Watch this short ABC video footage about millions of travellers being affected by weather conditions just before Christmas Day.
Self-study activity:
Watch the clip and answer the questions below. The activity is suitable for intermediate 2 students.
What do the following numbers refer to?
93 million
500
1,600
9 months
45 minutes
83 million
20
11
For correction, you can read the transcript below.
A mass exodus is under way. 93 million Americans trying to make their way home for the holidays in the wake of a monster storm. And all day from L. A. to New York, we saw the pictures. Families stranded at airports. And look, every dot a plane, though hundreds of flights never made it off the ground, though. And here's why. Highways iced over turned into skating rinks and powerful winds, you can see how ferocious, that's not the ocean, it's the normally calm waters of Lake Michigan. The ice, wind and snow meant a headache for travellers. Tonight ABC's meteorologist Ginger Zee is tracking it all from one of the busiest airports in the nation, Chicago O’Hare.
Cynthia, almost 500 flights were cancelled here it Chicago alone. It caused a domino effect across the nation ruining some plans and delaying a whole lot of others. The holiday rush is on. Airports packed with frustration and fiasco.
“They told us they can't fly us out of here until Monday, which is two days after our cruise, our ship leaves.”
More than 1600 flights yesterday and today, canceled. Among those affected, the Apter family.
"It's frustrating. We're going home. We're not happy.”
Their nine months of planning a family trip to Peru, erased. Ripple effects from this week’s storm were felt all the way to Los Angeles.
“I had to wait like 45 minutes to see somebody to change my next flight.”
The storm that caused all that unhappiness, but it ripped scaffolding from buildings in New York City today, rocked rough waves across the great lakes, and left far from perfect roads for the 83 million expected to hit them this weekend. We took an icy drive from Des Moines to Chicago. So, we are just going east on i-80 going only about 20 miles per hour, it's a full ice rink, even though the skies are completely blue. Look at the westbound lanes. They have been like that for about half a mile. We don't know how long that goes.
There are new weather woes are on the west coast too. Heavy rain drenching the pacific northwest causing landslides in Oregon, and shutting down rail service in parts of Washington state after 11 landslides in three days. The weather this weekend is a whole lot quieter, so that’s good news, aside from that storm in the west. Next natural question, who gets a white Christmas. Look at this map, the Rockies, the plains where we just had that blizzard, plenty of cold to keep the snow there and in the north east and New England we can see a little fresh white at least in some parts.
