IceStorm 98 Study

Bob Napier (BN) is one of five platoon commanders. He rotates through three shifts over a 35 day schedule. He has one sergeant and 12 officers working with him. They are responsible for the first-line response to any police issue that comes up while they’re on duty. He’s been with the Kingston Police Department since May, 1979.

BN served in his regular capacity as watch commander (staff sergeant) for the first couple of days of the emergency, then switched over to City Hall, where he and Const. Al Melvin established and ran a police command centre. The command centre dealt with a wide range of issues, helping co-ordinate military assistance and arrange checks of the city and the region, and helping ease the transition to the new emergency operations centre on Gore Road.

BN was working days when the ice storm first broke out. He was at home Wednesday night. He has quite a few mature trees in his back yard, and he basically spent the night listening to the storm outside, the rain pounding, trees breaking. One tree started banging on the side of the house. “There was nothing I could do about it at the time, so I didn’t really worry about it.” He had “absolutely no idea” of the magnitude of what was involved. It was just a storm like any other. He got up Thursday morning at around 6 a.m., went outside, chipped the ice off his car and drove to work.

He didn’t have much of a problem until he hit Portsmouth. He lives in the former Kingston Township, and drove in along Front Rd. past Dupont. His area is a residential area that’s about 20 years old, and except for odd little pockets of mature trees, it’s all 20-year old growth. So there were no trees across roads or any of that kind of stuff. “It was just ice on the road, and it wasn’t a big deal to me.”

En route to work, BN picked up the sergeant who was working with him at the time. He lived in the Bath and Days Road area. Had no problem getting into that area. Travelling along Days Road there were no trees blocking. When they got to the area of KPH, they saw that a police car had the area blocked off due to a tree down or something.

BN’s power never went out through the whole ice storm. It’s not unusual to have pockets of power outages. It’s not common, but it’s not unusual. And the fact that there was a tree down and some power out in the area of KPH didn’t mean much to him at the time. It could have been due to an accident.

They continued along Portsmouth and down another street and onto Union Street. It was on Union Street that they first noticed a larger number of trees down and other problems. But BN still felt that maybe it was only isolated along the road. “I had no idea how widespread it was at that time ... so I’m thinking, it could be the whole southern part of the city, who knows. It could still be an isolated thing, because trees break.”

They went down Union without all that much of a problem, and it wasn’t until they got through Queen’s, reached the courthouse and got into the area of Bagot Street and Gore Street that they realized the problem was more widespread. “That was like a disaster area there; there were wires all over the place, and we had to back up and change routes. That was when I thought ‘This is a little bigger than we figured.’” They were able to get to work.

Asked how he felt driving through the carnage, BN said he viewed it as an adventure. “It reminded me ... did you ever see Dante’s Peak? It’s a movie about a volcano that explodes, and Pierce Brosnan, the guy that plays double 07 now, he’s in this movie, and he’s somebody who goes around to blown up volcanoes. He goes to a town with a mountain called Dante’s Peak, and he reads this sign that there’s going to be an explosion, and of course nobody believes him, and the whole nine yards. There’s an explosion, and the whole town’s wiped out. He’s in a vehicle with, you know, the love interest, and he’s trying to survive. And he’s up and down on sidewalks, and driving through back yards and all kinds of stuff, and that’s what it was like. It was like an adventure.”

The ice storm was unusual as emergencies go because it happened so gradually. There were no ‘policing issues’ in the usual sense -- no deaths or serious injuries -- but it was still a matter for the police and other emergency workers. “If we had an explosion that half the block was wiped out, then they would call people in to try and deal with it. But we didn’t have that.”

“So the first time in all my time here, the downtown was in complete darkness, which was unusual, although it’s not unusual for short periods. It can happen. It doesn’t happen often, but it can happen. And it was the first time that I’ve ever come to work and our emergency generator was running. So the police station was lit up and nothing else was. At that time I figured ‘Hey, there’s something wrong.’ It could still be one or two grids, caused by an accident or caused by whatever, by trees falling ... certainly, coming in the dark, all you see is what’s in front of your headlights. Everything’s in darkness, so there’s no street lights. So therefore it’s whatever your headlights catch.” (He drove in at about 6:30 a.m.)

Once he arrived at work, the officer who was on duty the night before brought him up to speed on what was happening. The power was out in a lot of the city, they’re working on it, etc. BN kept a couple of people from the midnight shift over for a while to give some continuity and added help to the daytime staff. He also put extra people on duty, taking some people out of administrative positions to help with the front-line response. Even police chief Bill Closs went out in a car to block streets, put tape up, notify the PUC, etc. Things as they evolved were starting to break and fall down.

“The PUC actually didn’t do that bad of a job in terms of trying to get things back up and running. It was the following night, Thursday night, where things continued to break down. And that’s where people were [saying] that this may be a little bit more long-term than anybody would have first thought.”

It was overnight Thursday that the PUC realized they couldn’t keep up with the damage, that they were falling behind and might lose the whole system. “During Thursday, they were working on things, and things were no longer freezing, and most of what was going to fall had fallen. Then overnight on Thursday it’s cold again, things continue to fall, and the areas they’ve fixed already are going back down. That’s when there’s a realization that they’re not winning anymore.”

