Traveler Valerie Bell sat in an airplane for more than two hours as historic amounts of rainfall deluged South Florida's Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport Wednesday night.
“Our cellphones were beeping all the time about tornado warnings. So you can imagine how vulnerable we felt," Bell said in an interview Thursday.
“We were on the plane there, stuck in the plane, and all around us it was a lake. It wasn’t just puddles, it had covered the tarmac.”
Bell was among the many passengers, drivers, employees and others stuck at the airport for hours, or even overnight, after more than 2 feet of rain fell in the area in just a few hours.
“I saw many people by themselves driving in cars crying because they couldn’t locate the people they had come to pick up, they couldn’t get to them," Bell, who had flown in from Chicago, said. "It was very emotional for a lot of people, this completely unexpected and unusual weather event.”
The airport was shut down from around 5 p.m. Wednesday until 9 a.m. Friday. In all, more than 1,100 flights to or from Fort Lauderdale were canceled during the closure. Long delays were expected to continue Friday until full operations resumed, and travelers were advised to check with their airlines for the most current status.
Nearby Port Everglades, one of the world's busiest cruise ports, remained open but passengers there were also advised to check their trip's status.
David Woodard, a regional manager for Frontier Airlines, was headed home from work when the weather moved in Wednesday evening. He decided to turn around and go back.
By that time, between 4 and 5 p.m., the flooding had already started.
"The water on the airport roadways was starting to rise, and it was happening very quickly," Woodard said in a separate interview. "So, I knew that I needed to get to higher ground and in an airport, the easiest way to do that is to get into a parking garage."
He spent the next two hours or so standing in floodwaters, directing others to safety. Finally, Woodard made his way to his office, where he and about 20 other employees hunkered down for the night.
The rain went on for hours.
"Where we were at that airport it was like it just came and parked right over it and it didn't stop and the intensity of it never decreased either," Woodard said. "It was a significant torrential downpour for the duration of the event."
He went to an airport newsstand to buy snacks and drinks for the group, and they played charades and other games to pass the time.
Finally, at about 5 a.m. Thursday, they were able to leave via the airport's elevated departure roadway.
Woodard said people stranded in the airport were generally in good spirits.
“There was an understanding that what was going on out there was something that Mother Nature was doing and it was really just out of our control and we needed to watch and see how it played out," he said.
