IceStorm 98 Study

[Note: The first part of this interview with Chief Bill Closs can be found at the very end of the Lindsay Reiach tape. It's about five minutes of tape, not transcribed here. We had to interrupt our first interview and start again. The main value of the first five minutes of the first interview is descriptive; Closs goes into some detail about how he felt driving down Princess Street in pitch darkness. We picked up on that point at the beginning of the second interview, but there is more 'colour' in the first]

Bill Closs (BC) recalled driving down Princess Street in the wee hours of Jan. 8 and feeling something like fear. The entire city core was in darkness, and he was worried about a sudden rise in crime.

"It's just an eerie feeling ... was this just another crisis? No."

The ice storm was something no one could really prepare for, he said, because "the emergency is on such a wide scale, and has such a devastating effect on all of the issues, such as hydro, traffic lights, in such a wide area. Then of course there were the falling trees and the falling wires..."

Chief Closs said he fully expected his own people to perform well during the crisis -- because they're trained to deal with emergencies -- but what really impressed him was how resourceful and level-headed other city employees turned out to be. "I was quite frankly in awe of how well they seemed to be handling the situation, working so hard and working in such a cooperative way. As a police chief, it was great to see how many people could come together in such a cooperative way and just make sure that things got done. So out of a terrible, terrible situation, I was left with a really good feeling about the people of Kingston from two perspectives: the people who worked for the city of Kingston, and then all of the volunteers and everybody else that just wanted to help out."

What made this even more impressive was the fact that many of the people who helped manage the crisis for the city (i.e., city employees) and those who volunteered their time were also dealing with their own crises at home.

The key to managing an emergency is choosing the right personnel, BC said. He said he chose Const. Al Melvin and Staff Sgt. Bob Napier to run the police command centre at City Hall because he felt they would be able to work well with city officials and military, whether they were giving or taking directions. "We believe they had the ability and the skills to get things done. I don't think there was any problem at all ... the officers over at City Hall in what was being called the command post functioned very well."

Police fielded all of the usual 911 calls from residents, and although residents were being told to contact City Hall with questions about power and downed trees, etc., police discovered that "regardless of where you tell people to call, they'll still come to the police for help," BC said. "Or, if you tell them to call City Hall, they'll always come to the police if they get tired of getting a busy signal."

BC said it's hard for him to find an example of something that didn't work well on the policing end, because he and his officers are used to responding to emergencies. They're so accustomed to this sort of thing (though on a smaller scale, usually), that BC found he was able to accurately predict what would happen during different phases of the emergency. At an early meeting, he predicted people would be patient and courteous, that they would all help out and that most would obey the law. That was the case early on. An example of this came when the traffic lights were out, and police were unable to put police officers at most intersections because they were needed elsewhere. Accidents fell to almost zero during the first part of the storm, even though about ten major intersections were without power. "So people were paying attention," BC said. He also predicted that as time wore on, "the criminal element would come out from wherever they were and begin to take advantage of the situation," and that tempers would begin to flare among residents as the emergency and the response effort dragged on. He said he was proven correct in both cases.

It was "almost policing as usual" during the ice storm, BC said. There were fewer traffic accidents, but the police still had people calling them for help as they normally do. The volume of calls increased dramatically, and there was still crime in the city, so from that perspective, BC said, things didn't change much.

In addition to assigning two of their police officers to City Hall, the department used its community volunteers and patrol officers to carry out special functions, like check-the-welfare calls and house checks.

BC worked with local Crown Attorney Jack McKenna to encourage stiffer-than-usual sentences for anyone caught taking advantage of the power outages to commit property crimes. "I was concerned that we would start having B&E's [break-and-enters], especially with the power outage, so Mr. McKenna and myself formed an agreement that we would go public with a message" warning criminals that they would be subject to special 'ice storm' sentencing. The Crown Attorney agreed that anyone who broke into a house during the blackout would be given stiffer treatment. The Crown would make the court aware of the special circumstances of the crime at the time of sentencing, and would seek a higher penalty.

BC sure that got out to the media -- print and radio -- and in fact one person was apprehended early in the disaster, and did receive jail time for breaking into a house. That was well-publicized. This campaign did seem to have a deterrent effect, BC said, but it also sent the message out to criminals that "if I'm going to do the crime, I'd better be really, really careful."

On the fourth, fifth or sixth days of the emergency, the break-ins started to increase, and Kingston lost about six or eight generators to thieves, BC recalled. But there was no increase in violent crimes during the emergency.

