IceStorm 98 Study

Bob Crawford (BC) is chief officer of the emergency planning office for the Toronto Fire Service. In his role as chief officer he looks at emergency planning from a lot of different perspectives to try and support the operations section of the fire department. Some of his areas of responsibility include hazardous materials, harbour firefighting, and airport firefighting, but his job also covers a broad range of topics not limited to firefighting. His office is still going through a reorganization of duties as a result of the City of Toronto’s Jan. 1 amalgamation. Ultimately the goal is to have BC supervise four captains, but at the moment he has one.

In BC’s role as emergency planning officer, he provides support to the Toronto Fire Chief as a staff officer. Unlike line officers, staff officers do not respond to calls or go out into the field, but BC has plenty of experience in both areas. BC is a hazardous materials technician and a fully qualified fire captain. But his tasks revolve more around providing a research and development component for the fire department. He looks at literature, raw data, checks on paperwork, checks facts, new products, new technologies, new techniques, all kinds of things.

While the situation in Kingston occurred just days after its fire department reorganized, BC said it was the same thing in Toronto in terms of trying to put together a response.

Toronto’s amalgamation brought together six municipalities and seven layers of government. BC said in many ways it was a nightmare for people within the organization trying to deal with an emergency like an ice storm. “Although we just provided a support role for the city of Kingston, we still had our troubles here [getting] organized.”

There were six collective agreements in place when the various parts of the newly amalgamated city (of Toronto) responded to Kingston’s emergency, and quite a bit of uncertainty about how or how much people would be paid. But BC said he doesn’t think anybody complained too loudly about the lack of a pre-set plan for compensation. There were many question to be addressed, such as ‘are they going to be paid overtime or are they going to be recompensed through time owing? Who is in command?’

Toronto Fire Chief Speed asked BC to go to Kingston. From the former city of North York, BC took a full team of mechanical officers, including a mobile shop, a machinist, some electricians and some mechanics. He suspected they would need quite a few mechanics to help deal with things like generators. The City of Toronto also sent some mechanical officers. In addition to that, during BC's time in Kingston, all of the public information officers and planning officers from the fire departments in Metro Toronto were rotated through. At some point they all had a chance to get down to Kingston and participate, some more than others. Captain Scott Cowden of the Toronto Fire Services came from Toronto information and planning. He was the individual assigned the task of co-ordinating the distribution of generating equipment, and played a key role in Kingston. He worked very closely with Cynthia Beach and Barclay Mayhew. “Scott proved invaluable.”

All told, Toronto sent about 25 firefighters down. They rotated staff, sending smaller groups down for two or three days at a time.

There was no framework in place to facilitate the Cowdens and Crawfords coming together to go and do this exercise in Kingston. BC said they had to fly by the seat of their pants in many ways, get to know each other quickly, try to assess what the other person’s role and skill sets were. There was a period when they were trying to figure out who does what. BC said he was the first of the Toronto fire crews to get to Kingston and last to leave, but said Cowden was close behind in terms of the duration of his stay. [BC stayed one week, then came back to Kingston to tie up loose ends after the emergency was stood down. He first went down to Kingston early Saturday morning, on Jan. 10, and went home the following weekend, early Saturday morning on the 17th. He went back to Kingston briefly on Jan. 20 or 21].

BC said he first got his orders from Chief Speed. He got a phone call on Friday letting him know there was something going on in Eastern Ontario that the fire service might be participating in. The province had contacted the City of Toronto, and EMO at some point made the decision to place Toronto in a ‘twinning’ relationship with Kingston. It became clear by Friday afternoon that it was time to pack his bags and head to Kingston. Putting the response together was a joint effort between Chief Speed, BC, a retired Deputy Chief from the North York Fire Department, and Toronto Deputy Chief Boyko. A number of people had a hand in assembling the team, but it was all under the direction of Chief Speed.

BC's role on the trip was to act as a co-ordinator, to document what occurred, and to report to the chief on a regular basis re. the status of the emergency and what was required. After BC arrived in Kingston, that role changed somewhat. He was still feeding information back to his own chief in Toronto, but his key role was to participate in the EOC at City Hall in Kingston.

