This is the dramatic moment a ceiling collapsed and water began gushing over a desk at JFK airport where staff had been sat just seconds earlier.
The arrivals section of Terminal 4 had to evacuated around 1.30pm on Sunday after a water pipe broke flooding parts of the New York City airport.
Hallmark Aviation Services employee Jonathan Chiu captured the moment water from the bust pipe began leaking onto his co-worker Tavita Basdeo’s desk. As he was filming, the water began gushing through and the ceiling began to creak.
They both began running, and moments later, the ceiling collapsed onto where they had been working, bringing down ceiling tiles and other debris.
This is the dramatic moment water began gushing over a desk at JFK airport where staff had been sat just seconds earlier
Hallmark Aviation Services employee Jonathan Chiu captured the moment water from the bust pipe began leaking onto his co-worker Tavita Basdeo’s desk (pictured)
They both began running, and moments later, the ceiling collapsed onto where they had been working, bringing down ceiling tiles (pictured)
‘We ran in time to capture this, told everybody to move, then it collapsed exactly where I was sitting to work,’ Basdeo said.
‘Thank God I ran though, would’ve been covered in that!!’
Water began flooding out over the terminal floor as passengers rapidly backed up to save themselves and their luggage from the rising flood.
Other videos show water cascading from the ceiling and people wading through three inches of floodwater as the terminal was evacuated.
Power to the affected areas was temporarily shut off for safety reasons and additional staffing and buses were deployed to assist travelers, the Port Authority said.
The water system damage, which is being investigated by the Port Authority, caused at least 143 flight cancellations.
Other debris continued to fall as water from the broken pipe began gushing out over the floor
Water began flooding out over the terminal floor as passengers rapidly backed up to save themselves and their luggage from the rising flood
Around three inches of floodwater fell in parts of Terminal 4 on Sunday, which had to be evacuated
The delays sparked further misery and travel chaos for passengers, some of whom had already been waiting days for their flights after blizzard conditions caused the airport to close on Thursday, and caused severe delays and cancellations through till Monday.
Thankfully, operations are finally returning to normal Tuesday after the chaos of the weekend with the majority of flights running on time.
Monday saw 116 cancellations and 98 delays although Port Authority Director of Aviation Huntley Lawrence said that by Monday afternoon, the majority of flights were on or close to schedule.
The Port Authority has pledged to investigate the cause of the delays.
‘What happened over the weekend was a completely unacceptable performance,’ said Rick Cotton, executive director of Kennedy Airport’s owner, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. He pledged to bring in outside experts and investigators to dissect the breakdowns and improve communication and contingency plans.
Delays, which JFK had been hit with since Thursday, were compounded on Sunday when a water mains pipe in Terminal 4 sprung a leak
Staff were forced to wade through the freezing floodwater at the terminal which was evacuated of passengers
‘We intend to identify what went wrong, why it went wrong… and we intend to fix it,’ Cotton said.
The return to schedule will no doubt be a huge relief for frazzled passengers who have been stuck at the airport, snoozing on floors, and others who have been nervously waiting to see whether their upcoming flight would be affected.
Andrea Collavo and his girlfriend were supposed to fly home to Italy on Friday after a vacation in the U.S. but still were trying to get into the air Monday.
They had spent days shuttling back and forth to hotels, waiting in a terminal, calling airlines and finally boarding a plane Sunday only to have it spend two hours on the tarmac and then turn back because of an equipment problem, a frustrated Collavo said.
‘I can understand: Yeah, it’s a mess because of the weather. But it seems that they’re not very well organized,’ he said. ‘There’s a big lack of information.’
Mariani Silva spent the night at Kennedy after arriving around 7pm Sunday for her flight home to Brazil.
‘I’m trying to go back to Sao Paulo since yesterday, and I’m still in the airport, sitting on the ground,’ she said on Monday.
Lost luggage is surrounded by water at the airport where passengers were forced to leave it behind. The leak caused a power outage at Terminal 4 on Sunday
Staff worked quickly to clean up the water which flooded the airport as temperatures plunged to around 5 F degrees
Huge mountains of luggage remain unclaimed at the airport after hundreds of passengers were forced to leave it behind when the luggage carousels stopped working.
Passengers complained about spending hours looking for their bags, while others have been forced to take their vacation in New York, which has been in the single digits over the weekend, with just the clothes on their back.
Cotton said the Port Authority had told airlines and the companies that run terminals to get bags and passengers back together fast.