During the last couple of days of the state of emergency, some of the crews who were out there trying to help residents were running into verbal abuse, BC said. From time to time the police had to send an officer out to intervene or just provide a presence, BC said, "so that the people who were here trying to help restore power and deal with the emergency felt safe, and [so that] cooler heads prevailed."

BC would not agree to provide incident logs from the emergency because he said it would be too time-consuming for the police to go through and black out confidential information.

Asked about how he perceived the lines of authority at City Hall, BC said he thought Mayor Bennett was the main person in charge, and that Mayor Bennett's closest advisors were Gardner Church and Carl Holmberg.

BC would often get approached for interviews with the media, but if he was next to the Mayor at the time he would always try to defer to Mayor Bennett's authority. "Several times the media would come towards me because of the police chief's uniform, and I would say 'wait a minute, here's your main man here.' [The Mayor]. I'm not sure he always appreciated that, but it was meant to do two things. Number one, the Mayor was the boss, and number two, it was meant to illustrate my respect for him and the fact that I knew he was the boss."

Although he acknowledged that emergency control group meetings tended to get unwieldy at times, BC said he felt Mayor Bennett ran the meetings well. "Everybody had an opportunity to report and raise their issues. The Mayor had a tendency to move this along as quickly as possible, to speak as little as possible, and both he and Gardner Church tended to summarize and make points at the end of the meetings."

"I know it has been raised that one or two of the [control group] meetings were very large. Most of them were held in one room, downstairs [in city hall], and were not for the purposes of City Council. One was much larger than the others. But not everyone at the meetings spoke." For example, Kingston police might have four bodies in the room, but only one of them would be the designated speaker.

Const. Melvin and Bob Napier worked "unlimited hours" at the command post, BC recalled. "They had a job to do and they had to get it done, regardless of the number of hours." Back in the station, the other police officers were placed on 12-hour shifts, from a normal one of ten hours. "So we simply extended our day. We were careful not to drain our staff in that way [by making them work even longer hours]."

BC recalled that stress and other after-effects became noticeable towards the end of the storm. He recalls dealing with one woman near the front door of City hall. She was concerned about the power being out, and was so distraught that one of BC's officers couldn't calm her down. BC got involved, and tried to steer the woman towards counselling.

BC said he recalls hearing concern expressed several times about the danger of burnout and depression among city staff dealing with the emergency. Someone was designated to watch out for signs of traumatic stress disorder, and city managers were advised that this was a possibility.

But BC said his own staff on the police force were used to handling emergencies, so he wasn't particularly worried about the stress levels among his own rank and file: "Maybe I've become hardened in my years of experience, but police officers, during the course of their careers, see terrible things. They see very, very violent, horrific deaths, which is probably the worst thing you can see, and that did not exist in this particular disaster. So I don't think ... I hope I'm not wrong on this ... in terms of being stressed out, the littlest impact probably was on the police department, because our job is to respond to volatile, serious occurrences."

"The other people, who were tasked with looking after the fallen wires and getting the power on and moving the trees and making everything safe in that way, were being worked and overworked right to the core ... Those were the people that are in my mind the heroes of the storm."

Some of the biggest challenges those people faced stemmed from differences between Utilities Kingston and Ontario Hydro, BC recalled.

"For me, that was the major problem that I saw. It became very problematic for the people in the community, and for the mayor. You have the PUC -- the local agency that is responsible for utilities -- so the mayor could give very clear direction as to exactly what was happening in terms of restoring power in the old city of Kingston. But then when it came to restoring power in the former Pittsburgh Township or Kingston Township, those areas were under the auspices of Ontario Hydro, who were absent for the first few days, then eventually started showing up."

Mayor Bennett and Gardner Church showed political savvy by bringing Ontario Hydro to the table, according to BC. "I'm sure they were making a lot of phone calls behind the scenes [to make that happen]."

BC said he can't really blame Ontario Hydro for showing up late or working in ways that seemed to be at cross-purposes to the local utility. "Ontario Hydro had a different way of doing business, and I respect that. And they had to look after all of Ontario, not just the City of Kingston."

But he said it's clear that "Somebody within Ontario Hydro decided to give Kingston a particular pecking order in terms of hydro [being restored], and that's what we were stuck with."

