With its location on Florida’s panhandle, Pensacola Aviation Center—which has been in operation for nearly half a century at Pensacola International Airport (KPNS)—is certainly no stranger to dealing with unusual weather, but when it comes to the first recorded blizzard to hit the Gulf Coast region back in January, there was no frame of reference. “That was unprecedented, to say the least,” said Chris Adamson, the FBO’s operations manager. “We’ve gotten snow here before, but it’s only been 1 or 2 inches. We ended up with 8 and a half inches, and that caught everybody by surprise.” That surprise marked the largest single-day snowfall ever recorded in the state, breaking records that had stood for nearly a century.
KPNS was shut down on January 20, and Adamson sent his staff home while he spent the night at the FBO terminal, bunking down in the pilot lounge. He awoke to a winter wonderland, with snow drifts juxtaposed against palm trees. The sun came out that day to provide natural snow melting; snowplows were such a novelty in the state that the city of Pensacola had to contract with a Georgia municipality for some plow-equipped pickup trucks to clear its streets. To grind up the ice that was continually forming on the ramp in the cold temperatures, Adamson and those staffers who were able to reach the airport drove the facility’s heavy equipment around all day. “If they had allowed me to build a fire out there, I’d have done that,” quipped Adamson. The work paid off as the ramp was clear when the airport reopened the next morning after the two-day interruption.
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