On September 11, something extraordinary happened in this tiny town | KonradMarshall
I know you think you have a September 11 story worth telling – about where you were when you heard the news, how transfixed you became as New York's Twin Towers fell in rushes of bloodied rubble.
In Gander, "Timmys" is where business is done, so Claude – then mayor of Gander – was sitting in his usual booth trying to resolve a school bus drivers' strike, when the first plane hit the North Tower at 9.16am, local time. When the second plane crashed, everyone went home, and the federal government in Ottawa called the town hall: Gander should expect visitors. "Everybody has a disaster plan," says Claude.
Planes banked up on the runway at Gander after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 temporarily closed American airspace.The passengers were forced to sit in their planes on the tarmac for as long as 12 hours, while officials scrambled to set up customs and immigration. Most disembarked the planes in the middle of the night with only their hand luggage. "Every language you can imagine. Every age," Diane says. "We had the world.
Requests – whether for bedding or apples – were broadcast on television and met with an avalanche of donations. They rescued 19 forgotten animals by going through the cargo holds, plane by plane, at times crawling over suitcases and bags to find them. The memory that always gets to Oz Fudge, though, is the handful of terminally ill children from the Make-A-Wish Foundation. They were headed to a dream vacation at Disney World in Florida. In Gander they were housed in an old church camp, taken on canoe trips and hay rides, and even saw a bear in the wild. At 8am on the last day, Oz heard that two of the sick girls were celebrating birthdays. By 2pm, the town had organised a birthday party for all 350 people on board their flight to Orlando.
Gander has also been touched by tragedy. In 1946, 27 people died when a Sabena Airways DC-4 crashed in a wooded area while coming in to land. In 1967, 37 people died when Czechoslovakia Airlines Flight 523 came off the runway. The worst was an American military flight carrying peacekeepers deployed in the Middle East home to Kentucky for Christmas.
Then they were gone. And the locals were left with a profound sense of loss. Diane drove around Gander looking to see if there were any strays left to help.
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