Weather makes Pearson a mess

The ice and cold lead to a mess on roads and sidewalks, but it didn’t end there. Canada’s largest airport was more or less a parking lot for a couple of hours Monday morning.

The icy weather shut down two major destinations, Montreal and Ottawa and that resulted in planes headed to those destinations being diverted to Toronto. That meant that arrival gates were overloaded and backed up and so was the ticket counter.

Stranded, and temporarily homeless, hundreds of passengers pushed their possessions through Pearson looking for a new way home. The Della Vecchia family was supposed to fly from London to Montreal. Instead, they took a detour to Toronto, that they weren’t expecting. Lianna Della Vecchia: “We got here at like 9 or 10 last night, and didn’t get to a hotel until about 2:30 because there were no people working to help us get to any hotels.”

Joan Parsons: “I stood in line for 4 hours last night. I finally got shipped to a hotel at 4 o’clock this morning.”

Some people were lucky enough to get hotel rooms. Some people are still scrambling for hotel rooms. And some people, it appears, have just given up.

And one traveller named Jeff says limo drivers were taking advantage of desperate travelers: “Limo drivers were charging upwards of a hundred bucks to take people downtown, and they charged my daughter and another woman who shared a limo $160 bucks.”

Many of the flights to Ottawa or Montreal were delayed or cancelled due to freezing rain and poor conditions. It took travelers more than an hour, just to check in, at the Air Canada desk. Jordan Cooper and Kalynn Crane made it out of Ottawa but sat on a crowded tarmac in Toronto, unable to get off the plane while their connecting flight departed for the east coast. Now they won’t be able to get home until Tuesday night. Jordan said: “I’m supposed to be working today, supposed to be working tomorrow and now, yeah tomorrow’s just not good enough really.”

And it was worse for Adam Potvin who was trying to head west to Vancouver to get back to school: “The next flight home unfortunately is all the way on Thursday, so being a University student i’m missing obviously not only today’s classes but a whole week of classes.”

Potvin said business class seats were available sooner on Air Canada but they weren’t being offered to stranded economy class passengers.

But as bad as that might be there’s always someone who seems to be facing a bigger challenge. John Hepworth hit the travelling trifecta, with small children, a broken arm and flight delays to his home in Montreal. At this point he says air travel seems anything but glamourous: Well it’s ahh, what I see in that line is, I hope it makes the case for high speed rail travel.”

As we are checking flight information, almost all flights to U.S North East destinations have been cancelled. And a flight to Orlando Florida was also cancelled so, as always, check with your carrier as often as possible.