Airport mostly back to normal after shooting
Many abandoned belongings have not yet been returned.
Strollers. Bags. Purses. Shoes. Toys. Glasses. Car keys.
Thousands of items sitting in an aviation hangar. Items separated from people who dropped everything as they ran for their lives.
They — more than 20,000 items in all — are just part of the residue from the act of one man stepping out of a restroom at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport with a pistol.
On the first weekday since Estaban Santiago allegedly shot 11 people at midday Friday at a Delta Air Lines carousel, killing five of them, America’s 21st busiest airport — and the primary airport for a large segment of Palm Beach County — was mostly back to normal Monday.
Or, at least, however “normal” would be defined following one of the most chaotic single days in the history of commercial aviation in South Florida.
It’s not just the keys and purses. Or the thousands of pieces of luggage, still bearing tags, that never left the airport because they never got to planes that never got off the ground.
Baggage claims areas usually aren’t dusted by FBI crime scene technicians or sanitized by bio-hazard crews after their blood-stained carpeting was torn up.
By Monday, the FBI had released two-thirds of the Terminal 2 baggage claim area and it was back in business.
And about half the abandoned belongings had been reunited with their owners or were on their way to them.
“We’ve returned thousands of pieces of luggage and items, but we have thousands more to deal with,” airport spokesman Greg Meyer said Monday. “A litany of items that have been just dropped when you’re fearing for your life.”
Meyer said airlines still were working to resolve the backlog after hundreds of flights were diverted or canceled after Friday’s shooting. Planes ready to head to the runway had turned back. Crews loading passengers at the gate had been told to stop. Inbound flights never left their originating cities.
The airport usually handles 700 flights in and out every day, and was moving 1,000 the previous week bec ause of the holidays, Meyer said.
It was airport management, Meyer said, that made the call to close the airport soon after the shooting. And about the time one report of shots fired in terminal 4, and of a second gunman lurking in a nearby garage — both false — prompted more stampedes.
Meyer said that, despite the inconvenience to thousands of travelers, reopening Friday evening, or anytime before Saturday morning, wasn’t an option.
“You have this panic situation,” he said. He said people were told to leave the airport if they could. Those who could get to their cars drove off. Passengers as well as airline and airport workers and even Transportation Security Administration agents abandoned their posts and just ran. Then law enforcement closed roads to the airport, including the ultrabusy Interstate 595.
On top of that, Meyer said, by dinnertime Friday, police still weren’t satisfied that the threat was limited to one man, or that it was over.
“It would be impossible to open the airport at that condition,” Meyer said. “This was a very fluid situation.”
And, he said, “we had 12,000 people stuck at the airport who needed to get out. I was very proud of my colleagues, along with the airlines, to be able to reopen at 6 a.m. on Saturday.”
Meyer also said the airport still is investigating how security video that allegedly shows Santiago opening fire ended up on a celebrity web page.
It was an intense time for Meyer, who worked at West Palm Beach’s WPEC-TV Channel 12 for several years. He said he probably has spoken to about 400 reporters in the past few days. And averaged about three hours of sleep a night.