Most Americans at one time or other have been stranded in an airport, railroad station, bus station or along an icy or snow-drifted highway. It’s almost always a terrible experience with varying degrees of misery and even tragedy.

Just these past few days, many area residents have had their holiday plans disrupted by Mother Nature. Those who were stuck at home were lucky compared to those who were stranded by poor travel conditions or even sleeping in their cars after sliding off the highway.

It was a difficult weekend for many, but just imagine being among those on the England-France English Channel Tunnel last week. More than 2,000 poor souls were trapped in a tunnel with no light, heat, water or bathroom facilities for as long as 10 hours. It is bad enough when delays occur above ground, but to be almost buried alive in the “Chunnel” for that long has to be terrifying. It will be interesting to learn of the aftereffects people suffer from this event.

Problems on the Chunnel route are rare, but anyone with even the slightest tendency toward claustrophobia has to shudder about the European escapade. We can be sure this incident will prevent many others from taking the transportation artery “just for fun.” There can be no fun in what those people encountered.

It is understandable that snow, ice, mudslides and the like can ground planes and stymie land transportation. These are natural happenings. But what about the revelation that the European tunnel machines were affected by powdery snow that invaded some equipment and caused a major outage? “It’s not like it never snowed before,” said one irate victim. “It’s hard to understand how something this big could happen from something that minor.”

It is easy to sympathize with the thousands of Americans who had holiday plans altered, disrupted and even canceled by our bad weather. But at least they were not trapped below ground wondering what else might go wrong and when.