BN went home at 5 o’clock. It was busy but calm, because nobody was driving. The biggest issue he thought they would have is accidents caused by slippery roads and the fact that there was a lot of traffic lights out, but traffic nearly ground to a halt and took away this concern. In the first 48 or 72 hours, he thinks they only had one accident, and it was in a parking lot. The first traffic accident was an hour after the lights came back on.

There wasn’t any traffic, and people were careful. They would come to an intersection that was not functioning, and they would behave accordingly. They would treat it as a four-way stop sign.

BN was the watch commander on the first day of the storm, and that didn’t change. He didn’t go out on the road, but served as watch commander from headquarters. He had a lot more people than usual, because he used people who would have been there on a Thursday doing other functions (the people who were pulled away from administrative duties to go out on the road). We had them doing response based on safety issues more than anything else, ie., trees down, transformers on fire, wires down, etc.

At 5 p.m. he was replaced by somebody else who was coming on. During the entire ice storm crisis and beyond, that system of shifts was continued, because that system has to continue. “You can’t just take somebody out of there and not replace them. Even if it’s not me, it’s somebody else. When I was eventually taken off my platoon to deal with things at City Hall, the sergeant I normally work with fulfilled that role. There always has to be a watch commander.”

Like anyone else, emergency workers can get caught up in the excitement and adrenaline of a case. “When we have major investigations, like murders or whatever, our detectives will work 24, 30 hours, whatever, because they’re the ones that are intimately knowledgeable about a particular thing. Having said that, the people in city hall were in the same sort of boat. Nobody realized that it was going to go on for 10 days or whatever. I think the whole thing from start to finish ... was 14 days.”

Normal policing duties can’t stop just because there’s an emergency, BN pointed out, so the department had to function pretty much as it always does. “Might we do our regular policing with fewer resources? Might we cancel court attendance? Might we not attend low priority calls that we would normally attend? Sure. But the bottom line is that we still have bad people out there, we still have the potential for traffic accidents and other accidents, and we’re still responsible for the general security, particularly when you’ve got streets blocked off and there’s no power. There’s no alarms, a lot of things that operate on power of course aren’t working, in terms of security and door locks and everything else. So all of those issues are still our responsibility, whether there’s an emergency or not.”

“We kept shifts over to supplement other shifts, so we had more people working than we normally did, but we had very few people who were called in on their days off. Again, we didn’t have the issues, the investigations, the big problem.”

In some ways there was less volume than usual, because they didn’t have any accidents to deal with. Kingston police normally deal with five or six accidents a day, and those numbers were dramatically reduced.

At any given time, they might have 10 people working, and they would keep five people from the midnight shift over, and have five people from the evening shift start early. So instead of 10 people working they would have 15. They didn’t double their shifts, but ran shifts of one and a half size.

Kingston police dealt with a lot of ‘check the welfare’ calls from residents worried about relatives. They would check on the relatives and report back to the family member who had called.

BN went to the first control group meeting. He was not named in the emergency plan, but he said “the chief and everybody else [named as control group members] takes whoever they want. If the subject had come up, ‘Can we do this?’ the chief would have asked me if we had the personnel or whether we could get the personnel or whether we could get the equipment or whatever. Don’t get me wrong; he has the authority to instruct me to have extra people come in. But if they said something like ‘if we were to shut down a power grid tomorrow, could you get three people there?’ then I would say yes. If they said ‘can you get 20 people there?’ then I would say no. But the chief would say alright, ‘this is what we’ll do’...”

The first control group meeting just consisted of the various groups reporting in. The police had no big issues at that time, but other groups did. BN is not sure if there were water issues by that time; down the road they became concerned about the purification system. Plans were made to meet again at around 8 p.m. By that time BN was home; he went to bed at 9 p.m., because, as he said, he “find[s] these days long.” He was woken at 10:30 p.m. by a phone call from Staff Inspector Murphy, asking if he could come in. He was back at the police station by 11 p.m.

A lot of people asked Napier and Melvin questions about what to do, because they had never experienced an emergency situation before. BN thinks it may have been easier for police to handle the ice storm because their jobs normally consist of crisis management. “It was never really a panic situation for us. It was just a matter of there’s a job to be done, let’s do it. Because that’s what we do all the time.”

There were some awful decisions to be made, BN said. He remembers a volunteer who came in to report that there was an elderly woman living in an apartment on Mack Street. She was mostly blind, she had candles lit all over her apartment, there was animal feces all over the place, and she was refusing to leave. The volunteer wanted to know what to do. That particular case was fairly easy, he said. Police had no authority to make people leave their homes, but he got one of his senior offices and a sergeant to go up and gently twist the woman’s arm, and she did eventually go to a shelter. Some of the volunteers went back and helped get her apartment cleaned up. The main fear was fire. She or one of her animals could knock over a candle, and that would be it.

Volunteers weren’t used to even seeing that kind of stuff, BN said, and that particular case shook them up. The tough part of it was that volunteers and police had to face the fact that they couldn’t force people to leave their homes. They had to acknowledge that and move on, he said.

The only powers police had would have been a police officer’s regular powers under the mental health act. If they found someone who was a danger to themselves or others, then they could stretch the limit and bring them to a hospital. The beauty of having Hotel Dieu as a shelter was that they could just move them on up the hall to a shelter. “Once they’re there, and they’re warm, usually common sense kicks in, and they don’t necessarily go back, or they only go back for a while.”

