Any traveler can tell you about the nightmares that often go along with going through an airport, but some travelers at Miami International Airport Wednesday had an experience that took things completely off the rails.
The passengers were on the Skytrain when the car suddenly stopped in its place on the tracks. It left the people inside, irritated, moody, sweaty, and hot. All the while, the entire incident was being posted live to social media.
"Literally it stopped so abruptly that everyone falls down; so we think, ok something happened," passenger Carlos Whittaker said,
The Skytrain was built to transport up to 9,000 passengers per hour, but couldn’t get moving Wednesday which prompted Whitaker to hit social media and it quickly picked up a following.
Whittaker said, "I thought, ‘Wow this is pretty epic,’ we got some emotion so I pulled out my iPhone and started tweeting and I hashtaggged it and people started following it."
Whitaker, who is a motivational speaker and author with tens of thousands of Twitter followers, go the hashtag #miamiairporttramdisaster rolling. Whitaker said the delay caused him to miss his flight and left him stuck in Miami for another seven hours.
Travelers were grounded inside the tram for almost an hour with tempers flaring and blood pressure boiling. The reasoon it took so long to evacuate passengers from the tram is because of the weather outside. There was a lightning storm and it was safer for the passengers to stay on board than go outside.
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Finally, MIA mechanics arrived and evacuated the tram. But, passengers had to walk the tracks to the nearest gate.
Whittaker said, "We walked about 200 yards down and the guy told us, ‘Listen you have to stay between the two yellow lines because there’s 7500 watts of something if you touch that you’ll die’....so there were some people freaking out."
In the end nobody was hurt and Whittaker walked away with official MIA gear and a formal apology from the airport. Following his lead...@iflymia tweeted...."We love happy endings....have a good flight"
Whittaker said, "I’m a fan now. I’m a fan of MIA even though I was frustrated at the airport."
This is only the second time the train has stopped mid-track with passengers on board in four years of its operation.
