I'm sure by now that everyone has heard of that volcano in Iceland, spewing ash all over Europe and the airlines across the continent are shut down. Turns out, it's bad juju to fly through an ash cloud.
Everyone's stranded. Lots of Brits are without flights across the channel.
So I'm wondering, what about that vaunted tunnel that connects Dover and Calais? Don't they have trains? Or cruise ships? Heck, Churchill used pleasure craft to pull the British Army off the beaches at Dunkirk during WWII.
The airlines could have chartered passenger cruise ships. The trains could run at full capacity to places that were not threatened with ash.
I don't see any news of any of those things happening. Just because you can't fly doesn't mean you can't walk or float. It's slower, but it beats standing still. It looks to me like a lot of folks have their heads up their butts over this problem.
Rivrdog's right. Just because modern conveniences don't work, doesn't mean that the last generations solutions to those problems won't work. Sometimes low-tech is best.
My wife flew to France last Monday; she got back on Friday through sheer luck; her return travel was via Munich, which stayed open although the airport they came in via was already closed. Her flight was reportedly one of the last that made it out.
ReplyDeleteThe coworker she was traveling with was supposed to continue to England on Friday. She's still in France last we heard, and per the company booked rooms through this Friday.
The cross-channel trains got booked solid for days very early on; she was told on Friday that today (Tuesday) was the earliest she "might" get a seat. Rental cars were also gone, and the regional train to get from the city they were in (not Paris) were also apparently not available (they couldn't get tickets, booking, whatever, don't know the details).
Couldn't speak to cruise ships but early on they expected only a 2 day at most outage (so the news here and there said); the time overhead for ships would have seemed unreasonable. Maybe not so now, but hindsight...
Another point of view from a person over there; this is an internet/network security diary so its written from that perspective.
ReplyDeletehttp://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=8653
Figures that the French train workers were on strike again...