The Day the World Came to Town: 9/11 in Gander, Newfoundland (2 page)

Clark, Roxanne, and Alexandria Loper, Moscow, September 10, 2001.
Courtesy of Roxanne Loper

R
oxanne and Clark Loper were homeward bound.

Nearly three weeks had passed since they left their ranch outside the small Texas town of Alto and embarked on a journey to adopt a two-year-old girl in the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan. It was a journey more than fifteen months in the planning and saw the young couple race through airports, bounce along bumpy roads, and wind their way across the Ural Mountains. They dealt with bureaucrats in three different countries and spent their life savings, all for the sake of a child whose picture Roxanne had seen one day on the Internet. Every minute, every dollar, was worth it, though, because now they had Alexandria, and by dinnertime they’d be home.

Over the last seventy-two hours, the three of them had flown from Kazakhstan to Moscow to Frankfurt and were now on the final leg of their trip, a direct flight from Frankfurt to Dallas. They all felt as if they hadn’t slept in days. Shortly after takeoff, Alexandria climbed out of her seat and curled up on the floor to take a nap. Roxanne thought about picking her up and strapping her back into her seat, but she knew Alexandria liked sleeping on the floor. She felt comfortable there. It was something the child had grown accustomed to in the orphanage.

As the Lopers’ plane, Lufthansa Flight 438, proceeded northwest out of Frankfurt and climbed to above 30,000 feet, Lufthansa Flight 400 began preboarding its first-class passengers. Settling into her seat, Frankfurt mayor Petra Roth was excited about her trip to New York. That night there would be a party in honor of New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Roth and Giuliani had become friends during official visits to each other’s city, and Roth was happy to travel the 4,000 miles to pay her respects to the outgoing mayor.

Sitting near Roth was Werner Baldessarini, the chairman of Hugo Boss, who was flying to New York from the company’s corporate headquarters in Germany for Fashion Week—an eight-day spectacle of clothes and models in which more than one hundred of the world’s top designers show their latest wares in giant tents and on improvised runways. A good show at Fashion Week can guarantee the success of a manufacturer’s collection. On Thursday evening, Baldessarini would premier Hugo Boss’s Spring 2002 line at Bryant Park in midtown Manhattan. In addition to the financial implications of having a good show, this event was also important to Baldessarini for personal reasons. After twenty-seven years with Hugo Boss, he had made up his mind to retire in 2002. The news hadn’t been leaked publicly, but this would be one of his last shows and he wanted it to be a success.

While a flight attendant offered Roth and Baldessarini a glass of champagne before takeoff in Frankfurt, a few hundred miles away in Dublin, George Vitale was taking his seat in coach aboard Continental Flight 23. As one of the people responsible for protecting New York governor George Pataki on a day-to-day basis, Vitale had flown to Ireland in early September to make advance security arrangements for the governor’s visit there later that month. Unfortunately, a fresh round of violence in Northern Ireland caused the governor to abruptly cancel his trip, and the New York State trooper was told to come home.

If he had wanted to, Vitale could have stayed in Ireland to see friends and family. The forty-three-year-old is half Irish and he’s made several trips over the years to the Emerald Isle. This wasn’t a good time for a vacation, however. He had a number of responsibilities waiting for him at home in Brooklyn. In addition to being a senior investigator with the state police, Vitale was also taking night classes toward a degree in education. Assuming everything went smoothly, he’d be home in time for his class at Brooklyn College.

An hour after Vitale’s flight ascended into the sky, Hannah O’Rourke stood outside the boarding area for Aer Lingus Flight 105 and cried as she hugged brothers and sisters good-bye. The sixty-six-year-old O’Rourke was born in Ireland’s County Monaghan, about forty miles north of Dublin, but had emigrated to the United States nearly fifty years ago. She made a good life for herself in America. Along with her husband, Dennis, she raised three children and now lived on Long Island.

