The Day the World Came to Town: 9/11 in Gander, Newfoundland (10 page)

In June, she was named director of intelligence for the joint United States European Command, which made her one of the country’s key players in the war on terrorism. And yet here she was, trapped on a plane for more than twenty hours. The plane’s phone and her cell phone worked only intermittently, but she’d had enough communication with her staff in Stuttgart to know they were doing everything they could to deal with the crisis and to find a way to get her home.

From time to time she wandered to the front of the plane, where the door was open, to survey the scene. She was quite familiar with Gander, because the U.S. military often used it as a refueling stop. She also recalled the Arrow Air plane crash of 1985 and the loss of all those young soldiers from the 101st Airborne. From her vantage point on the plane, Fast could see that the airport was surrounded by trees. She could also see an amazing assortment of commercial airliners.

By midmorning Wednesday, a row of yellow school buses pulled up to her plane and the passengers were allowed off. Striking up a conversation with the bus driver, Fast learned about their strike and how they had all voluntarily come off the picket line when they learned about the diverted flights. Fast was impressed.

Fast could see that security inside the airport was being handled by both the RCMP and a detachment from the Canadian military base. After going through a metal detector, Fast placed her carry-on luggage on a table in front of a young soldier. Although she wasn’t wearing a uniform, she was carrying her military identification, and when the soldier spotted it and noticed her rank, he adopted a very formal manner. She noticed that while the passengers before her on line seemed to speed right through, he was taking an exceptionally long time with her. She surmised that the young man, out of a sense of pride, was showing her that he would be thorough and deliberate in accomplishing his task. When he was done, Fast nodded her approval.

There were 154 passengers aboard American Airlines Flight 49, and once they had made their way through the airport, they were taken to the Knights of Columbus hall in the center of town. Even though Fast was off the plane, there was still little she could do but wait. After showering nearby at the community center, she decided to see if she could accomplish a few of the chores her husband had given her to do while she was in the United States. (She called it her “honey-do list.” As in: “Honey, do this for me” and “Honey, do that for me.”) Although it didn’t look like she would make it to the States, she thought she might find a few of the items in Gander.

Most of the items were things her husband had trouble finding in Germany. The big item: a Sears catalog featuring Craftsman tools. As luck would have it, there was a small Sears outlet store—not a full-blown Sears—on the outskirts of town. Fast got directions and set off on foot. She could easily have found a ride with someone if she’d wanted to, but she liked the idea of walking after being confined to a plane for so long.

The walk also gave her more time to think. Earlier, when she arrived at the Knights of Columbus, she saw for the first time, on TV, what had happened. She thought back over all of the bits of intelligence information her command had assembled over the last few months. Was there something they had missed, something they should have seen or detected that would have allowed them to prevent this attack? There were some indications that bin Laden’s network had been more active in recent months, Fast thought, but nothing that would have suggested such a brazen assault on the United States.

She refused to allow any doubts to gnaw at her or cause her to feel a sense of guilt. She believed the men and women in her command had done the best they could with the information they had.

Fast found herself on a residential street, where she spotted a man on a porch waving at her. He asked if she was one of the stranded passengers.

“Yes,” she said.

He explained that he and his family were preparing a big birthday party for his grandson in the backyard. He asked if she’d like to join them. She agreed and followed him around the house. The boy’s parents were still decorating the backyard with balloons and streamers in anticipation of other children arriving. Fast was introduced to the guest of honor.

“Happy birthday,” she said.

“Thank you,” the boy replied.

“How old are you?”

“Seven,” he answered.

Fast was energized by the family’s sense of warmth and their willingness to share this time with an outsider who just happened to be walking down the street. For a moment she could almost forget what a dangerous place the world was and the horrors of the preceding day. But she didn’t stay long. She didn’t need to. A little of that warmth went a long way. Besides, she still wanted to make it to the Sears store before it closed.

