Sewage Leak Splashes Hundreds Of Checked Bags At Nashville Airport

Image courtesy of KTRK

Yesterday morning, water from a restroom directly above the baggage handling area at Nashville’s airport leaked through the floor and onto hundreds of bags below. While the water came from a plugged toilet, officials treated it as sewage, and removed 380 bags from Southwest flights that were on the carousel to check for, um, dampness.

The leak occurred because someone plugged a toilet in the women’s restroom with paper towels, flooding the area. While that isn’t the same as splattering bags with raw sewage, airport officials still took precautions, and brought in an environmental cleanup crew.

“The affected bags are being sanitized, and in some cases, replacement bags are being offered,” Southwest said in a statement.

This isn’t the first time that this has happened at Nashville’s airport, though. TV station KTRK reports (warning: auto-play video at that link) that the airport authorities are considering restructuring the airport’s drainage system to make sure this doesn’t happen again.

“Second time that has happened? First time that’s OK, but a second time?” one passenger told CBS (warning: auto-play video at that link) after he learned about the incident last year.

Another Southwest passenger told TV station WKRN that her plane simply took off without her bags, and she wasn’t the only traveler affected in that way.

“People had issues that we could’ve dealt with in Nashville,” she told the TV station. “They knew that getting us on the plane, letting us happily fly out of Nashville with no luggage.”

Update: Southwest sent us a statement about the incident.

We do not attribute any flight delays yesterday to the incident in Nashville. As our Employees in Nashville worked to resolve the issue, they identified which bags may have potentially been affected, contacted our Customers, processed the bags, and reunited our Customers with their luggage.

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