LOGAN, Utah (ABC 4 News) - Susan Jorgensen told ABC 4 it was all a matter of bad timing. She had just arrived on a flight from Bangkok, Thailand and was waiting for a connecting flight back to the United States.
She said, "There were literally minutes to board..." when she felt the initial jolt. That was followed about 5 minutes later by the series of stronger jolts that seemed like they would never stop. "Somebody was shouting get away from the windows and sit on the floor," Jorgensen remembers.
The next order was to get out of the building. The airline passengers and employees were evacuated from the gate area and out into the open of the airport tarmac.
"We were right next to the plane that we should have been on," she said. But they might as well have been miles away, that plane was going no where for the next 24 hours.
After a couple hours, the airport concourse was declared safe. Jorgensen and the others were herded back inside to spend a cold night on the hard floor with little food and water. She said with a laugh, "Everyone got a bottle of water and a roll of ritz crackers." That would be lunch, dinner and breakfast.
During the night, when there was power, the travelers sat or stood in silence as they watched the monitors show the first pictures of the developing disaster to the north of Tokyo.
"And it was hard to wrap your mind around it," she said. "Here you are in an airport with no damage -- nobody hurt -- and all this devastation around, but you can't see it. It was a real humbling thing for everybody."
The next day Jorgensen got the last seat on a Delta flight for Seattle. She admits to feeling something of a survivor's guilt. She was flying away from the devastation. She was going home, while so many people in Japan now had no home. Still she knows that she can do more for the victims here than she could stranded in that airport.
