After a ‘fantastic beautiful’ week, Harold van Vegten and his wife were yesterday at Heraklion airport, ready for a flight back to the Netherlands. “There seemed to be nothing wrong, it was drizzling a bit.” But the drizzle soon turned into a storm. “Suddenly you couldn’t see anything anymore, you couldn’t even see the planes from the departure hall.”
Flying was no longer an option: everything was shut down. The runways were flooded. ,,And away from the airport was not possible due to the storm. We spent hours there. But our situation was not too bad: when we were finally able to leave the airport around 6:00 pm to go to a hotel for another night, people entered the departure hall who had been on a plane all those hours. It was deemed so dangerous by the ground staff that they could not unload the plane earlier,” says Van Vegten, who reported back to the airport this morning for a new attempt to return to the Netherlands. “Air traffic has started again, but we have a delay.”
On their way from the airport to the city, where they had booked a hotel themselves for the night, they saw red sludge on the streets yesterday. ,,It was not too bad there, as far as we could see. The images from other villages were much more intense. Our taxi driver told us that his company’s taxi was dragged into the sea by a wave of water.”