The As It Happens Files

by Mary Lou Finlay

  In Canada, meanwhile, thousands of unexpected visitors from around the world began arriving in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia after the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration closed American borders to incoming air traffic. The FAA also grounded all domestic flights, as did Canada, stranding Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and his Cabinet all over the country. Canadian Transport Minister David Collenette was essentially acting alone when he gave the go-ahead to reroute North Atlantic passenger planes to Canada’s east coast. He spoke afterwards of his admiration for the air traffic controllers who got everyone turned around and safely brought into harbour.

  The visitors, when they put down, also had to find somewhere to stay and something to eat and drink, and if they were Americans, extra sympathy and understanding. The people in Gander, Newfoundland, and elsewhere delivered. Many new friendships were forged that week, and years later Americans were still finding ways to show their gratitude for the comfort they had found on this darkest of days.

  Ultimately, I can’t find the words even now to describe the turmoil, horror and grief we witnessed on that terrible day and in the days that followed. The sound of laughter was forgotten. I was shocked one morning as I headed into the Broadcasting Centre to hear two young women giggling merrily. Who are these unfeeling creatures, I wondered, who could laugh at a time like this? Baseball games were cancelled; the comics on late-night TV were muted. Families clung to each other for security and comfort.

  It soon became clear that there were no survivors to be found in the rubble of the twin towers. Pictures of missing fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, lovers and friends had been posted all over Lower Manhattan, but they weren’t coming home now. It was a heart-breaking story to cover, but working on the story was easier than not working on the story; it gave us an outlet. There was nothing else we could talk about anyway, nothing else we could think about; working for news, at least we didn’t have to pretend to be doing something else—we had a licence for our obsession.

  When regular programming resumed at the end of the week, it still wasn’t normal programming; there still was really only one story. As more days passed, we did begin to ease back into something resembling our old habits, but the world had shifted, and we would begin to see the outlines of the new world very soon. There was a new emphasis on security, for example. People accustomed to their liberty had to start thinking about how much freedom they could trade off for security. Citizens and neighbours with a Middle Eastern cast were regarded with suspicion.

  There was fresh panic when someone started mailing samples of deadly anthrax to news anchors and legislators in the United States, fearful speculation about whether this was a new terrorist attack. The anthrax sender has never been identified for certain, but there’s a consensus now that it was a disturbed individual—an American—acting alone. Another plane crashed in Rockaway, Long Island, on the outskirts of New York City, but that, too, it transpired, was unrelated to the terrorist attack.

  Down at Ground Zero, the clean-up was getting under way. On October 26th, we had a chat with Bart Voorsanger, a New York City architect who was part of a group assembled by the Port Authority to identify and preserve things they might eventually want to include in a memorial before they all got carted off to Staten Island, to a landfill site bearing the eerily apt name Fresh Kills. As he described his grim task, we began to realize the scope of the damage visited on New York on 9/11.

  ML: Mr. Voorsanger, what kind of things have you salvaged?

  BV: Well, they’ve really fallen into about four or five categories and the categories keep expanding, but the first major category, of course, is the collapse of the actual buildings, the towers themselves, because they were a unique structure—the perimeter with this very, very heavy steel cage—and it broke into four-and five-storey pieces that were literally hurled through the sky into the adjacent buildings and collapsed into the site itself. These weigh tons and tons and tons—I think everybody has seen the photographs of just the four-or five-storey piece that’s remaining at the base. It looks a little bit like a piece of a cathedral. So pieces of this we’re saving.

  And the second category, the workers and the firemen and policemen, understandably in a very emotional state, have sort of canonized objects and pieces and fragments of what was remaining there. There was a fire engine that was almost totally destroyed, and I think a lot of firemen were killed in that collapse, so they’ve taken that off. They want to make that into their own memorial. They found a light pole that had been broken off, and when they first started the rescue, they hoisted it up with an enormous American flag, a little bit like Iwo Jima—the famous iconic image of Iwo Jima. So what we’ve done is we’ve taken these sorts of images that have become memorable and emotional and we’re trying to store them. There’s a cross that’s on the site right now made up of part of the structural steel, and we will save that.

  The third category is objects that are off-site, damaged, destroyed. There’s a fire engine, there’s a taxi, police cars—all these things have been destroyed—and the force of the explosion, the force of the destruction was so unbelievable that these have been mangled in an unrecognizable and unique way that would be very memorable, to remind people of the force of the destruction.

  Fourth, there would be fine art objects. I mean, there was an Alexander Calder sculpture, a stabile. There was a great Louise Nevelson piece. Juan Miró had a huge tapestry—some of these things are, of course, gone, but they did find pieces of the Calder, so we’ve recovered that.

  And then, lastly, photography is an incredibly important thing, and video.

  ML: Taking pictures.

  BV: Taking pictures. This is very emotional and very important to people. For example, Bellevue Hospital—many of the families of the survivors came there with photographs of their families, trying to see if they could be found, and so they’ve formed these sort of memorial walls, and we’re offering to save these intact. And I know that St. Vincent’s Hospital wish to make their own memorial. This is just the beginning of this effort.

