The Day the World Came to Town: 9/11 in Gander, Newfoundland Read Online Free PDF Page A

to go home, where he could follow the coverage on CNN.
    Inside his house, he stared at his television in absolute disbelief. As the towers became engulfed in flames, he kept glancing at the word LIVE in the corner of the screen. This wasn’t some movie, he thought to himself, this was actually happening right now. Before long, Elliott received a phone call from the town manager. Officials at the airport had called. U.S. airspace was closed and a lot of planes were being diverted to Canada. It looked like Gander was going to be receiving a sizable portion of them, perhaps as many as fifty planes.
    “What about the passengers?” Elliott asked.
    For now, he was told, the plan was to allow the jets to land, but to hold all of the passengers on board until U.S. airspace opened up again and the planes could take off. They would probably be on the ground for only a few hours.
    Elliott knew better. Watching events unfold on his television, he could see that the United States was in a state of chaos. The whereabouts of the president were unclear. The American military was mobilizing. Nobody seemed to have an understanding of what was happening. This was obviously going to take time to sort out, certainly more than a few hours. The mayor then started doing the math. If there were fifty planes en route, with an average of 250 passengers and crew members on each plane, they could easily have more than 12,000 people landing in Gander in the next few hours. Even if they never got off the plane, just having to feed that many people would be a tremendous undertaking for a town the size of Gander.
    Elliott didn’t want to get caught flat-footed. The town needed to start getting ready in case the passengers were going to be stranded there overnight. The town opened its emergency operations center—a room inside town hall—and started contacting local groups to place them on alert that it might need their assistance.
     
     
    G eoff Tucker was already making preparations at the airport. He’d worked at Gander International for nineteen years and was now the vice-president of the local airport authority. With the airport director out of town for a conference, Tucker was the man in charge.
    He was alerted to the attacks in New York by Bruce Terris, the supervisor up in the airport’s tower. Right away Tucker knew the ripple from such a catastrophe would find its way to Gander. “The lifeboat of the North Atlantic” is the way he always referred to Gander International. Every pilot who flies to the United States from Europe knows exactly where Gander is located. If there is a serious mechanical problem over the ocean or a passenger has a heart attack or goes berserk with a case of air rage, the pilot makes an emergency landing in Gander.
    After receiving the call from the tower, Tucker met with the head of the local detachment of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the commander of the Canadian military base in Gander, as well as local and federal government officials. They all knew an onslaught was about to hit them. The RCMP and the central government in Ottawa were adamant, though: the planes could land, but nobody would be allowed off.
     
     
    O ’Reilly was amazed at how calmly his controllers were handling the situation. Their first task was to contact all of the planes currently heading for the United States. During that first hour not all of the pilots had heard about the attack, and controllers were told to tell pilots only that “a crisis” in the United States had forced the government to close down its airspace. The pilots had the choice of turning around and returning to Europe or landing in Canada.
    Even if pilots asked questions about the events in New York, the controllers were told not to discuss the attack with them. They weren’t there to provide news updates or answer questions or knock down rumors, their only concern was to get the planes safely on the ground. The truth was that the controllers weren’t the best