BN is not aware of any case where a police officer invoked his or her power under the mental health act during the ice storm. But several people “had their arms twisted, [where we told them] ‘you’re either going to go on your own, or we will invoke this, and you’re going to go anyway.’ But just because someone was cold, that wasn’t sufficient enough. There’s hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people who are cold. It’s that one or two people that are really in dire straights that you’ve got to deal with.”

A lot of things were done out of necessity because it was the right thing to do, BN said. “There were times where the limits were stretched because it was the right thing to do.”

For example, the first day they got the military deployed, there were about 20 people that they found to be in difficult situations and took advantage of the opportunity to leave. At least one person went in an ambulance. “That was a hypothermia type thing,” he recalls.

Figures on the number of people who took advantage of the opportunity to leave their homes during these door-to-door checks will probably never be available because no one kept records, BN said. “What we said was ... the military of course had this strict command structure, which is fine. But the way that we left it was ‘If you find somebody who needs help, get them an ambulance and move on. Don’t call us and say we’ve got somebody that needs help. You’re just wasting time.’”

“Our biggest thing was trying to make sure that different streets were covered, all the residences were covered,” BN said. But he freely admits that some homes and some streets were left out, just because of the sheer size of the job and the difficulty of hitting every single residence. “I do know that the plan was there for them to all be covered, but unless you go out and actually do it yourself, it’s not going to happen.”

Getting back to the issue of how and when he was reassigned to City Hall, BN said he got into the police station by 11 p.m., Al Melvin was also called, they went over to City Hall and met with the Mayor and Gardner Church. They basically said they had had a meeting, that things were much more long-lasting than they had anticipated it was going to be. They asked BN and Melvin to organize a door-to-door ‘check the welfare’ campaign, and to see where we might be able to get some help to do it. The Mayor and Gardner Church planned to check back with them in a couple of hours.

The Mayor went down to the basement of City Hall, hoping to get some maps from the planning department, but he had forgotten that planning had moved upstairs after amalgamation. There is an emergency centre out at the Correctional Staff College, and there are some maps there. Mayor Bennett went there and got the maps to help BN and Melvin plan the campaign.

Organizing the campaign was touch-and-go at first. “In the early goings, we had no idea who we were going to use, how we were going to deploy them. So what we did was we sat down and created an inventory of what we thought we would need in terms of transportation, meals, communications, maps, supplies, how we were going to coordinate it. And then we looked at who we might potentially use, whether it was going to be military, volunteers, whether we would try to go to a college, the university, whatever the case may be. Whether we were going to call in off-duty police officers ... these were the things we had to look at.”

The reason Al Melvin was involved in this -- other than the fact that he had the skills to carry out the assignment -- was that they were hoping they would be able to use the military, and thought his background as a military police officer would help pave the way.

Initially they thought they would just canvass the hardest-hit areas. That was when officials still thought the emergency would last 24 to 48 hours. It wasn’t until Friday that they realized they were losing the battle, and realized that the door-to-door checks would have to be expanded to the whole city and beyond.

Municipal bus routes had been cancelled, so BN and Melvin (in a meeting with Staff Sgt. Glen Fowler of the OPP) decided to use the inactive buses for transportation. John Giles, who is in charge of transportation for the city, put six buses at their disposal. Smaller buses were designated for use in the rural areas, where fewer people would be needed to do door-to-door checks.

On Friday morning, BN and Melvin contacted base operations at CFB Kingston to see if there was any possibility of getting a deployment of troops. In order to get the ball rolling, they needed to go through Emergency Measures Ontario. Gardner Church made the call. They got about 120 troops the first day from two or three different units at the base. They put 20 or 30 troops on each bus. They concentrated on the hardest-hit areas within the city core for the first day. Then they got in touch with the OPP, and Joe Marshall came down that day. He was responsible for deploying two buses in the former Kingston Township (Kingston West), based on his assessment of need.

At that time they didn’t have any co-ordinated effort, BN recalls. “We were given this task, and we really didn’t have any idea on how big it was going to get, how long it was going to go, or whatever. Basically we were being tasked for Friday, and that was all.”

Both BN and Al Melvin worked a 24-hour shift after being assigned this task. They came in at 11 p.m. on Thursday night and didn’t go home until after 11 p.m. the following night. Because they thought this was a one-shot deal, that didn’t seem like a problem.

It was just Al Melvin (AM) and BN in the beginning. Asked whether Joe Marshall was “doing his own thing” at that point, BN said “Yeah, you could say that.”

BN admits there were problems co-ordinating city and provincial police within the command centre. “They had some sort of a communication issue. They were going to send one bus to Sharbot Lake and the other bus to Wolfe Island. So there was some misunderstanding about the new city and where these buses were supposed to go.”

He believes the confusion resulted from the fact that OPP Kingston is a split detachment, with South Frontenac being responsible for Sharbot Lake and Wolfe Island. Somehow, in the decision where to send the buses, Kingston West got left out.

“I’m not sure what the issue was, but there was some sort of a breakdown there,” BN says.

Part of the problem stemmed from unclear or overlapping areas of authority. BN and AM were given the task of running the police command centre and co-ordinating the door-to-door checks, but they had no authority over the provincial police, who continue to run their own show in Kingston West.

Reading from notes he made about this, he said “It’s not ideal to have more than one agency in this kind of circumstance. The left hand doesn’t always know what the right hand is doing, and it complicates it.”

BN and AM stayed with the command centre during the whole operation, he says, whereas the OPP had four different people involved. That meant that the new person from the OPP always had to be brought up to speed and trained in what was going on, BN said.

