IceStorm 98 Study

After serving as the Director of Parks and Recreation for Kingston Township for the past fifteen years, Barclay Mayhew was transferred to the Parks and Recreation Department for the City of Kingston where he was employed for the past two years. His most recent position is that of the Senior Projects Manager for the City of Kingston.

On the morning of the 8th of January, Barclay Mayhew made his way slowly into work.
Conditions in Kingston Township were still quite manageable in spite of the fact that power had not yet been restored to the area. Upon entering the city he was surprised at the extent of the devastation that had occurred the night before.

“...I started into work and the devastation was just unbelievable, I drove around Kingston Township and actually just thought that it was an ice storm and didn’t think much of it... I went into work and coming through the city and half the streets were taped off... gee it was like a demilitarized zone...so when I got in here in the morning obviously we knew it was an issue and they were going to make a decision by noon, I think, that day on whether it was called a disaster or not and I think that from then on for the next two and a half or three days we never left the building... you were running on adrenalin because it was exciting at first and you had some tasks to do and it was pretty intense...”

The push was on to get organized “it continued to get bigger instead of smaller which amazed us and then you start to hear bits and pieces of it’s a lot worse than you think it is... then you start to hear the Quebec situation... and then all of a sudden we got a scare from people ... the radio reported that (you should) boil your water and that had nothing to do with Kingston, but people listened to CFRA in Ottawa ... they were hearing those kinds of issues which were not issues here... I think the real magnitude might have hit the morning that they had all the busses out front and the army...”.

He was surprised at how quickly the army was able to mobilize its forces. As it was, the army had been alerted to the emergency some time previous. Their main function involved a door to door campaign to inform the community of the location of the various shelters that had been designated throughout the City and to check on people.

B.M. emphasized that they had no idea of how serious the emergency was. This made it extremely difficult to cope with planning and prioritizing.

“... I think that yeah it’s bad in Kingston but we’re getting by; then all of a sudden as we became more regionally in tune with things we found out how serious it was and there was a little bit of a communication problem within City Hall, we weren’t always right up to speed on everything. ... “This was to a certain extent due to the fact that there was little, or no, co-ordination in the call in centre. Information was not passed on to the people in charge of various tasks since nobody knew who was in charge of what.

Security was a problem at City Hall due to the fact that people were wandering in off the street in search of a hot meal or just warmth. Individuals were wandering around City Hall unimpeded through offices and secure areas since no central area, other than Memorial Hall had been set aside for them to congregate.

“I started out looking after generators and pumps and what happened was that we fell into that
... with someone coming to the door with some pumps and generators the first night of the ice storm and we catalogued them and took them in and thought that this is going to be a fairly reasonable job to handle and all of a sudden we found out that it was from a military perspective I guess, one of the key areas that needed to be looked after in the ice storm more than any emergency...”

Calls came in from the Cobourg area and around the City offering spare generators and pumps for the emergency use of the City. These were for residential use only. The question now arose concerning who these generators and pumps should be distributed to.
“...what became a bit of a critical issue - do you give them to private homes, or do you not and if you give them to one private home how do you tell somebody else that we don’t have one for you ... so we determined fairly early in the process that we wouldn’t provide them to private homes.. we understood that there may be a liability problem...”.

In any event Barclay Mayhew (B.M.) discovered that generators were still available for sale in and around the Kingston area and he was personally contacted by local merchants who had generators and pumps available.

The City of Toronto Police and Fire departments contacted B.M. and offered their services to the City Of Kingston.

Upon their arrival in Kingston both forces “were allocated I guess to me, as a resource and I looked after their accommodation needs as well as giving them their assignments...” Most, if not all of the “visitors” were booked into the Ambassador Motel.

“... the first big issue was...Bob Crawford, who is the Deputy Chief from the city of Toronto who was down here said look we’ve been standing around for two hours, we came here to do something, let’s get a move on- so we convened a meeting really quickly at that point because there was a concern that the Water Treatment plant was going to go down and that there was a need for a major generator for that ... what we were impressed with was the Toronto Fire Department with their technical people... immediately went out there and sized up what would be required for a generator... and came back and we at that point phoned Fort Drum and talked to them about a generator that they might have... that was the first major generator situation that we had ... the problem got resolved and so we knew that water supply to the City was going to be o.k... there was a concern that the power would go out in that section, (but it didn’t) and they had continued power through the whole storm...”.

B.M. credits the authorities from Toronto with doing an excellent job. “...I like to look at it that we were an ‘enabler’, a catalyst, and we basically set out the parameters and they decided whether a case was critical or not... and because very early in the process we became a regional centre, we sent our forces, the Toronto people, out to Wolfe Island... to Westport... to Smiths Falls...one of the negatives that we had was we had a Toronto Police generator - it was a truck design with a generator on it, we sent them out four times to different areas and they got there and they weren’t needed... there was either a lack of communication or there were some political boundaries or problems...that weren’t being followed up by the proper people...”.

“They (Toronto Fire Department) had a lot of expertise in the whole disaster planning area, of which we had none and had not really looked at it as being a concern I had over the years gotten to the point where I probably looked at these mock disasters with a certain amount of laughability, I guess, to be quite honest... but I think that I’ve got a whole new appreciation for disaster planning and how we handle those kinds of issues...”.

B.M. discussed an occasion where he provided a generator to a private home and was to regret this decision later on.

