Travelers Crunched by Holiday : Transportation: Weather adds to Thanksgiving travel woes in some areas of nation. Thousands suffer delays at L.A. airport.

Passengers crowded Los Angeles International Airport and other airfields across the nation Wednesday evening as weather problems added to what had already been expected to be one of the worst holiday travel crunches on record.

Thousands of travelers trying to fly in or out of LAX were put on hold--some for a few minutes, others for a few hours--as some flights were delayed.

By nightfall, automobile traffic around the airport was crawling, the airport’s parking lots had started to overflow and the terminals were full, but the expected lines had yet to begin forming at terminal ticket counters, baggage carousels, restaurants, pay telephones and rest rooms.

“So far, it’s not as bad as we thought it would be,” said a clerk at an American Airlines reservations desk.

Officials predicted that about 650,000 passengers would pass through the Los Angeles area’s busiest airport during the four-day Thanksgiving weekend--about 20,000 more than last year’s all-time high. About 210,000 were expected just on Wednesday at Chicago’s O’Hare, 50,000 more than normal.

For some, the going was beginning to get tough by nightfall Wednesday.

“My flight was supposed to leave 10 minutes ago,” said Jeff Kurtzer, 22, a student at UC Santa Barbara, who was heading for a family reunion in Ft. Lauderdale and was worried about making a connection in Dallas.

“My plane got in 20 minutes late,” he said, gazing at the crowd gathering around the Delta Airlines boarding gate. “But (being Thanksgiving) I expected this.”

Fog in the Bay Area, the Sacramento Valley, Portland, Ore., and Salt Lake City and snow in the East and Midwest forced the cancellation of several flights Wednesday and prompted the Federal Aviation Administration to implement a nationwide air traffic quota system that caused delays of up to 2 1/2 hours.

Joe Hopkins, a spokesman for United Airlines in Chicago, said the delays along the West Coast were expected to intensify during the night as low clouds and fog moved inland from the Pacific over airports in the Bay Area.

FAA spokeswoman Ellie Brekke in Los Angeles said low overcast over Orange County could affect some flights at John Wayne Airport before dawn today.

While the weather did not directly affect planes landing at and taking off from LAX, some flights in and out of the airport were held up because of traffic backups at other airports.

For most of those along the West Coast, it was too late to switch to the train. Amtrak reported that many of its trains were booked to capacity, with reservations on this weekend’s Seattle-to-San Francisco and Seattle-to-Chicago runs sold out two months ago.

Highway traffic was expectedly heavy in the Los Angeles area Wednesday when, as usual, most locals used their cars to leave town for the holiday weekend.

“It’s really bad--we have advisories for heavy traffic all over,” Officer Jill Angel, a spokeswoman for the California Highway Patrol, reported at sundown.

“All the freeways are jammed,” she said. “The San Bernardino Freeway is a mess, with everyone heading east, out of town. There’s a major Sigalert where the 134 (the Ventura Freeway) meets I-5 (the Golden State Freeway) because of an overturned big rig. There’s just a tremendous increase in the volume of traffic everywhere.”

But the worst gridlock may have been in New York City, where more than a million cars--12% more than normal--created an avalanche of traffic that officials say is becoming a Thanksgiving Eve ritual.

“It’s like lemmings marching to the sea,” said Victor Ross, a spokesman for the New York Department of Transportation.