In recent years, she’d returned to Ireland as often as possible to see her family. This time around, she spent three weeks in the countryside with her husband. She hated saying good-bye to her kin, but her family in America was eager for her to come home. Waiting to board the plane, O’Rourke dreaded the flight back. It was no secret she hated flying, especially over water.

The scene was no less emotional for fellow passenger Maria O’Driscoll. Although the two women didn’t know each other, the seventy-year-old O’Driscoll was born in County Louth, a stone’s throw from O’Rourke’s birthplace. O’Driscoll had come to the United States when she was a young woman. Her reason was simple: “I fell in love with a Yank.” That was back in 1954.

Standing alongside her at the airport in Dublin was her husband, Lenny.

Lenny O’Driscoll wasn’t “the Yank” that prompted Maria to move to America. That fellow, Maria’s first husband, died in 1987. When Lenny met Maria a short time later, he, too, had lost a spouse. They married in 1993, and since then, they had been over to Ireland almost every year.

The occasion for this trip—not that they ever needed one—was the wedding of Maria’s niece. Of her six brothers and sisters, Maria had been the only one to come to America. They all stayed in the Irish Sea town of Dundalk.

Lenny’s ancestors were Irish, but he was born in Newfoundland, so the good-byes every year at the end of their trip weren’t as painful to him as they were to Maria. He knew she would be sad and quiet on the flight home. There must be a way to cheer her up, he thought. He decided he’d think it over as soon as the plane took off.

H
ow
aboot
this weather?”

“Beautiful.”

“Delightful.”

“Cold’s gonna come soon, buddy.”

“And the snow.”

“Ay, she’s gotta come sometime.”

Inside the local coffee shop, the unseasonably warm weather was all anyone could talk about, including Gander mayor Claude Elliott. Since becoming mayor in 1996, Elliott liked to start each morning at Tim Horton’s, the Canadian equivalent of Starbucks. Elliott rode to political power on the strength of a snowmobile—or, as they are more commonly referred to in Gander, a Ski-doo. In 1989, members of the town council wanted to ban Ski-doos from operating inside the city limits. Elliott helped lead an uprising against the ban, and in 1990 he was elected to the town council.

Like any small-town mayor, Elliott knew how important it was to keep in touch with what folks were talking about. On this day it was the weather. This was the warmest September anyone could recall in a decade. Temperatures were around twenty-one degrees Celsius, about seventy degrees Fahrenheit.

The local economy was another coffee-klatch topic. The unemployment rate in Gander wasn’t as high as on the rest of the island, but people were still looking for new ways to stimulate business. They’d certainly had their boondoggles. A few years before, they attempted to turn Gander into ski resort, a project that had ultimately failed.

After an hour or so at the coffeehouse, the mayor headed over to town hall.

Meanwhile, Oz Fudge was making the morning rounds in his patrol car. One of only two town constables in Gander, Fudge used to be with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. That was more than twenty years ago. For the last fifteen years, the forty-seven-year-old has worked exclusively for the town.

In Gander, the RCMP handles investigations into serious crimes, and Fudge handles more community-oriented problems. He makes traffic stops and helps round up stray animals. If a husband and wife are arguing a little too loud for the neighbors, Fudge calms them down. If a couple of knuckle-heads start throwing punches in a bar, Fudge is the one to break them up.

He doesn’t carry a gun, doesn’t like them, and as far as he’s concerned, he doesn’t need one. Guns only make people nervous. A few years ago, the RCMP provided him with a bulletproof vest. There had been some drug smuggling in the area, and since Fudge was making traffic stops, the Mounties were concerned he might inadvertently pull over a gun-toting smuggler on his way through town. Fudge wore it for two weeks, but took it off because it was so darn uncomfortable. He hasn’t worn it since.

