IceStorm 98 Study

Bob Baird [BB] works on roads for the Technical Services section of the Kingston Public Works and Transportation department. He makes sure all municipal roads and sidewalks correspond to local guidelines.

BB came to work on the first day of the ice storm, Thursday morning at 8:30 a.m. He recognized the extent of the ice storm when he drove in to work that first morning because he "had to make about 4 detours just to get downtown. I live out at Bath and Days Road. There was definitely obstacles [along the way]. I was coming down Johnson Street and I made the mistake of going towards the water when I hit an area that was blocked off on Johnson Street. And I think, I ended up on Princess Street before I finally got down past it. You just seemed to keep hitting more and more problems. So, I had a sense of it."

Once at work, he noticed immediately that there were a lot of problems. BB himself was at that time only attending to minor things, planning his normal day of work. The state of emergency had not yet been declared. As the day progressed, however, the mayor declared the state of emergency (around noon), and BB and his co-workers were trying to organize the staff at the management level. BB put a computer generated drawing of the new City up on the wall. Shortly after noon, a meeting was called and the department was trying to get hold of their staff. Technical services, which was engineering staff who work mostly outdoors, were called in for a 3 PM meeting, at which time Brian Sheridan and Mark Fluhrer came in and gave instructions as to what they wanted their staff to do the next day. Explaining that their task was to look for problems and fill out occurrence sheets, BB remembers: "The next day everybody was to be here, I believe, at 8 o'clock in the morning. Don't quote me on the time, but it was early. We were sent out in 2 men teams to assess the damage looking for dangers or problems. Everything from, you can't get through this street so putting up tapes across the road to recording live hydro lines down. Most of our vehicles are equipped with a two-way radio to the city yard, so if we found a problem we would get someone on the telephone line very quickly. We were just looking for problems and we were actually supposed to fill out forms. We were handed a whole stack of occurrence sheets which are something that generally the City uses if there is accidents or things where there may be a law suit or an insurance case or something in the future. It is just a way for us to record our information in a comprehensive manner, and everybody does it the same way sort of thing. We used them. I don't know how many we turned in. It was very quickly realized that this wasn't a wise use of our time. We were going along a street, I was up in the area in front of Skeleton [McBurney] Park, and in the one block I filled out about 6 or 7 of these sheets. And in the meantime ... our staff was front line trying to determine where the problems were, and we had divided the City up into quadrants the day before. So, that was another thing I was doing in the afternoon, I guess, I was plotting out drawings of the City itself which was divided into quadrants to send these teams out on, once we knew what we were gonna be doing. The old part of the City, the city centre as we were calling it in those days, I believe, was divided up into 14 different quadrants. Small areas that we could send the team out into and get the information back."

BB mentioned a collection of photographs, and said there is a photo album going around. Two copies of each photograph were printed, so there may be extras that could be made available for the ice storm study. Two photo albums were made up, and one may be somewhere in the department. BB thinks the other one may have gone to Mr. Sheridan.

"Every photographer in town was taking pictures. You couldn't take enough pictures of what happened. It was so devastating."

Returning to the issue of the practicality of occurrence sheets during the ice storm, BB explains that " we went with them for basically the first day. I think we all probably tapered off, you know we were starting to realize that we were only going to be recording the really important things. We were starting to [become] selective because it was taking so much time. And when that feedback came in ... we were back in, I believe, at 4 o'clock. Mr. Sheridan met with us and that was the feedback that was coming back then: 'we are never going to get the City as a whole covered at this rate.' And by that time it was realized, by the management that that wasn't useful. What we were doing was useful, but there was better uses for our time."

When asked if anyone ever thought of recording occurrences on a tape as an efficient way of documenting, BB agrees that it probably would have been a quick way of documenting things, but that it would have been impossible to supply enough machines, tape and batteries to cover the whole emergency operation that way. They were lucky to have cameras, he said. The cameras were purchased especially for the ice storm. "They just all of a sudden [appeared, saying], 'here are some cameras, here is a whole bag of film, take it and get out on the road, start taking pictures."

