Delivery problems at New York's JFK airport left Bermuda high and dry with its US mail recently.

Mystery difficulties at the airport left just a trickle of post reaching the Island from the States until a deluge of letters left the Bermuda Post Service swamped by backlogged mail.

Postmaster General Cleveland Crichlow said his staff worked extra hours to move the items, some of which dated back to March.

He said there were also some problems sending express mail from Bermuda to the US, which had taken ten days instead of the normal three.

Mr. Crichlow said it was not clear what the difficulties were at JFK, but added that when the huge amount of post suddenly started to appear it came from other gateways serving Bermuda.

"The mail had been coming from JFK on a fairly regular basis, all of a sudden every plane that comes in seemed to have mail on it, '' he said.

"We received this mountain of mail, we don't know what happened.'' His staff of 35 worked weekends and nights to clear the huge pile of post, and only in the last few days has the problem eased.

Mr. Crichlow said there were often difficulties with Bermuda mail routed through JFK. UK post was not affected.

"I think they are trying to do too much there, before we had lots of gateways, they decided to close the other airports because they had all this capacity at JFK.'' It was rare for Bermuda to experience mail delivery problems during the summer months because of the increased capacity and frequency of US flights, he said.

Often it was the winter months that experienced the worst delays, especially around Christmas, when airlines downsized their aircraft and reduced the number of flights.

"This seems to be unusual for this time of year,'' he said.