The problems began on Thursday when the airport’s snow teams weren’t able to keep up with the ‘bomb cyclone’ which brought heavy snowfall and strong winds. JFK was closed, initially to reopen Thursday afternoon.
The majority of international flights bound for JFK weren’t due to arrive until the afternoon, when it was due to reopen, so set off as usual with almost no cancellations.
But the storm got much worse, forcing the airport to close completely until 7am on Friday – meaning dozens of flights already in the air had to divert with many simply returning to their point of origin. More than 6,000 flights were cancelled amid the chaos.
Huge piles of unclaimed luggage remain at JFK airport which has been hit with days of delays
Many passengers were forced to leave their bags behind as the luggage carousels were not working. Now a huge mountain of bags remain at the airport
By the time the airport finally did reopen Friday, the dozens of diverted aircraft from Thursday all had to compete with the day’s normal scheduled flights.
The result was a disaster. There simply was not enough availability to deal with double the amount of flights, meaning aircraft kept arriving but had nowhere to go, forcing air traffic controllers to direct them to unused runways and taxiways for extended periods of time resulting in very lengthy delays, the PointsGuy reported.
The reopening was compounded by further disasters – such as a plane needing to turn back for an emergency landing after a false alarm and a collision on the tarmac.
One Air China flight had to wait more than hours for a gate at Terminal 1 where it was eventually loaded via airstairs, rather than a jet bridge.
The backlog continued into Saturday where one Aeroflot flight say on a runway for nine hours before the crew finally requested someone come pick them up, and simply left the plane on the runway.
Other flights were diverted. One plane even clipped another outside a terminal amid the difficult conditions early Saturday.
Exhausted passengers lay down as they wait for their delayed Avianca flight at Terminal 4 on Monday
A passenger rests in the arrivals area of Terminal 4 near a huge pile of unclaimed luggage, Monday, as New York’s JFK airport is hit with delays for a fourth day running on Monday
Avianca passengers wait for flights at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport, Monday, where delays have continued after four days of chaos
Pictured are dozens of suitcases piled atop one another at JFK
Another delay was caused when a 61-year-old man was arrested for trying to smuggle a loaded gun through security.
Temperatures around the airport hit as low as four degrees Fahrenheit over the weekend, according to the National Weather Service. Frozen equipment, luggage-handling problems and staff shortages slowed down operations on the ground.
As flights got backlogged, gates clogged up, and some arriving passengers waited on the tarmac for hours and ended up being bused to terminals.
It wasn’t immediately clear how many passenger-filled planes at JFK sat on the ground long enough to risk a possible U.S. Department of Transportation fine.
The threshold is more than three hours for a domestic flight and four for an international one.
Eventually, the Port Authority stepped in and requested that the FAA stop all arrivals to the backlogged terminals, meaning every inbound flight had to call ahead to the dispatch centers to confirm there was a gate available for them when they landed.
But the mismanagement meant that many passengers had already been waiting hours for their flights.
Passenger Lily Crawford told Pix 11: ‘People are sleeping on the ground, people are sitting on the ground. People have taken over wheelchairs. There are no outlets, people are running out of power on their phone.’
Chaos reigned at John F Kennedy Airport as thousands of passengers are stranded due to bomb cyclone-related delays and cancellations
‘We are sharing a gate with another airline, and they have just cancelled there flight, causing the disturbance and the police being called,’ Virgin Atlantic tweeted just before midnight
She added: ‘It’s complete chaos.’
Adding to the misery, at around 2pm on Sunday, the water pipe broke, flooding part of Terminal 4, and suspending its international flight arrivals for a few hours.
The terminal was completely up and running again four hours later, according to JFK International Air Terminal LLC, the company that runs the terminal.
Cotton blamed the weekend of woes primarily on poor communication between international airlines and terminal operating companies.
Brian Kelly, CEO of The Points Guy travel website, pointed to rocky coordination among the different companies that run the airport’s terminals. They’re independent of each other, and that can make it difficult, if not impossible, for an airline operating at one terminal to find a gate at another.
‘I didn’t think JFK could one-up itself, but it certainly did,’ Kelly said. ‘They need to get all the terminals working together because this can’t happen again.’
Meanwhile, Valentina Kukwa continued trying to get home to Salt Lake City from her trip to Cameroon. Two days of travel had turned into three-plus, including a daylong wait in Morocco, and she had no idea where some of her luggage was.
Kukwa, who’s originally from Cameroon, wasn’t surprised that a storm would disrupt winter travel.
‘My frustration was the way they handled it,’ she said. ‘It’s a bad situation, but they’re making it worse.’