A woman drove for 10 hours to pick up her 78-year-old mom who got stranded for 5 days by the Southwest chaos

• A woman drove for 10 hours in bad weather to pick up her 78-year-old mom in Oakland.
• Tracy Hurst told The Mercury News her mother was stranded for 5 days by the Southwest chaos.

A woman drove for 10 hours in bad weather to pick up her 78-year-old mom who got stranded in Oakland for five days over the Christmas weekend by the Southwest Airlines chaos.

The Mercury News first reported the story.

Tracy Hurst told Insider that Ida M. Kelly had flown from New Orleans to Oakland with Southwest on Thursday, December 22, but her connecting flight to Portland was canceled.

"I was abandoned," said Kelly, who is diabetic and has bad knees. "Nobody reached out to me to help."

Hurst said she tried to get a response from Oakland International Airport on Twitter.

"I was asking 'Can you check on her? Can you get her a wheelchair and maybe potentially put her in a sky lounge,'" she told The Mercury News, but didn't get a response until she was already on her way to Oakland.

Kelly spent the Christmas weekend shuttling between a hotel and the airport, hoping to make it onto a flight.

An airport spokesperson eventually notified Southwest after seeing a tweet from Hurst, according to The Mercury News. A Southwest flight attendant located Kelly and they shared a hotel room on Monday night while her daughter made the lengthy drive from Oregon in poor weather, the report added.

Hurst said she was yet to receive a refund for her mom's ticket, which cost more than $600.

Southwest has faced huge disruption to its schedules since the winter weather began affecting travel on December 22 and has canceled almost 16,000 flights since then.

Shobi Maynard, a 22-year-old from Cleveland, Ohio, told Insider his Southwest flight got canceled right before Christmas, so he rented a car with three strangers and drove 20 hours home.

Another passenger, Brady Goodman-Williams, said his "quick" trip took 41 hours. He never made it to his destination, nor did his luggage.

Southwest asked corporate workers to volunteer for shifts to help with crew scheduling to restore its flight schedule.

A Southwest spokesperson said: "We apologize to all of our customers who were affected by this disruption. Customers are encouraged to submit requests for refunds due to disruption, as well as requests for reasonable reimbursements for incidental expenses. Those will be processed on a case-by-case basis."

The airline expected to resume normal operations on Friday.

Oakland International Airport didn't immediately respond to requests for comment from Insider.