The Day the World Came to Town: 9/11 in Gander, Newfoundland

by Jim DeFede

He wanted to move the passengers through the airport as fast as possible so that those on the next plane could be taken off. He made sure all of the television sets in the airport were either hidden or unplugged. He knew the passengers hadn’t seen any of the images of the attack and was afraid they would emotionally break down in the terminal. To keep them moving, Out of Order signs were posted on all of the pay phones in the airport. The phones actually worked, but officials were afraid people would stop and wait in line to call their homes. The biggest problem facing officials was transportation. How do you move almost 7,000 people to shelters, some of which were almost fifty miles outside of town? The logical answer was to use school buses. On September 11, however, Gander was in the midst of a nasty strike by the area’s school-bus drivers. Amazingly, as soon as the drivers realized what was happening, they laid down their picket signs, setting their own interests aside, and volunteered en masse to work around the clock carrying the passengers wherever they needed to go.