His first meeting with the EOC was on Jan. 10 at 8 p.m. BC was a bit unclear about what the requirements were going to be from Kingston, but he realized when he got there that they were struggling with their organization. One of the first calls he made was to try and arrange for his counterpart from the Metro Toronto Police, senior emergency planner Warren Leonard, to come to Kingston. BC said Leonard is a highly skilled non-operational organizer and “probably the number one individual in Toronto” when it comes to writing policies and implementing organizational overlays, such as an incident management system or an incident command system.

With the support of Kingston’s mayor and CAO, BC was able to get Warren's commanding officer (Inspector Ryan) and Gardner Church together for a telephone call explaining the need to have these folks (Warren Leonard and his crew) sent down. They were given the green light, and a crew from the Toronto Police -- Fred Ellerbee, Warren Leonard, Gary Symonds and Rick Follert -- was in Kingston the next day.

BC said there was another Toronto police presence in Kingston, but it was completely separate from the fire service response. The Emergency Task Force (SWAT team) from Toronto police had sent down a couple of members with a mobile unit that contained a very large generator. BC didn't know this other team was in Kingston until they met up at City Hall, but he ended up informally bringing them into his own group. BC said there was a high degree of co-operation between the two units, whose members worked together seamlessly. “We were one big happy family from Toronto and away we went.” They dispatched the mobile unit generator from their base of operations with Capt. Scott Cowden, Barclay Mayhew and Cynthia Beach.

BC said he kept himself away from the technical side and focused on what was occurring in the management of the emergency, specifically what was going on in the EOC and what was occurring between the new city council and former municipalities prior to Dec. 31.

BC didn’t want to criticize or appear judgemental about the operation, because he said “you really [had] to be there.” There was a dynamic occurring within the group, and people were suffering from a lack of sleep. “Things of that nature make it difficult to have a true perspective on what happened at that time,” he said.

BC spent most of his time trying to analyse what was happening on the strategic level; how decisions were being made in the municipality, and how the emergency reseponse was being managed from a strategic and policy perspective. He said he was given an excellent opportunity to sit in Kingston’s EOC and offer input where he saw fit, to provide them with some assistance where it was possible. He was impressed with the openness of Kingston officials, saying he’s not sure he would have found it so easy to allow someone from an outside agency to come in and basically be a fly on the wall. “It speaks very well to the City of Kingston that they felt a comfort level that high,” he said.

BC said he and his team were strictly there to help, and not to critize Kingston’s response. His presence in Kingston wasn’t totally altruistic; he also had some goals he wanted to achieve. The key thing was that he wanted to be part of an unfolding emergency, and viewed it as a kind of laboratory for testing out approaches and ideas from the policy and planning side.

From a strategic point of view, BC said the best thing that happened was that emergency planning staff from Toronto were able to provide some structure to the way the emergency response and planning were carried out. Kingston’s planning was occurring ad hoc during the emergency. Despite the fact they had an emergency plan that had been delivered by Bob Boyd (a plan BC said he never reviewed, largely because copies were difficult to locate), the decision was made early on to set the plan aside. BC said it was decided that Kingston officials would work on managing the response as they went along. To their credit, BC said, it worked very well. It speaks to the type of people who ended up in the EOC. They have nothing to be ashamed of, he said, and in fact they did admirably.

Warren Leonard and others in BC’s group provided some structure to the response, and introduced things like an incident management system, which is an internationally accepted model of managing an emergency of any magnitude. It divides duties and responsibilities into manageable blocks. It is used all over the U.S., in most provinces and in Toronto. BC is not sure if it used by Kingston Fire Department, but thinks so. It is the model that was used when Mirka Januskiewicz and Lynne Jordon moved the EOC out to the former Pittsburgh Twp.

Was the division of duties and responsibilities occurring naturally?
BC said he didn't think the early response took on a clear structure, because Kingston officials and other EOC staff were flying by the seat of their pants. He thinks they were putting out the fires as they found them.

BC said organizational efforts were his team's primary contribution. But his staff also provided 20 workers who performed mechanical functions, such as supplying power to run furnaces, nursing homes, and pump gas. Those are the main task, or tactical level, operations that occurred.

