IceStorm 98 Study

At the time of the storm, Adele Lafrance was just moving over to Social Services from another department. On the morning of January 8th, she was scheduled to interview potential employees. This was the first day on her new job, which was to hire people. She was late waking up because her clock hadn't worked and she was panicked about being late on her first day at work interviewing people. She didn't look outside and was "hustling about" when she received a telephone call saying that the interviews would be cancelled because of the weather. She decided to go to her old job to finish some things there. "As we left our neighbourhood, I noticed how beautiful it was with all of the ice on the trees. And as we proceeded a little bit further I noticed there were a few broken branches and, as we tried to get into the City, it ended up taking me over an hour and a half to get to Rideau Crest because of all of the streets that were shut down." At that point, her focus changed and she became concerned about possible understaffing at Rideau Crest and, if the power was out, they would be having a hard time providing service to the residents. When she arrived at Rideau Crest, they were in the dark and on auxiliary power. So she spent the day dealing with Rideau Crest issues, rather than Social Services, troubleshooting.

She was still in the dark at home that evening. She called back to Rideau Crest at 11:00 p.m. and the power had come back on. The next morning she went to Rideau Crest and they did have power, "which was great. And it was business as usual and everybody seemed comforted and in control."

She then called City Hall to their command post, who she had been in touch with the day before, to let them know that everything was under control at Rideau Crest. They then asked to her to help out at City Hall, which she did. She was assigned a variety of tasks when she got there including answering the phones.

Adele also did vacant bed counts at the shelters (over the telephone with contact people at each location) and communicated this to Hotel Dieu Hospital. She would let the hospital know which shelters had space, which ones had provisions for families, which ones had chicken pox in them so that they wouldn't send pregnant women there and if there was a person who was medically stable but couldn't be in an environment with too many kids or too many people, they'd look for a quieter shelter for that person. She stayed at City Hall Friday night and continued doing this through the night.

In between doing that, she worked with Linda Breen to make a list of provisions that they would need to stock the shelters. She made calls to get linens. She was also the contact person with the Community Care Access to get the nursing staff into the shelters. Whatever job came across the desk, such as people calling to donate firewood, she would deal with.

By Saturday afternoon, the set-up and placement issues were decreasing and the calls that were coming in were more those from residents with problems, asking for transportation to get to the shelters or asking if they should stay in their home overnight because their power had been out for close to 48 hours at that point. They were also calling to ask when they were going to get their power back, which nobody knew "because we were losing it as fast as we were getting it back in some areas". They were encouraging people to close up their houses and move to shelters during the daytime.

Between 5:00 and 6:00 o'clock in the evening, they started getting calls from people who were concerned about the water supply. Adele is not sure how this started but people told her that they had heard on the radio that the water supply was contaminated. "It was sad. They were so desperate. The people were saying, 'I'm in my house and I'm in the dark and I have no power so I can't boil the water and I want to know what to do and I don't want to leave my home and can you send me pills to make the water sterile?' It took us about an hour to absolutely be sure that the water was fine and it took us about another half-hour to organize the public response to that so that we would get it out on the media because the calls were becoming very frantic." She remembers that it was about 8:00 p.m. that Dr. Gemmill was assured that the water was fine because he’d been in touch with the Utilities. He issued a press announcement telling people to not boil the water because it was just using up more of the utilities.

She finished at about 9:00 p.m. and went home "and my domestic situation wasn't very good at the point" because they still had no power. The next morning, the power came on.

She had been in touch with the Social Services staff in the shelters, primarily with Tanie Steacy (Manager of Program Delivery). They thought that they should be opening up on Monday or Tuesday at Social Services because their sense was "as people returned home and they had to throw their food out of the 'fridge and the freezer, that certainly those that are low-income and that kind of live from cheque to cheque were going to be in a desperate situation."

