The April 15 eruption of a volcano in Iceland stranded or grounded several Park City residents along with thousands of travelers worldwide.
Olympic skier Ted Ligety was one. According to USSA Alpine Press Officer Doug Haney, Ligety was in Europe, mostly Austria, testing skis for next season.
Local attorney Les England with Founders Title Company was in Paris on vacation, said colleague Pete Peterson. England reported back to his office that his hotel allowed him to keep his room during the stay, so he’s just extending his vacation.
“As far as I know, they weren’t planning on getting out until later this week,” he said. “They’re just seeing a few more things than they anticipated seeing.”
Carol Tesch with Tesch Law Offices got home from Europe Friday morning at 1 a.m. She said it took some strategizing to do it.
She was in Denmark and Germany visiting some of her family’s former au pairs. Her husband and sons returned after the end of spring break, but she stayed behind to visit more people.
She was in a small town near Cologne when the volcano erupted. At first Delta Airlines would schedule her for departure the next day, but the following afternoon she kept getting emails canceling the flight. Eventually the website became so bogged down she couldn’t even get it to load.
She would hold on the telephone line for hours but never got through to a person. On Wednesday, Tesch and the people she was staying with all tried to get onto the website from separate devices for four hours.
Networking is what finally saved the day.
She called a Park City friend married to a Delta pilot and asked for help getting into the company’s databases. The friend said she had already helped others in Dubai and Scotland.
The friend found a flight leaving out of Charles De Gaulle Airport the very next day with 10 seats left.
Tesch took an AirFrance flight out of Düsseldorf which also allowed her to book the Paris flight to Atlanta at the same time. To stay under any ash clouds, the plane flew to France at only 3,000 feet, providing passengers a picturesque view of the countryside, she said.
At Charles De Gaulle she met people who’d been in line over four hours waiting to just speak with a desk clerk. After a 90-minute queue at a security checkpoint she was headed home. She arrived in Atlanta 26.5 hours after leaving Düsseldorf.
“It was pretty interesting to be Robinson Crusoe but in a pretty wonderful place,” she said.
The skies over Germany were clear and quiet from the lack of planes and also happened to be a beautiful blue.
“It was really lovely quite enchanting,” she said. “It was really a wonderful experience.”
Tesch said the people having less than wonderful experiences likely were on flights forced to land in places for which passengers had no visas. That meant those governments might not have let them leave the airport.
She said she saw a lot of “frazzled” people at Charles De Gaulle.
Tesch also saw on a news station there that the U.S. military had sent a fighter jet into the ash cloud to test its safety and it came back damaged. She heard the ash turned to glass inside the engine.
Oakley-resident Steve Morrison is a professional pilot who’s been grounded because of the ash. He said a passenger plane almost crashed several months ago after flying into an ash cloud over the Pacific Ocean.
“Scientists haven’t analyzed much what these clouds do,” he said.
Morrison was scheduled to fly between San Francisco and London this week. He knows how it feels to be inconvenienced by grounded flights and said he empathizes with the stranded passengers. Had the volcano erupted on a different day he might be stuck in London right now.
Besides feeling for travelers, he said this natural disaster has been a “kick in the stomach” for his industry.
“But we have to err on the side of caution even though it costs big money for the company and for people,” he explained.
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