DAILY NEWS
New cooler at LAX will help prospect of storage bloom
By Gene Maddaus, Staff Writer
Posted: 04/03/2009 12:00:00 AM PDT
L.A. Mayor Antonio
Villaraigosa shuns his overcoat upon entering the 35-degree
cooler at Mercury Air Cargo at LAX on Thursday, April 2, 2009.
Joseph Czyzyk, right, laughs at the mayor's bravado. The 12,700
sq-ft. cooler will house flowers and perishable products flown
in each day from South America. (Brad Graverson/Staff Photographer)
If you bought a bouquet of roses recently, chances
are it came from Colombia.
The flowers probably arrived at Miami International
Airport, where they were loaded onto a refrigerated truck for
a long cross-country drive.
That circuitous supply route will get a lot shorter
with the opening Thursday of a 12,700-square-foot cold-storage
facility at Los Angeles International Airport.
Built by Mercury Air group, the $1.1 million unit
can accommodate 8,500 tons of perishable products arriving annually
from South America.
"Mercury Air Group has made an important
and smart investment that will open Los Angeles to new markets
and new trade. It's good for business, it's good for the environment
and it pushes Los Angeles closer toward a sustainable model
of environmentally conscious growth," Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa
said.
With the new unit, officials hope to turn Los
Angeles into a West Coast hub for the distribution of flowers,
which could result in lower prices at local flower shops.
"Before we never had that kind of capacity,"
said David Herbst, of Mercury Air Group. "Los Angeles never
had a large enough refrigeration unit to process that many flowers."
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