very excited because the phone worked. She had 
5

been calling for a week and the phones didn’t work. She finally got to call and I knew 

Terry. She asked, “How are things at Stennis?” I said, “Well, they are very hectic but we 

are O.K.” She asked about coming home. I said, “No, where are you?” She was in 

Arkansas. I said, “You need to stay there for another 3 or 4 days, maybe a week. There is 

really no reason to come here. The sooner you get here the worse it is going to be because 

there is no service, there’s no electricity, there’s no fuel. If you are staying in Arkansas in 

a hotel, you would be better off to stay there for another week or so.”

MARTIN ORAMOUS: Could you tell us what the normal function of the EOC is and is 

it any different because of the storm making such a direct impact?

MICHAEL MCKINION: Well, we never trained and we’ve never experienced the 

devastation of a storm. We’ve always trained on the front side of the storm. We trained 

what to do to prepare. There was a lot of learning going on for us but that is kind of our 

business. We are in the facilities business. My group with the MSS group, we are in 

facilities. We manage fuel, electricity, and air-conditioning. That was what we normally 

do. The information that people wanted; I guess our big learning curve there was the 

contacts off-site. The NASA contacts at Marshall. The State contacts, the Highway 

Patrol, the folks in Louisiana, the Emergency Response people in Louisiana. Some of 

those were significant where in the past they hadn’t been. If the disaster doesn’t actually 

strike, you never get a chance to talk to these folks. So, we had to meet those people. On 

a real low level, the most significant thing that I learned was don’t hang up the phone 

until you get a name and a phone number because the first thing the next person you 

mention that to will say, “Who was that and how do I get in touch with them?” There was 

a lot of that. It was just standard practice to get the names and phone numbers no matter 

what they were talking about.

Michoud was a new function for us. They were isolated down at the Michoud Assembly 

Facility. They were isolated from the rest of the world so to speak. So we coordinated a 

lot of shipments on the helicopters to go there. They took ice, water and food to those 

guys. Some time during all of this, it was determined that the Highway 11 Bridge was 

open so then they started doing truck convoys to Michoud to take them what they needed. 

A lot of those things were brought by Kennedy, a lot of generator capability. Marshall 

brought a lot of people down to help. They wanted to know what should we bring. Do 

you need food, water? The fellow told them, “No we need about 10 sets of washers and 

dryers and 300 lbs of Tide.” Laughter... The priorities change when you get people here 

that have been here a week, you need to wash some clothes. That was a pretty high 

priority there. In MSS we hooked up the power, the washing machines and wherever the 

people were they had washing machines out the door in some mechanical room or out in 

the atrium. After the 1st week that started to become higher on the priority list. You 

needed to wash some of these clothes. 

MARTIN ORAMOUS: It sounds like up until now everything has kind of been a dry 

run.
6

MICHAEL MCKINION: It has. It has for me and I’ve been here at Stennis doing the 

hurricane drill for, well I’ve been here a little over 20 years but I think I’ve been in the 

Emergency part of it for probably 15 years and we’ve never had anything approaching 

this as far as a disaster. I think we held our own. We did O.K.

MARTIN ORAMOUS: In a way you’ve been rehearsing it for 15 years. Is there 

anything that really stands out that surprised you or just blind sided you that you didn’t 

expect?

MICHAEL MCKINION: No, not really. There were a lot of experiences when you see 

peoples’ reactions. Some people do real well and some people don’t. I don’t see anything 

that totally surprised us other than the Com System going off when the phones went out 

in the EOC. That’s not a bad thing you just can’t talk to anyone. It’s actually a slow time. 

You can’t talk to anyone. That’s probably something that we really need to address. I’m 

sure the guys that manage the phone system are going to take care of that. The local 

phone companies, they didn’t do any better. The surprising thing for me was how fast the 

cell phones came back up. I had thought about that over years how everybody is going to 

the cell phones, what are we going to do when the storm comes and blows all of the 

towers down? Go find a pole, climb up that baby and hang whatever these things use to 

talk on, they hang it right up there and go back to talking. So they were back on quicker 

than the normal phone service. I don’t know how many days into the storm the AT&T 

folks brought us some telephones. They brought some phones to the South Gate and 

hooked up some telephone service so people could go and call their family and that kind 

of thing. That was probably the biggest thing that really surprised us I supposed is just the 

total lost of communication and I’m sure the guys that plan for this kind of thing have got 

that first on their list.

MARTIN ORAMOUS: How would you characterize the overall effort of the whole 

scene here at Stennis?

