Ask any reporter who’s worked on a major disaster story if there is a moment that brought the tragedy home to them, and they will usually say “yes.”
For me, it was covering the crash of Swissair Flight 111, and it came in the form of an 18-year-old girl I would never get the chance to meet.
Rowenna White boarded Swissair Flight 111 at John F. Kennedy Airport bound for Geneva where she was going to be studying at the Hotel Institute Montreux.
A little more than an hour later, Flight 111 was crippled by a fire hidden above the plane’s false ceiling in the cockpit. The plane was preparing to make an emergency landing at Halifax International Airport when all contact with it was lost.
It crashed into the ocean killing all 229 people on board.
READ MORE: The night 229 people lost their lives on Swissair Flight 111
I covered the story extensively in my days as a newspaper reporter for Halifax’s The Daily News.
I helped write the initial story on the crash for the paper and then stayed with it for the next five years until the Transportation Safety Board (TSB) published the results of its investigation.
I would go to the crash site with family members of victims; I’d attend every briefing held by the TSB during the long operation to recover the wreckage of the MD-11 aircraft; I talked to aviation experts around the world about the crash. The newspaper would often break stories related to the Swissair crash.
About two weeks after the disaster, I got a note from Rowenna’s mother.
Nancy Wight enclosed a picture of her daughter, a pretty, dark-haired teenager with an open, honest-looking face.
Nancy thanked me for the stories I’d written. She called them “her lifeline.”
The photo hit me like a hammer. I began to understand the value of working on a big story like this.
While it’s important for the public to learn as much as possible about disasters like this, it’s absolutely vital to the people whose lives are changed through tragedy.
Whenever I doubted why I was continuing to follow the story, even years later, I thought of Rowenna.
Whenever I struggled to find inspiration, I thought of Rowenna.
I believed someone owed it to her — and her mother — to tell the story of Flight 111 and the many lives cut short.
Nancy would also write a letter of thanks to the people of Nova Scotia, which we published in the newspaper. She thanked people for the care she received while she was in the province dealing with the unbelievable grief of losing her daughter.
I would stay in touch with Nancy over the years.
She’d mail the occasional card or brief note and keep me posted on what she was doing.
Nancy came to Halifax from time to time to visit with friends she made during those dark days after the crash, and of course to visit the memorial and gravesite in Bayswater.
We’d have coffee or lunch and chat. Not so much as journalist and interview subject, but as two people bound through tragic circumstances.
One day, she wrote to say she was going to China to teach — I suspect maybe because she felt a little less connected to her home in New York and was looking for a change.
We’d eventually lose touch over time as people often will.
But I never forgot the gift she gave me by sending me Rowenna’s photograph. It was a simple gesture that not only reaffirmed my faith in people but my purpose as a journalist.
Richard Dooley was a newspaper reporter in 1998 and covered the Swissair Flight 111 crash extensively. He’s now Global Halifax’s Supervising Producer.
Comments