BC’s staff generally ran without much management. The EOC and what was occurring at City Hall was completely divorced from the operations of his staff.

Warren Leonard and BC attended the EOC for the rest of the week. They went to all the control group meetings, which were held two or three times a day. They rode shotgun to see how local officials were doing, and BC concluded that they were doing very well.

Gardner Church was very effective at delegating, said BC. He was handing jobs off to people on a regular basis. What really impressed BC was that some of those delegating decisions were “non-traditional,” such as the decision to put Mirka Januskiewicz and Lynne Jordon in charge of the move to a new control centre.

In many ways this was a non-traditional emergency, BC said. Generally speaking the lead agencies in almost any emergency are the fire, police and ambulance. The lead agency in this emergency was works and hydro. The fire, ambulance and police really had a support role. That's not to downplay their role, BC said, because people were having trouble with carbon monoxide poisoning, heart trouble, all these things that naturally occur in a community. But what was really interesting was some of the lead people in the organization. Lynne Jordon, director of library services, managed the new EOC and its call centre, and did an “outstanding” job, BC said. She is “completely competent, with exactly the skill set you want in someone to run an EOC and a call centre.”

BC and WL marvelled at the fact that not only would Gardner Church assign these serious duties to Mirka Januskiewicz and Lynne Jordon, but that they flourished. There were a couple of organizational hiccups at the Pittsburgh organization when some private sector people and (retired) military folks nosed in, BC said, but those things were smoothed out.

BC said he personally doesn’t think the retired military group was required. He thinks Kingston's staff was fully able to manage the situation and he thinks that was proven. He doesn’t doubt that they brought some great skills for specific situations, but he is not so sure that this was a situation that required their input. He feels that everyone who has skills to offer should be brought to the table and consulted at least, but if you already have the people and resources in place of your own, why do you need the unnecessary extra expenses? BC said it is difficult for him to judge the situation, though, because he doesn't know all the players or have all the information.

What BC saw was Mirka Januskiewicz and Lynne Jordon running the new EOC and the new call centre really well, particularly after they were shown the incident management system. The people in that building knew what was going on, where they fit in. From what he saw and heard, they handled an incredible number of calls.

The IMS (incident management system) was more in operation in Pittsburgh Township than in City Hall. BC said it was recognized at City Hall that there was no formal structure in place.

Returning to the issue of the emergency plan, BC said Mr. Church and Mr. Bennett decided early on they were going to step away from the plan. BC said he knows that caused Mr. Boyd some consternation at EOC meetings, because he felt his work had been set aside. In a sense it had been. But writing a plan to manage an incident is not the only step to managing an incident, BC said. The plan needs to be exercised, you examine the results, you tweak it, and you go back. It is a “planning continuum.” The whole idea is to have a planning team, set the plan, exercise, review the results, make the changes to the plan and then exercise the plan again and review the results.

Mr. Boyd probably knows this, BC said, but it was not very palatable to him. BC and Leonard had to talk to Boyd a little because he [Boyd] may have perceived them as a threat to his emergency planning role and expertise in the city.

Boyd’s plan to use the Staff college as EOC was not suitable, BC said, if only because of the building’s small size. City Hall was crowded in the meeting rooms and would have been crowded even if the Toronto people were not there.

Something BC’s team brought from Kingston back to Toronto is the understanding that while they may think “this is the emergency control group for our municipality, this is our emergency planning committee,” the reality is you could end up with far less than that or you could end up with far greater numbers. If everybody in that group brings a deputy, where are they all going to go, and who will have the chance to stand up and talk? BC said he was impressed with the way Mayor Bennett and Gardner Church ran meetings. They kept firm control at every EOC meeting.

Those meetings are not the place to squabble. There’s lots of time to throw stones when the emergency is over, although BC said he understands that it’s human nature to squabble, and that if you can learning something from the feedback, then it’s worthwhile.

