Families and community reflect together 25 years after Swissair Flight 111 crash

At the Bayswater Swissair Flight 111 Memorial, 229 names are etched into stone. Each represents a life and a person with their own hopes and dreams.

On Sept. 2, 1998, those dreams were shattered as Swissair Flight 111 plunged into the ocean off Nova Scotia.

Twenty-five years may have passed, but the pain for mother Nancy Hausman has not.

“It’s something I live with every day, and his brothers and sisters and friends,” said Hausman, who is visiting Nova Scotia from Illinois. She has visited nearly every year since the crash.

Her son Thomas Hausman, 33, was married and living in New York City working as a grain buyer for Continental Grain Co. He was on his way to Geneva for a business meeting.

“And he had already promised when he got back from this meeting he was moving back to the Midwest,” she said.

Instead her family rushed to Nova Scotia to get any updates on the crash.

Hausman said her children recall being at Peggys Cove and a person wrapping a blanket around them to keep them warm and offer comfort.

“They fed us. They comforted us. They were unbelievable,” Hausman said.

The task of recovering the human remains was enormous.

Many are still scarred by what they saw and handled. CTV News spoke briefly off-camera with both a former navy member and a community member of the Bayswater-area about the debris and human remains they saw in the water. For both, the anniversary brings up difficult memories.

In September 1998, Dr. John Butt was Nova Scotia’s Medical Examiner. He and his team was tasked with identifying the remains of the 229 people onboard.

“One of my first recollections is that I could run away. And you can imagine, you can imagine what that would do,” said Butt.

Instead the former medical examiner, the Canadian Armed Forces, police and others worked tirelessly to recover and identify the remains of every person onboard.

“For lack of another phrase it was a successful operation for the identification of the dead and that meant something to the families,” he said.

Even after 25 years, the people from the Bayswater and Peggy’s Cove-area continue to wrap their arms around families left behind, which is partly why Hausman returns for the anniversary every year she can.

“The comfort. It was like having family here already waiting to welcome us into their homes, their families,” she said.

“At a time like that you want family and friends with you and you had them here.”

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