The Superior Express -

Wendy Helfrich was visiting New York when she received a text message at 2 a.m. on Dec. 27, reporting her family’s flight home to Hebron on Southwest Airlines had been canceled. The flight was one of thousands of flights interrupted by Winter Storm Elliot. Before the flight mess was cleared up, nearly 12,000 flights had been disrupted by the storm.

Wendy and three other family members, Todd, Logan and Laken, headed to the airport hoping to catch another flight.

Logan told a Hebron Journal-Register reporter, “We went to all the terminals and no airline had a flight. Technically, we co...