Perhaps the most serious consequence of this was the fact that some parts of the former Kingston Township -- including the Reddendale area -- had still not been checked after three days. AM and BN took the blame for this at a council meeting where the issue was raised, but in fact it was the OPP’s responsibility to make sure all parts of the former township were checked, says BN. “It was not within our area of control. Considering the fact that we had two agencies, I’m not sure it could have gone any better, but clearly there were some issues.”

“What needed to happen was administratively, whether it’s the politicians or the mayor or Gardner Church ... if someone had taken the time to sit down and say to whoever the OPP people are, ‘These people are in charge, do what they want.’ Because if we’re responsible for the whole city, then we are going to task in the areas that are identified as being most important. I don’t think that ever happened, or if it did happen, it wasn’t clear ... We were co-ordinating, and officially we were responsible, but we had no authority in the former Kingston Township.”

From a policing standpoint, the OPP still have responsibility for the former township, and BN is not suggesting that he should have been allowed to interfere with that in any way. “It’s more in terms of, ‘these people are organizing a door-to-door check-the-welfare campaign, and it involves your area. It involves the new city, we [have] political responsibility for the new city, they’re going to co-ordinate, you do whatever they say.’ ... The bottom line is that I’m not sure it was clear enough as to who should be doing what.”

He doesn’t know why Reddendale wasn’t checked. It was on the list to be checked. The people that were being deployed in the OPP area were sent out to the OPP detachment to be briefed by them. “So what happened out there as far as communications, I don’t know. It comes back to the fact of why are they trying to send a bus to Sharbot Lake and Wolfe Island when this is being organized for the new city. There’s no doubt in my mind that there were needs on Wolfe Island, clearly there were, and there were needs on Sharbot Lake. But the thing is ... from their perspective, there wasn’t one person responsible. Now having said that, they weren’t notified about it until 8 o’clock in the morning, either. So it’s easy for things to get mucked up.”

The door-to-door campaign did eventually become regional, at which point it was appropriate for the buses to go outside the city limits. “But at the time all this happened [with Sharbot Lake, Wolfe Island and the Reddendale area of the township], it was the city administrators and the city politicians trying to look after the city. Until there’s a declaration that this is some kind of regional centre, they have no authority to send people anywhere. It’s as simple as that.”

BN attributes the whole thing to a miscommunication. “It’s simple for it to have happened, but the bottom line is it made it kind of difficult for us. The only reason we found out about it was because the people we had briefed, the bus people, knew they weren’t supposed to be leaving the city.”

Neither bus actually made it to Sharbot Lake or Wolfe Island. The one that was headed to the island missed the ferry by two minutes. They would have been on the island if they’d been on time. They came back to City Hall, whereupon the bus driver and the army trooper came in and said ‘We missed the ferry,’ and we said ‘What ferry?’ That’s when we found out that there was a bit of a problem ... The entire morning was basically wasted for that bus that was trying to get to Wolfe Island. But it’s just one of those things that happens.”

He’s sure some streets went unchecked, in addition to the Reddendale area, and says that’s an inevitable result of the number of steps and different groups involved in carrying out the search. “We tell the military what we want, their chain of command goes down till it finally gets to the person who’s in the bus. We had a bunch of flyers that were supposed to go out; we know that everybody didn’t get one. Even if nobody was home, they were supposed to put one in the mailbox. It’s just that information did not get all the way down.”

They didn’t go past daylight with checking houses. The military wasn’t going to hand over their people indefinitely, and they (AM and BN) felt there was a safety issue, because there were still large areas without power, and ice falling and tree branches falling. “We didn’t want anybody out after dark, tramping around in areas that they’re not familiar with. We were concerned with people banging on doors in the dark ... there were just a lot of issues.”

The troops stopped work at 4 p.m., but BN and AM stayed on at the emergency operation centre until after 11 p.m. because they had been told they would have to arrange at least another full day of the door-to-door campaign.

Communications were “lousy,” says BN. “Communications on all these things are lousy. Anything we get involved in, communications are always a problem. It doesn’t come as a surprise at all that communications were a problem. Ask any policeman what happens when there’s an event, whatever it is, and what could have been fixed, it’s communications.”

An example of this was the fact that BN and AM didn’t get reports on what was being done in the field until each busload of troops physically came back and told them what they had done, because communications were lacking. Communications were primarily used for emergencies, he said. The only communications they had was through the bus system. They gave portable radios (police portables) to each of the buses, so that in an emergency they could get into contact with the command centre. BN was able to get a base station set up in City Hall, but for the first day it didn’t work very well, because their own communications tower was icing up. They couldn’t even establish radio contact between City Hall and the police headquarters on Queen Street. Cell phones were virtually useless on Friday because they were overloaded. “So even though we tried to set up proper communications, it just didn’t work out for us,” he said.

The one system that did work was the bus communication system. Kingston Transit set up a little satellite dispatch centre around the corner from the police command centre in City Hall, and that’s how they communicated. Police had to walk down the hall, ask them where a particular bus was and what they might be doing, then walk back up to their command post and put the new information on the map. “So it got to the point where we said, ‘Don’t call us unless there’s an emergency, because this is ridiculous.” As a result, few records were kept about the routine activities of the troops.

If they needed an ambulance, the bus driver would call into the bus dispatch centre, and their dispatcher would call an ambulance. The police would check in now and then.

