Amtrak passengers were stranded more than 24 hours at a packed Union Station, homeless shelters were bursting at the seams and the city was swamped with complaints about landlords providing inadequate heat Friday.
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As area residents headed into the weekend, the bitter cold had taken a firm grip on the region and was imperiling holiday plans.
At Midway Airport, scores were forced to look for alternatives to reach their destinations on one of the busiest travel days of the year as one of Midway’s principal carriers, American Trans Air, canceled more than a dozen flights.
The problem was blamed on temperatures that disabled ATA maintenance trucks so that they were unable to refuel planes.
The problem got so bad that ATA dispatched its chairman, George Mikelsons, to Midway to offer apologies and free plane tickets to some of the inconvenienced passengers.
Mikelsons “wished he could apologize for the weather, but it was a factor beyond our control,” said ATA spokeswoman Mary Cochran.
But the alternatives to air travel weren’t much better. At Union Station, where passengers and their holiday gifts flooded the floors, 10 out of the 52 trains operated by Amtrak were canceled Friday. Most of the rest were experiencing serious delays as the bitter cold froze everything from locomotive compressors to train horns.
Georgia Clark, 77, and her 80-year-old husband, Isiah, of Mississippi, were just two of the hundreds hoping to be with family members by the holiday. The two, trying to get from Chicago to Milwaukee, scurried for information about catching a bus when told late Friday that their train had been canceled.
“This makes me upset,” Georgia Clark said. “I didn’t intend to spend the holidays at the train station.”
One of the worst delays was with the City of New Orleans, a fabled train that makes the run from Chicago to the Big Easy. Scheduled to leave at 8 p.m. Thursday, the train didn’t pull out until about 4 a.m. Friday, but was then forced to reverse course and bring its 263 passengers back to Chicago, where most were still waiting late Friday.
The train’s troubles were legion as one key system froze after another. Finally, Amtrak workers installed two new locomotives on the train. But it only got as far as south suburban Homewood, where crew members were supposed to switch with another crew coming from Carbondale. The replacement crew never arrived due to weather-related equipment problems, said Kevin Johnson, an Amtrak spokesman.
Passengers grew frustrated as the train sat still. Margitta Rose and her husband, Russell of Muskegon, Mich., who were heading to New Orleans for a vacation, said they felt like hostages on the train.
Others took the hassles in stride.
“My friends were laughing at me,” said J.T. Watkins, a 36-year-old engineer from Baton Rouge, La., who wanted to avoid the holiday delays at Chicago’s airports by taking a train home after a convention here. “I told them I would beat them home–but they’re already home.”
City Aviation Commissioner Thomas R. Walker said Friday was expected to be one of the busiest travel days of the year for the city’s already jammed airports. But he said that all runways were in operation and that except for the ATA problems, no extraordinary delays were reported.
About 240,000 passengers were expected to pass through O’Hare by the end of Friday, while about 40,000 were to come through Midway.
The troubles began mounting late Thursday for American Trans Air, an Indianapolis-based carrier that has grown into one of Midway’s biggest airlines. At least 22 ATA flights arriving or departing from Midway had been canceled by Friday evening, Cochran said.
By Friday afternoon, the ATA terminal area was jammed with long lines of irate passengers. Computer screens showed almost every arriving and departing flight delayed. Explanations were hard to come by, passengers said.
“It seems like they just fell apart at the seams,” said Mitchell J. Loshaw Jr., 29, of Phoenix who was trying to get to Boston. Originally scheduled to leave on a flight from Midway at 8:40 p.m. Thursday, Loshaw was still in an airport lounge Friday evening hoping to catch a 7:30 p.m. flight nearly 23 hours later. “No one seems to know what’s going on,” he said.
Chicago’s homeless experienced serious problems with the cold, as temperatures Friday plunged as low as 10 degrees below zero, with windchills dropping the figure much further. The average temperature for this time of year is about 32 degrees, according to the National Weather Service. The temperature is expected to climb as high as the mid-teens Saturday.
City officials said Friday that plenty of room was available at homeless shelters, but numbers from the Department of Human Services showed those 128 shelters were at capacity Thursday night.
About the only beds available were 500 overflow emergency cots being set up at special community service centers, said Jennifer Polovick, a spokeswoman for the Human Services Department.
“We’re filled to the rafters. There are people that aren’t making it to shelters and you wonder how they’re going to survive the night.” said Virginia Cook, the director of an overnight warming center run by Cornerstone Community Outreach at 4626 N. Clifton Ave.
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The Cook County medical examiner said 10 deaths have been linked to hypothermia since Dec. 1.
In Chicago, police said they believe faulty heating equipment led to the carbon monoxide asphyxiation deaths of Philomena Garcia, 89, and her 34-year-old nephew Peter Garcia, in their apartment in the 2200 block of North Wayne Avenue. Police said autopsies will be performed Saturday.
Apartment residents, meanwhile, were flooding the city with calls about landlords who they said were violating a Chicago law requiring that room temperatures be kept at a minimum of 68 degrees during most of the day and no lower than 63 at night. City building inspectors are working multiple shifts to respond to the calls, said Christopher J. Kozicki, deputy building commissioner.
There were 371 such complaints from about 4 p.m. Thursday to 6 a.m. Friday, said Kristen Lobbins-Cabanban, a building department spokeswoman. About 220 more came in by 11 a.m. Friday, she said.
Jennifer Hoyle, a spokeswoman for the city’s Law Department, said 30 cases have been brought against landlords for alleged heat violations so far this week.
“Our main goal when we go into Housing Court is to get the problem fixed first,” Hoyle said.