On Sunday night, Adele did an "overnighter" at Q.E.C.V.I. manning the shelter. A lot of the catchment area for that shelter was Compton and Elliott Avenue and north Kingston and their power did come back on at some point on Sunday, so after breakfast on Sunday they had a lot of people leave the shelter. For the Sunday night shift, they only had between 50 and 60 residents. So it was a very quiet night at the shelter and the provisions were ample. "Towels and food galore and your choice of cot. The area where people slept was quite calm so it was a really good night at the shelter."

The next day, they had a staff meeting and the decision was made that they would go in to the Social Services building and assess how well they could operate there because the building had had no power. (Adele didn't go in on Monday. She went home and slept.) There were people who had purchased food when they received their assistance cheque at the beginning of the month or had bought extra over the Christmas holidays and they lost it all. So there were people with a lot of need.

On the Monday, they issued money because they were isolated and didn't have the opportunity to do a lot of outreach. Tanie did meet with the Salvation Army and the Red Cross on Monday and it became evident that people from outlying areas and those less affected were being very generous with food and they had cases of food coming in. They decided to issue non-perishable food baskets through the Salvation Army. There were some perishable goods also, like bananas and eggs and bread. "Whatever had been donated or could be readily made available." Non-perishable items were the safest to make available to people.

So Social Services started to issue letters of referral to the Salvation Army and they then issued the food baskets. By Wednesday, after reassessing the situation and reviewing the Emergency Provisions under the General Welfare Act, they felt that they could be issuing vouchers for people to be able to pick up perishable items as well. They did that for the remainder of the week.

They were constantly reassessing and in touch with other communities, with other agencies, with the Ministry, and with different departments of City Hall. They decided that for the next week (the week of January 12th), they themselves would move to the Salvation Army so that it would be a one-stop situation for people. It made it easier for people in regard to transportation. They did that for two weeks, until January 23rd.

At some point during the week of January 19th, they were advised by City Hall that the provincial government had made $2 million available to them through an emergency help fund and that Social Services had been identified as the agency that would distribute the money. They worked on the criteria for this and identified a location, they made notification through the newspaper and arranged transportation. On January 27th, they opened up on Midland Avenue to the public-at-large. That process did not require means testing, it was based on residency. If a person was a resident of Kingston and had lost food, then a claim related to the storm could be made for urgent replacement. This process went on for two weeks.

They then spent the next month paying the bills associated with the storm relief and dealing with individual cases that had not been served during the initial public outreach.

Adele mentions that Social Services was very low on staff because of the amalgamation and the V.E.P. (voluntary exit packages) that staff had taken, so they were missing between 18% and 20% of their staff. They also had people with personal difficulties because their basements were flooded or they were in rural areas with pumps that weren't working. In order to carry on their normal business and serve people who require General Welfare Assistance and also do the issuance and processing of hundreds of customers who needed ice storm relief, they were dependent on assistance from outside for manpower. The County of Hastings provided a team of three caseworkers for a week. The Region of Kitchener, Waterloo and Cambridge also sent a team of five caseworkers from the 27th to the 30th. "And those people worked extremely long hours. They didn't take lunch breaks. We were putting through about 300 clients a day, and all the paperwork that goes with it." They also relied on Office Overload agencies. Their own caseworkers would leave the Montreal Street office and do the evening shift out at Midland Avenue so that they could see all of the people.

The people who came here from the Kitchener area to help were the same people who had assisted during the meningitis outbreak that they had over the New Year's period, so they were real crisis workers, she says with a laugh. "They had worked on helping all these children get vaccinated the first week and then, I think, were back in the office for a day or two and then were re-deployed here to issue emergency assistance, but were very, very sympathetic to our clients and to our community and really gave us their all."

One of their concerns was that there would be articles in the newspaper that counties or areas had run out of money, so when Social Services developed their criteria they did keep an eye on essential needs. Their fear was that if they covered a whole tank of oil ($200-$300) or if they paid for the whole rental of a generator to the tune of $2,000 that they might run out of money and that there would then be people who were going to do without food. And these might not be people who were eligible for general welfare. After brainstorming about what's fair and what's generous and what's going to comfortably meet people's basic need but, also, what is responsible, they looked at what the general welfare provisions per month are for a single person. They decided to make the maximum half of that. The concern was to meet people's basic emergency needs without running out of money for people who were desperate.