MICHAEL MCKINION: Well, it was pretty awesome when you go out there and see 

all the trees lying on the ground. These are not just little trees, these are big huge trees 

and they are all snapped off 30ft in the air just like a lawn mower came through. They are 

all pointing in the same direction. That kind of told me that there was no tornado 

involved in that. It was just a big wind that blew all this down. I think overall Stennis 

fared pretty well. It’s a pretty robust facility. The facility did fare pretty well. The trees 

and the forest and all the greenery around Stennis has come back out in a false Summer is 

what people have told me what that is. Everything has kind of re-blossomed again. Even 

though it is Fall, everything has come back out green. A lot of tree damage this far away 

from the beach. 

The FEMA guy told us and I’ve heard this from people who have studied from outside 

the area, they’ve studied the slosh models and those kinds of things and it talks about 

how the susceptible the Coast was to flooding. People in the local areas all talked about 

Camille, who got water and who didn’t. This raised the bar pretty significantly but the 

FEMA guy said if the storm had tracked about 20 miles further to the West that he 
7

thought there would be water in this building. So, that was pretty much an eye opener 

there. If that’s the same guy that said Bay St. Louis is going to flood then we need to get 

some dikes built around here. That was a surprising thing. You can see some water lines 

that just make your mouth open. You just can’t believe the water got that high but it sure 

did. It was a lot of water.

MARTIN ORAMOUS: When did your EOC effort start winding down?

MICHAEL MCKINION: I don’t remember. Mine did after 14 days. I took a few days 

off. We probably worked in there another week or two. We might have stayed active in 

there for a month overall. My office in the Energy Management Office is almost like the 

EOC as far as the environment anyway. We continued to monitor the radio the traffic 

with the FEMA Group 24/7 there. Don stayed here in the EOC probably for two months. 

He may still be in there today. I don’t know. He didn’t have a home to go back to so he 

was staying somewhere around Stennis. He may have a trailer to stay in now. He stayed 

there for quite a while. I think we pretty much put a sign on the door and said the EOC is 

closed probably after about 30 days and started to try and route the traffic somewhere 

else.

MARTIN ORAMOUS: Did you ever think you would have to spend 30 days in the 

EOC?

MICHAEL MCKINION: No, but like I said as more and more systems come back, the 

phones systems come back you’ve got people you can hand things off to, once those 

systems got reestablished you could stay there a long time. That’s the kind of thing we do 

at our office anyway. We answer the phone and hand it off to whoever needs to take care 

of whatever the individual is looking for, the group or the agency is looking for, power, 

water, sewer, whatever the case is. It’s good to get a copy of it because your memory 

starts to fade and all those things you thought you would never forget start to kind of go 

away and I don’t really have the urge to go back and try to remember all that. When it’s 

exciting for the Waffle House to be coming on-line in Bay St. Louis it’s a pretty slow 

time. Laughter... I called my wife on the cell phone two days ago and said, “They’ve got 

salt and pepper shakers on the table, it won’t be long now.” Laughter...

MARTIN ORAMOUS: The simple things are things you miss the most.

MICHAEL MCKINION: Oh, yea. My wife and I are big on the restaurant circuit. We 

don’t have children living with us so we are out adventuring looking for somewhere to 

eat. 

MARTIN ORAMOUS: Slim pickings right now.

MICHAEL MCKINION: Pretty slim. We found a little Sports Bar in Diamondhead the 

other night that was kind of a breath of fresh air. So that was an interesting night. We will 

go back there. We’ll go back for Monday night football again and check that out.
8

MARTIN ORAMOUS: Is there anything that you can think of that stands out in your 

mind that we haven’t gone over or talk about? 

MICHAEL MCKINION: No, it’s just... getting back to the people in town. 

Everybody’s got a story. You just have to slow down to listen to their story and hear what 

they are dealing with. It’s one of those things. I was real aware of hurricane season and 

you studied hurricanes and every year you come away from that with a new thought 

about how to judge the track of a hurricane, how big the storm is, a 30 mile eye versus a 5 

mile eye. That kind of thing and it doesn’t devastate the whole Gulf Coast like this storm 

did here. This storm here, I think they’re showing a clip of Mike Reader talking about 

this might be the worse case scenario and I think it was. It could have been a little bit 

worse for New Orleans but not a lot. I spent a little time looking at that and those folks 

over there had a pretty hard time with their levee system. I have no doubt that the people 

will continue to live and enjoy the Coast and do all the things you do on the Coast. It just 

may take a little while to get back to some semblance of normalcy. As long as you stay 

off the beach it looks pretty good but when you go down to the beach it’s pretty bare.

MARTIN ORAMOUS: How do you think we’re doing now at Stennis and in the 

community overall?

