Small plane carrying hurricane relief supplies for Jamaica crashes in Florida neighborhood
A small turboprop plane bound for Jamaica on a hurricane relief mission crashed into a pond in a residential area of the Fort Lauderdale suburb of Coral Springs on Monday morning, minutes after takeoff, authorities said.
A fire official told The Associated Press no victims were located during rescue efforts and they said the search had become a recovery effort. It wasn't immediately known how many persons were aboard. Aerial TV footage from local media outlets showed a broken fence in the backyard of one home bordering the pond near where the plane went down.
Broward County, where the plane took off from and where the crash occurred, is home to a vibrant Caribbean American community that sprang into action to collect relief supplies following Hurricane Melissa. A fierce Category 5 hurricane, Melissa slammed into Jamaica late last month, leaving a path of destruction.
Coral Springs-Parkland Fire Department Deputy Chief Mike Moser said crews responded within minutes of a call reporting the crash. No homes were damaged, but he said rescue workers did spot some debris near a neighborhood retention pond.
“There was no actual plane to be seen,” Moser said. “They followed the debris trail to the water. We had divers that entered the water and tried to search for any victims and didn’t find any.”
Moser said rescue efforts concluded without finding any victims. He said police would take over recovery efforts, and federal aviation officials would investigate the cause of the crash.
Coral Springs police didn’t immediately respond to calls and emails from AP.
The small Beechcraft King Air plane took off from the Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport at approximately 10:14 a.m., according to a spokesperson for the City of Fort Lauderdale, which owns and operates the airport. The crash occurred soon after takeoff, with Coral Springs police officers and firemen responding at 10:19 am, just five minutes later.
According to Federal Aviation Administration records, the registered owner of the plane is listed as International Air Services, a company that markets itself as specializing in providing trust agreements to non-U.S. citizens that enable them to register their aircrafts with the FAA. A person who answered the company’s phone Monday afternoon declined to answer questions from a reporter, stating “no comment” and ending the phone call.
Hurricane Melissa made landfall in Jamaica on Oct. 28, tied for the strongest landfalling Atlantic hurricane in history. The storm also caused devastation in Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic and prompted relief organizations to mobilize.
Local government officials in Jamaica said in the days after the storm that Melissa had ripped the roofs off 120,000 structures, affecting some 90,000 families in the island’s especially hard-hit western region. A week after Melissa's landfall in Jamaica, more than 2,000 people were still reported to be in shelters.
