HEATHROW AIRPORT:THE SITUATION at Heathrow airport yesterday was not as chaotic as in previous days, with large numbers of British Airport Authority staff on duty to offer information. However, there was little enough to give as just a fraction of the normal traffic was managing to leave the beleaguered airport.
Australians Renee Campbell and Adam Courtney had hoped to spend the new year in a Bedouin tent in the desert watching the stars, but yesterday, they sat on the floor of Heathrow’s Terminal One, four days after they first came to the airport to catch a flight to Beirut.
Mr Courtney joked: “Well, instead of the stars, we can look at the lights in the ceiling.”
The couple, now living in Nottingham, had come to Heathrow on Saturday only to find that nothing was moving. They quickly tried to book a hotel, eventually getting one back in the city near Paddington station.
Thousands of others were not so lucky, having to sleep on the floors or pay up to £300 (€354) a night for a hotel room.
“It’s pretty ridiculous, really, I have never seen anything like this before,” Mr Courtney told The Irish Times. “These are the kinds of things that you see or hear about in the Third World.”
BAA staff waited at the top of escalators from the underground, offering early but limited information to passengers.
“Cork, you say? Have we are any Corks today?” one asked a colleague. “I think we have one at six, but nothing before that.”
Outside the terminal, hundreds more waited, most impatiently, in hurriedly erected tents. Several hundred passengers were gathered inside, barred by staff from going towards check-in desks unless they had tickets for flights that were likely to take off within two hours. Some sat on the floor, while others recharged mobiles and laptops from the available sockets.
One Saudi student living in Scotland had travelled overnight by train from Edinburgh, which stopped repeatedly because the brakes froze. He was late for his flight to Jeddah. “Now I am told that the earliest I will get away will be tomorrow night,” he said.
“People should be held accountable,” said student Alanna Rodrigo (19), whose flight home to California has been delayed by five days. “They should lose their jobs because this has been a disaster for everyone; it has been absolute hell.”
Prime minister David Cameron said: “I’m frustrated that the situation [at Heathrow] is taking so long to improve. I can tell you now that snow ploughs are on that second runway and it will be open by this evening.”
Gatwick has done better, partly because it had invested £8 million in snow-clearing equipment.