They brought it on themselves

The Transportation Department has ordered airlines to allow passengers to deplane after a tarmac delay of three hours.
This will be hailed as a victory by groups that have lobbied for such a rule. Over the last decade, there has been no dearth of gruesome tales of passengers trapped for eight or more hours on planes with no food, water or working toilets.
The straw that broke the camel's back was overnight captivity of passengers on a Minneapolis-bound regional jet that was diverted to Rochester, Minn., in August.
In reality, the rule probably won't prevent many of the more horrifying events, at least not initially. If a major snowstorm cripples operations at an airport and there are no gates to be had, there's little that can be done. You can't allow passengers to deplane on air stairs in the middle of a blizzard. Nor can you allow ground crews to move equipment around during a lightning storm. The pilot of the Continental Express flight in the Rochester incident wanted to deplane her passengers, but the Mesaba Airlines employee who was manning the station wouldn’t allow it.
But this is a wakeup call for commercial airlines, which have appeared to ignore the rights of human cargo to be treated as human beings.
Behind the scenes, several airlines have taken steps to reduce the number of horror stories. Some, like American, have worked on technologies that track trouble spots so that aircraft sitting on tarmacs aren't forgotten. Southwest has made a point of avoiding such situations and has procedures for dealing with them when they do.
Publicly, most airlines have claimed that they are at the mercy of events over which they have no control. They point out that the horrible incidents represent a small fraction of airline operations, overlooking the fact that they represent thousands of hours of human suffering. The same people who accept no deviation from absolute safety in the air have appeared clueless when it comes to caring for passengers on the ground.
Now they are going to have to pay attention. The good news: History shows us that when airlines pay attention to problem areas – on-time performance is a good example – things get better.