Communications did get a little better later on when the police command centre got help from the Princess of Wales’ Own Regiment. They provided a corporal or somebody who did some running for them. But the police could not be spending all of their time in the transit communication centre when they were supposed to be in their own command centre.

The police command centre was located in one of the offices at the front of City Hall, with windows facing onto Ontario Street. This was good and bad, BN says. It meant they were centrally located and had ready access to troops coming in on the buses, but it also created a situation whereby anyone walking through the door of City Hall (or working within the building) tended to ask the police questions. The command centre turned into a kind of de facto reception centre, which was time-consuming. But BN said he would still do it that way again, rather than being hidden away, but it did create some issues. “We spent a lot of time directing people to the right spot.”

Things eventually got better when a sign was put up directing volunteers to the tourist information centre, he said. But in the early goings, police fielded a lot of questions that should have been dealt with by others. This happened because nobody anticipated that the emergency would last as long as it did, and therefore systems were not put in place early on to deal with the influx of volunteers and citizens asking questions. Like most people, BN says, he had no idea the emergency would last 14 days.

BN was told to start working out in Joyceville Penitentiary starting on the Tuesday after the first weekend of the ice storm (Tues., Jan. 13). The city set up two rural command centres -- one in Joyceville Pen and the other in Woodbine Road fire hall -- and BN was assigned to the one in the former Pittsburgh Township. Al Melvin stayed at City Hall, and oversaw the creation of a ‘mobile bus shelter’ system that brought municipal buses into neighbourhoods for use by residents who didn’t want to leave their homes but who wanted to get warm for a while and have a cup of coffee.

BN was the police liaison officer at Joyceville Pen, and worked alongside Gerry Coady’s crew. “Compared to what was happening at City Hall for the first three days, it was a picnic,” he said.

Sunday was the last day that they deployed people. On Monday they started tying off loose ends. The emergency was actually declared over on Monday. Saturday and Sunday were by far the easiest days, BN said. They had two groups of six RMC students on Saturday and two groups set up for Sunday, but only used them in the morning. All they were doing was going back and double-checking places, pockets of the city and region. They were able to check those pockets on Sunday morning, so the police didn’t even use the RMC students in the afternoon.

Asked for more detail about the regional centres, BN said he’s not sure they were needed. Had the emergency carried on even longer than two weeks, it would have been a good thing to have those regional centres, he said, but as it was they may have been redundant.

BN mentioned that there were “some issues, some struggles over who was in charge and who was not in charge” once Col. Coady’s team came on board and had to answer to Mirka Januskiewicz in the new Gore Road emergency centre. But BN said “the way it was structured, the way it was organized and the way it was run by Col. Coady’s people was extremely professional.” He’s not sure how the struggles originated. “The people that I was dealing with at the grass roots level, there wasn’t any problem, but at the time they were getting Gore Rd. Set up, and I don’t know wehther the people at Gore Rd. really felt that it was important that this carry on. Again, I was out of the loop there, so I don’t know whether they considered themselves the regional centre or not. I know that there were some hard feelings when Col. Coady’s group was officially stood down. On both sides, really. But I’m not sure how serious they really were. Col. Coady’s group, basically the group he put together are people that are used to running operation centres in a military sense, and they were trying to deal with a civilian system. I have no problems dealing with a civilian system, because I’m used to it. I can switch back and forth as required. If I’m given orders by a superior, I follow them. If I give orders, they follow them. At the same time, there’s a lot of issues where we sit down and discuss it, because we’re talking about community issues and so forth ... it’s not a my way or the highway sort of thing ... I’m not sure what mandate they [Coady’s people] were given, and I’m not saying that’s bad, I just don’t know. I know what my job out there was, and that if there was policing issues to be dealt with, in the rural portion of Pittsburgh Township, then I was there to answer the questions about what we would and wouldn’t do. They still had, thankfully, the use of some military, which Col. Coady’s group co-ordinated ... I answered their questions, I advised them as to what the civil powers were and that sort of thing. There was a military liaison person right there on site that was responsible to deploy, responsible for communications, responsible for everything that we were trying to do at City Hall. So it was beautiful, in comparison.”

BN says it was probably a good idea to set up the centres in case they were needed, just as a precaution. “I think what it came down to was, if this thing is going to carry on, let’s be properly organized. It’s always nice to have 20-20 hindsight and say it wasn’t necessary, but it’s better than having 20-20 hindsight and saying we should have done something differently ... I’d rather be prepared than not.”

“The people that were responsible for Gore Road [Mirka Januskiewicz and Lynne Jordon] did a hell of a job, but they weren’t intimately involved with what went on in City Hall. I know Mirka was out at the PUC. But I think that with what they had, and the information they had, they did a good job, because they actually came around and asked what we had done, in order to bring themselves up to speed. Because I know that City Hall was trying to get back up to do City Hall functions. So a lot of the people who had been previously in charge and previously responsible and intimately knowledgeable about the past were now doing something different. I think it would have been nice to have more people over at Gore Road that were intimately involved with what went on at City Hall, because there were issues that came up ... none of it was a killer issue, but certainly issues that may have caused some friction, where people were now responsible that didn’t have the history.”

By contrast, the people in charge of the police command centre remained the same throughout the emergency, BN said. That made it easier to make the transition to Gore Road, since they had some continuity. “I wouldn’t want to have been one of those people thrown into it after Day Six or Seven, and say ‘there you go’. But having said that, given the information that they had, I think they did pretty good. Was it perfect? No. But then we weren’t perfect either.”

