TSA Issue.

[hernanu]

I was taking a trip from Gulfport, MS, and had a connecting flight in Atlanta.

I went through security at Gulfport, letting them know that I have metal hips. I went through the whole body scanner, and as they sometimes do, they found something on my shoes.

I have TSA precheck, so get to keep my sneakers (trainers) on, but in this case I had to hand them over to be scanned.

Put them back on, continued on the carpeted floor and got on the plane and went to Atlanta.

I got off the plane, went to the main concourse onto their tiled floors and within a few steps, noticed my sneakers were sticking badly to the floor. I took a couple of steps (being in a hurry) and then tripped badly, hitting the ground with my knees first, then landing on my chest.

I am not a clumsy person by nature, but the sneakers sticking made it impossible to stay up.  Both my knees were pretty hurt and a month later are still healing.

Needless to say, I thought I'd put up some caution here.

I've seen TSA use a liquid to test for chemical particles. The Gulfport TSA I think is used for training, so when my sneakers were "inspected" I think someone was overzealous in applying the solvent to the sneakers, which being rubber may have reacted.

This is just circumstantial evidence, but when I got up, I noticed it still sticking to the tiles, went to the escalators with their slats of steel, scraped my shoe soles sideways with them and had no more problem.

So whatever was on them was gone.

So my caution is that if you do go through TSA and your shoes are inspected, please take some measures to clean the bottoms of your sneakers (at least) to avoid issues.  I'm nine years along, but for some of the more recent hippies, it may be more important.

Again - this was with my shoes being re-scanned and inspected. It may not be an issue if you're just having them scanned normally and no chemicals being applied to them.