© Christopher Mullen/AP PhotoSubway riders are seen on a car of an subway train that was stranded for eight hours near John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, Monday, Dec. 27, 2010.
It took hours for Christopher Mullen to get off a plane from sunny Cancun and on to a half-empty subway car, his only way home. It would be another eight hours and more - a night spent huddled under a thin blanket on the frigid, grungy car - before he could get off the A train.
His feet soaked to the bone, with no food, water and hardly any heat, Mullen and 400 others lived through a New York nightmare on an elevated subway track, one of hundreds of stories of hardship caused by the crushing snowstorm that dropped more than 2 feet of snow on the Northeast.
By the time they got on the subway shortly before 1 a.m. Monday near Kennedy Airport, Mullen and his girlfriend were well into their ordeal battling the blizzard of December 2010.
Their flight landed two hours late. With snow whirling around the terminal, the airport train was down. There were no taxis. Wearing just a light spring jacket, Mullen stood in the snow and attempted to dig his car out from long-term parking. The only result: feet and legs that were soaking wet.
When the couple - their diving gear and luggage in tow - boarded the A train more than six hours after clearing Customs, it seemed that they were finally on their way. But the subway got only one stop before it was forced to a halt at an open-air station platform in a forlorn corner of Queens near the airport and Jamaica Bay. Later, NYC Transit spokesman Charles Seaton said the cause was snow drifts piled on the outside tracks and thick layers of ice on the electrified third rail.