  ML: How have you been affected by spending so much time still attached to that dreadful site?

  BV: It’s—it’s a very emotional process. Not only for me and for people working, helping on the site—because every time you go down to Ground Zero you’re reminded in a completely different way what a terrible tragedy it was. It reminds me of Berlin in World War II; just unbelievable destruction—literally, 20 blocks of destruction.

  And then one day you go down there and the survivors are weeping, surrounding the site. Or you have the firemen digging for body parts.… It’s a very difficult scene there. I don’t think the public really understand the level of devastation. At some point, it will be opened up and I think they’re going to be really flabbergasted. I mean, it’s just an extraordinary thing.

  Even then, weeks after the event, it was not uncommon for people talking to us from New York suddenly to be overcome by emotion and unable to speak. Jan Hoffman was helping to write the New York Times obits—their “Portraits of Grief”; she said she often ended up in tears as she interviewed friends and family of the victims of 9/11.

  ML: Ms. Hoffman, how did this page come about, these Portraits of Grief? Did you decide right away that every single victim was going to be remembered?

  JH: A few days after the disaster, a number of reporters and editors were sitting around trying to figure out what we could do to commemorate the victims, and … finally consensus was achieved that we would try to do little almost jewel boxes about as many victims as we possibly could.

  ML: How did you start to collect the names?

  JH: We started in a very crude fashion, by sending reporters and interns out to look at flyers on bulletin boards all over the city. Then, as we began to publish some of the portraits, corporations would contact us, unions would contact us. We combed the Internet, where a lot of people had posted the loved ones they were seeking, and we began to collate this vast list.

  ML:
Is there an official list now?

  JH: It keeps floating up and down; it’s not really nailed down. We have the New York Times list that we’ve been working from.

  ML: Yes. And how many names are on your list now?

  JH: Right now we have, I would say, about 2,700.

  ML: When you have a name and a contact number, who writes the stories?

  JH: There are a team of reporters who are given a series of these. I’ll be given the name of a victim, and often just a phone number, so I’ll have no idea whether I’m calling a mother, a son, a cousin, a friend—literally, it’s a blind phone call.

  ML: Right.

  JH: And it can be extraordinarily awkward, particularly if I think I’m calling about a man and I find out it’s a woman. I’ve reached children unknowingly, elderly parents—I’ll say, “Hello, this is Jan Hoffman from the New York Times,” and I’ll just launch into my tentative speech, hoping that I have not hurt somebody inadvertently.

  ML: And what do you tell them?

  JH: I tell them the truth, which is, we’re trying to write an appreciation of as many victims as possible, and I want to know if they have a few minutes to speak with me to share some of their thoughts about someone they loved … and a lot of people don’t want to talk.

  ML: They just can’t bear to talk about it?

  JH: They can’t bear it. More people do, but a lot of people don’t want to talk.… And I don’t want to press them, because this is obviously not a traditional news story. If I feel that it’s just not the right time, I may make a phone call a week later, and in some of those situations, it’s been more successful. Particularly in one instance, when I called a woman—it turned out to be a mother—and she said they were still looking for her daughter. I thought that she clearly had not come to terms with what had happened, and so I waited a week and talked to her again and got a full story.

  ML: They’re heartbreaking to read.

  JH: Yes.

  ML: They must be very difficult do.

  JH: It’s true, but I keep remembering that I don’t have the hard job, because I don’t have to live with the memories and the nightmare. And I have to tell you that more often than not, I end up weeping on the phone with people. It’s chilling, it’s heartbreaking, it’s sad.

  It’s also quite beautiful. And I also feel honoured to be doing it, to help to celebrate some of these wonderful people.

  Part of the problem with the job is that some people are articulate and some people are not. There are sometimes language barriers. So what I try to do is figure out—if I can’t get a full sense of someone from the person I’m interviewing, I gently inquire if I can speak with somebody else, if there’s a friend or another family member … someone from the business. I remember once I asked, “Well, is there someone from the business that I can speak to about your husband?”

  And the woman said, “They’re all dead.”

  ML: That was [financial firm] Cantor Fitzgerald probably.

  JH: Right. And so I do the best I can. My goal is to try to get a sharp and distinct sense of the person as an individual.

  ML: Are there any that have stood out particularly in your mind?

  JH: … There’s one man—when I heard about him from his brother, I couldn’t stop crying. He was a very quiet, unassuming man who was Jamaican-born, in his late 30s, divorced—and he lived all of his life, unbeknownst to his family, working with African-American underprivileged youth. They did not know.

  He would leave his work, twice a week, in Manhattan, and drive out to Queens to counsel young men, get them jobs and drive all the way back home to New Jersey—I mean this was quite an extensive commute. And at his memorial service, more than 30 young men came up to the family to say how the victim had graced their lives.

  ML: And they had no idea.

  JH: They had no idea. They knew that he coached inner-city basketball, that he had coached football—they knew a lot of stuff about him, but this kind of thing they had no idea about.… And all the man really wanted in his life was to be married again and have children of his own. So I just wept as his brother described that to me.

