Things To Do In SW Florida

A deep interest in luxury sports cars and the mechanisms that make them roar led Dylan Serrano to pursue a career as an automotive technician.

“I think I fell in love with being a problem solver,” he said. “With a car, it’s just a bunch of problems and then I just love solving it and figuring it all out.”

Serrano, a 19-year-old student at Osceola Technical College, was one of 20 teenagers who tested their automotive technician skills this week at the Central Florida International Auto Show.

As part of an annual student competition, students identified and fixed mechanical issues in the 2025 models of about a dozen vehicles, including a Ford Bronco and a Dodge Charger.

It was a chance for the students to earn scholarship money — and for the industry to find workers and to highlight the national shortage of automotive technicians.

“With the tech competition, what we’re doing is identifying talent because we’ve got a nationwide shortage of over 70,000 techs,” said Evelyn Cardenas, the auto show director. read more

By DAVID KOENIG

Spirit Airlines said Monday that it has filed for bankruptcy protection and will attempt to reboot as it struggles to recover from the pandemic-caused swoon in travel, stiffer competition from bigger carriers, and a failed attempt to sell the airline to JetBlue.

Spirit, the biggest U.S. budget airline, filed a Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition after working out terms with bondholders. The airline has lost more than $2.5 billion since the start of 2020 and faces looming debt payments totaling more than $1 billion in 2025 and 2026.

The airline said it expects to continue operating normally during the bankruptcy process. Spirit told customers Monday that they can book flights and use frequent-flyer points as they ordinarily would, and it said it will continue to pay employees and vendors.

The airline said it received commitments for a $350 million equity investment from existing bondholders and will convert $795 million of their debt into stock in the restructured company. The bondholders will also extend a $300 million loan that, combined with Spirit’s remaining cash, will help the airline get through the restructuring. read more

A carrot company headquartered in Bakersfield is linked to a national outbreak of E. coli, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The CDC announced Sunday that the multistate outbreak stems from Grimmway Farms, which is one of the largest growers, producers and shippers of carrots in the world. The company has recalled multiple brands of bagged organic baby and whole carrots.

As of Sunday morning, 39 people in 18 states were infected by the outbreak of E. coli. Fifteen of those people had been hospitalized and one person had died, according to the CDC. People infected experience severe stomach cramps, diarrhea and vomiting.

The carrots were available for purchase in stores from roughly Aug. 14 to Oct. 23, according to the CDC. The brands include 365, Bunny Luv, Cal-Organic, Compliments, Full Circle, Good & Gather, GreenWise, Marketside, Nature’s Promise, O-Organic, President’s Choice, Simple Truth, Trader Joe’s, Wegmans and Wholesome Pantry.

The public is recommended to check their refrigerators for recalled carrots and throw away any of these products. read more

SpaceX executed a Sunday evening launch from Kennedy Space Center with a Monday launch attempt from Cape Canaveral on tap.

First up was a Falcon 9 rocket from KSC’s Launch Pad 39-A on the Optux X/TD7 mission to launch a geostationary communication satellite built by Northrop Grumman for the Australian company Optus at 5:28 p.m.

Falcon 9’s first stage has landed on the A Shortfall of Gravitas droneship pic.twitter.com/6kkSy4y3mY

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) November 17, 2024

This was the 16th mission for the first-stage booster, which was used on Crew-5, CRS-28 and NG-20 among other missions, making another recovery landing downrange on the droneship A Shortfall of Gravitas in the Atlantic Ocean.

Next up on the Space Coast is a Monday afternoon launch of a Falcon 9 on the GSAT-20 mission to send a communication satellite for the Indian Space Research Organization to a geosynchronous transfer orbit from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 40 during launch window from 1:31-3:20 p.m. and backup on Tuesday during a two-hour window that opens at 4:33 a.m. read more

HAINES CITY — Not long ago, Polk County’s biggest draw was citrus instead of people. Located between Tampa and Orlando, Florida’s citrus capital produces more boxes of citrus than any other county in the state and has devoted tens of thousands of acres to growing millions of trees.

But last year, more people moved to the county than to any other in the United States, almost 30,000.

Bulldozed citrus groves in recent years made way for housing and big box stores that could one day merge the two metropolitan areas into what has half-jokingly been dubbed, “Orlampa.”

The migration — and property sprawl — reflects a significant kind of growth seen all over the country this decade: the rise of the far-flung exurbs.

Outlying communities on the outer margins of metro areas — some as far away as 60 miles from a city’s center — had some of the fastest-growing populations last year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Those communities are primarily in the South, like Anna on the outskirts of the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area; Fort Mill, South Carolina, outside Charlotte, North Carolina; Lebanon outside Nashville; and Polk County’s Haines City. read more