FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. – Just yards away from a major runway at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport (FLL), dozens of rail tankers marked with hazardous material warnings sit parked in plain view — and some say it’s a disaster waiting to happen.
The tankers, lined up along the edge of Runway 10L, are labeled with placards reading “1987,” the code for highly flammable alcohol. Their presence so close to active air traffic has alarmed residents, aviation experts, and even airport officials — but despite years of concern, no changes have been made.
One of the concerned residents, Ched Keiler, often drives along Perimeter Road near the airport and was stunned when he first saw the tankers.
“There’s got to be a better place for these tanker cars to be parked other than at the end of a runway,” Keiler said. “I could picture quite a scenario if an airline or jet ran off the runway.”
Keiler, who is also an engineer at Local 10 News, understands firsthand how catastrophic an accident involving these tankers could be.
This is not a new problem. Florida East Coast Railway (FEC), which owns the tracks, has been parking tankers near the airport for years, despite safety concerns raised internally by airport administrators.
Local 10 News has learned that FLL officials have voiced these concerns to FEC on multiple occasions.
However, sources say Broward County leaders are reluctant to push harder for change. They fear that challenging the powerful private railroad company could damage their working relationship on future projects.
In fact, when asked to comment for this story, Broward County’s mayor and airport administrators declined on-camera interviews.
Repeated efforts to get answers from Florida East Coast Railway also went nowhere. Local 10 reached out three separate times to Robert Bullock, a vice president at FEC, asking key questions: Why are the tankers parked at the airport? Is this a safety risk? Why have county concerns been ignored? No one from FEC ever responded.
In an effort to press for accountability, Local 10 News Investigator Jeff Weinsier personally visited FEC’s Fort Lauderdale office at Port Everglades. But even there, no one was willing to discuss the hazardous tankers or the airport’s concerns.
“It appears that no one here wants to touch this topic,” Weinsier said after the visit.
Aviation safety expert Dr. Bob Baron, a pilot and risk management consultant who taught at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, doesn’t mince words when it comes to the tankers’ location.
“It’s the worst possible place to store those train cars,” Baron said.
“Every time I’ve flown into that airport, year after year, I’m like — they still have those cars there.”
Baron warned that in the event of a crash or runway overrun, the parked tankers could become a major hazard, not only fueling fires but also hampering rescue efforts.
“We are looking at proactive safety here,” Baron emphasized. “We want to avoid looking back one day and saying, ‘We should have done better.’”
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said it has no jurisdiction over the tracks next to the airport. Rail safety falls instead to the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA).
The FRA confirmed to Local 10 News that the tankers are awaiting final delivery to nearby customers. However, the agency also admitted it does not track the tankers’ contents in real time and cannot confirm what is inside them. What’s in the tankers is considered proprietary information, kept secret for security reasons.
Even more concerning, research shows that even “empty” tankers that previously carried flammable liquids can remain extremely dangerous because of lingering vapors.
The airport does have one safeguard in place: EMAS, or Engineered Materials Arresting Systems — a bed of crushable concrete at the end of the runway designed to stop an overrunning plane.
But EMAS only works if a plane stays on a straight path. A veer to the left or right would send an aircraft directly toward the line of hazardous tankers.
Willard Shepard, a former fighter pilot and an attorney, says it’s a risk that doesn’t make sense.
“Why take any chance?” Shepard asked. “You could park the trains south of the airport property... or you could park them to the north.”
While FLL is operating within federal safety regulations, Shepard points out that regulations don’t account for every real-world hazard — and that common sense should play a role.
For now, the hazardous tankers remain parked perilously close to where thousands of flights operate every year. The concern is clear. The warnings are loud. Yet bureaucratic caution and corporate silence have kept the issue in a dangerous holding pattern.