Airport reopening as South Florida floods slowly recede

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.

While it started raining on Monday in South Florida, much of the water fell Wednesday, and the Fort Lauderdale area saw record rainfall amounts in a matter of hours, ranging from 15 inches (38 centimeters) to 26 inches (66 centimeters).

In Fort Lauderdale’s Edgewood neighborhood on Friday morning, the water level had receded about a foot from Thursday but was still up to 2 feet (.6 meters) deep in some spots as residents tried to clean up.

Newlywed Tatiana Rodriguez pointed to the spot a foot above the floor where the water rose inside the one-room rental she shares with her husband, Joseph. The patio they share with other boarders and use to enter their home remained underwater.

Tatiana, a hotel worker from Colombia, and her husband, a restaurant kitchen assistant from New York, have no electricity to power their air conditioning, small microwave or tiny refrigerator.

The bridal tiara from their marriage last month is still hanging on the headboard of their bed. When the water started gushing into their home Wednesday night, they went outside and found foot-high cinder blocks that they used to prop the bed up.

“The only thing we think about is, ‘Save the bed,’ because if we don’t have the bed we will have to leave,” Tatiana Rodriguez said as she swept debris. “We are lucky because we can stay.”

Nearby, yacht deckhand Sawyer Canale trudged through the water with his two South African houseguests, Fran Human and Dominic Linda.

Canale, who moved to Edgewood last week, said he was lucky because his house sits on a tiny hill, keeping the water inches from seeping inside. But the trio was surrounded on all sides by flooding.

“I can’t complain — all of my stuff is dry,” Canale said. “But everything around us is wet.”

“It is not the vacation we expected,” Human deadpanned.

Hayden Wooster spent two days driving Edgewood’s streets in his large pickup truck, helping people get to and from their homes. He said he was able to help two people with medical devices leave their home after firefighters in a small boat couldn’t, and also helped a family with two disabled daughters to evacuate.

“Grabbed them, grabbed their wheelchairs and got them to the hotel,” said Wooster, an attorney.

Airlines were forced to cancel more than 650 flights at the Fort Lauderdale airport on Thursday, according to FlightAware.com.

On Fort Lauderdale Beach, the three-day Tortuga Music Festival kicks off Friday afternoon, headlined by Eric Church, Kenny Chesney, Jake Owen and Shania Twain. The “rain or shine” event left many ticketholders out of luck once the airport closed.

Amber Borkoski of Baltimore, Maryland, purchased festival tickets six months ago and had planned to travel to Fort Lauderdale to celebrate her friend’s birthday. But Southwest canceled her Thursday night flight from Baltimore to Fort Lauderdale, and festival officials told her that no refunds were available.

Borkoski said she understands that some things, such as weather events, are beyond the festival organizers’ control, but added, “It’s hard to swallow also losing money.”

Broward County Public Schools, the sixth-largest school district in the nation with more than 256,000 students, canceled classes Thursday and Friday after water inundated halls and classrooms in some schools.

Shawn Bhatti, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Miami, said the region received “an unprecedented amount” of rain. The weather service was still confirming totals, but some gauges showed up to 25 inches (63.5 centimeters) of rainfall.

“For context, within a six-hour period, the amount that fell is about a 1 in 1,000 chance of happening within a given year,” Bhatti said. “So it’s a very historical type of event.”