Having divided the city (core) into 14 quadrants, City officials then began sending workers out towards the surrounding areas east and west of the old city: "It was the intention and actually was done that we would move out into the surrounding areas as soon as we had the city centre done. Primarily because at the time that's where we thought the most damage was. Certainly there were more trees and there were more lines down within the immediate city centre because they were there. As you moved out into the Townships, well of course a lot of the new subdivisions are underground, [and] the damage was lessened. There was certainly lots of damage out there. A lot of trees were already cut down before they built the subdivisions so they didn't have that many ... you know the tree damage was down. But it wasn't ... you know, we were downtown, so start here and let's work our way out."

Q: Then it turned out that Pittsburgh, former Pittsburgh was quite hard hit in some areas.

"Oh certainly, there was ... farms, there was a whole row of hydro poles down along one road. I think it was Middle Road. I wasn't out there, I just heard the reports. But I believe there was like five or six or seven poles that came over. There was no difference between the damage downtown and the damage out there, except that that there was more wires down in the city because there are more wires there to knock down."

On Thursday (the first day of the storm) almost nobody came in to work, BB said. He did, and was asked to stay around. He plotted out section maps for the old city in order to help establish patrol areas.

Jan. 9 was the first day the City sent people out in two-men teams to cover the quadrants.

While he was helping with the City's emergency response, BB was also trying to take care of a family situation. "My father's got breathing problems and is on oxygen. [That was] important for me as well. Fortunately, I got him into Hotel Dieu Hospital on Thursday night. He spent the day at home. He has oxygen tanks which he can use. He has an electric, what they call a concentrator, which takes normal air and turns it into oxygen for him. That's what he normally lives off. So when the power went out that was a problem. His supply was sufficient for several days but he needed to be better taken care of on that."

BB had high praise for Hotel Dieu: "The treatment was amazing! It was just totally amazing! It was around 6 o'clock, I guess, that night when I was at [my father's] place. I had been here [at City Hall] until 4:30 or 5:00. So I went there figuring 'how [am I] going to deal with this?' And I heard that the Hotel Dieu was open and was accepting elderly and infirm. So, I took him to Swiss Chalet for supper and then took him down to Hotel Dieu. We walked in and we were ... under normal circumstances, I think I would have been screaming because I was probably an hour and a half or so in the lobby while they arranged for a room for him. Standing back and looking at it even later in the evening, as I am leaving, and what they were going through downstairs, it was amazing it didn't take 3 hours. I was just so pleased that they got Hotel Dieu open and functional to that level that quickly. The hospital had been closed down. The wings that we were in weren't even open. So they had to bring staff in. They had to get the things up and running. The floor they put him on didn't have oxygen functioning on it. So they had to get that opened up. It was all piped into the rooms. It's just that the main valves, down in the bowels of the hospital, had been turned off because it wasn't being used. It was amazing that things got up and going as quickly as they did in the shelters. And the people ... I talked to nursing staff, I won't say they were all nurses, but people that had been retired for 5, 10 years were back working. People that were off, they were all great. And they treated them really well."

The only difficulty arose when Hotel Dieu staff decided to transfer BB's father to Saint Mary's hospital on Sunday night, in order to make way for more critical patients. BB said his father "reacted badly"to the transfer, thinking they were trying to commit him to a nursing home. All of this happened before BB could get away from work to talk to his father.

"Saint Mary's is terminal care, or whatever you would like to call that. [He thought they were] putting him into a nursing home for the rest of his life type of thing. I think I persuaded him about 99 per cent when I got there, but there was no forewarning. They just walked in and said 'you are being transferred to Saint Mary's.' They may have explained it to him. He wasn't wanting to believe it, if they did. He's fine other than that. He just reacted badly to that situation. He was under a lot of stress. He had been ... pulled out of his own home and stuck in a hospital. And I was spending 12, 14 hours a day here. So, I couldn't look after him all the time. It just wasn't possible. And if I could I didn't have the heat and the oxygen and everything that I required. So, anyway, they called me here, and I went up and calmed him down and escorted him out there, got him settled, and then came back to work. There was some emotional concerns at the time. But, I had already been out in the City. I knew what was here and it was less stressful because I knew he was being taken care of. If I had been trying to do it myself, I would have been worrying more about it than I was with competent people looking after him."