“There were certainly new faces out there [at Gore Rd.] who we hadn’t been dealing with much at City Hall ... Some of these people were given more responsibility, which is not a problem, except that they just didn’t have intimate knowledge. But I mean, that’s not unusual, either. Again, in terms of us dealing with emergencies and issues, we try to have people involved who have the information base, but you can’t sustain that for two weeks.”

Barclay Mayhew was a good resource because he made the transition from City Hall (where he was working on generators) to Gore Rd., where he was doing much the same thing. Lynne Jordon was at City Hall, but she was doing press releases most of the time. Mirka wasn’t even at City Hall; she was at the Utilities building. “But having said that, I’m not being critical of them at all. And I’m not saying it could have been avoided, really, given the resources they had, and the fact that they had a city to get up and running again. I know they came and asked us a lot of questions, and we were more than willing to help out.”

If there was a “real big community issue where you needed to have a command post run,” Col. Coady’s group or another military body could do the job, BN said. “They certainly knew how to run a command post, in terms of their reporting mechanisms, and how we did things. Whether or not that legitimately jives with a civil incident all the time, I don’t know.”

Col. Coady’s group had to send in reports every four hours. They were sending them originally to the Woodbine Road station. Col. Coady had Bill Stevenson set up as his second-in-command, and they had a duty officer who was the officer-in-charge of the command centre, BN recalls. None of those people had any authority to tell him what to do, he said. His job was to act as a resource to assist them. They would ask him about particular incidents and find out whether it was a police issue or not, or what the police response would be, and BN would give them an answer. “From my perspective, I was there to answer questions, and I didn’t have any responsibility,” he said.

A week or so after the original ice storm, Kingston was hit by a snow storm. BN went out with a military guy in one of their four wheel drive vehicles for a couple of hours and checked some houses. That was his only hands-on experience in the field during the emergency, and he said it was “nice to get out.”

Going out that day reinforced the feeling that he was part of an adventure, BN said. “Here we are, it’s a blinding snowstorm, we’re out on roads, you’ve got these headlights and I have no idea where we are except we’ve got this map. Of course he thinks I know where we’re going ... he’s not from Kingston, he just lives here. But we went out, checked some people, and they were all as snug as bugs in a rug, everybody was happy, and we were able to cover off our responsibility. My thing was that anything in terms of the safety of the people from a policing standard was covered off.”

Aside from that, BN helped load a few supplies, but spent most of his time in an and advisory role. Mostly he was just there to answer questions.

BN feels it would have been better to deal with the regional aspect of the response (the need for a northern command centre) earlier on in the exercise. But at the same time, he said, the rural people, with the possible exception of farmers, were in better shape than most of the urban people. For example, one of the people on their list was a woman in her 80s, who lived out on the Washburn Road. She didn’t have a phone. She had no power. She was actually one of the people he checked personally in the snow storm. They had a tough time finding the place, he says, but that was OK. “We knock on the door with snow halfway up to our knees, and we go inside to check on her, it’s about 8 o’clock at night, pitch black, and she’s cooking a turkey on the wood stove. It was like it was Christmas time, you know, the smell outside, you could smell this turkey. She didn’t offer us any turkey, but anyway ... we’d been subsisting I guess, very well, mind you, on ham sandwiches and stuff, and here’s this turkey. But like I said, she was not a problem. She had a wood stove, I don’t know if it was her primary source of heat or not ... but it was 80 degrees in there. She had a kerosene lamp going, which she probably has had for 100 years. Not a problem. She had a couple of neighbours that were looking after her. She had a lot of friends. Once the phones came back on line we continued to check on her by phone and we had a tough time getting through, because she was trying to catch up on all the local happenings.”

There’s always a danger that there might be some people out in the rural areas who are in dire straits, BN said, but in general, rural residents tend to help each other out and keep a close eye on their neighbours. “Generally speaking .. they’re much more helpful and much more independent.”

Getting back to the prepared questions, BN said he knew traffic lights were going to be a problem, potential for B&E’s was going to be a problem, patrolling was going to be a problem because it would be difficult to get down some streets. But he said the ice storm didn’t present any insurmountable police issues. “Was it a big deal? At least from my perspective, the answer is no. Was it serious? Yes. I’m not trying to belittle it.” He compared it to the collapse of a Health Ministry roof several years ago in Kingston. “It’s just a matter of going there, doing an analysis of what’s needed ... everything was being looked after in terms of the people. Then it’s ‘how do we make it easier’ ... our function ... we’re responsible to make sure that emergency routes are open, and orderly traffic flow and everything else. Our job doesn’t stop, just because there’s an emergency in a square block. We still have to do all those other things. But yes, it was a slow onset, and I would be surprised if anyone said they knew right away that it was an emergency, because I don’t think they did. Nor would I expect them to.”

Regarding his authority to act, and where that came from: “At one time we had regular visits from our senior staff. The officer that called me in was over to see if there was anything we needed ... Under normal circumstances I would not have had the authority to call in the resources that I did without asking first. And it was nothing serious, but if I needed a car or if I needed whatever ... we had an incident where one of our volunteers dumped a [police] car in a ditch. Under normal circumstances that would be a big deal. During this emergency it was ‘let’s get the car towed out, let’s get on with it, and we’ll deal with it tomorrow.’ It was no big deal. He just slid off the road.” [It was one of their marked community service vehicles].