Fudge was born in Lewisporte—about forty minutes from Gander—where his father used to work out at the military base. Fudge and his wife, whom he refers to as “the War Department,” have three kids. He named his oldest son after his favorite actor, Jimmy Stewart, who starred in his favorite movie,
It’s a Wonderful Life
. He coaches his daughter’s basketball team. The team’s not very good, but then again, he’s not much of a coach. It’s all for fun anyway.

A school bus drivers’ strike in the district meant most kids were either walking to school that morning or being dropped off by their parents, so Fudge was paying close attention to the crosswalks and streets nearest the schools to make sure no one was speeding. Once the kids were tucked away in school, he continued on with his normal patrol.

The streets in Gander are laid out in an unusual fashion. Rather than laying out a simple grid, the town’s forefathers thought it would be unique to twist and turn the main perimeter roads into the profile of a male goose’s head. Memorial Drive forms the base of the neck; Elizabeth Drive curves up to form the back and top of the head and then swoops back down to meet with Edinburgh Street to create the bird’s beak. When most people look at a map of the town, the gander image doesn’t strike them right away, but as soon as someone points it out, it’s impossible to miss. Trees line most of the streets in Gander, while the majority of homes are modest, two-story structures with small, neatly trimmed lawns and backyards. And although the town is relatively flat, it sits perched above Lake Gander, a long thin body of water that feeds into the Gander River and ultimately the Atlantic Ocean. Fudge liked the quiet nature of his town. And on this morning, he’d seen nothing out of the ordinary.

By midmorning Fudge was sitting in his patrol car in the parking lot of the curling club, wondering how he was going to keep himself busy for the rest of the day, when Bonnie Harris ran up. “Turn on the radio,” she yelled. “You’re not going to believe what’s going on.”

Fudge flipped over to the CBC radio news channel.

“Holy God,” he cried, and then sped off for town hall.

H
alfway between Frankfurt and New York City, Captain Reinhard Knoth switched his plane’s radio to Unicom, a frequency shared by all pilots. Unicom allows planes from different airlines to pass information to one another about weather conditions or delays at airports. A pilot for Lufthansa for thirty years, Knoth had made this transatlantic run more times than he could remember. He was flying an older-model 747, his altitude was 30,000 feet, and he was cruising along at just under six hundred miles per hour. The sky was blue, the air calm, the horizon clear. Turning on the autopilot, Knoth was listening to the casual banter between planes when a pilot for KLM broke in excitedly. “There’s something happening in New York,” the captain declared. “An accident.”

Knoth turned his radio to the commercial frequency for the BBC. The station was broadcasting live from New York, and the announcer reported an explosion at the World Trade Center, possibly caused by an airplane crashing into the North Tower. Knoth was dumbfounded. He looked over at his copilot and his flight engineer to make sure they heard this as well.

How could a plane crash into one of the towers? It didn’t seem possible. His copilot speculated it must have been a small, private plane. Maybe the pilot had a heart attack or blacked out. Even so, what were the odds of a plane accidentally hitting a skyscraper? There was that time back in 1945, they recalled, when an army pilot, lost in fog, crashed his B-25 into the Empire State Building. But that was so long ago, and approach patterns and the rules for flying over Manhattan were different now. As they talked, the BBC broadcast caught their attention once again.

“…another explosion…a second plane has hit the World Trade Center!”

A second plane? Two planes had hit the towers? Clearly, this wasn’t an accident. It was 9:03
A.M.
in New York, and Knoth bounced from one radio frequency to another, scavenging bits of information. One fact was certain: even with a gun to his head, no airline pilot would deliberately crash his plane into the Trade Center. Knoth knew someone other than the pilot must have been flying those planes.

Knoth wasn’t the only person to realize this. On Unicom, pilots were alerting one another to be careful. Every plane in the air could be a possible target for hijackers. With each passing minute, the voices of pilots broadcasting over Unicom grew more frantic. Did anyone know which airlines were involved? Was it American? United? Delta? Did anyone hear a flight number? How many other planes were unaccounted for? One? Two? Five? Nine?