Although the airport has been open for commercial operations more than a month, officials say it will take years to repair the damage done by Hurricane Katrina at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport (MSY).
“The airport still has a lot of repairs to do,” notes Michelle Duffourc, public relations manager. “Everything has been made safe and secure, but these are temporary fixes. We have to wait for the insurance money to make the repairs. We have tarps covering some roofs and some hangars still don’t have any walls.”
Duffourc said the airport sustained approximately $51.5 million in damage. The airport anticipates more than $90 million of revenue losses through 2007 because of reduced traffic. “That’s pretty scary for us,” she said.
The situation could have been worse, she said, noting that just a few days before the storm, refurbishment of the east west runway was completed.
“It has lights that operate on a generator, and that helped us,” she explained.
Other airports in the region were closed down altogether because their runway lighting systems would not work when power was lost.
Because it had runway lights, MSY became a staging area for relief efforts in the days following the storm.
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