BC said this emergency was a singular opportunity. Gary Symonds of the Metro Toronto police has been an emergency planner for 22 years, and it was the first time he was ever in a declared state of emergency. It’s extremely rare to find oneself in that kind of situation when you live in Toronto, because one of the definitions of a state of emergency is when a municipality exceeds its own resources to enable it to respond. There are so many people in the Toronto area that there are a corresponding number of fire stations, police, technical staff etc. It is probably comparable to to Kingston’s resources on a per capita basis, but when you have 3 million people within 100 square miles, there are a lot of extra resources that can be brought to bear on any situation. Consequently, Toronto would rarely declare a state of emergency. (The last one may have been Hurricane Hazel, which was in the mid-1950s). There are plenty of large fires, plane crashes, subway crashes, highway closings etc in the Toronto area, but none would constitute a state of emergency, so for BC and other emergency planners, the Ice Storm was a great opportunity.

Does the reality (of emergency planning) fit the theory?
“Very closely,” BC said. He was heartened to see that essentially the plan does work. Probably the most heartening thing was to see how people respond to adversity. He had read things like the crime rate dropping during emergencies in other parts of the world, and that was demonstrated again in Kingston. Crime ground almost to a halt until the city moved into the recovery period, when police noticed that things were getting back to normal.

BC saw a real sense of community, of people pulling together to help one another. There was no shortage of volunteers. If anything, they had a difficulty in dealing with all the people who wanted to help. The question of how to manage volunteers is something BC said he’ll be examining in Toronto. How are they going to manage large numbers of people who want to donate things like food? Private citizens were showing up at Kingston City Hall with fully cooked meals, drinks, pies, muffins. Staff didn’t always know what to do with them. It was an unlikely problem, one BC did not expect.

He did not hear one dispute on the streets while in Kingston, even though people were in a heightened state of stress. He said that despite his excitement at being a part of the response, he realized that it was not a good situation for the residents, who were uncomfortable, sad, and had a lot of bad things occurring to them. Long-term plans were upset, including one case he heard of, where a couple had planned their wedding for that weekend.

Given the strong community effort, the people didn't need anyone from Toronto because they could have managed it themselves, although it would have taken a lot longer, particularly with the Toronto Hydro input.

Two anecdotes stood out for BC, one on the task side and one on the strategic side.

A gentleman who operates a charitable food kitchen -- BC thinks it is affiliated with a church, but couldn't remember the name -- in the city. He had no power. People were coming to the door hoping to get fed. He couldn't run his kitchen, the food is going to spoil, the freezers are out, he can't cook. He needs a generator. If they get him a generator, all of these other problems can begin to get resolved. There was a poignancy. It was really wonderful the way it evolved. He came in with his hat in his hand, very upset, the food was going to rot. He was out of power. He recognizes he's not a nursing home or a hospital. He realizes he's a low priority to get a generator. He doesn't have the money to buy one. He's running this little charity downtown. Somebody was able to wrestle up a generator, the team was able to get a crew together. It all just flowed so nicely and the man went back to tell them the next day what the outcome was from those actions. Months later, BC still thinks about what a wonderful event to have been involved in, even though he was on the periphery for that particular task.

On the strategic side:
The issue of making sure people had adequate personal needs met. Sleep, knowing that their families were safe and sound, peace of mind, food, water. BC brought up a topic at an EOC meeting -- peer support and critical incident stress. There were very few people in the room who had ever even heard of either. In all literature that deals with emergency planning and emergency management, absolutely accepted principle is that you must deal with critical incident stress on an individual basis. That was a real shortcoming in Kingston, BC said. He tried to address it in the latter stages. When he first broached the subject in the EOC group he felt a number of people were dubious as to how valid those concerns were. Yet at those meetings he saw people leap to their feet, rush out of the room, shout, exhibiting behaviours that, if serious decisions need to be made, he wouldn't want somebody necessarily to be that passionate about what is going on, not at an EOC meeting. It's not a criticism that he would level at anyone individually, because the people of Kingston should be proud of how they functioned, but from a strategic point of view, because these things weren't being monitored that carefully, the danger of making dangerous decisions at that level was very great you can have ramifications throughout the system if someone makes a poor strategic decision.

