Sometimes there’s travel news that happens and you’ll see all the travel bloggers write about it. To be honest, my husband and I don’t even try to write about those most of the time. After all, what’s the sense of writing about the same thing that at least 4 other bloggers wrote about in the past hour? I mean, if there’s a choice of reading View From The Wing, One Mile At A Time, Live & Let Fly, Paddle Your Own Kanoo or Your Mileage May Vary, which version are most people NOT going to read first?
Of course it’s us
Which is fine, by the way. Those other blogs are older and more established than ours (although we turned 8 years old earlier this year – go us!) and it makes sense that, if we’ve all written about the same thing, people will click on them before they’ll click on us. It is what it is. So we just don’t write about “news,” more often than not.
But when it comes to quirky, oddball stuffs? Especially quirky, oddball stuff that happened a while back? Friends, I can sniff that out like a bloodhound looking for a squirrel that passed by a week ago.
Such was the case a couple of days ago, when I discovered a hilarious (but expensive) story out of Palm Beach International Airport (PBI).
PBI isn’t huge – they’re considered a medium-sized mixed-use airport and saw about 8 million passengers last year. But the airport was ranked by the readers of Travel & Leisure as the 3rd best domestic airport in the country in 2024. So they have that going for them. Plus, of course, it serves as the main airport for Air Force One when the current president is in town (not sure if this has changed, but circa 2016-2020, they used schoolbuses to keep the area free of onlookers).
Despite its smaller size, an event happened at PBI that really should have gotten more publicity than it did.
In the morning hours of July 7, 2023, an emergency system at PBI appeared to be accidentally activated in one of the hangars. This caused an unintended deployment of foam. Lots and LOTS and LOTS of foam.
According to BocaNewsNow, there was so much foam that although the event had happened in the morning, there was still foam floating around the hangar area that afternoon.
By the way, although the foam was a fire retardant, there was no fire. Palm Beach County Fire Rescue did come to the scene, but when they saw there was no fire and no emergency, they left.
Aviation International News reported at the time:
…while three aircraft in the 30,000-sq-ft hangar were affected, there was no significant impact on its base operations. Clean-up was delayed by inclement weather in the area over the weekend but completed by Sunday, July 9.
And the cleanup for an event like this winds up being super expensive. According to the National Air Transportation Association (NATA), the overall clean up and aircraft damage costs of accidental foam events run between $64 million and $235 million. It’s said that such accidents have happened close to 150 times since 2004. Similar events have happened in Santa Barbara (2019), Manassas (2020) and Houston (2024), among others. It even happened to the US Army, back in 2012.
So yes, it’s a serious, expensive problem. But it’s an amazement to see. And because not all heroes wear capes, someone at PBI shared a bunch of video footage of that fateful July 7, 2023 day.
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This post first appeared on Your Mileage May Vary