W
hile the one-star general explored the town, another passenger from American Airlines Flight 49, Lisa Zale, surveyed the Knights of Columbus building and had her own epiphany. After spending a night on the plane, the thirty-eight-year-old Zale was anxious for a little space. Rather than sleeping each night indoors, crowded together as they had been on the plane, why not camp out on the front lawn? Zale was traveling with her business partner, Sara Wood. They had been to Paris for a trade show and were on their way home to Dallas. “Let’s just sleep out here,” Zale told Wood, pointing to stretch of green grass between the Knights of Columbus building and the sidewalk.

Wood initially thought Lisa was crazy. Who sleeps on the street when they can be indoors on a cot? Besides, unlike Zale, the forty-five-year-old Wood had never been camping. Zale told her to have a little faith. Following the main road, the two women walked about a half mile to the Wal-Mart. They bought a lantern and a few other items, but the store was out of air mattresses and sleeping bags. So the ladies moved on to Canadian Tire. As its old slogan implies, Canadian Tire is more than just tires. One of the clerks was able to scrounge up a pair of air mattresses and two sleeping bags and then asked, “Do you want a tent as well?”

Zale said it wasn’t necessary, but Wood cut her off.

“Hell, yes, we want a tent,” she declared, her Texas accent almost bowling the clerk over. It might rain, Wood reasoned, so a tent could come in handy. Zale and Wood piled their supplies onto the checkout counter and started reaching for their credit cards.

“You’re off the plane, right?” the cashier asked.

When Zale and Wood nodded, the cashier announced that they could just take the items. Anything the stranded passengers needed, the store was happy to provide. The store even offered to send one of their employees over to the Knights of Columbus to help them set up the tent. The two women were awed by how generous everyone in the store had been.

Zale and Wood loaded their gear into a shopping cart they had taken from Wal-Mart and pushed it back the half mile to the lodge.

E
very business in Gander joined the relief effort. The local Kentucky Fried Chicken and Subway sandwich outlets, as well as the local pizza joints, sent carloads of food to the airport on Tuesday and Wednesday to help feed the passengers stranded on the planes. Gander’s food co-op, one of the two supermarkets in town, went to twenty-four-hour service in case any of the shelters needed an item from their shelves.

Newtel, the telephone company for Newfoundland, set up a long bank of tables on the sidewalk in front of its offices and filled them with telephones so passengers could make free long-distance phone calls to their families. On another set of outdoor tables, they placed computers with Internet access. Newtel officials kept the tables running day and night for as long as the passengers needed them.

Rogers Communications, which provides cable-television service to Gander and the surrounding area, made sure every shelter had cable television so the passengers could watch CNN and the other round-the-clock news stations. By the time the first busload of passengers was heading for town, technicians for Rogers were already running temporary cable lines into the local churches where they would be staying. Rogers also operates the public-access television station in Gander, Channel 9. The station became a giant bulletin board where messages were posted to help organize relief efforts. The town’s radio station also broadcast dispatches. An urgent plea for toilet paper at St. Paul’s brought people running to the school with rolls of tissue from their own homes.

After handling the initial nicotine crisis caused by the smoking ban aboard the plane, Kevin O’Brien, owner of MediPlus Pharmacy, rallied the other pharmacists in the area to face an even more daunting challenge. Many of the passengers had packed their prescription medication away in their luggage before leaving Europe. Since all of their bags were still on the plane, they were desperate to have those prescriptions replaced while they were stranded.

In most cases, the passengers didn’t have their actual prescriptions with them. In each case, O’Brien and the other pharmacists had to call the hometown doctor or pharmacist so they would know the exact medication and dosage, and had a new prescription sent. During one stretch, O’Brien and his wife, Rhonda, worked forty-two hours straight, making calls to a dozen different countries.