BB explained that his father lives by himself in his own home, and has done so since his wife (BB's mother) passed away last August. "So we are still working our way through these things. He is capable of looking after himself mostly. We have what they call home care coming in 2 hours a day to prepare an evening meal for him. I don't like him standing over the stove for too long with the oxygen on. I'm not near as worried about him as I used to be. Anyway, it's a big job for him too. He has the home care every day for 2 hours. Wednesday she is there for 4 hours. That's the day she does major cleaning and stuff, and Sunday is my responsibility. I am divorced. My kids are grown up and are out of the house. I live in an apartment out in the west end and I run and see him whenever I get a chance. It's working fine right now, although other arrangements will have to made sometime in the future."

Back to Friday, about 2 o'clock in the afternoon, BB remembers how he came to be in charge of producing maps during the ice storm: "Friday, [when] we were out doing our tours around 2 o'clock in the afternoon the radio in my car started jumping. One of the staff from one of the other vehicles called me on the two-way radio and asked me to come to City Hall right away. So, I came down here very innocently, and it turned out that we were the only ones with an up-to-date overall map of the new City. The planning department would normally have had the maps. They had put the maps together for the election. So, they had the one with all the ward boundaries and that. That's where the map had started out and my job being roads, one of my projects is to organize a numbering system and identify all the various streets in the City. So, when I came to work on January the 5th, one of the first things I did was start looking for map information. Well, we got that map information on the 7th from the planning department [the day before the ice storm hit], as the planning department was packing up to move to Gore Road. So, when the ice storm hit on January 8th, the planning department was in a total disarray and didn't have anything available. They didn't have the equipment hooked up, let alone available to use. So, it turned out that our computers were the ... I mean I wouldn't say I'm the only one because there is certainly two other draftsmen that could do ... But we had the map available and word got out. So, we started drawing maps. And basically that's all I did for the next 5 days. Well, I've got some samples there (some which are in the Queen's Archives now). I mean, the first one was just a map to get people out. And I made copies of different sections of it to give to forestry sections. Now the utilities must have had a map as well because they weren't working from ours. But certainly all the forestry and the maintenance staff, they were working from the maps that I was pushing out of here."

At this point BB described the clean-up routine: "Forestry and the public works yard on Division Street, the maintenance people ... were picking up and moving branches. What they were trying to do was get the utilities in to cut off the power so that then the maintenance people could get in and open the road up. And then the forestry group could come in and try to clean up or move the branches off the road, ship whatever they could [out]. A lot of our streets were opened by snow plows. That's how they opened them up. That's how they moved the bushes. There wasn't time for an army to go through and pick up all the branches and move them off the sides of the roads. So as soon as they had a street or block cleared, that they knew there were no downed live hydro lines [on], then they just went and snow plowed through it. It was rather fortunate, I mean, the utilities could say, you know, there were 14 block areas that were out of power. So in that way it was easier for us because we could just do every street in that area. There was large blocks or large sections of the City that were totally without power, so the snow plows could go and work in those areas. Even if the wires were down, they knew that they weren't alive because there was no power getting to that section of the grid."

Back to the topic of the maps, BB explained that he produced a wide variety of maps for various purposes: "New maps, different maps, I mean probably one of our first maps that was turned out was where are the emergency shelters. So I had to go ... it wasn't a very pretty one, but I got a map together that I could get ... I don't know whether it went to the press or not, but to the police departments and the army control centre downstairs, so they could direct people to the shelters. Once we got our crew, our travelling crews from here out on the roads we started developing the emergency routes. You know, what routes are clear. Where can we send an ambulance or fire truck to get to the main routes. This was another map. There was another one I call the work zones. It was the deployment areas primarily within the city core. There was quite a lot of those. The various forestry crews, I think they used new ones every day. And, they had a lot of volunteers and staff, so there was people who didn't even know the City. Everybody had to have maps so they could mark out a small area for them to work on. I'm not even sure that I know everything that was turned out. There was a map, I think in the paper, showing the location of sites for bus drop offs. There was another map that had a number of sites on it that weren't for public use. Like we put one in the paper that showed were you could drop off your brush. But then there was three or four other sites additional to that, that were only for City use. So, there was another map for that."

