Hi everyone...havent been on in a long time, my computer crashed and had to be reformatted but it's nice to be back and read the interesting thoughts and feelings and info you all have. I came across this story in the paper here in Halifax, not sure how you guys will feel about it, but I felt you should know and be able to read it.

By Andrea MacDonald
The Daily News

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A Hants County man is disgusted to see someone hawking relics from the site of the Swissair crash for $25 a pop.

Glenn Nelson, who lives near South Rawdon, said he couldn�t believe his eyes when he opened the latest Bargain Hunter and stumbled across the ad.

Expecting to find some post-holiday deals, he spied a notice advertising sand, rock and water taken from the spot near Peggy�s Cove where Swissair Flight 111 went down Sept. 2, 1998.

All 229 people aboard the New York to Geneva flight died.

The items are taken from �the location where Swissair plunged into the Atlantic Ocean� and wrapped in ribbon and lace, according to the ad.

�Great for gift or keepsakes,� it reads.

Nelson, who runs a woodworking business, said he considers the ad �one of the crudest things� he has read in a long time.

�It�s just like a little boy getting killed on a road and someone trying to sell his shoes as keepsakes.�

Nelson said he called the Sackville phone number Thursday and spoke to a woman who sounded between 25 and 30 years old.

He said she told him she had a cabin near the site of the crash.

�I said to the woman, �I was totally disgusted when I read this, but I can imagine how the family members would feel if they read this.�

�I said, �You�re going to hurt a lot of people.��

Nelson said the woman responded: ��Well, I lived in that area and I just wanted to see if it would work.�

�After I gave her a little bit more of my opinion, she said, �Well, it was actually supposed to be for free.� That was a pile of garbage.�

The Daily News tried to reach the seller last night, but the line had been disconnected.

Nelson said he also left a message with Bargain Hunter to complain about the ad.

Bruce Murray, an agent for the weekly buy-and-sell newspaper, said he wasn�t aware of the ad or of any complaints about it.

No Swissair victims� family members could be reached for comment last night.

In a similar vein, hundreds of World Trade Center and Pentagon souvenirs popped up on the Internet after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Online auction giant Ebay temporarily banned the sales after some Web surfers posted their disgust.

amacdonald@hfxnews.ca

� Copyright 2003 The Daily News

Daily News Story

B & D, I'm not at all surprised to see this. This past summer when we went to visit my daughter at camp, we had to pass through the Sommerset County area on the turnpike and there was a sign on the road offering tours for a fee to see the area where Flight 93 went down. I thought that was horrible but unfortunately there will always be people that take advantage of tragic situations such as this. I had personal experiences during that time that were just as bad with people taking advantage of Mark and I and the messed up state we were in and suspect that others did as well.

I really appreciate though that you have brought this to our attention but I can't say that I'm all that surprised to hear this though it certainly is disgusting.

Barbara

Here is another article:

Souvenirs of Swissair site offered for sale

By Michael Lightstone and JoAnn Sherwood / Staff Reporters

Souvenirs "from the location where Swissair (Flight 111) plunged into the Atlantic Ocean" are being advertised in a metro buy-and-sell publication.

The current issue of the Bargain Hunter carries the five-line ad, which says a $25 collection of sand, rock and water wrapped in ribbon and lace would be "great for (a) gift or keepsakes." It lists a Sackville phone number that wasn't working Friday night.

The attempt to profit from the September 1998 plane crash that killed 229 people in the sea near Peggys Cove is discouraging but not too surprising, a Swissair victim's brother said.

American Miles Gerety said he knows of at least one other plane crash after which souvenir hunters desecrated the disaster site.

"These kinds of things happen," he said by phone from Connecticut. "I don't think there's going to be a big market to buy it."

Mr. Gerety, whose brother Pierce was killed in the Swissair disaster, said he'd like the crash site to be protected from souvenir hunters.

"But these things are going to be exploited and there just isn't much you can do about it," he said. "It isn't really worth getting paranoid about."

The father of a Swissair victim called the souvenir sale crass.

"I would be very surprised if she had any takers," said Ian Shaw of West Dover.

Mr. Shaw's daughter Stephanie died in the crash and he moved to Nova Scotia from Switzerland the next year to be near the site.

Lorne Clarke, a retired chief justice of Nova Scotia Supreme Court who was chairman of the Swissair Flight 111 planning and co-ordination secretariat, was stunned Friday night when told of the ad.

"The loss of Flight 111 and the resulting death of the 229 people on board was a tragedy for which all Nova Scotians share a respectful and sad memory," Mr. Clarke said. "It is not an event that should become a profit-making venture."

After the crash, the province gave Mr. Clarke the task of ensuring Nova Scotia's response was dignified and respectful, and he spearheaded the selection of appropriate monuments and sites.

He won a Red Cross humanitarian award in 2001 for his post-disaster work.

Mr. Clarke said he was "shocked to hear that an attempt would be made to make (commercialization) happen."

He said there is a provincial law affecting the Swissair crash site.

"We have a bill in Nova Scotia that proclaims that as a special place," he said, "and that location is marked on marine maps in Canada."

A South Rawdon man said the phone number in the ad was working earlier in the day.

Glenn Nelson, a regular Bargain Hunter reader, said he called at about 4 p.m. and complained to the woman who answered.

"It's just disgusting somebody is trying to make money off of a tragedy where people's lives were lost," he said later.

"It's going to upset some people and it's going to hurt other people. I can think of all these poor people that were in the area and live with the tragedy. And I can think of the poor people, their families died in it.

"Here's their nightmare, somebody trying to make money off it, it's going to hit them hard."

Mr. Nelson said the woman initially told him she was "going to try and see if it worked."

