A water pipe burst in the main control tower at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, which forced hundreds of flight delays on Tuesday.

The burst led to an evacuation of the tower just after 1 a.m., bringing operations at O'Hare to a halt. Since then, delay times slowly but surely decreased, but it impacted the entire day.

The Federal Aviation Administration said the main tower would be down the entire day for crews to fix the pipe, leaving the north and south towers to pick up the slack. That led to mounting flight delays. 

"We pushed off, then we got the announcement that we had a 50-minute delay, so five, zero," said Lara Dyke. 

Dyke was departing from Fort Myers, Florida, when her flight came to a halt before taking off. She said she didn't mind the nearly one-hour delay for safety, but hopes the airport works on prevention.

"I think that it was precautions because you know water breaks are very scary, and especially with these cold temperatures, it's actually quite common these days. Unless preventative maintenance is done, hopefully, they think about that in the future," Dyke said.

"We were headed to Cancun, actually, trying to get away from the cold weather," said Jon Eis.

Eis and his wife were hoping to be in Mexico by the end of the day when they felt the ripple effect of delays in Green Bay on their way to O'Hare.

They had two delays there for us, so we just got in. I ran all the way to the gate, and I thought I made it, and they were already gone," he said.

Eis said there are no flights to Cancun until Wednesday, so they will have to spend the night in Chicago before reaching their tropical destination.

"A bit frustrating, but we'll check out Chicago and have a good time downtown, maybe, I don't know, we'll see," he said.

Delays earlier were about an hour, and at last check, the average delays were just over 20 minutes.

The extent of the damage at the tower is not known, but the FAA said that air traffic controllers are back in the tower. They said they will continue to investigate.