Mercury Air Cargo opens cold-storage unit at LAX
The company spent $1.1 million to build the 12,700-square-foot
refrigerated facility. Now flower shipments from South America
can go directly to LAX, instead of to Miami first.
By Nathan Olivarez-Giles
April 2, 2009 Flowers from South America,
once shipped to Southern California florists by truck from Miami,
now are getting a quick trip to Los Angeles International Airport
and a chilly welcome.
Since early March, tulips, carnations,
astromelias and roses have been flown to LAX, where a 12,700-square-foot
cold-storage unit has been built to handle the airborne flowers
and get them to consumers faster.
"We've seen six 767s a week
full of flowers, two platforms inside the plane with no room
for passengers, over the last three weeks that we've had the
unit open," said David Herbst, a spokesman for Mercury
Air Cargo, which owns the unit. "That's something that
wasn't here just a month ago and it's a glimmer of good news
in an otherwise dreary economy."
This morning, the facility will be
officially opened at a colorful ceremony with Los Angeles Mayor
Antonio Villaraigosa, city officials and representatives of
Mercury. The Los Angeles-based international cargo company spent
$1.1 million to build the facility inside a 200,000-square-foot
warehouse at LAX to make way for the flower shipments that require
temperatures of 35 degrees Fahrenheit. The unit is the West
Coast's largest on-airport cold-storage unit, with previous
facilities at about 4,000 square feet, Herbst said.
The six planeloads a week the unit
has seen so far have come from Mercury's partnership with Lan
Cargo, a subsidiary of Lan Airlines based in Santiago, Chile,
said Ivo Skorin, Lan's West Coast cargo director. He said Lan
previously flew flowers only to Miami and trucked them out to
Southern California.
nathan.olivarezgiles@
latimes.com
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