Some people misunderstood the situation and concluded that Mayor Bennett was taking care of his own former constituency -- the old city core -- before helping the townships, BC said, but it was strictly a matter of waiting for Ontario Hydro to come to the table and begin sharing information with Kingston about when power would be restored in those areas.

Contrary to what some residents thought, "He [Mayor Bennett] was driving Ontario Hydro as hard as he could."

"I'm sure it must have been very frustrating for the mayor, but eventually he got them to the table," BC added. "That's the way it is ... you have this local public utility, and they have their way of doing business and doing things, and you have Ontario Hydro, which has its own way of doing things."

The same thing is true of the relationship between city police and the Ontario Provincial Police, BC said. Both forces have their own way of operating, and occasionally seemed to be working at cross purposes during the ice storm. He gave the example of a local car dealership offering 10 unlicensed vans to the city for use in the emergency response. City police were willing to look the other way during the storm and let the vans be used without licenses, but the OPP insisted that licenses were needed.

When the person who was responsible for deploying the vans came to BC and told him that the OPP had said they couldn't be used, BC told the person "Wait a minute. I can only speak for the old city of Kingston, and the former Pittsburgh Township, of which I am the police chief, and the vans are welcome to be used in those jurisdictions without license plates, because my officers will not prosecute, In other words, we'll exercise discretion. So there was just a different way of doing business."

[See interview with OPP Staff Sgt. Glen Fowler. The vans were used, but only after the OPP made arrangements for the Ministry of Transportation to issue temporary license plates. Fowler said it was easy to get the temporary plates, and he can't understand why city police would have agreed to look the other way when liability issues were at stake.]

BC acknowledged that he doesn't have "the legal authority to say it's OK to break the law [by driving without plates]," but he said "as chief, I do have the authority to say 'my officers will use discretion.'"

BC was careful to point out that the van issue was relatively minor, and that he didn't intend his comments as a criticism of the OPP: "Please don't misunderstand me. I'm not pecking away at another police organization. I'm just saying that when you have different levels of control, different agencies, one provincial, one municipal, you end up sometimes doing things differently or thinking about things differently."

On the matter of costs: BC said the police department spent about $28,000 in overtime during the ice storm, but that there were no other major emergency-related costs.

BC recalls being told to spend what he needed to spend and work it out later. This situation was helped by the fact that Mayor Bennett sits on the police services board, he added, "so from a policing perspective, he's my boss. So he and I already had that rapport ... he knows how I operate, and I know how he operates. So it wasn't necessary for him to say 'do what has to be done' -- but somewhere late on the first or second day, that's exactly what he did say. 'Just do what needs to be done.'"

During the control group meetings at City Hall, the Mayor indicated to everyone that the city would worry about costs later, but that right now everyone was just charged with looking after the emergency. Despite this advice, BC said he and other city officials were still trying to control costs, because they're trained to do so all the time.

BC said he had no contact with Emergency Measures Ontario, except when he was in the room with the EMO official who was finally sent to participate in the city's control group meetings. Furthermore, BC said he's not sure he has enough knowledge about the EMO to express an opinion on their involvement in the emergency. "The main player [regarding the EMO] was the mayor," he said. "I'm not just sure where Emergency Measures fit in [to the response]. I do know Randy Reid was trying to make things happen for the mayor."

One of the major things BC said he learned from the emergency was that Kingston needs a better plan for dealing with elderly residents. "The elderly, or the vulnerable, the people at risk -- sometimes they don't recognize when they're in danger, or they refuse to be helped," he said. "We were a little slow, but eventually someone came in with the White Flag campaign idea, on about day four or five." The White Flag campaign was a public information campaign that encouraged residents to fly a white cloth from their home if they needed help.

For the next emergency, BC said the city will have a single symbol that indicates when someone needs help. "[It will be] something you hang in your window or put out a door, etc., so that anyone walking by will know, 'Gee, there's something happening in that house.' We need to come up with a symbol that young and old will recognize."

BC said the city was also a little slow in providing information to the media. "People were phoning my house and saying 'we need more information here,'" he recalls.

Every home in Kingston should have a radio that runs on batteries, he said. There should be some way of communicating this to the public, because very few residents have transistor radios any more, and they need to have at least one for emergencies.

Some of the media were being swamped with calls, BC remembers. "Unfortunately [media relations] gets left behind, but it wasn't very long before the mayor had a media person designated."

BC had high praise for Tony Orr of CFLY radio, who he said contacted him early on in the emergency and urged him to help the station get more information out to the public. "So between Tony, the mayor and I, we got something going ... after that, there was almost a regular parade over to the radio station, with people trying to get information across to the public. Tony Orr deserves credit for organizing that. I know it's his business to be in the media and to get something out to his clients, [who are] the listening community, but the fact of the matter is that when he wasn't getting what he felt was a good enough response, he was smart enough, and assertive enough, to come to the police chief and say 'hey, you gotta help us here.'"

The Whig-Standard was running good stories, BC said, but the public wanted to hear its up-to-the-minute news on the radio. "When you read it in the paper, it's a day late."

In general, BC said, the media "played it right." During the ice storm, CKLC and CFLY dedicated themselves to full-time coverage of the emergency. CKWS may have done the same, he said, but they were knocked off the air.

BC had high praise for the Kingston Police Volunteers, who provided long hours of free service during the storm. This allowed the regular police officers to remain on a virtually normal schedule, and kept the officers fresh.

BC explained the difference between auxiliary police and police volunteers. "Police auxilliary can only do certain things, [whereas] our volunteers, because they're volunteers and they're not governed by the Police Services Act, can do what we want them to do. So for example, our volunteers will go out on patrol by themselves, they carry a police radio and they patrol in an unmarked police vehicle. They can drive an unmarked police vehicle. Auxilliary police don't do that. So our [volunteers] are at a higher level, but they don't wear the uniform."

Without the volunteers, in fact, overtime costs (which amounted to about $27,000] would have been closer to $35,000 or $40,000.

"When I said our officers only had to work a few hours of overtime and were not that stressed out, that would not have been true without the volunteers, because the volunteers were doing work that traditionally would have been done by the police."

Kingston has had its police volunteers for two years. The group was formed after BC became chief.

Asked whether the police department has an emergency plan separate from the city's, BC said the department has "policy rules and procedures that peck away at little things," but no overall separate emergency plan for the department.

He found the city's emergency plan helpful because it "lays out who is the boss."

"I describe Bob [Boyd's] emergency plan as very valuable, because it gives a check list. And I relate that to policing."

For example, he said, if you have a police officer specializing in homicide or sexual assault investigations, you can give that officer a check list of things to think of, but that's not really telling the police officer what to do.

Boyd's plan "doesn't' tell us what to do, but it's worth looking at every now and then to make sure myself and everyone else is covering the bases."

BC has held responsible positions during a number of provincial emergencies. When he was in the OPP, he helped organize their initiative to send 300 officers to Temagami. (Not sure whether this was a logging dispute or what it was). He also handled negotiations with the truckers during a trucking protest on Hwy. 401 in the early 1990s ('90 or '91). In addition, BC was in charge of police action during a major strike in the Brantford area.

Experience has taught him that lessons can always be learned after an emergency: "Every time there's a major detail, there's always something that goes wrong. There's always people dissatisfied. You can always have done it better ... My whole point is saying that you can never have a perfect plan, and you can never have a perfect disaster, if you will, where everything has been looked after ... therefore the value of debriefing is critical, because, quite frankly, every experience you have is simply a learning experience for the next time."

The value of what Queen's is doing with this study "cannot be overestimated," BC added.

He said there are limits to how much anyone can learn from an emergency plan. "I've been around. So when people talk about 'the plan' ... I didn't expect any more of the plan, and I was not disappointed in the plan. The plan for me was simply a check list."

Asked whether he would endorse any changes to the plan, BC said it all depends how detailed you want to get. Sometimes more detail is less: "I guess the question is how far are you going to go with an emergency plan ... do you take a generic emergency plan, which I believe Bob Boyd's plan is supposed to be, and then do you put in there appendices, a hundred appendices, to deal with a hundred different disasters? I don't really see the value of that in terms of what Bob Boyd is doing..."

Having said that, though, BC does expect to see some changes in the finished plan: "I'm sure what Bob Boyd is doing now is taking his plan through a process; I'm sure we're going to end up with an emergency plan from Bob Boyd that will be changed as a result of this experience."

BC said he can understand why the city might want to plan for a similar type of event -- i.e., another prolonged black out -- because he said the likelihood of that happening is fairly high. The electrical system was weakened so much during the ice storm that BC believes "a similar event in terms of power shortages is very realistic for this city."

"If there's another major storm next winter, the same thing could happen again. So I think that's where the city has to be prepared ... And of course there's only one solution ... the only way to prevent power outages is to bury all your cable, at huge cost."

