Newfoundland and Labrador · Civic arena
Gander drinking water hardness is 230 mg/L on OpenStats, plus City Score rankings and local readings.
Civic arena · hometown HUD
#206 of 343
48% City Score XP
5/8 pillars on the board
Decade trail
Gander packs 5 of eight open-data pillars into its composite standing. Tap a rival below to see how the hometown stacks up head-to-head.
Hardness, pH, and lead from municipal reports on the OpenStats water atlas. This page uses a regional estimate — open the water atlas for method notes.
Full Gander water quality report →City Score rankingsCompare cities · vs Happy Valley-Goose Bay · vs Conception Bay SouthHardness guide
Watershed to tap · system map
Source, treatment, and distribution for Gander from municipal and provincial water records. Open the animated map for the full watershed-to-tap diagram — no nested topic navigation here.
Permits, tax, internet, radon, hazards, drinking water, and sports rankings where a CHL hometown applies.
Gander sits at City Score rank #206 with a standing of 48%, from 5 of 8 open-data pillars (tax, construction, connectivity, indoor air, water, seismic hazard, growth, safety). Missing pillars score at median standing so thin coverage cannot inflate the rank. Rising 25 places versus 2022 (#231 → #206).
Latest owned placements: indoor radon rank #230 of 327 at 83 Bq/m³ survey mean. Full tables and method notes live on each study edition; atlas readings for the same slug open from the topic buttons.
In the 2025 City Score edition, Gander carries a City Score standing of 48% (rank #206 of 343) with 5 of 8 pillars observed. That sits 5 points below the Newfoundland and Labrador peer average across 15 ranked cities. Within Newfoundland and Labrador, Gander ranks #12 of 15 on City Score.
The strongest signal in the current chart is seismic hazard (standing 86%, rank #295 of 343, raw score 0.027). The weakest observed pillar is drinking-water hardness (standing 20%, rank #68 of 343).
Drinking-water hardness on the water atlas reads 230 mg/L as CaCO₃ for Gander. Compare that figure to the hardness pillar on the chart and to the national hardness guide on the hub.
Arena loadout
Arena rank #206 of 343
5/8 pillars · main XP bar
Pillar avg · hardness #68
No placement
Rank #241
Rank #230
Rank #295
No placement
Gander pillar standing
Eight equal-weight City Score pillars, 2025 panel year.
Source: OpenStats composite / study editions
City Score standing trend
Standing percentage by panel year (higher is better).
Years: 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025
Source: OpenStats composite timeseries
Achievements
Published residential mill-rate context for Gander.
Highway-side museum overlooking Gander Lake, with historic aircraft outside and a dedicated 9/11 display inside.
The boardwalk park for an ordinary Gander evening: walk the loop, claim a picnic table, catch a free summer concert.
Festival of Flight is the premier summer event, with Gander Day on the first Monday in August and a closing fireworks display.
Where Gander sits in published building-permit figures for July 2026.
Older hometown notes stay on the desk archive (noindex) — this section shows recent highlights only.
Gander grew up beside runways, and the town still introduces itself that way. Municipal history calls the jet-age stop the Crossroads of the World, and Gander International Airport remains the landmark you navigate by even when you are only heading to Memorial Drive or Elizabeth Drive. The International Lounge, North Atlantic Aviation Museum on the Trans-Canada, Heritage Memorial Park, and Silent Witnesses Memorial keep aviation memory on the ground, while Come From Away interpretive panels mark sites from the 2001 diversion week without needing a Broadway ticket. Aerospace still shows up on the town's business pages as a growth file, not only as nostalgia.
Summer belongs to Festival of Flight. Gander Day on the first Monday in August closes roads, fills parking lots, and ends in fireworks talk that locals treat as a central Newfoundland highlight. Between festival peaks, Cobb's Pond Rotary Park is the boardwalk default for walks and Concert in the Park nights, and Steele Community Centre covers indoor ice, Geek Fest, and the recreation-hub identity the town claims for the region. SnoBreak holds the winter carnival slot on the third weekend in February, which keeps the calendar from being only an August story.
Gander Lake sits just off the highway for marina and golf days, but the everyday map is airport, Cobb's Pond, and the Field Complex corner of Elizabeth and Memorial. The current OpenStats datapack has no City Score rank for Gander, so the profile stays with what the town publishes about itself: flights overhead, festival week in August, and a recreation calendar built for more than one postal code. Take away the airport and Festival of Flight and the hometown voice collapses.