BB said there were times when it got stressful: "I think the worst one I had [was when] I walked through the door, and I don't know which morning it was, but the forestry section needed 15 copies and the police department needed 12 copies of something else right away. You can only turn out two or three of one kind for one of them. I mean, we have a laser plotter, so it's not too bad. The small drawings were six feet long by two feet wide and they take probably about eight to 10 minutes to come out of the plotter."

As for the equipment for the map drawing, BB states that the plotter was the printer and that "everything was done with the colour printer. We didn't take time to make an original and run blueprints on our ammonia printer. Primarily because we didn't have enough paper. Now the plotter, I thought we had a substantial amount, it turned out not to be, but we had a pretty good stack of it. So we just started turning them out that way, it was easier. The plotter is just in the next room and we are hooked up by an internal network to it. So, I just sit here at my computer and tell it to start plotting them. The software itself is Autocad. Autocad is probably the best drafting tool out there."

Explaining that the new map was important to everyone "because this was a new city and a new organization running it, there was all kinds of people in positions that knew a portion of the City but didn't know it all," BB jokingly remembers that "the police department" was "just harassing" him for maps. "They were very nice about it, of course. But they had their needs and the army was using large quantities of them [the maps]. The police department would have some sort of a map, but they wouldn't have the tools to generate the type of map that we have, and certainly not the detail."

The planning department is normally in charge of supplying maps to the police, but because the Technical Services section of Kingston Public Services and Transportation department was the only group with access to working computer equipment for map making, the police became reliant on them for their supply. This plunged BB and his department into a role that they wouldn't normally have filled.

Asked if he could recommend other people in his department for us to interview, BB suggested we talk to Kim Brown, who was involved with the overall coordination of the technical services office, and Bob Brooks, who is the assistant leader for capital implementation. "He is in charge of the men that were out on the road. So he is fairly knowledgeable in what's going on. He probably will be able to give you better insight in what they were actually doing out on the road. Especially when they got back, in the back country. We didn't want to drive on the City streets, but these guys were driving on back roads that they didn't even know."

He also mentioned Judy Brick, who is the administrative assistant for Brian Sheridan, and Valerie Pashley. "They were the ones sitting up on the phones taking all the complaints. Taking all the information from people, volunteers of service, trying to coordinate that into things. Like the people from Toronto that were coming in to do the brush."

Returning to the issue of the maps, BB said a problem arose at one point when it looked like technical services was going to run out of the paper it uses to print maps. "I knew we were short on paper for our printing machine but the plotter I thought was okay. As things turned out, we started turning out these plots of outrageous amounts, and we realized very quickly that we were going to have a problem." Denis Leger managed to solve the problem by going through Toronto. "That was Saturday morning, and all the suppliers that we would normally use were closed for the weekend. To this day I'm not sure exactly how he got it, but he made a phone call ... [and] the city of Toronto responded with somebody's name or got a hold of somebody in Toronto. And the next thing I know, [I was told] 'be at the Voyageur bus station at 10:30 at night, there are going to be 12 rolls of paper sitting there, waiting for you.' It was not just the cooperation of the people in this city, but there was other people well removed, they were reaching out. I mean obviously, someone had to get out of their home and go downtown and ... I think it was some place called the Drafting Clinic. Next time I'm in Toronto, I'm gonna look them up. It was really nice of them. They gathered up a whole bunch of stuff, paper, stuck it on a bus. They paid for shipping the stuff down. Whether we ever got billed for it or not, I couldn't say."

As far as BB was concerned, he found that everything worked well during the ice storm. He just wished he could have worked more hours to meet all the needs that were out there: "I mean, if I could have worked 24 hours a day, I could have met the needs of people better. But obviously, you can't do that. We had two other people that are draftsmen, but everything was set up on my machine. And they could have turned something out if they were here, but they were working on other duties while this ... They wanted to deal with one person, I think. That way, everybody knew who to go to and it saved time. From my perspective everything worked fine. You know, people were all great. Things kicked into gear around City Hall amazingly quickly. Like, for a new organization, everything seemed to work. Now, I'm sure it didn't. That's just one person's perspective, but I mean things were being dealt with in a timely manner. They had communications up and running quite quickly. I didn't find I had a problem. It would have been a problem if I had been at home because at least I was here, I knew what was going on. Or at least, I knew something was going on. I don't know that there were any real problems. It was just a heavy load of demands for maps. There was a big demand. But everybody was so nice and supportive, I put on an extra 10 pounds over it. The food was wonderful. It was wonderful food. Right from McDonald's big breakfast to chicken from Megalos."

