During her first four days living in an airport, Dominica Zschiesche cleaned her body with hand wipes and used a public bathroom sink to shave her legs and wash her hair.
However, by day five at Camp Kennedy, she seemed almost at home, standing near the concourse barefoot and with her hair wrapped in a blue towel after she finally got to shower.
“It was wonderful. It was the best shower I ever had,” the 29-year-old art student from Frankfurt said.
PHOTO: AFP
Hundreds of passengers are stranded at John F. Kennedy International Airport while they wait for the volcanic ash cloud over Europe to clear and flights to resume. They were doing the best they could in the stuffy, smelly space.
A Belgian family sat on a terminal floor around a coffee table they built out of a cardboard box. And in a corner, two British tourists made light of their situation by scrawling a sign on a sheet of notebook paper: “JFK Squatters, Yorkshire Branch.”
They have set up mini-encampments, brushing their teeth and hair in public bathrooms, fending off boredom by constructing a big cardboard airplane and sleeping on cots under fluorescent lights amid the din of televisions and the public address system.
“Time goes by slow,” said Laurence De Loosa, trying to get home to Belgium from a vacation to celebrate her 21st birthday with a friend. “The lights were on all night. It was not so easy to sleep. The TV was still on.”
As homey as they tried to make it, the airport still presented a hostile environment for some.
Geoff Gilbert, a 57-year-old structural engineer waiting for a flight to Manchester, England, had his wallet stolen at an airport McDonald’s. Now, he said on Monday, he’s completely out of money.
“It’s not very comfortable,” he said of the airport. “You’re indoors all the time. It’s hot in there, sticky.” And the end — though in sight — is very far off.
“I still have a long wait. I don’t fly out until Sunday,” he said.
The cloud has paralyzed trans-Atlantic flights since Thursday, causing the biggest flight disruptions since the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks.
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs the metropolitan area’s major airports, has set up 1,000 cots and blankets at JFK and Newark, New Jersey, served hot meals to the stranded and handed out essentials such as bottled water and baby wipes. The Red Cross and various consulates have provided some of the bedding and food.
On Monday afternoon, five days into the crisis, the agency opened trailers with a dozen showers at JFK.
The 500-some people camping out at the Port Authority’s airports “are being well taken care of,” said Chris Ward, the agency’s executive director.
Some passengers made JFK their home because hotel rooms were scarce, they had gone way over budget on their New York vacations, or they just thought that staying close to the airport was the smartest thing to do if they wanted to get home soon.
Around the world, hundreds of passengers were having similar experiences, resting on blankets spread on airport floors and relying in some cases on McDonald’s meal vouchers.
“We have one meal a day. At the moment a lot of people are not eating,” Andrew Turner, a graduate student en route to London after a vacation in Sydney, said from Incheon International Airport in South Korea.
The passenger experience was more pleasant at Frankfurt Airport in Germany, where spokesman Uwe Witzel said the hundreds of stranded travelers were getting three meals a day, showers, fresh clothing and more.
“We’ve set up an Internet lounge, we’ve hired people to entertain the kids and we’ve also arranged a spot outside the terminal building where people can go to get a breath of fresh air and some sun,” he said.
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese