CNN 2010-12-30

Well, the holiday glow has faded. The beauty of a pillowy snowfall has turned downright ugly. Problems are stacked as high as the snow drifts in the northeast. The blizzard 1 is gone. The horror stories are just coming to light.

Earlier on CNN's "AMERICAN MORNING" we spoke 2 to an angry airline passenger who was stuck on the tarmac at New York's JFK Airport for more than eight hours. And get this. The ordeal 3 just ended a couple of hours ago, long after the worst of the storm had passed.

It was terrible. Basically, what happened was we were running out of food and water and the pilot came on to say he was going to be -- he had been arguing with the folks at the airport to at least let the police come on board to deliver some food and water, and I guess he lost that fight.

Nobody came on and we've moved up to a gate and spent another couple of hours at the gate, thinking we were going to come off and never did. And apparently 4 what happened was the customs folks went home at 1:00 a.m. and so everybody coming international kind of had to sit out there in the snow for, you know, all night.

Sounds fun, doesn't it? New York's Port Authority says the situation was unacceptable and it's investigating what went wrong.

And there are plenty of problems on the street. No surprise there. Here's a home video of what the northeast is dealing 5 with as it digs out from as much as 30 inches of snow. Watch and listen.

Oh my god. Are you out of your mind?

Exactly what we thought. The New Yorker who shot that video from his apartment window says that was a city sanitation 6 truck trying to free a snowbound front loader. The results, as you just saw there, were pretty disastrous 7 for the parked SUV. The city calls the situation unfortunate but not unusual.

And here's the formal response. "An accident of that nature is generally followed up a supervisor 8 who follows up by giving a comptroller's claim form to the damaged vehicle owner who completes it, returns it and the matter is generally settled in their favor. Again, this is unfortunate but not unusual during the snow season."

Try telling that to the owner of the SUV.

Here's the video of the storm -- a view of the storm, rather, as it descended 9 on New Jersey 10. Keep an eye on the spinning hands of the clock there, hour by hour, inch by inch. This time lapsed 11 photography captures the snow piling up. And watch this. Of course the real measure of the snow -- of the story is how the region is coping today.

That tops our look across the country this morning, and we begin on this frozen pond in Watonga, Oklahoma. Take a look at that. That is where the pilot of a local TV chopper found that calf 12 there, slip sliding away. Now, with the help of a friend, the helicopter pilot used the downdraft from the chopper blades to actually push the little guy out of harm's way. Isn't he cute?

Meet Bubba, a pit bull terrier that is constantly reaching new heights, if you will, for a Phoenix 13 area roofing company by taking things, well, one step at a time. Yes, this dog is a self-taught ladder climber. Bubba's owner says his house-scaling dog is a good rooftop foreman.

And out west in Los Angeles, a suspected drug smuggler 14 may want to consider the holiday, as in which one, before trying to hide the drugs. Get this. Border agents say they found a Florida man trying to conceal 15 more than 14 pounds of cocaine 16 in Easter egg candy two days before Christmas. He now faces a possible sentence of life in prison.