When asked if BB thought about his authority to act and where his authority came from, BB stated: "I don't have any authority to act. I respond. I could take that authority if it was necessary, but there was always management around. Management told me to do a job: supply maps [the management was Kim Brown]."

According to BB, "money did not appear to be a concern; certainly not at our level. Whoever needed maps got maps. If we needed to get paper, we got the paper. I mean money is always a concern with a municipality, but it was at a point where we had to provide, I hate to use the word, a service. But we had to provide this work. And, whatever it took, it had to be done."

When asked if he was given carte blanche to use any amount of supplies during the emergency, BB replied "No, I don't think anybody would ever say that. At least not at our level. It may have been at a certain management level but ... The sense was that we have to get the job done."

BB says that he mainly drew on common sense to make decisions: "There was times though, when I was here, and there wasn't someone else around. But I mean, if somebody wanted something, common sense says you give it to them. I wasn't really in a decision-making capacity. [But if somebody asked for a map] I just got out what I needed to get out."

BB communicated with the public only on the first day: "The first day when we were out touring, that was the most important part of the job, really, I think communicating with the public. Because as we were driving down the street and trying to identify these downed wires and things, we were spending a large portion of our time talking to the people that don't have radios, that didn't have TV. [People were asking] 'What's going on? What's happening?" [BB definitely got the sense that he was of some comfort to them] "the same as the army was a comfort to them a couple of days later when they were going around knocking on doors, making sure ... We were just the first people that they ... in a lot of cases the first people from the organization that they saw. And it was comforting for them to see the City of Kingston vehicle out on the street."

Internal communication was very informal: "When the manager Brian Sheridan came in and wanted to have a meeting, of course, it took on a formal tone. But as far as the intercommunication between departments or anything else, it was very informal. I'd be walking down the stairs and hear: 'Bob!' -- That was the police department wanting maps." [What normally would happen through a phone call or written request took place through very personal verbal requests or comments] "Can I get this? I need this! And it happened. It certainly moves quicker. It may not be more efficient, but it moves quicker."

According to BB, the only major resource that was required was the paper mentioned earlier. "We were fortunate, we had a sufficient supply of ink cartridges which was the only other big thing that I was using. They were here already. Monday morning, we phoned Ottawa, and we had them I think Tuesday afternoon or Wednesday morning to replenish our supply. Not knowing how long it was going to go on. Like we said, the cameras and the film, we bought it. I'm sure the city paid for it. It showed up very quickly. The only other resource I used was the food and lots of coffee! There was a lot of volunteers around keeping that coming."

BB does not know how activities were co-ordinated across the entire City: "Just our own area here, we just basically organized things the same as we always would. It seemed like in a lot of cases, people knew what needed to be done and went ahead and did it."

BB was able to prioritize a little bit based on the size of the drawing that he had to produce: "If somebody wanted some small ones, well I can get him a couple of small ones quicker than I can get one big one out of it. So, I would get him a couple, and then I would print a couple of the other ones, and then I would go back and print the rest of what he needed. Basically trying to meet all the requests as quickly as possible. If the police department is looking for a dozen maps, if I can give them two or three to get them started. In most cases I knew what they were going to use them for. The other department was ... I don't even know what they called them then, but it's Joe Davis who runs the licensing and permits, he was looking after volunteers. People who came in and wanted to go out and clear an area. Brush off sidewalks or whatever, he was co-ordinating that. So I was providing maps to him for that."

"Everything in our department seemed to work well. We were front line. We were providing information to works and forestry and so all we had to do was get out there. I mean we had a hard time getting around the City, but we were fortunate enough that we had the vehicles, so we could at least get out there. How they dealt with the information afterwards, because we were information gathering, it wasn't a big problem. There wasn't any big problem for us, I don't think. Nothing that I personally experienced."

