Hurricane Wilma, the 21st storm in the worst Atlantic
hurricane season on record, came personally knocking on Michael McCauley's
hangar door on the east coast of Florida just north of Miami.
McCauley, president of Universal Jet Aviation, based at the
Boca Raton Airport, had already moved most of his aircraft to safer ground when
the Category 3 hurricane hit. Winds of 125 mph tore down his two 15-year-old,
140-kt-wind-rated hangars and crushed the delicate creatures undergoing
maintenance inside—a Challenger, Learjet 35 and Learjet 55. Altogether, he
figures he lost about $13 million in assets. "We win the prize for the
tri-county area," he joked.
Boca Raton overall faired rather poorly as well. The AOPA
reported that 85% to 90% of the hangars on the field were destroyed. McCauley's
biggest concern 10 days after the impact was finding an alternate location for
his FAR Part 145 shop. "There's not a whole lot of space," he said.
Bill Ashbaker, state aviation director for the Florida Dept
of Transportation, said Opa Locka Airport had $2 million in damages to its
buildings (the state doesn't tally aircraft losses), and Kendall-Tamiami
Executive had $700,000 in damages. The state had not yet received tallies in
the Fort Lauderdale/Boca Raton area because its district office there remained
out of commission.
Ben Shirazi, whose Aero Toy Store is located at the Fort
Lauderdale Executive Airport, said Wilma was "the worst that we've ever been
hit with in Lauderdale" in the 12 years he's been in business there. He said
some hangars came down at the airport but everyone was "slowly starting to come
back into business." Shirazi and his pilots ferried $350 million in assets—15
aircraft—to Brunswick, Ga., "at the last minute" on Sunday, hours before the
storm moved in. The Toy Store's biggest problems 10 days after the storm
included not having Internet service (he was able to use a Blackberry for
e-mail) and dealing with a two-hour commute to and from work due to inoperative
traffic lights. "It's still chaos in the streets," he said.
Replacement hangars could prevent much of the damage next
time the area gets hit, said FDOT's Ashbaker. Florida has new design codes for
hangars that call for stronger, heavier doors, better and more fasteners
holding the walls to the roof, and more anchoring at the base of walls. Beefier
doors are critical to hangar survival: Ashbaker said a lesson learned from four
hurricanes last year was that hangars tended to fail after the wind pried the
door open. The downside of code changes is that the construction is more
expensive and that doors are often too heavy for opening by hand. Hangars built
under the new code were constructed in the Orlando area last year after
Hurricane Charley hit. Wilma, having spared Orlando, did not put the designs to
the test.
In McCauley's case, heavier doors may very well have helped.
He said the roof buckled after the front doors "started to swing in and out."