Asked how it was dealing with the media during the ice storm, BC said he's used to reporters and is comfortable giving interviews: "For a person employed by the city who is not used to dealing with the media, it might be an unusual experience. But for me to have a camera around or a microphone around, does make me a little sensitive, but it's not such a big deal ... I have great respect for the media in this area ... I understand they have a job to do, they understand we have a job to do, and we mutually respect each other. I try to give them what they want if I can."

BC related a person story, saying the most difficult time he had during the ice storm was when his mother-in-law suffered a major stroke. This happened on Jan. 8, the first full day of the ice storm. She was in Perth, and they tried getting her to the hospital in Kingston, but they couldn't get through by ambulance because the roads were blocked. So she ended up in Ottawa. For BC, what happened then illustrated what a strong woman he is married to.

"My wife should have been saying 'come on, Bill, we've got to go to Ottawa...' and she never did say that. She demonstrated patience, even though she was obviously distraught and concerned ... her mother is a healthy person who lives on a farm by herself, and all of a sudden has a life-or-death stroke ... my wife never did say 'you've got to take me to Ottawa.' What she did was she waited for me to say 'OK, I can go.' That's just a personal story. It's never a good time to have a stroke, but that was just the worst possible time." (I neglected to ask the Chief why his wife didn't go to Ottawa by herself, since their children are living in Toronto.)

Lots of municipal employees had problems at home that weren't being adequately dealt with, in most cases, because they had to be working on the emergency response for the city. A tree fell on the mayor's house, and somebody else had a flooded basement. "We all have our own little personal problems, and people forget that. People that are not involved in the emergency effort, that are at home living their own lives, sometimes forget that the people who were involved in the emergency response had their own emergencies at home."

One of the most heartening things about the whole experience was "just being around City Hall as much as I was [and seeing] so many people coming in and offering to help."

BC recalled another personal story about being hit on the head by some ice while cordoning off dangerous areas of the city with yellow police tape. He was out with one of his special constables, a woman who looks after court security, and who wanted to drive around the city to see the damage first hand. "So here we've got this yellow police tape and we're tying off areas that we consider dangerous .. And some ice falls off a tree and hits me on the head. And I've gotta tell you, it hurt. It really hurt. It was only a little piece. It drove home the idea that you forget to be careful. It drove home the point that maybe in the future [we should buy] hard hats ... who wants to spend the money, but I can see now that there's the need for a hard hat for police and volunteers."

BC recalled a situation that was taken care of by the Kingston Community Police Volunteers: "There was a blind woman who had a seeing-eye-dog, and the dog was outside during the storm. And the dog, being outside, got scared and ran away. So although she's at home, that leaves her helpless ... our Kingston Police Community Volunteers responded, went to the streets, found her dog and returned it to her ... She was really pleased, and I'm sure there's gotta be a hundred other stories like that from across the city."

On another occasion, Kingston Police Community Volunteers were patrolling the streets and found a young man in his early 20s who had fell down after a night of drinking and turned into a 'human icicle': "He had been drinking in the local bars, and quite frankly had fallen down in the middle of this ice storm and just lay there for quite some time. Eventually our community volunteers came along and got him up. This guy was a living, human, breathing icicle. I mean, he was just absolutely covered in ice. He knew it was cold, and he knew he was hurting, and he was really looking for help. But he was well looked after. That's just one small example of how close this [emergency] was to being life or death ... He was literally covered in ice, right from the top of his head to his shoes. Even his face was covered in ice. He was an icicle."

On another occasion, BC witnessed a man leaving his house who fell on the ice and hit his head. Closs stopped, and an ambulance arrived at about the same time.

Like other emergency workers and city employees, BC became exasperated with residents who failed to take precautions while walking through dangerous areas of the city, and some of whom treated the emergency as a giant photo opportunity. "The other thing that scared me -- and you can't control it -- [was that] in the downtown core, where all the trees are, people were out the next day taking pictures and walking underneath the trees. It really was a dangerous situation. You have to rely on people using common sense, because you really can't cover every square inch [of the city]."

BC confirmed what many other interviewees said: that the ice storm, for all its stresses, was a "great way to start the city off."

"That's a terrible, terrible thing to say -- we should have just had a big party ... It was an absolute disaster, but what a great, great team-building exercise it was for the new city of Kingston. And for police officers ... where you see the tougher side of life, it's nice to get involved in something where everybody's working together to help each other. Restores the faith."