The emergency response was swift after hijackers flew two planes into the World Trade Center 25 years ago. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) closed American airspace and Transport Canada subsequently did the same. Hundreds of planes were still in the sky, carrying thousands of passengers with landing plans in limbo. Gander, N.L., a town of 9,000, famously stepped up to welcome 38 planes that day. Mayor Percy Farwell recalls it was “extremely busy.” He was deputy mayor at the time, attending a meeting an hour away when the news broke. “By the time I got home we had already declared a state of emergency and the aircraft were starting to flow in, I knew it wasn’t going to be a normal day from that point on,” he told Your Morning Atlantic’s Crystal Garrett. He says in 2001, many residents moved through the day without cellphones. There wasn’t exactly an emergency alert that could immediately notify a population. “Old school communication, I guess, is what ultimately saved the day for us, made it possible for us to co-ordinate the way we did,” Farwell says. He points to their community television channel and local radio stations that distributed the urgent information. “And word of mouth, really, to mobilize the population,” he says. “Without every man, woman, and child in the community and the surrounding area providing support, it would have been just too much to handle.” Some 6,500 passengers were stranded in the community for days, and the town rallied in efforts to provide provisions and shelter as its population nearly doubled. “Time, in some respects, stood still, and other times flew by. There was so much to do,” Farwell recalls. “We were grateful to be able to do it because, watching what was unfolding in the U.S. was one of those situations where you watch and you wish you could do something to help and usually you can’t.” he says. “In our case, literally out of the sky, came an opportunity to help.” The U.S. ambassador will be in Gander Friday attending a ceremony commemorating the 25 years since the attacks. “There’s certainly a delicacy in the relationship between Canada and the U.S. now,” Farwell acknowledges. “Ultimately, this story and this event and this response and this relationship is not about politics – it’s about people, it’s about humanity, and that hasn’t changed.” The ties between the United States and Gander were strong after 9/11. Farwell says he’s gone through a list of emails from supportive writers since Thursday night. “One from Scotland, but the rest from U.S. citizens,” he says. “Just reaching out to say thank you and how much they value that relationship and today, how embarrassed they are for the current state of that relationship and they’re very apologetic.” “We all obviously have strong feelings about the current state of affairs, so do Americans,” he adds. Farwell points to another time Gander supported American allies, when 248 soldiers and eight crew “perished on our doorstep” after a flight carrying U.S. army personnel crashed on takeoff in 1985. “So, we’ve had a longstanding connection to the U.S., and person-to-person, human-to-human, that hasn’t changed,” he says.
