Like most Florida airports, the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport’s runways and taxiways are some of the lowest in the country.
According to data posted online by the Federal Aviation Administration, some parts of the facility are just five feet above sea level.
Just a couple of years ago, county leaders spent more than $95 million making improvements to the north runway. The upgrades were not enough to keep the area dry after more than 26 inches of rain fell in one 24-hour period this week.
Air traffic control canceled a day’s worth of flights Thursday as high water sat on Fort Lauderdale’s two runways, stranding some aircraft on the taxiway.
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“Nature wasn’t kind to us. That’s just unfortunate,” said Broward County Mayor Lamar Fisher at a Thursday press conference.
NBC6 Investigators began looking into details after the county mayor told the press the county made major changes at the airport just back in 2019.
“We have never had to deal with such an item (the storm) We thought we were able to with the raising of the north and the redo of the south, we thought we were there. But again, one in thousand-year storms we just can't predict,” Fisher said.
According to county documents, in the summer of 2019, the county closed the north runway for four months as nearly 200 workers did $95 million worth of work. The major change was replacing the center portion of the runway, which workers originally installed in 1943 when the facility was a naval air base. The new work hoped to add 15 to 30 years to the runway’s life.
Part of the change was raising the center line of the runway so water would run off easier. Workers also installed more than 1,000 feet of new drainage piping.
Planning documents two years before construction began noted because the plan called for less “impervious area,” stormwater runoff would be reduced, and the airport would see a “slight improvement in the overall drainage characteristics of the airfield.”
The drainage work began in June 2019 and was completed in late August, according to county presentations. This was the first major overhaul since 2004 according to reports at the time.
Five years before the north runway overhaul, in 2014, the county added improvements to the south runway as well as built it across the highway and the Florida East Coast Railway.
The county mayor told NBC6 at the press conference more work and planning needs to be done.
“In the future, we will look what we can do better. We have a master plan coming on board. People movers, etc. We want to make sure we can incorporate changes now, to alleviate the problem in the future,” Fisher said.
According to that updated 2020 master plan, county staff wrote “because of sea-level rise and future flooding projects, the new/expanded facilities may require stormwater retention capacity that exceeds the current standards.”
After this storm, county leaders are taking an extra close look at what they can do in the future.