What lessons can be learned?:

1. Proper emergency preparedness for the City of Kingston must include that -- critical incident stress and peer support -- as a component, BC said.
2. Followed closely by the training shortfall. There are avenues available, through Emergency Measures Ontario and the Canadian Emergency Preparedness College in Arnprior. He is positive that if someone were to contact FEMA (?) the Emergency Management Institute in Emmetsburg (??) Maryland, provides training for integrated emergency management for communities. He believes they would even attend Kingston to participate in a seminar, although BC says they may not need it now, after having gone through the Ice Storm.
3. Exercising the plan, whether they go with Mr. Boyd's plan or tweak it and regenerate the plan again.

BC said one of his duties over the last number of years has been to participate on an emergency planning committee for the fire department where they take draft documents, fashion a plan and they go through a peer criticism, round-table, and any number of criticisms can be aimed, and some of it can be severe. Pride of ownership is a wonderful thing in some cases, BC said, but with emergency planning and documents, it is not.

He suggests striking a committee, that consists of people who are going to be on the hot seat when the day of an emergency comes and people that were involved in the emergency, draft an emergency plan and then allow people to critique what happens and redraft it. One plan for the Toronto fire department required 300 editorial changes and was reviewed 10 times by the same group of people. It has to be a consensus document that everyone is comfortable with.

Also the custody of the plan has to rest with the municipality, absolutely, BC said. It can't be a consultant that holds the plan. He is not quite sure why the municipality would even want a consultant involved. All these people have now been through an emergency and it is generally found that communities that have been through states of emergency end up with the best plans because they are not dealing with abstract notions. They know what can happen because they did it.

If he were involved with drawing up the new emergency plan he wouldn’t hesitate to draw upon the people in Kingston. “It’s commonly felt that municipalities that have been through an emergency such as Kingston went through have the best plans anywhere. It isn’t that they’re dealing with abstract notions of how are we going to deal with these things; these are people who can say ‘if that happens, these are the ten things that will occur next.’ It's experiential. They know it because they did it. It isn’t that they read it in a magazine. So I wouldn’t hesitate to draw upon the people of Kingston."

Asked what lessons might be learned, BC said: we have to acknowledge that the timing couldn’t have been much worse for a municipality going through this sort of thing. That has to be set aside. “Six days after amalgamation, bang. Who knew?”

What the ice storm demonstrated is that an emergency plan is not a document that’s pulled off a shelf, you blow the dust off it and try to work with it. That was demonstrated very clearly in Kingston. The plan wasn’t much use to anybody. If people had read it, they didn’t bring it with them. An emergency plan is really just a framework to work around. His recommendation is that if you’re going to draw up a plan, you must exercise it. You must tweak it, review it, and go back through the cycle again, and drill on it. It can be difficult to convince people of the need for such proactive measures, though, because all of get caught up in the day-to-day business of what we're doing, and tend to focus more on things like cost-cutting and greater productivity. “For most folks, it’s an intangible thing to demonstrate that this [emergency training] will have a real benefit to you at some point.”

Kingston should consider having a full-time emergency planner, BC said. A person who liaises with all of the agencies, not just police and fire, although it could be under the police or fire budget. The Kingston police department probably could use a full-time emergency planner, who is going to review the plans, who will facilitate exercises. This person could also liaise with outside agencies and outside geographical areas. He would strongly suggest that Kingston should examine having such an individual.

“Kingston has an opportunity to really demonstrate due diligence, taking the hard-learned lessons and fashioning them into something that’s going to be really productive for the community down the road.”

BC has been joking with his colleagues in Toronto that he’s waiting for the job call [for the emergency planning job] to come out, because he's “keenly interested in what happens in Kingston.” He found the city “wonderful” and would “move there in a heartbeat,” he said.

Initially, the Toronto fire people tried to track their costs in Kingston, and of course they kept receipts for all their expenditures. Some of the bills tended to be split between Toronto and Kingston. For example, all of their gas bills were picked up by Toronto fire until they got to Kingston, at which point Kingston opened up the gas pumps and gave them free gas. Meals and accommodations were split between the city of Toronto and the city of Kingston. He doesn't think any of his staff were out of pocket on anything from the trip.

