It will take an army of sweepers and considerable largesse from Mother Nature before a flooded Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport can dry out and resume operations Friday morning after being inundated by an historic 26 inches of rainwater since Wednesday, Broward County officials said Thursday.
One of the nation’s busiest airports remained closed as squadrons of workers plowed through 5 feet of water in some places on the north runway, assessing damage and calculating what equipment will be needed for the massive cleanup so that planes operated by major commercial airlines can resume their flight schedules.
The airport announced that it is grounding all flights until at least 9 a.m. Friday due to the volume of flooding and debris on the air field, although the upper level roadways are open for passenger pick-ups. Travelers are advised not to come to the airport without checking their airline in advance for flight status, although the garage is open for cars to be removed. The lower-level roadway remains closed until further notice.
“Nature has been unkind to us,” Broward County Mayor Lamar Fisher said at an afternoon news conference at the airport. He warned travelers not to come to the airport.
“Please don’t come hoping to get on an airplane,” he said. “We hope to be operating again by Friday. We’re cautious, but optimistic.”
He emphasized that the airport will not reopen until all operations are in place, from aircraft to food deliveries and roadways.
“We will not open the airport until it’s completely safe for our visitors and our residents,” Fisher said.
A major issue, the mayor and airport officials said, is standing water of up to 5 feet on the north runway that has nowhere to go. Although the airport is surrounded by retention ponds designed to capture rainwater runoff, they are all either overflowing or are filled to capacity.
Another impediment: taxiways that feed the airport’s two main runways. Although the airport’s south runway built in 2014 is clear of water, the taxiways that lead to it are not.
“The south runway is in very good condition and it is dry,” said Michael Nonnemacher, the airport’s chief operating officer and deputy director of aviation. “In order for us to have aircraft operations, we have to have clean taxiways that serve the runways. That is our priority right now, trying to get those clean, but they still have standing water as well.”
Moreover, water has crept up to the terminal ramps, in some cases beneath the tails of parked jetliners.
“We also have the terminal ramp that as you can see is under the water,” Nonnemacher said, referring to water surrounding Terminal 2 and the Delta Air Lines planes parked behind him. “That has to recede before we can allow aircraft to proceed. Once that happens we clean it up and that’s the point where we can allow aircraft to travel.”
He also said that two multimillion-dollar systems that prevent planes from overshooting the runway were destroyed and that the concrete debris left behind has to be cleared.
Thousands stranded, inconvenienced
Regularly scheduled commercial air transportation in and out of the county remained a tenuous proposition with the airport closed and major roads submerged beneath floodwaters.
Spirit Airlines, which flies the most passengers in and out of the airport, canceled a 30th anniversary celebration so it could try to restore operations caused by the airport closure, a spokesman said. The airline announced all its flights would be discontinued until Friday morning.
JetBlue Airways, the second-busiest carrier serving the airport, said it would not resume operations until airport conditions allowed.
“Please closely monitor your flight status as well as local road conditions prior to traveling to the FLL Airport,” the airline said in a website message. JetBlue said it would waive change/cancel fees and fare differences for customers traveling Wednesday through Thursday on trips affected by the closure.
Stranded passengers on Thursday were visibly upset, frustrated and furious, many prevented from reaching their vacation destination, but others in more dire circumstances.
Yvette Ellis and her husband Rohan Jarrett, of West Palm Beach, were trying to get to Montego Bay, Jamaica, to attend Jarrett’s sister’s funeral. She died in childbirth.
They drove to Fort Lauderdale to fly Southwest using tickets obtained through a third-party broker.
Ellis was furious at the airline. “We tried to reach somebody, but there’s nobody here,” she said near the empty ticket counter about noon on Thursday. “At least they could have given us a call or some type of acknowledgement that this was happening.”
County Mayor Fisher said he was “sad to hear” that many passengers had failed to receive word that airport operations were ceasing as rains pummeled the airport on Wednesday.
“I thought we had communicated well,” he said. “We even asked our vendors to stay late. We will check on our communications component. We did our best.”
