Passengers faced an air travel nightmare in South Florida on Thursday after a historic deluge left one of the region’s busiest airports partially submerged.
Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport (FLL), the region’s busiest airport after Miami International Airport (MIA), remains closed at least until 5 a.m. Friday after a localized series of extreme storms drenched the area and flooded the airport.
More trouble loomed for the airport Thursday as more rain was expected to fall in South Florida, raising the possibility of continued flooding, according to the National Weather Service.
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Fort Lauderdale is currently under a flood warning until 4 p.m.
More than 25 inches of rain fell in Fort Lauderdale on Wednesday. Water engulfed areas around FLL, including the surrounding roads, forcing the airport to close.
At around 2 a.m., the Fort Lauderdale airport reopened its upper-level roadways, allowing family and friends to pick up stranded passengers. The lower-level roadways were still closed early Thursday.
On Twitter, the Fort Lauderdale airport urged travelers not to enter or leave the airport as the roads were “impassable.”
The closure left airlines scrambling to provide customers with alternative flights and waivers. As of Thursday morning, 48% of flights departing from Fort Lauderdale were canceled, according to flight tracking site FlightAware.
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Greg Land, a Fort Lauderdale resident who was planning to travel from FLL to Seattle for a work trip, said he endured a harrowing experience at the airport on Wednesday, where he was stranded for 14 hours at FLL before deciding to walk toward the entrance of the airport — which was elevated and therefore, did not sustain any flooding — for two miles to catch a ride back home from U.S. Highway 1.
Due to the severity of the floods, no one was allowed to enter FLL for much of Wednesday.
“I was really frustrated at this point,” Land said. “So that’s when I started looking at maps to see: Was there a path that I could walk out?”
Land added that he and around 60 other people stood on the shoulder of the highway waiting for rides back home. His husband and next-door neighbor ended up picking him up from the highway, and Land did not get back home until 3 a.m.
“Families with babies in strollers who had run out of diapers or run out of formula and were just desperate to get somewhere and people with little kids — they were standing on the side of the highway because they wouldn’t let anybody into the airport,” he said.
The severe storms prompted Fort Lauderdale to issue a local state of emergency Thursday. The city is also now using airboats and high-clearance buggies to rescue people and pets stranded in flooded homes, according to CBS News.
Fort Lauderdale bore the brunt of the flooding, and nearby airports in Miami and West Palm Beach did not see the same extreme weather. Consequently, they were not seeing widespread flight disruptions Thursday, possibly giving stranded Fort Lauderdale passengers some backup options for rescheduling flights.
Land said he his experience at FLL paled in comparison to the floods that engulfed much of Fort Lauderdale that he saw on his drive back home.
“It was just a drop in the bucket,” he said. “I mean, the whole town was a mess.”
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