Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

reinvented

Today’s Arizona Republic has a story about the overhaul of the former Williams Air Force Base, where I was born on my dad’s first day of pilot training. The base closed in the early 1990s, and since then the land has been parcelled up for, among other things, use as the new Williams Gateway Airport and as campus space for ASU East. (“A choppy flight into the future” - 10/13/03)

Williams’ new owners found splintery old buildings with asbestos and lead paint; mercury and fuel contamination; weeds growing in streets; outdated gas, electric, water and sewer systems; and coyotes, mice, snakes and skunks.

“Everything we looked at needed work,” said Wayne Balmer, Mesa’s project manager for the 4,100-acre base. “It will probably be another 10 years until all the buildings are remodeled or removed and all the utility systems are upgraded or rebuilt.”

Tip from Balmer to anyone considering reusing a military installation: “Realistically you should plan how much money you will need and how much time it will take to accumulate it and then double it.”

I’ve been to the former base a few times since my family moved back to Arizona in 1993. The first time was in 1995, around my 16th birthday. The Air Force gate guard was still there, and waved us, with our Davis-Monthan AFB car sticker, into the mostly deserted base. We found our old house, which I remembered only from photos, and we walked around the outside, my parents pointing out the dining room chandelier they’d installed so many years ago. When I drove through the base by myself in 1999 or 2000, the gate guard was gone and the area more obviously populated. I tried to find the old house, but the streets had since been renamed. The base still looked unmistakeably like an Air Force base, though, from the boxy buildings to the street layout, and I was able to pick out what I thought were the former Base Exchange/Commissary and the hospital where I was born.