It’s not normal for a volunteer to drive a police car, BN said, but they were using every vehicle that they had available during the storm. Normally volunteers would use unmarked vehicles. But this incident happened during the day, and during the day, unmarked vehicles are used by the criminal investigation division. The police volunteers were super. [Talk to Inspector Elliott, or Mike Shultz, who is a Constable and the liaison for the police volunteers.]

The job they were tasked with was given to us to organize by the mayor and by Gardner Church, and that’s where BN’s authority came from during the storm. “It could have been just as easily anybody else, but because health and safety and welfare is a police sort of function, they just thought they would have us do it, and then if there was some issues that were police issues requiring further investigation or emergency response, well, we always know what we’re doing in that area. We wouldn’t have to bring anyone else on board.”

BN and Al Melvin generally developed their plans independently and then had them approved by Mayor Bennett or Gardner Church. “We didn’t just go and get the military and do whatever .... through the entire night, particularly the first night, Gardner Church and the Mayor were basically there all night, and we kept them informed as to how the plans were, and it was no problem.”

When BN was out in Pittsburgh, he was the liaison person. If he came across something that he didn’t have the authority to deal with -- and this never happened -- he would call down and contact the police duty officer, and make whatever requests needed to be made. “So we had a lot of authority already, that’s already in place ... that didn’t change because of this emergency ... but certainly we weren’t going to march down a road that [the mayor or Gardner Church] didn’t want us to march down ... It was a very broad brush that was painted, and away we went.”

BN’s own back yard suffered significant damage, but he didn’t check it out until after the snow storm. He was coming home in the dark every now and then, and couldn’t do a thorough examination. “The first night when we left city hall at about 11, we were back at 5 a.m., because we had to get ready for the next day.”

BN was very fortunate to have no family problems. His home never lost power. By the time he was able to call home on the first day, his wife had already taken precautions in case the house did lose power; she had set aside blankets in case she had to move everybody [their three boys] down to the room with the fireplace. BN’s parents live in Kingston, and they didn’t have power, but they had a gas-operated fireplace, so they had no problem with heat.

Money was not a concern. The police department spent money on overtime, but there was a job to be done, he said. Early on people had no idea there would be funds. Other than some overtime, the expenses were not much. [BN said he would come up with a raw figure for how much was spent].

The greatest single piece of luck everyone had during the storm was the fact that the phones never went down completely, BN said. “The phones generally will work but in a limited capacity ... that’s where the cell phone concept was excellent, but they didn’t always work. Radio communications are always a problem [in any emergency],” and were this time, he said.

Asked what he would do differently or recommend be done differently, BN said he would clarify the lines of authority within the EOC. “Make sure everyone knows who is in charge.”

Co-operation between all of the parties taking part in the rescue was “pretty good,” BN said, “considering a lot of the politicking and things that are going on in our community ... But it would be like you working for two bosses. There’s just issues there.”

Police are used to more structure, BN said, and it would have been nice to see more of that over at City Hall during the emergency. “We know who the bosses are, and we know where we have to go, and I’m not sure that was really very clear over there. But I don’t look at that as being super-critical, because the way I look at it is that no one expected this to go on, and to go on, and to go on. In the early goings, for the longest time, there was the expectation ‘Well, this would be over tomorrow.’”

Asked to comment on OPP Sgt. Gary Collins’ complaints about a lack of leadership at City Hall during the ice storm, BN said that may have to do with the fact that Collins was not always kept in the loop. “He wasn’t there a whole heck of a lot. He got floated in after it started. He was there I think a couple of evenings, if I remember correctly.”

Told that Collins’ said he felt excluded from the police command centre, and that this was due to various parties ‘staking out turf,’ BN countered that the OPP did itself a disservice by floating different people into the command centre at different times.

“I wasn’t going to get into that, actually. I’m surprised that he did. But if that’s the case, then, so be it. It’s funny. I didn’t even look at political wars, or the future, or anything else. I had a job to do, and I took that responsibility very seriously, and that’s what I wanted to do ... We found it very, very difficult dealing with four different OPP people. It was like you were training somebody new. Gary Collins came in I think the first night at around 7 or 8 o’clock, and Al [Melvin] and I had already been working on this thing for 20 some odd hours. Joe Marshall had been there partly during the day. Initially, for the first two days, he didn’t even set up ... he had a phone, his own cell phone, which seemed to work, but he didn’t even sit in our command post ... This was going on when we were having the problems with the buses and everything else. He was off doing something, I don’t know. When Collins came in, we had to bring him up to speed, just like a new kid, as to what we were doing and how we were doing it, and we told him what the plans were for the next day, and that we were fully prepared to look after the plan for the OPP deployment if that’s what they wanted, and he said he was there for that purpose, and he then started to develop some maps and stuff like that. He then got called away, there was a sudden death involving a child, a SIDS death out in Elginburg or Glenburnie or someplace. So I could certainly see where he might have some sort of an impression, but when you’re talking a couple of people that have already been going for 20 hours, and a new person comes in and basically has no clue as to what’s gone on and how it’s going to happen tomorrow, and you’ve already been dealing with some of these issues about buses being sent to Sharbot Lake and Wolfe Island, you don’t really have much of a sense of humour.”

“The thing is, we already knew how the military wanted their orders. Gary is an ex-military guy. He kinda knows that. I wouldn’t have wanted to have been in his shoes and come into that circumstance, so there’s no doubt in my mind that he probably felt awkward right from the start.”

