XSport Reopens after Plane Crash
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NAPERVILLE, IL -- Just 21 hours after a plane crashed into its building, the XSport Fitness in Naperville, IL, reopened, and repairs to the facility are expected to be minimal.
Around noon last Wednesday, a Piper 32 aircraft taking off from the Naper Aero Club Airport, a private runway just 2,000 feet from the XSport building, crashed into a decorative cupola on the southwest corner of the building. The pilot, Lloyd McKee, and his wife, Maureen McKee, were injured, but no one in the club was hurt, according to Dennis Pierro, vice president of XSport Fitness, Chicago. The McKees have since been released from the hospital, according to various media outlets.
The garage-sized cupola was above a corner of the basketball court, which is on the second story of the building. Although some media reports say the basketball court was empty at the time of the crash, Pierro says some people were on the court but were safely evacuated.
XSport staff evacuated all 280 people inside the building within five minutes, Pierro says, immediately reuniting children from the play area with their parents and moving members far from the building even before the police and fire departments arrived, he says.
The building suffered no structural damage, Pierro says. Minor repairs to the roof have already been made, and cupola repairs are expected to be completed within two to three weeks. The only internal damage was a six-inch hole that the fire department punched into one wall of the basketball court to check for fuel, smoke or fire in the walls, Pierro says. The plane did leak fuel, but Pierro says it evaporated quickly.
Officials from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the National Transportation Safety Board and Homeland Security are investigating the incident. The FAA turned the building back over to XSport at around 4:30 p.m. on the day of the crash.
Danny Morrissey, the owner of XSport, brought in a crane to pull the plane out of the cupola, and roof repairs started immediately. By 9:30 a.m. the next day, the company was given the all-clear to reopen, which it did, except for the basketball court, which remained closed until the roof repairs were completed later that afternoon.
Pierro says the cost to repair the damage is unknown at this time, but he doesn’t expect it will be much.
“It hit a part of the building that was open,” Pierro says. “There was no damage to any of the equipment or any other part of the building itself.”
He added, “If you didn’t know that an airplane had been there, you’d think we were just doing some updating because it didn’t hit the structure of the building. If they had hit any other part of the building, it would have been a different story for us and them.”
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