When they got back home, they realized they were missing a few generators and about two hundred of their special Saber lights, which are the high-end flashlights firefighters use in burning buildings. (They’re fully submersible, fireproof, shatter resistant and worth about $40 or $50 each). A couple of his own staff members “got the wrong end of the handle” and distributed the flashlights to emergency workers and residents out near the Joyceville Institution. When BC got home, he initially thought he would try to reclaim either the cost or the flashlights themselves, but eventually decided to absorb the loss, and never told Kingston officials about the mistake. “What we eventually looked at was the relatively great advantage of leaving this in a way that generates good feelings between the municipalities probably outweighs the cost [of the lost equipment].”

The generators eventually came back, and the costs that were out of pocket “are probably not that serious for a municipality the size of Toronto,” BC said. “Now, I’ll probably get shot by the city fathers for saying that. But that’s essentially the decision we’re at right now. I don’t believe there’s any move to try to reclaim the costs that were absorbed.”

At the same time, he says, his accommodations were taken care of by the folks at Holiday Inn, so it all comes out in the wash. “I can’t say enough about those folks at the Holiday Inn ... their rates to us were free.”

The first night his group arrived in Kingston, the Holiday Inn had no vacancies, but they offered to let BC and his people sleep on cots in the hotel bar. They brought sandwiches to the guys and set up a nice little makeshift suite, which they used for one night before some rooms became available. “To tell you the truth it was quite cozy ... we told them, we said ‘you don’t know who you’re dealing with, leaving us in the bar,’ but they were really nice. Really nice.”

BC’s staff felt they had contributed in a very real way to ease some suffering. They also felt a real sense of partnership, and ownership, with Kingston. “I would hazard a guess that all of these individuals will travel there in the next year.”

BC spent a good deal of his time serving as a liaison between the city of Kingston and the city of Toronto. After getting the police down there to help bring some structure to the response, his key role was to relay messages between the two mayor’s offices.

At one point very early on, Gardner Church asked BC how he would feel about being the emergency coordinator for the whole exercise. BC refused, saying that job should lie with someone from Kingston. This request came in the first hour BC was there, and BC thinks Church may have been trying to welcome him and make him feel as comfortable as possible before asking him to be an unofficial liaison between the two cities. “He did ask me shortly afterwards for some help intervening with the city of Toronto.”

BC didn’t talk to Toronto Mayor Mel Lastman or Toronto CAO Michael Garrett directly, but relayed information to his own fire chief, Chief Speed, who then passed the information along.

“After getting things off to a start with Chief Speed and Michael Garrett ... the way was eased for these people to talk to each other and make the request for what they actually needed.”

This came in handy at one point when Toronto Hydro started to try and bring its people back to Toronto before the emergency was over in Kingston. Gardner Church asked BC to intervene, and as a result of a few phone calls being made, Mayor Lastman told Toronto Hydro to keep its people in Kingston a little while longer.

Gardner Church was very clear about what they were doing, BC said. “He was very straightforward about it. He needed somebody to intervene from the municipality of Toronto, to make sure these people didn’t leave. He needed to have the communications path lined up. Because I have direct line to the fire chief ... and the fire chief is a fairly high-ranking official in our city who has the ear of the mayor and the CAO and so forth, and who was able to present the case clearly. In fact I phoned Chief Speed at one o'clock in the morning, got him out of bed, on a couple of issues during the first week down there, to put him in the picture about certain things. That was all at his say-so. He wanted to be briefed at all time. And he subsequently would phone Mike Garrett, and Mr. Garrett would speak with Mr. Lastman, and they would come up with what was going to be an appropriate reaction.”

“They [Toronto Hydro] were paid staff. They were paid overtime to be down there. They were paid thousands, thousands of dollars ... the police service, the hydro people, the parks people, they were all paid to be there.”

BC said it was important to make sure the key information got to the key people in Toronto. “It was very clear to anybody who was on the street in Kingston, there’s a lot of lights out and a lot of wires down. How do you get Mayor Lastman to know this? He’s not there, and he doesn’t know you anyway, if you call him.”