Surprisingly, there isn’t one universal standard for identifying drugs. A drug such as Atenol, commonly prescribed to patients with high blood pressure, can go by different names in different countries. A pharmacist for more than twenty years, O’Brien spent hours on the Internet, and worked with the local hospital and Canadian health officials, to sort through the maze of prescriptions and find the right drugs for each passenger. In the first twenty-four hours, pharmacists in Gander filled more than a thousand prescriptions. All at no cost to the passengers.

For O’Brien, an event like this was the reason he loved living in Gander. A Newfoundlander all his life, he was proud of the way his community would pull together and help one another—or for that matter, a complete stranger. It was a spirit he wanted his three daughters to know and understand, and it was the reason he would never leave.

P
atricia O’Keefe spent most of the morning trying to find the phone number for the American Legion hall in Nova Scotia. That was all the information she had on the whereabouts of her parents, Hannah and Dennis O’Rourke. Apart from having the wrong Canadian province, she was also obviously asking for the wrong country’s legion hall. Later everyone in the family would laugh about it. For now it drove them crazy. Somewhere out there, Hannah and Dennis were stranded with no way of getting home, and their son Kevin was trapped inside one of the fallen towers of the World Trade Center.

Patricia missed having her parents at home, especially her mother, Hannah was the one everyone turned to in a crisis, the person who held things together. She made sure things were done before anyone else thought about them, and would make everything seem effortless in the process. Patricia wanted to try to fill that void. And even though she was married, with children of her own, she still worried about whether she was up to it. Could she offer the type of support to the rest of her family they would need in the days ahead?

A
fter catching a couple of hours’ sleep, Hannah O’Rourke asked for directions to the Catholic church. The morning sky was clear and a breeze moved through the trees lining the four blocks she walked from the Royal Canadian Legion hall. The church, St. Joseph’s, is located in a part of Gander dominated by religious institutions. The Anglican church is close by, as is the United. And farther down the road are the Baptist and the Evangelical.

St. Joseph’s is a beautiful new church with a great steeple. When Hannah arrived at the church she was met by Father David Heale, a priest for the last thirty years whose family has lived in Newfoundland for three generations. Father Heale was standing on the front steps, greeting parishioners before morning Mass. Not recognizing Hannah, he quickly guessed she was one of the stranded passengers.

“Good morning,” he offered.

Hannah held his hand and tried to remain composed.

“Father, would you pray for our son?” she asked. “He’s a firefighter and he’s missing in New York.”

After morning Mass, Hannah walked back to the legion hall and called her daughter. She felt helpless being so far away.

“We haven’t heard anything yet,” Patricia told her.

Hannah was quiet.

“Don’t give up hope, Ma,” Patricia said. “You know Kevin; he’ll find a way out. He’s a survivor. There are air pockets all over the place.”

“I know,” Hannah said, not wanting to seem pessimistic.

Finally Patricia asked, “Where are you?”

Between calls to Aer Lingus, the Red Cross, and the Salvation Army, Patricia and her husband, Kevin O’Keefe, had finally pieced together that Hannah and Dennis were in Newfoundland and not Nova Scotia. By now, Hannah had realized it as well. Before she hung up, Hannah gave Patricia the phone number for the legion hall.

Throughout the day, Hannah and Dennis talked to Patricia and Kevin’s wife, Maryann, hoping for news. The message, though, was always the same: nothing to report, but don’t lose faith.

Now that her family in New York finally knew where Hannah and Dennis were, they attempted to make their own arrangements to bring them home. Maryann’s brother offered to drive up and bring them back by car, if necessary. Patricia’s husband, Kevin O’Keefe, even tried to reach Senator Hillary Clinton. He talked to a member of Clinton’s staff and explained the situation, and the staffer told him she would try to help.

Several of the people from town offered their homes to Hannah and Dennis. But they refused. They were terrified that if they moved out of the legion hall, someone trying to find them might not know where they were. The hard part of being inside the legion was finding ways to avoid watching the news on television. Neither Hannah nor Dennis could bear to watch scenes of the devastation in New York.