Jacksonville International Airport shuttered for hours following parking garage fire

A fire broke out in a parking garage at Florida’s Jacksonville International Airport on Friday, damaging multiple cars and causing the airport to close for a few hours. No injuries were reported.

The fire started sometime before 12:48 p.m., when airport officials first posted about it on social media. The blaze broke out in the airport’s hourly parking garage and proceeded to spread rapidly, the Jacksonville Fire Rescue Department said on social media Saturday.

JFRD personnel helped get civilians out of the garage and called for more resources shortly after arriving. They were forced to retreat from the structure due to a partial collapse, which affected the garage’s second and third floors, according to Jacksonville’s WTLV. 

Crews worked hard to stop this rapidly spreading fire of multiple vehicles in a parking garage at the JIA…1st in units called for a 2nd alarm immediately & reported smoke banked down to floor level in an open garage…a partial collapse required crews be pulled from the structure pic.twitter.com/8jJL08gr2O

— THEJFRD (@THEJFRD) May 17, 2025

“We were trying to get a car and we had the keys, and then they were yelling at us to evacuate and we had to run across to the terminal,” Cassy LaRussa and Nina Knappenberger, who were in the garage to pick up a rental car, told The Florida Times-Union.

A picture posted by JFRD shows multiple charred cars and a large piece of concrete that fell off the ceiling of one of the garage’s levels.

The fire damaged about 50 cars, Jacksonville Mayor Donna Deegan said, according to WFOX-TV. About 2,000 parking spaces are now unusable.

Ms. Deegan also said that “it doesn’t look like anybody’s hurt. We can’t be 100% sure until we can get in there and actually access those vehicles, but they did send a drone in and it looks like, from what we can tell, nobody was in there and nobody got hurt and they got people out pretty quick,” according to WTLV.