Florida floods: Airport reopens as residents clean up mess
FORT LAUDERDALE, FLA. >> Fort Lauderdale’s airport reopened Friday morning, two days after an unprecedented deluge left planes and travelers stranded, as residents in the city’s hardest hit neighborhoods began the slow process of cleaning up the mess left behind.
Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport shut down Wednesday evening as a storm dumped more than 2 feet (60 centimeters) of rain. Airport officials completed final inspections after sunrise Friday and resumed operations at 9 a.m. By the afternoon, airport operations were slowly returning to normal, but the almost two-day closure was still affecting some passengers.
One of them was Michael Clement, a Baptist minister from Scottsbluff, Nebraska. Clement’s congregation, which he has served for 40 years, paid for him and his wife, Ariel, to visit their son, a missionary, who lives with his wife and three children in Sao Gabriel, Brazil, a small town in that nation’s deep south.
They set out Thursday, flying Southwest to Denver in hopes of catching a flight from there to Fort Lauderdale, where they would board a Friday night flight to Brazil. When the flight to Fort Lauderdale was canceled, they flew to Orlando instead, then drove about 200 miles (321 kilometers) in a rental car to reach the airport.
That’s where Clement sat on the floor Friday playing sudoku 10 hours before his flight — after first taking a taxi into the city to get a COVID-19 test he didn’t know he needed to fly on Azul Airlines.
The headaches had to be endured; the connecting flight they will catch in Brazil to Sao Gabriel is only scheduled twice a week and the tickets can’t be exchanged.
“We just plodded through it. The airline, Southwest, treated us very well,” Clement said.