Drawn from Town of Gander, History, Annual Events, Attractions, Parks and Playgrounds, CBC Newfoundland and Labrador.
City Score from 2016–2025 across eight open-data pillars. Individual study placements are listed in the panels below.
Each study below is its own ranking. Where a study has more than one edition for this city, the chart shows standing across those years only.
Safety · OpenStats
Statistics Canada does not publish a police-service Crime Severity Index that OpenStats can match to Gander without copying a province, CMA, or another city. The safety pillar scores at median standing (50%) on City Score, the same rule used for other missing pillars.
Connectivity · OpenStats
OpenStats
Cities ranked by household-weighted maximum advertised download (Mbps) from ISED National Broadband Data hex ISP rows, with hex-to-city assignment by population-weighted gravity. The headline 2025 score is the dwelling-weighted mean of per-hex technology ceilings (fibre and cable at 1 Gbps, DSL lower). Household-weighted 50/10 availability (%) is stored on atlas rows as avail_5010_pct. Earlier panel years backcast along a national speed curve with city-specific fiber and availability paths.
10 editions · 2016–2025
Composite · OpenStats
OpenStats
Dimensional average of OpenStats open-data pillars for each panel year 2016-2025: tax, construction, connectivity, indoor air, water, seismic hazard, population growth, and crime severity. Each series is scored 0-1 within its edition; series in the same pillar are averaged, then all eight pillars are averaged with equal weight. Missing pillars score at median standing (0.5). Crime severity uses StatCan police-service CSI only (Tables 35-10-0026-01 and 35-10-0063-01); cities without a police-service match take median standing on the safety pillar. Growth uses StatCan CSD estimates; construction uses verified municipal building-permit value per resident (population field on each city record, 2021 Census vintage); mill rates and broadband use live rows plus documented year-varying estimates where needed. Radon, water, and PGA may be survey/model vintages carried forward and are flagged when static for more than two years. External commercial livability lists are never inputs.
10 editions · 2016–2025
Water · OpenStats
OpenStats
Communities ranked by municipal drinking-water hardness (mg/L as CaCO₃). Hardness changes slowly; the atlas vintage is carried across panel years and flagged when static for more than two years.
10 editions · 2016–2025
Water · OpenStats
OpenStats
Communities ranked by reported lead (µg/L) on the OpenStats water atlas. Carried across panel years until annual municipal report panels are ingested.
10 editions · 2016–2025
Health · OpenStats
OpenStats
Communities ranked by Health Canada survey mean indoor radon (Bq/m³). Rank 1 is the highest mean. Decade panel years without a new survey carry the CMA survey vintage forward; they are not annual retests.
10 editions · 2016–2025
Growth · OpenStats
OpenStats
Cities ranked by year-over-year population growth from Statistics Canada annual CSD estimates (Table 17-10-0155-01). Rank 1 is fastest growth. A few places without a clean CSD match use a provincial-path estimate anchored to seed population.
10 editions · 2016–2025
Hazards · OpenStats
OpenStats
Communities ranked by NRCan peak ground acceleration (higher = stronger shaking hazard). Rank 1 is highest PGA. The seismic model is multi-year; values are carried across the City Score panel and flagged as static until NRCan publishes a new generation.
10 editions · 2016–2025
Livability
MoneySense
Annual composite ranking of Canadian municipalities on economy, housing, crime, health, and weather.
2 editions · 2017–2018
Distinctive local notes and places, each linked to its source.
Town history pages still use Crossroads of the World for the era when transatlantic flights needed a Gander refueling stop.
Festival of Flight is the premier summer event, with Gander Day on the first Monday in August and a closing fireworks display.
Cobb's Pond Rotary Park offers a roughly four-kilometre boardwalk plus summer concert space.
Come From Away interpretive panels are installed around town at sites tied to the 2001 airport diversion story.
Still the geographic and identity anchor. The observation area and International Lounge turn a working airport into a hometown visit.
The boardwalk park for an ordinary Gander evening: walk the loop, claim a picnic table, catch a free summer concert.
Highway-side museum overlooking Gander Lake, with historic aircraft outside and a dedicated 9/11 display inside.
A quiet park remembering the 1985 Arrow Air crash, kept on the town attractions list beside the happier festival calendar.
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