Wild Weather Disrupts Holiday Travel Plans

As a record number of travelers prepared to leave home to celebrate Thanksgiving, violent thunderstorms and heavy snow in much of the country Wednesday made the going difficult.

The severe weather produced three-hour delays for departing air passengers in Newark, N.J., and Chicago. At New York’s La Guardia Airport, heavy rain and dense fog caused delays of 70 minutes or more.

“It is definitely unpleasant,” said Lou Martinez, a spokesman for New York’s Port Authority, which manages the region’s airports. He said 1.5 million people were expected to fly out of the metropolitan area Wednesday, up from 1.2 million in 2003.

“We have told people to practice some patience,” Martinez said.

Despite the bad weather, about 37.2 million Americans were expected to travel 50 miles or more from home for Thanksgiving, said Sean Comey of AAA in San Francisco. The figure, a 3.1% increase from last year, was the highest number of Thanksgiving travelers since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Comey said reduced air fares and renewed confidence among travelers accounted for part of the increase. About 85% of the holiday travelers, he said, were expected to drive to their destinations.

Braced for delays, many air travelers arrived at airports extra early for Thanksgiving-eve departures. In Washington, D.C., lawyer Claire Hanselmann, 26, went to Reagan National Airport two hours before her plane was scheduled to leave for Columbus, Ohio.

Hanselmann said she expected nightmarish lines at security, but to her surprise, she sailed right through.

“Screening was great,” she said. “It was faster than a regular day.”

Still, Hanselmann spent five idle hours at the US Airways terminal when her flight was delayed by rain and wind.

At Los Angeles International Airport, USC student Winthrop Ellsworth, 21, also expected long lines when he arrived 3 1/2 hours before his plane was due to take off for Houston. Instead, Ellsworth found he had time to kill.

“Compared to other years, this was fast, easy and amazing,” he said.

Alfonzo “Twin” Doty, an LAX skycap for five years, said the day before Thanksgiving was uneventful, perhaps because travelers have become accustomed to heightened security demands.

“Three years ago, people on the lines were crying and fighting,” he said. “This is just another day.”

Travelers at John Wayne Airport in Orange County also encountered short lines and uncrowded terminals on one of the heaviest travel days of the year.

Butch Stanford, 28, thought he and his girlfriend, Kimberly Hadley, 24, might miss their 5:15 p.m. flight to Dallas. The couple had come from Hadley’s office, where she had been delayed for half an hour because of work.

“I was upset until about five minutes ago,” Stanford said as the Huntington Beach couple waited to check in at the American Airlines counter at 4 p.m. “I’m feeling better now, This place is a ghost town.”

Not all air travelers were so lucky. The weather in Florida was so terrible that Curtis Gadson, 44, and his 3-year-old daughter, Christina, arrived in Atlanta after their flight for Germany had already departed. The next plane they could take would not leave until today.

The pair was headed for a reunion with Gadson’s wife, a soldier in Germany. He said six months had passed since Christina had last seen her mother, and their Thanksgiving holiday in Germany was scheduled to last a little less than three days.

“It’ll be a late turkey, but hopefully we’ll savor it anyway,” he said.

In some cities where weather did not seem to be a factor, delays elsewhere caused snarls. Although skies in Houston were clear, Texas Tech student Alexandra Ellis, 20, waited 3 1/2 hours to take a plane to Philadelphia to spend Thanksgiving with her mother.

“It’s always a pain to travel around the holidays,” Ellis said. “But this year it seems even worse because of the weather. It’s testing everyone’s patience.”

At Minneapolis St. Paul International Airport, delayed passengers sprawled in chairs and stood in line at the bookstores for something to read. Kim Uhri, a 21-year-old college student trying to get home to Chicago, had been impatiently waiting for two hours at the Northwest Airlines gate.

“It kills me that it can be clear here, and we’re still stuck waiting because Chicago got snow,” said Uhri, taking a break from checking e-mail on her laptop. “I should have known better. Flying into O’Hare is a nightmare.”

Road travel also was treacherous in many parts of the country. Snow and heavy rain made highways slippery in the Missouri and Mississippi valleys. A system of tornadoes that began in the Deep South reached north to Indiana.

The twisters killed three people Wednesday -- one each in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama -- and damaged homes and businesses.

A belt of heavy thunderstorms soaked southeastern Georgia all the way to the Florida Panhandle, said Bill Gile, a meteorologist with Precision Weather Forecasting near Boston. The rain pounded an area from Louisiana and Arkansas through Mississippi, Alabama and parts of Tennessee. Some popular vacation destinations were hit hard.

“Anyone who is planning to go to Disney World in Orlando is going to be very wet on Thursday,” Gile said.

Showers also fell in the Pacific Northwest, turning the Seattle sky the color of concrete.

Thick, heavy snow fell across the Midwest, pelting parts of Illinois, southeast Wisconsin and just about all of Michigan as the storm moved north toward Canada. The region also was unseasonably cold, with temperatures falling into the 20s in the Dakotas and Minnesota.

In Chicago, the city’s Snow Command sent 80 trucks out to salt the streets. The snow was accompanied by high winds that buffeted pedestrians along Michigan Avenue in the heart of the business district.

Annette Martinez, spokesman for Chicago’s Department of Aviation, said area airports experienced delays of up to three hours, caused more by the high winds than by the snow.

Freezing rain in St. Louis on Wednesday morning turned to the area’s first snow of the season by late afternoon. But it was a mere dusting, disappointing children who had hoped to make snowmen.

Denver had snow flurries on Wednesday, and Montana’s mountain region was covered as well. The country’s coldest spot Wednesday was Wolf Point, Mont., where the temperature was 1 degree above zero.

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Times staff writers Scott Gold in Philadelphia, Ellen Barry in Atlanta, P.J. Huffstutter in Minneapolis, Zeke Minaya in Los Angeles, Emma Schwartz in Washington, Daniel Yi in Orange County and researcher John Beckham in Chicago contributed to this report.