After he told her she should cancel the ad, she then said the souvenirs were supposed to be free.

"After I voiced my disgust, she changed her tune," he said.

Mr. Nelson, a 42-year-old woodworker, said he also called Bargain Hunter's Dartmouth office and left a message saying he didn't think the paper should run such ads.

The chief operating officer of Bargain Hunter's parent company agreed when The Herald reached him Friday night.

"It's in bad taste and it's not in our mandate," said Sean Murray of Advocate Printing & Publishing of Pictou. "It's not what we want to do."

Mr. Murray, who said he hadn't seen the ad or fielded any complaints about it, said classified ads are screened but sometimes one gets through that shouldn't.

He said he hopes people haven't responded to the notice or been offended by it.

"It sounds pretty much like a scam," he said. "Who knows where that rock and water might actually be from."

The ad won't run again and Bargain Hunter staff will be directed to be on the lookout for similar ads in future, Mr. Murray said.

"Obviously once we hear concerns, it's a lot easier to flag these things."

http://www.herald.ns.ca/stories/2003/01/11/f277.raw.html


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Just wanted to add my thanks to Mr. Nelson who has shown the good side of humanity.

Swissair souvenir sale 'boggles' widow’s mind

By RICHARD DOOLEY
The Daily News


The widow of a man killed in the 1998 crash of Swissair Flight 111 says the sale of souvenirs purporting to be from the crash site is tantamount to trampling a cemetery.

“That is the only graveyard we have,” said Lyn Romano, a New York state woman who also has a home in Hants County. Her husband, Ray, was one of 229 people who died when Swissair Flight 111 crashed into St. Margarets Bay on Sept. 2, 1998.

A small advertisement in the latest Bargain Hunter offered “sand, rock and water wrapped in ribbon and lace. From the location where Swissair plunged into the Atlantic Ocean.”

“I really didn’t expect to see something like this,” said Romano. The fourth anniversary of her husband’s funeral was Saturday, the day Lyn Romano read The Daily News story about the souvenirs.

Had to respond

“It just boggles my mind,” she said. “I had to make a response to it.”

The phone number in the advertisement has been disconnected, but not until after a Hants County man called the woman offering the souvenirs. He expressed his outrage and asked her to consider the victims’ families.

Glenn Nelson told The Daily News he considers the ad one of the crudest things he’s read.

Romano wants to thank him personally.

“I am so glad he spoke out about it,” she said. “Our loved ones deserve the dignity they were robbed of.”

Romano said Nelson’s kindness is more typical of the connection she feels with many of her Nova Scotian friends and Hants County neighbours.

Lost electricity

Romano spent Christmas at her Nova Scotia home, but lost electricity one bitterly cold night. A stranger stopped at her door to invite Romano and her family to his home because he had a generator and heat.

“We had a wood stove, so we were fine, but that is they type of connection I’ve made with so many people here,” she said. “That’s why I have to speak out against this.”

rdooley@hfxnews.ca

http://www.canada.com/halifax/story.asp?id={07E49FF3-F081-4F83-91F8-2A1A84540A3E}

How very sad. Beyond words.

This sickens me beyond words. Maritimers are not supposed to be like this.

It's hard to understand the attraction of tragedy, but there is no use in denying it. The movie Titanic was the most expensive Hollywood film ever made and won 11 Academy Awards including Best Picture. I guess people found it charming. As of July, 2002 there were only three remaining survivors. I doubt they found it very charming. And even though it's hard to imagine enything more repulsive than the exploitation of the tragic loss of human life for profit, for every seller, there must be a buyer. Challenger parts can occasionally be found on eBay. One can only conclude that human nature surely includes some repugnant qualities. And we can rail against them and express our revulsion - and we should, if for no other reason than to exert an opposing force, lest we start feeding prison populations to the crocodiles on reality TV.

But why don't the tragedies themselves evoke even a fraction of the riteous indignation that is exhibited over relatively unremarkable crassness. Nobody dies of indignation! People who sell souvineers of death and destruction don't cause it. They're nothing more than bottom-feeders, endlessly redistributing wreckage. Disgusting, but not deadly.

Maybe it has to do with our ultimate helplessness. Inasmuch as we must all accept the inevitability of death eventually, perhaps we have convinced ourselves that such things are acts of God, out of our control - nothing can be done about it. We can't prevent death. The best we can do is delay it. There's no point trying to change the immutable. But perhaps we can put a stop to the souvineer-sellers. Maybe defending the dignity of the dead alleviates our feeling of helplessness.

Or maybe there is an even darker and more insidious side of human nature. If we presume the inevitability of tragedy, might we not secretly view the destruction of others as our own good fortune, as long as it's not our parents or children who are lost.

There are certainly tragedies that are totally out of human hands. The lightening strike, the tornado. But ships and aircraft are designed, built and operated by humans. When we lose one (ship or plane) there are reasons, and they involve people. And we should insist on knowing what went wrong and who was responsible. Should they have reasonably been expected to have known better or were they truly knowingly negligent.

If a local service station filled propane talks with hydrogen and blew up families at their cookouts, we would be outraged. Is the complexity of the aircrash? Is it just too much to comprehend?

If it was determined beyond dispute that the crash of Swissair 111 was caused by a meteor srike, I would be forced to blink, shake my head, pick up my soapbox and go home quietly.

But I don't think that Swissair 111 was any less preventable then the loss of Titanic. In both cases, mistakes were made and the result was disasterous. In neither case were these "honest mistakes" nor were they the unintended consequences of innocent actions.

So as I perfunctorily decry the scavengers, please join me in a fit of indignation over the crash of Swissair 111 - a tragedy that should never have happened - no more then the sinking of Titanic.