IceStorm 98 Study

Principal Bill Leggett’s (BL) story begins in a different way than most people who lived in the path of the Ice Storm. He was travelling to Vancouver when the storm hit. He had taken the last plane out of the area the night the storm had begun. Once in Vancouver, he had been listening to the news which was reporting the storm and placed a call to VP Scott Cowan to have an update of the condition of the university. It was decided then, that he would attempt to return to Kingston as quickly as possible. Travel arrangements were difficult to achieve and BL didn’t get back to Kingston until the Saturday evening. Before he had returned to Kingston, BL arranged for all the staff to take on responsibilities in their areas.

Once BL arrived back in Kingston, he and the senior staff of Queen’s held a meeting on the Sunday morning to assess the situation of the university and to see how long it would take before everything came “back on line”. Priority was given to the welfare of the students, the buildings, academic scheduling and the campus safety/security. Participating in these meetings were the Director of Residences, Director of Physical Plant, Dean of Student Affairs, the Registrar, the Vice Principals, ITS, Communications and Security. The meetings were organised that they would meet first in the morning and assign tasks and then meet in the afternoon to give reports on the current status of the tasking. BL describes the meetings as: “A war council that met twice a day that decided what needed to be done and did it.” They had their final meeting on the Wednesday as the university was scheduled to be re-opened on Thursday January 15th, 1998.

The university was in communication with the City of Kingston on a ongoing basis although no one from the City was present at the university’s meetings. The key to the decisions being made was dependent on what was happening around the area. As BL describes it, “It was not a matter of just turning the power back on in the residences, there was a sequence of events that had to happen before then, such as the fire and security systems being up and running.” Dr. Cowan, Tom Morrow and George Hutson were the key people who liaised with the City on these matters.

On the issue of monetary concerns, BL said that there no concerns present. The issue was whether the students, buildings and systems were going to be up and running as soon as possible. The only decision that directly involved additional money concerns was what the cost was going to be to provide hot meals to both resident students and students living in private houses that were without power. Even that was only with respect to a cost averaging. BL said that money issues were not important, whereas getting the university up and running was. BL commented on how well everyone performed in their jobs and that the unions did not “quibble over overtime”.

The communication ability of the university remained intact. The telephone lines were operational as well as the fibre-optic network. BL said the only problem he experienced with communications was when he was in Vancouver and sometimes could not get a line through to the area. The university used the voice mail and Internet to keep up communications with students and their families. The university would update the messages twice a day and have since received commendations from people on how well that worked.

On the actual organisation of the meetings BL said the following:

In everyone’s mind, there was a sense of urgency. What we were talking about doing, it was going to get done by the next meeting. It didn’t matter what had to be done, it was going to get done by the next meeting. This is what we were focusing on. What differs in this instance was, everyone was absolutely focused. The meetings were about what needed to be done and telling people at the 2 o’clock meeting what was done. I have said to many people, that this was the most exhilarating time in my presidency. It’s very rare that a university president can tell someone to do something and it gets done right away.

The university does not have an overall emergency plan. It relied on the individual department’s emergency plans such as the one used by Physical Plant. BL said that the university is working on a global emergency plan.

BL said that in the beginning, there was uncertainty of the how long the situation was going to last. The university did not want to over react if it was not necessary. BL sees this as the “thing that didn’t work well”. A lot of the students by the third day said, “why didn’t you tell me on the first day so I could go home?” It was a dilemma for the university that they didn’t know how long the power was going to be out and whether to ask the students to incur costs of going home only to have to return the following day if the power came back on. It was that lack of information that BL found difficult. BL said that identifying the scope and nature of the emergency was the most difficult.

On intriguing and interesting events, BL said that it was soon discovered that the university does not need a smoke detector in every room and that they need to find a way to shut them off. About 40% of the smoke detectors were ruined by students who got sick of listening to them beep. He also said that he soon discovered why the exam periods could not be pushed back for a week or two. The reason is the way the leases are designed for most of Queen’s Housing to end on April 30th. They couldn’t delay the exams and expect 11,000 people to write them and look for a place to live at the same time. He also learned that even though the buildings had auxiliary power, it does not run the circulating pumps for the steam. This means that the buildings could have some power for illumination but no heat. On the issue of the sub-station on Centre Street, the university is clear that it needs to be up-graded. He doesn’t know if that work has been stepped-up because of the Ice Storm but commented that the work had already been planned prior to the storm.

Contact with the media was minimal. He received a few calls from CBC. For the most part, media contact was dealt with by the Communications Department.

BL has been in contact with the other universities that were impacted by the storm. Ottawa and Carleton were in a very different situation as they were only down for a short period of time. McGill on the other hand, was really hit hard. BL said that they handled it very much as did Queen’s. Even after the power came back up in Montreal, the university was still affected by the authorities asking people not to travel in the downtown area because of falling ice. BL said that each university had a unique situation and that “there really was nothing unifying about it.”

BL’s home was relatively intact and commends his wife, Clare at being “fairly resilient”. If anything, he said, his neighbours were upset with him for leaving Clare by herself. In his neighbourhood, the neighbours were having potluck dinners to use up the contents of the freezers before the meat went bad. The only thing that was a concern for BL was the inability to reach his wife from Vancouver. He called George Hood, who is a neighbour, and asked him to check on his wife.

The university’s contact with the government has been confined to the Ministry of Education. Queen’s has to submit a cost to the ministry although they didn’t submit any overhead costs (overtime and the cost of bringing the buildings back on line). BL said the costs were $240,000. He feels that the university got off quite lucky with respect to costs as compared to McGill, which sustained major building damage. BL relates the story of the crew from the University of Waterloo arriving to help out with the cleanup of the trees as well as the crew from Hamilton that had also arrived to help out. The crew from Hamilton brought their own wood chipper. BL said, “It was a really powerful coming together of people.”

When asked whether this situation will change the face of things to come with respect to the university BL replied, “It certainly tested the system and the people and they all came out with a wonderful sense of accomplishment.”

BL hasn’t had any reports yet as to the effect of the storm on student’s academics. There has been some notice taken by the Department of Psychology of the numbers of students who requested exam deferment or simply failed to show up for their mid-terms. On a final note, BL said he was impressed with the way everyone who was part of the decision-making team performed. BL said:

The residence system deserves a tremendous amount of credit. It wasn’t a case of simply turning the power back on. They had to organise themselves into teams and in the end, performed like a military machine. Physical Plant is also deserving of recognition. Between these two organisations, they really got things done. The communication going on between the various organisations was amazing. It was a case of needing to get something done now so they could go onto getting something else done. It was a good morale builder for the university and I suspect most people went home and slumped in their chairs when it was over. The work was amazing.