  This particular man was also the neatest person on the planet. He had his closet organized by length of shirt sleeves; his khakis were organized by shade of khaki. You know it’s all these kind of wonderful details that make people come alive.

  ML: Yes. Sometimes people are making an impact, obviously, that has nothing to do with their position or how they are seen by those people.

  JH: I have to say, one of the ironies of doing this is I’ve learned that almost nobody, in speaking of the dead, speaks of their work. They speak of their connections to others. We hear small, wonderful, intimate moments—what someone did for someone else, what they did for the community at large—but I almost never hear, “You know, he really did a good day’s work” or “He was brilliant at achieving such and such.” It really makes you pause and think about what you’ll be remembered for … and what’s important.

  No one should forget the frightful cost of September 11, 2001. As Jan Hoffman said, the numbers don’t begin to reveal the true cost—but the numbers are terrible all the same. Cantor Fitzgerald, the firm that had occupied the top floors of Number One, World Trade Center, lost 658 of their people—more than two-thirds of the company. When all the bodies, and parts of bodies, were counted, the number of people killed in the attack on New York came to 2,750, including 343 firefighters, 23 policemen and 24 Canadians.

  That was just New York. Another 184 people died at the Pentagon, and 40 people were killed when United Flight 93 crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. Flight 93 is presumed to have been heading for the White House or the U.S. Capitol Building until some passengers foiled the attempt. They all died anyway.

  In November, Kathie Scobee Fulgham came on As It Happens to tell us about a public letter she’d written to the children who lost their parents on 9/11. Dying in such a public way, she told us, creates special problems for the ones who are left behind. She spoke from experience: Kathie was 25 in January 1986, when her father, Dick, flew the space shuttle Challenger on its last, fatal mission.

  … It should have been a moment of private grief, but instead it turned into a very public torture. We couldn’t turn on the television for weeks afterward, because we were afraid we would see the gruesome spectacle of the Challenger coming apart a mile up in the sky….

  My father died a hundred times a day on televisions all across the country. And since it happened so publicly, everyone in the country felt like it happened to them, too. And it did. The Challenger explosion was a national tragedy. Everyone saw it, everyone hurt, everyone grieved, everyone wanted to help. But that did not make it any easier for me. They wanted to say good-bye to American heroes. I just wanted to say good-bye to my Daddy.

  I asked Kathie Fulgham how she got through finally. She didn’t get any grief counselling, she said; she didn’t accept that anyone else could understand what she was going through. But every time someone called or wrote to express sympathy, she asked them for a story about her dad so that the memories of how he lived might gradually supplant the all-too-vivid images of how he died. In her letter to the children of 9/11 victims, she suggested they do the same.

  You need stories about your Mom or Dad from their friends, co-workers and your family. These stories will keep your Mom or Dad alive and real in your heart and mind for the rest of your life. Listen carefully to the stories. Tell them. Write them. Record them. Post them online. The stories will help you remember. The stories will help you make the decisions about your life—help you become the person you were meant to be.

  “There are still hard times,” Kathie told us. “It’s been 15 years and I still miss him, but the grief is not as raw.”

  Eight months after the terrorist attacks on Washington and New York, we learned about a strange little offshoot of the disaster: David Travis, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Wisconsin, told us that as a result of there being no
planes in the air over the United States in the days following September 11, 2001, scientists observed that temperature differences between night and day had increased. The reason for this, they surmised, was that the contrails of the thousands of aircraft normally in the sky tend to moderate temperature differences by blocking out the sun during the day and blocking the radiation of heat from the earth’s surface at night.

  Six years after 9/11, Al Gore has helped put climate change, aka global warming, near the top of the agenda for many national and international institutions and got himself a Nobel Prize to boot (though not for science), so he’s gone some way to ensure that when they write the whole history of this time and place, he’ll be remembered for more than just being the failed presidential candidate of the beginning of this chapter. It’s too early to say how President George W. Bush will be remembered; much depends on how things turn out in Afghanistan and Iraq.

  FIFTEEN

  Air India

  I regret to advise you that one of our aircraft, VTEFO, Flight 182, of June 22, 1985, from Toronto and Montreal to Delhi and Bombay via London, was reported lost at sea off the coast of Ireland in the early hours of the morning.

  It was Air India’s early morning announcement on June 23, 1985, that alerted the world to the loss of 329 lives in an airplane accident in the North Atlantic. Only it was not an accident; it was a deliberate act of terrorism.

  Every As It Happens producer is a generalist, dipping into many and varied subjects every day, five days a week. Each of them also has favourite stories, or stories that haunt him or her. Mark Ulster loves American politics and culture. Robin Smythe keeps an eye on health and science matters (and Don Cherry). The problems of Vancouver’s Downtown East Side would not have got the scrutiny they did without the nagging of Max Paris. Meagan Perry had a passion for Japan, Sarah Martin for France—and Datejie Green spent more hours than we had any right to expect trying to get decent phone lines to Kenya.