BB would not do anything do differently the next time around.

BB states that he would not make any definite changes as a result of the ice storm but that he has a greater appreciation for hydro as well as all utilities. However, he does state that: "There are a lot of things that I would be aware of if I was going to choose the location for a new home. It would be things like that that certainly would come to mind. Near a major route. You don't wanna get back in the country because you are gonna be harder to get to. It's gonna be longer till hydro gets back. [But] I wouldn't do a whole lot [differently] because I wouldn't plan my life on another ice storm. My sister lives in Florida. She had a real time with [Hurricane] Andrew, when that came through. But you don't change your life for it."

BB explains that there was no departmental emergency plan for his section: "Being engineering at the time or technical services. There wasn't [any internal plan] that I'm aware of. We became a sort of co-ordinating end of things for the forestry [group]. We didn't look after the forestry crews, but we were co-ordinating all the volunteers for service for ... you know, from Mississauga, North York, the people that were coming in: 'How can we help you? How many crews do you need?' That was all being channelled through here. We were getting, gathering information and filtering it back out to the forestry [group]. I'm sure the forestry end of things, there is some kind of emergency plan in there. Fortunately, there was enough expertise ... Like it wasn't a new city. It was three cities getting together and there was enough expertise there that people knew what to do."

BB said he thinks it was "probably beneficial" for the city to have been amalgamated when the ice storm hit. But he said restructuring did cause problems in other areas. "The feelings that I'm getting from people in the northern country indicate that things were a lot worse organized because of the new townships up there. I'm thinking the three new townships: North, Central, and South Frontenac. I'm not gonna say which one. But, my gut feeling from what I'm hearing from residents is that it took a lot longer to get things organized."

He admits that there were some extra challenges arising out of the amalgamation in Kingston: "The way things were done, it appears that nothing could be organized because the City was put together in too much of a hurry. A lot of your senior management weren't in their positions for a month. You know, it's hard putting things together. Everybody has to remember that this wasn't an amalgamation where one unit took over the others. It was a new birth, although there is a lot of us that came from one or the other of the four entities."

BB has been with the city for 28 years, and has spent the last 10 of those doing road design for the City, so his own role has changed very little.

BB's only emergency training came from his experiences as a Scouts Canada leader: "That certainly covers a large range of things including first aid training. If you have gone through a first aid training and you have done accident assessment then that rolls over to the same type of emergency training that you are looking at there [the ice storm emergency]. You may not be looking for broken bones, but you are looking for problems."

BB had no contact with any of the provincial or federal emergency members.

BB does not think that stress was a concern during the emergency, although of course everybody was under stress. He even thought at one point that it was fun to be involved:

"It was enjoyable in that it was better to be here and be involved in what was going on than to be uninvolved and uninformed. Every media outlet in town was trying to keep people informed, but you can't be as informed as you can be if you are sitting in the hub of the activity. There was some relief in having something to do. The same as all of these volunteers that were spending all these hours in the hospitals or cooking in the kitchenette of the public utilities. It's amazing, but at least, it gives you something to do."

BB remembers a few funny interactions with people: "As the day went on and the stress that you are under, you get punchy. It was a very informal air in this office. So there was always jokes going back and forth and things like that. It was different. It was definitely different. I wouldn't say you don't have time to [joke], but there is a certain decorum that you keep in any office. And, we stepped over that line, I'm sure a few nights! It did not resemble a party, it was always work. It was just the personalities. There was some new people in this office. Judy Brick walked into here. She had never been in this office before. I never knew her before. I don't even know what department she came from before. She worked for the City somewhere, but she just stepped right in. And everybody interacted very well. I don't know about friendships, but it certainly helped us to get to know our fellow employees. We had amongst our eight or nine technicians, whatever we have, we have two that came in from Kingston Township, two that came in from Frontenac County. And five or six of us that had been here with the City all along. So all of a sudden we were working together as a team. We had to work together as a team. And we got to know each other very quickly. When you are out there in two-man teams in the vehicles, and we did break those people up because their expertise was their area, ours was the City, so we could interchange. And I got to know a couple of people I didn't know. It was quite nice."