A request was made by the nuns who lived on Wright Cr. for a generator so B.M. sent the Metro Police over to hook up a generator for them. In this instance, there were handicapped people involved so the decision to provide a generator was in accordance with his general policy. “...any institution or places where they had to move people we tried to accommodate their needs... that’s why we tried to stay out of the individual households was to try to accommodate the needs of larger numbers.. if we could heat up an apartment building lobby where people could come down and get warm instead of moving out of the apartment building we tried to accommodate those kinds of situations...”.

B.M. referred to George Sutherland who went from farm to farm with his generator in Pittsburgh Township helping the farmers out with their livestock.

In the second week the E.O.C. was moved over to the offices at Pittsburgh Township, and the generator distribution centre was moved to the Pittsburgh Township Fire Hall. “ ...had we had an opportunity to know that would have worked better initially, that would have made our lives easier, would have made stiffer control of the stock easier and so on.. but we weren’t prepared, again we went into this thing not really knowing the magnitude of it.... we’d certainly be prepared differently if we ever do it again...”.

B.M. did not consult the Emergency Plan which had just been prepared for City officials.

In a future emergency of this nature, B.M. would have a list of “hot spots” where generators would be assigned to such as schools that have been designated as shelters, old age homes, hospitals, chronic care centres and other institutions that housed groups of people.

Communications must be upgraded to the extent that a back up system must be made available in the event of a complete failure of the system.

Teams were assigned to man the phone lines. Calls began to subside later on in the week and the majority of calls came in during the day. B.M. arranged to billet the phone teams in at local hotels and food was brought in during the day. He was surprised to see the local community drop by with offers of food “... people brought food in, there was a pretty major outpouring of good will, it really showed the human character of people ... it was pretty rewarding actually when you think back and you look at...”.

People were more than prepared to help out their neighbours. Neighbourhood groups could have been organized and provided with a generator to go from house to house restoring heat.
B.M. received several calls from residents requesting generators. His response was to give them the location of the nearest shelter and suggest that they take advantage of the facility until the emergency was over. There were a few calls from residents who were either invalid or were taking care of invalids that required a generator to maintain power to life support systems. In these cases where they could not be transferred to a hospital, he supplied them with generators without hesitation.

Was cost an issue and did you have any concerns about your authority?

“... I guess it (my authority) was to Gardner Church....I think I asked once about money when I needed supplies and I was given a P.O. (purchase order) number so any of the out of town people that needed (supplies of fuel etc) we just wrote the P.O. number and told them to go to the electrical shop and get whatever they needed and bring the bill back to me, nobody abused that ... you’re dealing with professional people that are in that business...and they used a lot of their own stock off of the trucks... “.

How did you make decisions?

“Common sense... if you’ve been in management for 25 years, and there’s a certain group of us that were pretty highly intelligent people working together I think we made a lot of decisions based on common sense and past practice... might have been what we’d done over the four days prior, five days prior ... we became a lot more experienced during the storm, no question...”.

As the emergency wound down and the E.O.C. was moved to the Pittsburgh Township location, B.M started to get what he referred to as “frivolous calls... people wanting generators... the need wasn’t as great, or people, I think, were trying to test the system at that point, ... in anything that happens you’re going to get those people on the fringe...”.

As far as stress was concerned, B.M., nor his family experienced any stress during the storm. As a father of two teenaged kids, he didn’t observe any hardship. One night was spent at the Ambassador Motel, but they returned home the next night when power was restored. The family was used to his long hours away from home and this was no exception... “this was like being at a tournament for four or five days...”.
The Toronto contingent suggested that they should have had someone on hand to manage stress control just in case.

What things worked well, and what didn’t work well?

“What really worked well is that I think that people got to know one another, I think that it was probably the (?) team building exercise ... it was pretty healthy from that perspective...”.

“...obviously we’d do better, we’d be more prepared, we’d probably do a lot more processing, if we had another one, but the other thing is...usually you’re not going to find anything this widespread...it would be more isolated, it would be a situation where you’d have a train wreck or a chemical spill...”.

B.M. credits the management group with having “excellent management skills... we all brought some skills to the table...”.

A week after the move to the Pittsburgh Township site, the E.O.C. began to shut down. Most of his time was spent in retrieving generators, pumps and other equipment which had been lent out during the storm.

B.M. had no contact with the media “ we tried to gear that to certain people...”.

He recalled one incident concerning the briefing which Bell had with the mayor at the beginning of the storm in which Bell requested a generator since they were about to lose generating power from the temporary generator. “...it was a pretty critical night because we were about to lose 60,000 customers, phone customers and what are they going to do, they already got no power and no heat ... that was a situation that never got articulated outside of our area because we wanted to get it resolved...”.

As a direct result of his activities B.M. was asked to take on the position of Emergency Co-ordinator for the City of Kingston. “I indicated that I was too busy with the job I had and I didn’t know if it was the career move I wanted to make...”

As far as preparations for the next emergency are concerned “I would think, it’s my suspicion that this City will be much better equipped next time, I think that they did a fantastic job in what we did but I think that process wise we’ll be pretty strong next time...”.

Crews and emergency planning officials who came from Toronto and other cities gained invaluable experience from their involvement in assisting Kingston throughout the emergency.

“The people from Toronto surprisingly enough said: this is like a classroom, people wanted to come down here and be part of this, people who had been through maybe years of disaster training, some of the guys said we could go for 20 years and never be part of one, so they were really grateful for the opportunity that their superiors gave them to come down and try and utilize all the skills that they had acquired over time... they really put their skills to work ,... that was really rewarding for them... they were quite quick to point out that we’ll bring in our emergency experts, they brought in a couple of people probably as highly trained as anybody in Canada in disaster planning...so I got to work directly with those people, I was really fortunate compared to a lot of people ...”.