Cost to return items to fliers? $562K

Broward County spent about $562,000 to reunite travelers with their left-behind belongings following the Jan. 6 shootings at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport.

Another $270,000 was spent replacing carpets and ceiling tiles in Terminal 2 after the shooter killed five people. And $314,700 went to a company that evaluated how officials handled the crisis.

Although accused gunman Esteban Santiago was taken into custody within minutes of the shootings, unsubstantiated reports more than an hour later of additional gunfire in other terminals led to panic, evacuations of all the terminals and the complete shutdown of the airport until the following morning.

The money paid to BMS CAT — the company that coordinated the returns of fliers’ abandoned items — amounted to

almost half of the $1.2 million in county emergency purchases directly related to the shooting incident. That cost excludes many overtime hours put in by county staff to assist BMS CAT and speed up the returns. “We knew it was going to be expensive,” said Broward Commissioner Barbara Sharief, who was county mayor at the time. “It was an enormous undertaking.” Close to 600 personal items remain unclaimed, but that is a fraction of the 23,000 items abandoned as airport visitors sought cover or were forced to evacuate following the gunfire. The leftover items include 55 still-packed pieces of luggage, handbags and shopping bags. There are also a couple of laptop computers, a couple of electronic tablets and eight cellphones. “We’re really not sure why those items have gone unclaimed,” airport spokesman Gregory Meyer said. Maybe the information didn’t get to their owners, some of whom might have been international travelers, or maybe the owners didn’t think the items were worth the bother, he said. Many of the items are travel-related or not of great value. For instance, there are 68 pairs of sunglasses, reading glasses and eyeglasses, 44 pillows, 45 hats and caps, 43 books and 63 coats and jackets. More than 90 percent of the items were returned within a few weeks of the incident, Meyer said. BMS CAT collected, tagged and photographed the items and put the pictures online so travelers could identify their belongings. The site will remain in operation until June. Any remaining items at that time will be turned over to the airport’s lostand-found department, which could eventually auction them off. The company first secured the passenger items in the four terminals, documented where they were found, took them to a central location for sorting, managed the identification effort and shipped the items to their owners. The company also cleaned up hazardous materials in Terminal 2, where the shootings took place, for which it was paid an additional $29,000. Other county expenses related to the shootings:

$9,404 for passenger assistance, providing mental health services and helping passengers contact relatives, make travel arrangements and resolve other needs that arose.

$5,135 to Mac’s Towing Service to remove cars abandoned on airport roads during the evacuations. In addition to the emergency purchases, the Broward Sheriff’s Office and 10 local police departments spent $433,000 on 5,600 hours of overtime responding to the shootings and for increased airport security and followup investigations in the days after the incident. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement is using a federal grant to reimburse that money. The Sheriff’s Office had the largest overtime expense: $288,000. Fort Lauderdale police were next at almost $60,000 and then $20,000 each for Hollywood and Davie police.