Families mark 25th anniversary of Swissair crash, remember those who died that night off Peggys Cove

After 25 years, Dave March is still tormented by what he saw in the waters off Peggys Cove.

“If you were part of it, and you have a soul, how could you not be affected?” March said Saturday morning at the Swissair memorial in Bayswater. “You try so hard to forget, but you can’t.”

This weekend was the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 2, 1998, crash of Swissair Flight 111, which killed all 229 passengers and crew. March was in the Canadian Coast Guard.

“We were actually tied up in Shelburne; I was on the Simon Fraser at the time,” he said. “So, we got a call around 11:30 and we all got up and headed this way, a couple of hours later we were here and stayed for the next 12 days, cleaning up what we could. That destroyed me.”

The members of the Coast Guard had their cellphones confiscated, so March couldn’t even call his family to tell them what he was going through, even though he was anchored so close to his home he could almost see it.

March said the whole crew of his ship was so traumatized by their work that they couldn’t eat or sleep, so they just kept going, 18 hours a day.

“There were no full bodies,” he said, battling back tears. “I wasn’t ready for that, none of us was.

“After 12 days, (an American salvage ship) came and they started picking up stuff off the bottom of the ocean. The debris on the surface and on the shoreline was pretty much cleaned up at that point.”

After 12 days of recovery work, March was given a weekend off. The after-effects cost him a 23-year marriage, and he is still getting counselling. He goes to the Bayswater memorial often. Usually he’s alone, but there was a steady stream of people on Saturday.

“When they had the 20th (anniversary) here … they had a meet and greet afterward, and I went for a while,” he said. “I could see from what I picked up, who was their mom and dad. Just skin colours and stuff.”

The bad weather that night prevented Peggy Conrad from joining her husband Bob on the water when he went to help at the site of the crash.

“We had a policy that he never went out on the boat alone, especially at night,” Conrad said Saturday. “But it was raining and it was windy, so miserable, and I was dithering back and forth, and he said, ‘I can’t wait for you to make up your mind, I’m outta here.’

“His boat was in Dover, and he had come home on a truck, because tuna fishing was in full swing. I had gone to bed, in my dreams I heard these sirens, but I was still asleep. It woke him up, the television was on and he came upstairs and said ‘there’s been a terrible plane crash off Peggys Cove and I have to go.’

“He came back, and he felt … that he went out that night just to retrieve that baby’s body, and once he had passed that over to the big ship that was taking the bodies, he felt his job was done and he came home. He took good care of that baby’s body; it wasn’t intact, of course. He laid it on a table on the boat that they put the tuna on when they’re cutting the heads and the tails off. He’d washed it off, he put the body there and that wasn’t good enough while he was waiting for the other boat to come, so he went below and he found a blanket and he came up and wrapped that baby in a blanket.”

Bob Conrad, who passed away three and a half years ago, agreed to go to counselling to deal with the horror of what he’d seen, but Peggy thinks he was the only fisherman who did.

“Fishermen are tough and rough, and they ‘don’t need counselling,’” she said. “So, I don’t know what some of them have gone through.”

Nancy Hausman, 92, has only missed coming to Nova Scotia from the U.S. three times for the anniversary of the crash that killed her son Tom, who was 33. This year, she was accompanied by her daughter Barbara Mix, who has been here many times as well.

“He was living in New York, he worked for Continental Grain, and he was on that flight to Switzerland for business,” Mix said of her brother, who was the youngest of seven children. “Fun-loving, such a sweetheart, he loved life. Good kid. He had a wife, and they were in the process of adopting a baby from Russia. After the crash, his wife went ahead with the adoption, and that child is in her third year of college.

“I was here the night after the crash. The company, Continental Grain, had a jet pick up myself, a brother and a sister, and we flew here,” she remembered of her first trip to Nova Scotia. “We were put up at the Lord Nelson, which is the most beautiful hotel, and we came right to Peggys Cove that night.

“It doesn’t ever go away. I’ll see something, like a sign for Heineken beer, and I’m thinking, ‘I wish Tom and I could go and have a Heineken.’ He loved Heineken.”