Lessons from history prepared Gander for the worst
Y2K and Cold War prep came in handy when N.L. town sheltered thousands
GANDER, N.L.—Marguerite Moore walked into Gander’s emergency operations centre on the second floor of the town hall at 1:30 p.m. with a long list in her hand — one that outlined exactly what everyone there was going to do.
It was Sept. 11, 2001. Outside and overhead, on a partly cloudy day with temperatures nearing the 30 C mark, the town’s biggest crisis was looming: scores of planes were heading for Gander after the U.S. closed its airspace.
The town had been told to expect 200 planes, but many of those had not reached the halfway point over the Atlantic and were turned back to Europe. Ultimately, 38 airliners, containing 7,000 passengers, and four military planes landed at Gander International Airport.
But before any of those planes landed, Moore’s list, which came from the province’s Human Resources and Employment department, told town officials exactly where and how they would accommodate as many as 10,000 people.
That the 7,000 passengers aboard those planes were sheltered, fed and comforted by Gander and surrounding towns for the next five days until the planes lifted off again is the stuff of Canadian legend.
But perhaps even more impressively, the display of hospitality was no accident; Gander had been prepared for that moment for years — ever since the early days of the Cold War.
“Every community has a disaster plan,” says Claude Elliott, who was the Gander mayor at the time. “We’re an airport town. So, most times your disaster plan revolves around plane crashes. There was nothing in that disaster plan that said: ‘What do you do when 7,000 people drop in?’
Gander Airport opened in 1938, and within a few years it had grown, with its four runways, to be the largest airport in the world. During the Second World War, it was used as the main staging point for moving aircraft to Europe.
When the war finished, the airport pivoted to handling the booming transatlantic passenger flight industry, and by the 1950s, dubbed the “Crossroads of the World,” it was one of the busiest international airports around the globe.
But by the late 1970s and early ’80s, with the advent of jet airliners, transatlantic passengers through Gander had dwindled; those jets were capable of making the flight non-stop.
But there was still air traffic coming from behind the Iron Curtain, most of it to or from Cuba and South America, and those airlines didn’t want to make stops in the U.S. They came through Gander instead for refuelling.
“What happened was Cubana and Aeroflot used to make regular stops in Gander, and that’s where people would defect,” says Elliott. “On any given day you might see probably 400 or 500 people in Gander defecting and they would be taken to St. John’s.
“So, Gander had quite a bit of experience in looking after people that were stranded.”
Those defections started as a trickle in the ’70s and turned into a flood in the ’80s.
“Gander was seeing 32 flights a week to and from Cuba. Sometimes, the only people left on the plane when the aircraft left was the flight crew,” says Mac Moss.
Moss, the former principal of the College of the North Atlantic in Gander, is also author of “Into the Arms of Angels: Newfoundland and Labrador’s Unsung Heroes of 9/11”, which is being released on Sept. 11, to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the attacks.
With so many people seeking asylum, Gander soon ran out of hotel rooms, as did all the neighbouring towns.
The provincial government initiated a survey of all public buildings within a 250-kilometre radius with the capacity to host refugees.
And that, says Moss, is how it came to be that on Sept. 11, with 38 planes loaded with nearly 7,000 passengers yet to land, Moore’s list provided the framework for the emergency operations centre’s planning.
In 1999, ahead of the turn of the millennium, Gander airport had developed a plan for Y2K.
That plan included a strategy for parking 50 to 60 aircraft on the tarmac in case they had to get all aircraft out of the skies.
So when it came time on 9/11 to park a mere 38 aircraft, Gander had that plan in place.
Similarly, in 1999, the provincial government, in response to an increasingly frequent set of natural disasters, mandated that all major towns and cities develop an emergency management plan. These were the playbooks from which the 9/11 responses were run.
That Gander and its surrounding regions managed tohost the nearly 7,000 people thrust upon them is not just a testament to the character of the people but a validation of all the planning for an emergency that they couldn’t possibly have predicted.