A Bayport man who was on the Delta flight from the Twin Cities to Toronto said the scene after the jet flipped onto its roof while landing on Monday afternoon was “mass chaos.”

“There was like a big fireball out the left side of the plane,” John Nelson, 47, of Bayport, told CNN. “I was upside down, the lady next to me was upside down. We kind of let ourselves go and fell to hit the ceiling, which is a surreal feeling. And then everybody was like, ‘Get out! Get out! Get out!’ We could smell the jet fuel. Even now I smell like jet fuel.”

Nelson was one of the 80 people on board the Delta Flight 4819 from Minneapolis. The flight, operated by a Delta subsidiary, Endeavor Air, crashed around 2:15 p.m. Eastern time.

New video shows Delta plane crash landing at Toronto airport

Winds were gusting up to 40 mph during the day at Toronto Pearson Airport, according to the Meteorological Service of Canada.

“The winds were super gusty,” Nelson told CNN. “The snow had kinda blown over the runways. It was routine, but like it was noticeable that the runways were kind of in a weird condition.”

Nelson said that when the plane, a Bombardier CRJ-900 aircraft, hit the ground “super hard.”

“The plane went sideways, and I believe we skidded on our side and then flipped over on our back,” he said. “Where we ended up, there was like a big fireball out the left side of the plane. It was mass chaos.”

Nelson said he and other passengers crawled out of the back of the plane.

He took a video of the plane, lying belly up, that he posted live on Facebook as he was leaving the scene.

“We’re in Toronto,” he said in the video. “We just landed. Our plane crashed. It’s upside down. The fire department is on site. It’s upside down. Most people appear to be OK. We’re all getting off. There’s some smoke going on.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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