Adele suspects it was very opportune that she was new to Social Services because she didn't have a lot of expertise or experience in the operations. And, in terms of emergency relief, no one had experience. She says one didn't need a lot of expertise, "you just needed to be able to interact with people and brainstorm", so the division was that Tanie Steacy stayed at the office to deal with all of the crises related to their usual clientele and the new people they picked up because of the storm and Adele went to Midland Avenue and dealt with that operation (where no one had experience).

Tanie Steacy toured the shelters. They each had their own atmosphere and their own routine of operations. In order to make decisions about where they should be telling the public to go, she would tour them and get a sense of their operation, but she would sleep at L.C.V.I. at night.

Adele describes her responsibility the night she stayed at the Q.E.C.V.I. shelter as being that of a Social Services representative, so that if there were people in crisis who, for instance, couldn't go back home or who had essential needs at the shelter, then they could be forwarded to Social Services in the morning. Because the power had come back on and the shelter was quiet that Sunday night, she didn't see people who were really, really in crisis. Two nights before, there were people who were getting the sense they weren't going back home because of the flooding, or who had broken windows from trees going through them. The staff were concerned about where these people could go once they left the shelter. So it was much calmer at the shelter the night Adele stayed. "Most people had a sense that ' well, I'm here for tonight and there's hope tomorrow'."

If people did go home and discover that they had broken windows, Social Services could issue a cheque on Monday to deal with that. In some cases, the City Works department went and did things such as putting plastic over the window or boarding it up. People did have to deal with pumping out their basements on their own, however, because the City was busy pumping out institutions and locations that had to be kept operational. In terms of food, the Salvation Army was already issuing food before Social Services got active so people could be directed there immediately.

People called City Hall to volunteer their services pumping out basements, experienced chain saw users volunteered, people were calling to ask where they could drop off fire wood. In some instances, Adele was able to make an outreach to individuals by calling the Salvation Army to ask if they had had requests for certain things and then putting the two parties in touch. There was also a location on Woodbine where people could donate or pick up wood.

Stress and fatigue were both problems. It was stressful at home having no heat or lights and the hours became very long. Adele also felt an element of guilt that she "had abandoned her family" because her husband had extra duties at work and she was getting home at 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning or arriving home at 11:00 p.m. and then working another couple of hours. "It was stressful and it was really, really exhausting."

"I guess the thing is that when there is an immediate need, what happens is the need is really in the forefront." At Midland Avenue, the criteria didn't meet all of the individual needs so the whole day was spent "running and fixing". "You know, everything from finding a vacuum cleaner for someone to finding a breast pump that could be battery operated for someone, medications and talking to pharmacists about what do you throw, what do you keep.... All kinds of different calls."

"Just incredible things happened to people. Like one lady was saying, she had a load of wash in the washer when her power went out. [Adele laughs.] You know, it just wasn't in the forefront of her mind. I don't know why. But, anyway, she eventually got back home and got to the point where she could do laundry about two and a half weeks after the storm and when she opened the washing machine everything had blue molded and just stank. But she wasn't in a position where she had a lot of extra linen and so she was there. What she needed was bedding and linen because she had lost a lot of her towels and a lot of her sheets because this stuff had sat wet for two and a half weeks."

People had all kinds of stories like that, calling with specific needs. There were a lot of health issues including cases where people had to throw out medications because the refrigerator hadn't been working. There was also the other extreme where people moved stuff outside to keep it cold and then it wasn't any good for them because it froze.

Adele comments that she doesn't like to see people dealing with a lot of stress in their life and is bothered when she sees people who are so unbalanced and are having to cope with so much. “That kind of weighs heavy even if you're helping them. You can't make it go away, you can only help them. So that was stressful, too, after the fact.”

