One of Florida’s biggest airports announced intentions to reopen Friday morning, two days after a record-breaking downpour stranded flights and passengers and turned Fort Lauderdale’s streets into rivers.
Officials at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport announced via a tweet that operations would resume at 9 a.m. after final inspections were completed after sunrise Friday.
“Travelers should check with their airlines for updated flight times BEFORE arriving at the airport.” “We appreciate your patience while we work to restore normal operations,” the message added.
A storm pounded more than 2 feet (60 cm) of rain on the airport Wednesday evening, forcing it to close.
“Nature has been unkind to us,” Broward County Mayor Lamar Fisher said at a news conference at the airport Thursday afternoon.
Although a flood warning had expired, the National Weather Service warned motorists that water-covered roads remained a hazard.
Residents and business owners cleaned up all throughout Fort Lauderdale. While rain began to fall in South Florida on Monday, majority of it fell on Wednesday, and the Fort Lauderdale area recorded record rainfall quantities ranging from 15 inches (38 centimetres) to 26 inches (66 centimetres) in a few of hours.
On Thursday, residents in the city’s Edgewood neighborhood walked through knee-high water or navigated the streets in canoes and kayaks. Dennis Vasquez, a window screen installer, towed some of his neighbor’s things to a car on dry land on an inflatable mattress. When water climbed to his chest in his residence Wednesday night, he lost everything.
“Everything, it’s gone,” he explained in Spanish. “But I will replace it.”
Christopher Alfonso and Tony Mandico, Edgewood neighbors for 50 years, said their homes are most certainly total losses.
They claimed that the neighborhood had never been severely flooded until a sanitary sewage system replaced septic tanks 10 years ago, raising certain streets and channeling rain onto lower roadways.
According to FlightAware.com, airlines were forced to cancel more than 650 flights in Fort Lauderdale on Thursday.
Southwest cancelled around 50 flights through Friday morning, according to a spokeswoman. According to her, the airline is allowing passengers to rebook flights to and from Miami and Palm Beach at no additional cost.
Frontier Airlines relocated two flights from Fort Lauderdale to Miami but canceled approximately 15 other round trips, according to a spokeswoman. Allegiant Air canceled several flights and redirected others to Tampa, Orlando, and Punta Gorda.
Broward County Public Schools, the nation’s sixth-largest school district with more than 256,000 pupils, canceled classes on Thursday and Friday as flooding filled some halls and classrooms.
The sight on Wednesday as floodwaters swelled in the streets was chaotic, with abandoned automobiles “floating like boats,” according to tow truck driver Keith Hickman.
“A truck would come by, and the wake would push the cars into the other cars, and they were just floating,” he explained. “I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”
The region received “an unprecedented amount” of rain, according to Shawn Bhatti, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Miami. Although the meteorological service was still validating totals, several gauges recorded up to 25 inches (63.5 cm) of rain.
“For context, the amount that fell within a six-hour period has a 1 in 1,000 chance of happening within a given year,” Bhatti added. “So it’s a very historical type of event.”