Houma Naval Air Station Blimp Site, Louisiana

Houma Naval Air Station was one of eight blimp bases built during WWII. It operated until 1947, when it was transferred to the city of Houma, Louisiana, which has since operated the runways as a municipal airport, and the hangar area as an industrial park. The outlines of a few circular blimp mooring pads are still visible within the industrial park. It is located southwest of New Orleans, in a town dominated by the oil and gas operations in the Gulf of Mexico, and the industrial park is full of oil field service companies. The airport is a busy place for helicopters ferrying workers to and from offshore platforms. There was only one hangar built here, and most of it disappeared ages ago. Its floor is used as a storage site and as a truck training site. The concrete beams that ran along the sides of the 1,000-foot-long hangar are still there, and have been partially filled in to make warehouses. Though it was a wooden hangar, like most of them built at that time to conserve steel, the soft ground of southern Louisiana would not support the massive concrete towers that held sliding doors that were typically used on this type of hangar. Instead, doors at either end of the hangar were half domes, which moved aside on steel tracks.