As Adele says, it would be nice to plan your ice storm in advance so as not to be short of staff. Being short of staff certainly was a handicap. She feels that they did depend a little bit too much on the newspaper for some of their advertising and press releases. She feels that if this should ever happen again, their focus should be more on the radio for public announcements and for schedule information. The difficulty with that, of course, is that many people did not have a radio either. Her suggestion is that announcements should be made every 15 minutes on the radio every day.

Another thing they did during the storm was to ask to get a group of community agencies together when they were developing criteria to get a feel for how they should be providing the emergency assistance. One of the benefits that came out of getting the group together to brainstorm was that they found out all of the services these agencies had to offer. "So it was a real win-win situation for us in that we got their involvement and they were able to give us some input on how it should be done but, as well as that, we came away knowing what was available from these agencies." These included the Salvation Army, the Food Bank, the Ministry who did the issuance for the Family Benefits clientele (which cut down traffic at Social Services considerably), Monica Stewart from the Community Information Centre.

Monica Stewart was responsible for coordinating everything that was happening and for putting out information releases to all of the agencies about what services were available. For example, on Friday afternoon they would be waiting for Monica's issuances because that information would be fed over to the disaster information centre so that people could call and find out where they could get a hot meal or what emergency services were available.

Social Services also provided the initial emergency assistance under General Welfare for the whole county because, as of the 1st of January, they had taken them over onto their caseload. "So that was a real test, too, because we really hadn't been 'out there' yet."

The total amount of what Social Services issued related to the food vouchers through the Salvation Army and the vouchers for the grocery stores and all of the costs involved with delivering that service, including the cost of renting the shuttle bus from McCoy's, the cost of printing the vouchers, the cost of issuing the cheques. This all came to $531,531.00. $433,600 of this was related to food and food-related vouchers.

One of the groups of people that they identified as high-risk and possibly falling through the cracks was people who were handicapped or frail who wouldn't be able to come to the Salvation Army. The parking lot there was very busy and there were snow and ice moguls. The problem with the Midland Avenue location was that the waiting lineup was so long because of the number of people they were seeing and the seating was limited. Social Services issued a press release giving the telephone number of the Community Information Centre who had set up a hotline for people needing assistance. They had the screening criteria and so could prepare people for what they should take to Social Services. People could also register with them if they were not able to go in person and Social Services helped these people over the telephone.

People could also call the Family Benefits office directly and Social Services would send people up to Sharon Lassard who was the coordinator there. Beyond that, there were people who were on General Welfare. There were also people on Old Age Security who were not an appropriate case for Sharon so they were directed to call Monica and they were assigned a caseworker. This process took longer because the applications were handled through the mail.

A contentious issue they had to deal with was that some people had an expectation that Social Services would cover all of their hotel bills. The Community Information Centre did advise people that they were only covering those costs if they were for medical purposes, such as for people who couldn't sleep on a cot, people who required a hook-up for a respirator, who needed a more stable environment than the shelter, etc.

One of the difficult issues was that they did not know if Disaster Relief would be covering the cost of generators. People were arriving with bills of $1,000 wanting to know if they could claim to the maximum for that. During their second week on Midland Avenue, Disaster Relief called them to say 'go ahead and give them whatever you can because we're not close to knowing yet'. It has just recently been announced that this cost will be covered.

There was also a problem with fraud with the vouchers. "It was unfortunate. And, of course, hindsight is so much better than foresight. The first thing the police said to us is 'well, you know, it might have cost a little bit more but you should have used security paper'." They didn't think to give guidelines to the stores on how to check for the authenticity of the vouchers such as by making sure the voucher was on self-carbonating paper. The expiry date should have been shorter, also. People were originally asked to use the vouchers within one month but the fraud became evident during week two and the police asked them to close off the voucher program in order to limit the fraud. Adele says that now she feels she would put an issuance date stating the voucher should be used within a week or two weeks, but the problem during the storm, of course, was that nobody knew if the power would stay on.

Adele says, "I'm glad we're not doing it every day. Tanie and I were both relatively new in our positions. Tanie had been in Social Services for a while but not as a division manager. In our lighter moments, we used to say that it was 'just a test' and that would kind of keep us going."