‘Total exhaustion’: How a Gander college campus jumped in to help plane passengers on 9/11

Gander is a tiny dot on the map of northeastern Newfoundland, some 335 kilometres from the provincial capital of St. John’s. But Canadians know it for its citizens’ famous acts of kindness and hospitality, caring for 6,700+ stranded airline strangers in the days after the 9/11 attacks.

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Twenty-five years ago, Mac Moss was one of those citizens. Now retired as principal at the Gander Campus of the College of the North Atlantic, he and his team at the school helped 438 people who suddenly found themselves grounded in Canada after U.S. airspace was closed.

“Our college year just started … And it was a normal morning. Everybody was in class, or wherever they were supposed to be,” he recalled in an interview.

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Moss learned about the attack in a phone call from one of his staff. “She said: ‘We’re listening to the radio up here. And a plane just flew into one of the World Trade Center Towers.’ ”

The effect on campus, at first, was paralyzing, Moss said. “Everybody started crowding around the television, some radio. And the campus virtually came to a standstill.”

At 1 p.m., the Town of Gander’s emergency services called Moss, asking if the campus could accommodate incoming planeloads of passengers by providing shelter, first aid and food.

“I knew the size of the campus, the space we had available, and I said yes,” Moss said.

At 7 p.m., town manager Jake Turner told him he’d be getting a jumbo jet-load of people. That plane, carrying 234 passengers according to Moss’ recollection, was the first of two whose passengers the college hosted.

It was a stroke of luck that the college had commercial cooking and electronics classes running that day; it allowed students and staff to prepare hot food, set up additional television feeds with microphones in the cafeteria, and gather supplies.

Many people in Gander, including Moss’s wife, the college’s employees and their spouses, volunteered everything from bedding to food for their “guests,” as Ganderites endearingly call the plane people.

Gander provided free medical treatment, such as free prescription renewals, for the passengers as needed. Gander Campus also had a few student nurses available to assist. “We had them set up serving a little triage area,” Moss recalled.

As the “guests” trickled in, many did not even know where they were; they needed to see the news, make calls, or send emails.

The passengers had tight living conditions: “20 or 30 people to a room, and … they were lying on a tile floor, with just a blanket or a sheet underneath them,” Moss recalled. “If they didn’t have a pillow, we give them an extra sheet to put over the shoes for pillows.”

In the morning, though, the guests were in for a welcome surprise: a buffet.

“When the passengers came down to their breakfast, it was like walking into a first-class hotel. I mean, everything in the world that you wanted for breakfast was available,” said Moss.

“The big problem our cooks had, after the first day, was the stores were running out of food,” he said. But “Our cooks had managed to secure, you know, 250 or 300 chicken breasts in their raid of the stores the night before.”

To meet the needs of guests, everyone pitched in. “The Salvation Army took control of the local hockey rink, and … turned that into a walk-in cooler,” Moss recalled. Nearby towns also volunteered supplies.

He felt exhausted after the passengers left, having slept only two hours in the three days his campus hosted the passengers.

“I did over 300 interviews, and I always asked them the same question: ‘How did you feel after the passengers left?’”

“What they remembered most was the total exhaustion.”

The former principal had trouble sleeping too. “After the passengers left, I don’t think I had a good night’s sleep for two or three months,” he said. He relived every detail of those few days in his mind.

Moss continues to stay connected with some of the guests, such as Kevin Tuerff, a passenger who is portrayed in the musical Come From Away. “Kevin has been a frequent visitor to our house,” said Moss.

Moss has also visited the 9/11 site in New York City.

Twenty-five years after the plane people’s arrival, he says the big takeaway for him is “how well our towns — plural, our towns — were prepared to handle such an event, and they didn’t know it, because they had never experienced (this) before.”

The Town of Gander itself has planned commemorative events for today’s 25th anniversary of the landing of the plane people in Newfoundland. There will be a “Parade of First Responders” and a special remembrance of lives lost on 9/11.

Expected to speak at the commemoration are U.S. Ambassador Pete Hoekstra, Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Tony Wakeham, and former prime minister Jean Chrétien, who held office on the day of the attack and whose government quickly moved to welcome between 225 and 240 flights diverted from U.S. airspace to Canadian airports in what was termed Operation Yellow Ribbon.

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