If Hydro officials or anyone else get to him first and say ‘the situation is not dire, we can start pulling our resources out,’ that can cause problems, BC said. That’s why Gardner Church realized very early on that he needed a person here who was from Toronto, to be getting messages to the mayor’s office.

Church himself made a road trip to Toronto during the storm and “oiled a few of his rusty acquaintances up, and made sure everybody was aware of what was going on.”

“I had a good laugh with him about what my role was,” BC recalled. “I said ‘I tell you what, I'll be the liaison officer,’ and he said ‘fine, that’s it, you’re the liaison to Toronto.’ I’m not trying to inflate my role in this. Believe me. I was a minor player. But largely because I could phone the chief up and explain ‘this is what our situation is’...”

His clearest message to the chief was “this is a hydro emergency. This is not a fire emergency and this is not a police emergency. This is strictly a utility emergency. And that was spelled out as clearly as possible to the boss, and that, I believe, was the information that went to the mayor.”

How do you think Toronto Hydro felt having Kingston go over its head to the mayor, through you?
“I don’t like it when someone does it to me ... [but] this is an emergency. This is not the time to see who has the shiniest cap badge. We are going to try and get the thing resolved, and move ahead afterwards. I know these people from Toronto Hydro. They are as motivated as anybody is. They are clearly dedicated to what they do, and I have nothing but good things to say about them, from top to bottom, the whole organization. Whether they had a clear grasp of what was going on is another question.”

Toronto police didn’t have a clear understanding of what was occurring until they sent Warren Leonard to Kingston, and it was BC who suggested WL be brought down.

Gardner Church asked BC for: his estimation of how the organization was running, what was required, an audit of how the folks were doing. As soon as Church made it clear that these were the kinds of things he wanted to know, BC thought of Warren Leonard, who has a great head for strategic and policy issues around emergency planning. BC didn’t want to take all of that responsibility on himself. Everyone has specific training, and Warren Leonard’s great strength is in policy making. “He is the person ... you want somebody to write a bylaw, a policy, a protocol, he’s the guy. So who should we have? The best person in Toronto, in my estimation, is this fellow. And that’s how he ended up down there.”

Aside from the few suggestions he’s made for improvements, BC said “the people of Kingston should congratulate themselves for rising to meet the occasion. It was very reassuring, when I came back to Toronto and looked at our municipality here, it made me feel good to think that people are capable of responding in that kind of way to adversity.”

In many cases, the people doing the jobs had no emergency training and were functioning well outside their normal duties within the city. BC said it speaks well to the CAO and the Mayor that they had faith in their personnel, and that they had the good judgement to assign tasks in a non-traditional way. “Clearly you could have taken a fire captain, or a police sergeant, and said ‘you are going to run the EOC out in Pittsburgh,’ and no one would have critiqued you. And yet they took two women. I mean, no gender bias there. I’m not sure if I would have believed it if you would have told me that this was going to happen, that we were going to have this EOC moved, and we’re going to assign these two people to command it. And who are they? [Two women, one the commissioner of strategic planning, and the other a librarian]. Good for both of them. For Gardner to make that determination, number one, that was outstanding. That was really outstanding.”

Both Mirka Januskiewicz and Lynne Jordon performed admirably, BC said. “And that was adversity that they were up against, too. They were under a lot of pressure because of the emergency. They were also under a lot of pressure because of the organization, because these folks from the military [were there], private sector people coming in ... It was a daunting job.”

“Mirka and Lynne, though, other than the fact that they were both getting a little tired, as everyone was, I would trust them to run anything. After watching them with this, I thought boy, talk about custodians. I would have no doubts at all in my mind. I’d give them the keys to anything I own. Away you go. Absolutely trustworthy. If you were going to honour the folks who served down there, I would put those two out on a podium with anybody.”

BC thanked his own people by taking them out to a big steak dinner, and he would suggest that Kingston, if it hasn’t done so already, find ways to “identify the people who helped you when the chips were down, and pat them on the back.”

All told, Toronto sent about 25 firefighters down. They rotated staff, sending smaller groups down for two or three days at a time.