Miami, cargo plane runs off runway: at least five dead and airport closed

Shortly before 2pm local time on September 6, at Miami International Airport, cargo flight Prime Air 7598 ran off the runway after landing. The aircraft, a Boeing 767-300 that had departed from Luis Muñoz Marín airport in San Juan, Puerto Rico, struck several vehicles and caught fire. The provisional toll given by local authorities is at least five dead and five injured, three of them in critical condition.

More than 60 firefighting and emergency service units from Miami-Dade County responded to the scene; the airport remained closed for hours. The Federal Aviation Administration has launched a technical investigation into the incident.

The story rests on two distinct sources: the Italian agency AGI, working from data provided by the Federal Aviation Administration and the Miami-Dade aviation department, and Today.it’s reconstruction based on the press conference held by county authorities and the FAA. The toll is the official one given by local authorities, not a journalistic estimate.

“At least five dead” is a provisional toll: figures in the first hours of airport emergencies tend to change.

It is worth spelling out what “provisional” means in an incident of this kind. The victims were counted at a stage when the area was still affected by rescue operations and firefighting efforts; the number of vehicles involved is not specified in the available communications. Should the count be revised, we will state so explicitly — upward or downward — indicating the previous toll and the new one.

What we don’t know. We do not know the cause of the runway excursion: the FAA has opened an inquiry, and technical aviation investigations require timeframes that do not match those of news reporting. We do not know how many people were on board, nor the breakdown between victims on board and on the ground. We do not know when the airport was fully reopened nor how many flights were affected by the closure. As a matter of policy we do not publish details that would make the people involved identifiable, and none appear in the available materials.

Basilicata, the Policoro tornado. On the Italian side, a violent tornado struck the beaches and fields of the Policoro area, in Basilicata, devastating shorelines and crops. On September 6, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni visited the damaged areas. The story currently comes from a single source (reporting by Il Messaggero); no independent confirmation is available.

Here too the confirmed perimeter is narrow: we do not have an official damage estimate, we do not have a toll of any people affected, we do not have statements from civil protection authorities or the Region, nor news of any request for a state of emergency. An institutional visit is not a quantification: we record the former and await the latter.

The two stories share only their category — the sudden event entering the daily news of two different countries — and a difference in documentation worth keeping in mind while reading: in Miami a technical authority, the FAA, has already opened a public case file on the incident; in Policoro, based on the materials available, no official document on the damage has yet emerged.

Sources: AGI; Today.it; Il Messaggero.