OT: Making bigger wind-turbines 5.6MW now, 12MW soon.

[Michael Terrell]

On Thursday, October 31, 2019 at 9:06:13 PM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:

On Thu, 31 Oct 2019 13:24:22 -0700 (PDT), Michael Terrell wrote:

On Thursday, October 31, 2019 at 12:24:09 PM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:

We used to drive from New Orleans to Destin for vacation breaks.
Gorgeous dunes, warm water, and sugar-sand beaches, hardly anyone else
there. We'd never make a reservation, just drive up to some motel
across the highway from the beach. It was cheap.

When was this? I built a TV station (WMRX, Ch 58) in Destin almost 30 years ago. It was so crowded that it wasn't funny, and large areas of beach were off limits. They were either military property, or closed to protect the sea grass Ft. Walton Beach, and Sandestin were both tourist traps, and over priced. Anything along Highway 98 was expensive. It was so expensive that I lived in a camper, inside the TV station building while I installed and set up the transmitter.


Late 60s, when I was in college.

By the '80s, it was a lot different. A lot of the older motels were being torn down and replaced by shopping centers or new subdivisions. The land values went up, and older buildings came down. When the entire strip of land was only two miles wide, there was no room to grow. There aren't many places the the beach is no more than a mile away for an entire city.

I think that the TV station was at 502 Mountain Drive. The building was the offices and service depot of the developer who built almost everything there for decades. There was a quarter inch of old dried grease and diesel fuel on the floor of the service bay that became the studio and transmitter room. It is now a 'Pep Boys' Auto Parts Store.

It was almost impossible to do your own work on anything in that county, because of the overpriced condos in Sandestin. The few wholesalers simply refused to sell to anyone but large contractors. Even local branches of companies that I dealt with in other parts of the state refused. We had to go to Panama City to get copper pipe, or a 4'x10' sheet of 1/4" steel that I used to mount all of the electrical switch gear on.