Who burnt the toast??
It´s amazing how the small things in life can lead to bigger things. Who´d have thought that a fire alarm one hour before we were due to leave Gatwick could cause us so much hassle. Needless to say, we never did get to Lima as planned, 24 hours after leaving a very wet and blustery London!
And so it was just after spending our last few coins in WH Smith that an automated voice rang through the departure lounge announcing a fire alarm was going off. Watching the reaction of the public at this stage was fascinating – hardly anyone moved at all, which, bearing in mind the threat of terror and all that these days, was quite remarkable. Mind you, nobody was really helped by an appalling lack of direction offered by anyone official – it´s not really the done thing to file out of a place like this onto the runway itself.
Once we´d all been shuffled off into a side corridor (about 2,000 people!), the alarm stopped and we all came back out again. The remarkable thing about this was that throughout the evacuation of passengers into the side corridor, the (fire) doors through which we had to pass remained fully open, just waiting to fan any flames there may have been. All in all a very pointless exercise.
But the damage had been done, the flight was delayed by 75 minutes (someone decided they weren´t going to fly after their baggage was loaded – why do people do that?), and we knew we were going to be pushed at Houston USA to make our connecting flight to Lima.
But it wasn´t for the want of trying to catch our connection when we eventually did get to the States……..
Tags: Eug & Em arrive in South America
mihai