Nearly 4,000 baby chicks died at Miami International Airport after being left outside on the tarmac and in the sweltering heat for several hours. The chicks were being shipped to the Bahamas with a transit stop in Miami but baggage handlers didn’t take them to a temperature-controlled warehouse and instead left them outside where temperatures peaked at 99 degrees last Tuesday.
According to WWNY TV, a total of 5,000 chicks were being transported to the Abaco Big Bird Family Farm in the Bahamas. The shipment arrived on a Delta Air Lines flight at 1:15 pm last Tuesday and baggage handlers offloaded the cardboard boxes and left them outside on carts.
Third-party ground handlers from Alliance Ground International were allegedly meant to pick up the shipment of chicks and move them to an inside warehouse and out of the glare of the searing Florida sun but those employees failed to turn up.
As a result, the chicks ended up being left outside for several hours before airport workers realized what had happened. By this point, 3,900 chicks had already perished.
In April, millions of honeybees that were being shipped from California to Alaska were killed when the shipment was diverted to Atlanta and the crates were left outside in stifling heat.
On that occasion, which also involved Delta Air Lines, ground handlers had initially moved the 800-pound shipment into a climate-controlled warehouse but some of the bees escaped so workers decided to reposition the crates outside to prevent anyone from being stung.
The bees were left outside in 83-degree heatand most of the five million honeybees, worth an estimated $48,000, perished.