MICHAEL MCKINION: Stennis is good. They are back testing rockets and things are 

pretty well back to normal. There are still some people that are missing from work that 

haven’t come back to work and that kind of thing. For the most part everyone is back at 

work. Maybe not really excited about their living conditions, they are all in trailer parks 

and staying different places. I think Stennis is pretty normal. One of the funny things that 

I will tell you about the cafeteria when we were staying here at Stennis. I enjoyed having 

no choices. You show up with $5, I want a plate. Laughter... It doesn’t matter what you 

are having, I just want some of it. That will get you back to where you need to be. Now 

you have to go and pick and choose what you would like to have for lunch. That kind of 

made me smile when I went in there with my $5 everyday at lunch. You know I will have 

one of those and it doesn’t really matter what it is. I’ll eat it. 

The community, if you stay away from the beach, is starting to look pretty normal. A 

good bit of the debris in Bay St. Louis and Hancock County is starting to move away. 

There is still a lot of it out there but in most places they have made the 1st pass maybe the 

2nd pass as far as the FEMA contract people or the Corp of Engineer contract people. 

They have come through and done that. They have done it 2 or 3 times on our street. Our 

street is pretty well cleaned up. The places in Waveland, I went there today and looked 

around Coleman Avenue. There is still debris. They are getting their Right of Entry forms 

lined up and they will bring the bulldozers in there and push all that out. There’s not 

anything to recover there. So that will be just debris. If you haven’t been there you should 

go down there and look at that. That is an impressive power that the storm had.

MARTIN ORAMOUS: It’s been three months.
9

MICHAEL MCKINION: That’s right. People still are really severely affected by it. 

They are kind of in their own little world. They will go do things they want to do and you 

invite them to come eat or come visit or whatever and they just won’t come. They’re just 

kind of huddled up and hunkered down still. Maybe they will lighten up here as time 

passes. It’s fixing to be Christmas and everybody is really not in the Christmas spirit but 

that won’t matter. It’s fixing to be Christmas so you just kind of have to go with the flow 

there. We had a good Thanksgiving. We got our family together. I think we cooked in 

microwaves and crock pots. We were struggling with the gas system in Bay St. Louis. 

We didn’t have an oven but we’re doing a lot better now.

MARTIN ORAMOUS: Those little things you take for granted.

PAUL FOERMAN: You stated basically you did dry runs in the EOC until now. Did 

this storm with it being a direct impact and as powerful as it was, does this change how 

you will plan for future hurricanes?

MICHAEL MCKINION: No, I think on the front side it won’t change. I think we will 

have to add a back half to our plan. I think we will have a recovery section that we will 

have to come up with. I don’t think we did a bad job like we did. We just didn’t have a 

backup team or at least in my mind we didn’t have a team to come and relieve the 1st

team. When the 1st team has been there for 14 days, it’s time to hand it off to someone 

and do something a little different there. That’s the part of our plan that we may need to 

spend some time working on. The front half though as far as the planning for the shelters, 

the security people, the shelter managers, and all of those kinds of folks did a good job 

and everything worked real well. I don’t know what kind of planning and I’m not real 

privy to how much planning do you want to have for people to stay here longer term. 

That was the thing we kind of had to play by ear. I don’t know if you plan on having a 

thousand or two thousand people living here for a month, they’ll certainly show up and

take you up on that if you let them. Laughter... whether you have a bad storm or not. 

PAUL FOERMAN: Any thoughts that you would like to share for someone years down 

the road that may have to experience something like this?

MICHAEL MCKINION: I thought and I thought about this today driving in. The closer 

I got to the hurricanes and I was very nervous about the hurricane season every year, the 

more so as time passed and we did more years of this, I just hoped that I wouldn’t have to 

experience it. When it happened and I saw the Coleman Avenue video from the television 

and how flat everything was I said this would be one of those life experiences that you 

don’t forget. As far as for people down the road, it’s a shame that they won’t get to see 

the beach. My wife and I in our little adventures riding around looking for restaurants, we 

drove up and down the beach 2 or 3 times a week and looked at the houses and 

everybody’s homes and so forth. We had just started riding our bikes in town and I told 

her after the storm I knew we were having too much fun this summer. I don’t know that I 

have anything in a nutshell for people down the road other than if the guy with the slosh 

model says it’s going to flood you need to drive about 50 miles inland. That’s for sure. 

That surprised a lot of people there the fact that it flooded like it did. I hope we don’t 
10

have to do it again soon. It’s an experience. It’s one of those life experiences that people 

won’t forget and if you guys can get some more folks to come talk to you on the video 

that will probably be an O.K. thing too.

MARTIN ORAMOUS: Good.

MICHAEL MCKINION: Anything else.

MARTIN ORAMOUS: No, we’re good.

MICHAEL MCKINION: Good deal.

(End of Interview)