Bonnie Fickett, of West Palm Beach, arrived at the Fort Lauderdale airport only minutes after the announcement that all flights were grounded until Friday.
She said she was flying on JetBlue to Cancun, Mexico, and there were no flights out of either West Palm Beach or Miami. “I’m just so … angry,” she said, adding she had received a confirmation that her flight was scheduled and she now has lost a week’s worth of parking as well.
“I’m going home to have a drink,” she said. “I’m on vacation!”
Bob Maguire, who has a winter home in Boynton Beach, spent the night at the airport and had been hoping to get to Massachusetts on Thursday afternoon. But he said he was heading back to his Boynton home “to try to get some sleep.”
He said he used to operate a school district and there was “no sense of planning here. You would think they would have a contingency plan.”
“It was a disappointment,” he said. “I just thought it was disgraceful” the lack of information shared with passengers.
Darius Spencer of San Diego, who spent the night at the airport, played his ukulele to help keep the restless crowd entertained. He said he slept on the “very cold floor” because there was nowhere to lie down until he “found a nice cardboard box.”
But many passengers stranded at the airport remained frustrated.
“This is pure stupidity,” said Rob Gourley, of Sarasota, who had been heading to Nassau, the Bahamas, with his wife Dana and had been at the airport since Wednesday. “It’s the first time out in five years because of COVID and everything. We’re ready to just drive home and forget it.”
Bob McMahon, of Swanzey N.H., was at the airport with his girlfriend early Thursday. They had flown out of New Hampshire to Baltimore, then Jacksonville, then to West Palm Beach, where they were put in a taxi that took them to a motel near the Fort Lauderdale airport at 2 a.m. Thursday. “We’re already a couple days behind on our trip,” he said, and added he was hoping to extend his vacation to make up for the problems.
Arrival and departure boards Thursday morning were littered with misinformation, as some airlines scrambled to update flight statuses and others, like Southwest, listed no delays on any flights all morning.
Terminal 2, the Delta terminal, sat surrounded by water like a peninsula. Effects of receding water could be seen around the airport, with landscaping debris like wood chips lying along the walkways. Drivers started to pass through the closed lower level by mid-morning, although a pond of water sits between Terminals 1 and 2, blocking traffic.
Outside of Terminal 3, which houses JetBlue and other airlines, weary passengers slept outside on wooden benches. On the lower level of Terminal 4, which houses Spirit as well as international flights, hundreds of tagged bags sat waiting to be claimed. On the upper level, hundreds of people stood in line waiting to straighten out their flight arrangements.
Wellington Teixeira, who manages a Currency Exchange International booth on the lower level of Terminal 4 and has worked at the airport since 2018, said, “It’s the most flooding I have ever seen here. Even the hurricanes didn’t produce this much water” at the airport.
‘We are going to make it right’
At the news conference, Fisher said the county would take a look at the airport’s master plan to see what can be done in the future to prevent similar episodes of flooding.
Pressed about why floodwaters had overwhelmed the airport, he said: “Nature. Nature wasn’t kind to us.”
“It’s just unfortunate,” he said. “Having a storm like this — 26 inches of water in the airport — is just unprecedented. We have never had to deal with such an item.”
He said the county and its planners thought the new south runway and an overhaul of the northern runway in 2019 had addressed the issue.
“We thought we were there, but again, one of a thousand storms, we just can never predict,” Fisher said.
In the meantime, he said the county is receiving offers for help from a number of directions ranging from congressional representatives in Washington and the governor’s office in Tallahassee to other airports.
“All airports are ready to assist with equipment, whether it be lighting or whatever as well” Fisher said. “They are standing by to see what we need. We won’t know until the water has receded.”
The Federal Aviation Administration also has operatives on the ground he said, “not that we need their blessing to open up.”
“I want to make sure,” Fisher added, “we are not going to reopen this airport until it is completely safe for our visitors and our residents. No matter how long it takes we are going to make it right.”
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