The Twin Towers had already fallen. A section of the Pentagon lay in ruins and a fourth airliner had crashed into a farmer's field when its passengers attempted to overtake the hijackers.

For Whitehorse, it was not for a couple of hours after the attacks in New York and Virginia that the city would experience first-hand the emotional roller coaster that went with the day of terror on Sept. 11, 2001.

The decision to shut down U.S. airports and reroute traffic to Canadian cities, the miscommunication with a Korean Air Boeing 747 originally scheduled to land in Anchorage before going onto New York, put the Yukon's capital on alert.

Communication from the passenger jet had initially, and accidentally, indicated low fuel or hijackers on board.

Fighters scrambled out of Alaska intercepted the first 747 cargo jet, followed by a second Korean 747 passenger jet, which caused the alert.

The city's schools were evacuated, with parents and relatives flung into a high state of urgency trying to reach their children or learn of their whereabouts.

Many office buildings and retail outlets were closed. Traffic in the downtown area and Riverdale was jammed up, moving at a mere snail's pace.

Emotion was high. The morning was tense, as the city waited for the arrival of the 747 that caused the alert, and a second Korean cargo jet.

The airport was shut down, and the RCMP's emergency response team took up positions around the tarmac and terminal.

Despite later reports that suggested the aircraft was not in the hands of hijackers, the fighters remained in escort, and the local police treated the situation as uncertain, and perhaps hostile.

With the images of the devastating attacks in the U.S. playing over and over again on every television, reports that all was OK did little to curb the anxiety that was afoot in the city.

Residents lined the streets and scurried to high vantage points near the airport, and along Wickstrom Road on the opposite side of the Yukon River anywhere where they could witness the arrival of the two 747s.

They landed without incident, though the RCMP remained in full alert until they could verify that each and every passenger and crew member did not pose any threat.

In a late-breaking Canadian Press news story that morning, then-Alaska governor Tony Knowles said during a news conference that airport officials in Anchorage received an emergency transponder signal from the 747, indicating low fuel or a hijacking.

The transponder signal turned out to be a low fuel indicator, Knowles told the news conference.

Bob King, his press secretary, explained that afternoon that the U.S. Air Force had determined at around 11:15 that morning, Yukon time, that the plane was not hijacked.

He said the initial call to the governor's office came at 10:45 Yukon time.

'We were contacted and informed that this plane was over Alaska, about 200 miles from Anchorage, and that it was squawking a hijack code on its transponder,' King said.

'We were told that the Air Force jets were flying up to intercept it.'

As a precaution, the main state government building and courthouse were closed in Anchorage.

After the plane was further along, over Yakutat, Alaska, at the top of the Alaska Panhandle, the air force informed the governor's office that it hadn't been hijacked.

'Less than a half-hour later, and we were informed by the air force that the plane was no longer considered a hijack suspect.'

He said the air force said the emergency signal was meant to indicate the plane was low on fuel.

Whitehorse RCMP Sgt. Al Lucier confirmed at 2 p.m. that day that the emergency alert did come from a low fuel indicator warning.

At that time, police were still interviewing the Korean crew member and the emergency response team was still preventing any disembarking by others on board.

'Until we are able to remove all the individuals from the aircraft and determine the status of those individuals, we are not able to give you a finite assessment whether it is a hostile situation or not,' Lucier said back then.

'We are still dealing with the individual (crew member). At this point, there is nothing to suggest we are dealing with that but we can't rule it out until we get everybody off.'

For more than two hours, the RCMP detained the passengers while the Yukon's Emergency Measures Organization rounded up interpreters in four or five different languages to assist in the questioning.

Indeed, Whitehorse embraced their unexpected visitors, providing them everything from blankets and personal toiletry items to stuffed animals for the babies onboard.

Some 200 people were put up in four hotels. For two days, until flight restrictions in the U.S. were relaxed, the passengers of the two Korean flights remained in Whitehorse.

While everything ended without incident, city and territorial officials set down to examine the emergency response in an attempt to decipher how the city was so quickly put into what many felt was an uncontrolled frenzy.

Canada received more than 250 passenger jets originally scheduled to land at U.S. airports on Sept. 11, but no other arrived under the veil of uncertainty that accompanied the Korean jets into Whitehorse.