None of this was Sgt. Collins’ fault, BN said, but part of it stemmed from the fact that Collins was wearing two hats simultaneously: he was designated to be at the police command post, and he was also the duty sergeant for the OPP in Kingston West. By contrast, BN and Al Melvin were relieved from their duties to run the command centre, and were able to devote themselves completely to that task. “So he [Collins] was told to go down there and do whatever at City Hall ... I’m not sure what instructions he was given. But this comes back to clear command authority. We were under the impression, because we were held accountable ... my name in particular was questioned about why Reddendale wasn’t checked for three days. [It may have been a question from David Cash or someone else.] ... We took that one on the chin, publicly ... And actually Gary Collins was there later on that night, and I made it very clear to Gary Collins that if Reddendale wasn’t checked the next day, I was going to blow the whistle.”

BN said he took responsibility for the Reddendale oversight because ultimately everything that happened the command post came back to him and AM. But he didn’t like accepting blame for an oversight that originated with the OPP, in territory where the city police had no jurisdiction. “I’m not going to make a big public stink over it, [but] it certainly doesn’t make one very happy.”

After three days, BN and AM had covered off every area in their responsibility at least once, and in some cases twice, he said. Within the first two days of operation, the OPP checked some areas twice, without checking other areas once. “I still liken that to communication issues. Like I said, Joe Marshall was not set up in our command post. He was down the hall, yacking on the phone to whomever. If he’d have been in our command post, and I wasn’t going to go chasing him around...”

Marshall was assigned to look after the policing interests of the former Kingston Township, BN said, but that didn’t always seem to be happening. “I certainly had no authority to go down the hall and say ‘Joe, get your butt up here.’ It doesn’t work for me. He just grabbed a table in a hallway and was on the phone.”

Again, BN said, this comes back to the OPP officers having to do double duty. “The thing is, Joe is busy. Joe had other responsibilities. I was tasked away from whatever my other job was to do this. And I felt bad for Gary Collins walking into the middle of it, because he had his other job to do too.”

“I think we were more than fair. There were certain resources available, and we made sure that the resources were shared in as fair a fashion as possible. We didn’t try to hog anything. We tried to explain how we had things set up and why we had things set up. If you’re talking to anybody from the military, or anybody from RMC, just ask them how they thought about ... just ask them a question about police organization, and see where it goes.”

BN said he’s “quite positive” that Joe Marshall had Reddendale on the list to be checked, but it didn’t get checked. “What happened there was that he set up an area that was too big, then didn’t tell them where to start. So they started at the other end and never got down to it. It’s as simple as that. But again, I don’t know what else we were supposed to do on our end except say ‘ This area here needs to be checked today.’”

“We were rechecking areas in the city that had power up after 24 hours, and there was a political decision made to go back and make sure that everything was OK. We weren’t sure what the future issues were going to be, and as long as we had students and the military, we didn’t want them sitting around. Clearly you don’t organize something and then say ‘Oh forget it.’ Our information was that the whole grid and everything could go down again. So what we were trying to do was [give people flyers telling them what services were available if power did go out again].”

As time went on it became more and more of a communication thing to make sure people knew where the shelters were, and so on. The information was changing on a daily basis, so the flyers had to change. It was a challenge to keep the public up to date, BN said.

The first flyer they sent out talked about Frontenac Secondary School, and from the time they printed the flyer and began distributing it, Frontenac Secondary crashed and they switched to LCVI. “So we knew that the information that was being disseminated, at least one aspect of it, was not correct. It’s one of those things. Was there anything we could do about it? No. It’s one of those deals that you just eat. That’s all.”

BN said he’s not sure the city’s emergency plan -- or any city’s emergency plan -- is geared to this kind of an emergency. “You can go around the table, and I’ll bet that all of them are geared to something like an explosion.”

The only contact BN had with EMO was just getting Gardner Church to make the call to OK the troops. Once Randy Reid came on line, the police command centre had a couple of meetings with him.

BN had some media exposure. He went with Neville Murphy and Mayor Bennett up to CKLC once to do a live radio interview. That was in the first three or four days. BN talked to the media whenever they had any questions. They came in and took some pictures of the command post. “It was no problem for us for media. We are sometimes much more restrictive to the media when we’re dealing with criminal offenses. This wasn’t the case at all.”

Most media representatives did their jobs calmly during the emergency, with one dramatic exception. CKWS’s Tony Orr “threw a twister one day at City Hall for some reason,” BN said, “but that got straightened out.” There was a lot of “hollering and screaming” at Mayor Bennett and Gardner Church. Orr wasn’t escorted out of the building, but BN, who knows Orr, stood by in case things got out of hand. BN says Orr was under a lot of stress, and felt he wasn’t getting enough information out of City Hall.

“For whatever reason, he thought people, the mayor or the politicians or whoever, was being secretive. The bottom line was I don’t think they had the information. And it was a simple matter that Tony was under ... he’d been working 20 hour days too, and was under a lot of stress, so I think it was just kind of snuffed off. Anyway, his issues were dealt with by the three of us going up and doing that little talk with him.”

Asked whether he felt stressed out during the storm, BN said he mainly felt tired. “I think the biggest stress would be some of the frustration factors we’ve already discussed. I mean, that would cause stress in anybody. But I’m a big enough person to realize that there’s a job to be done, let’s do it. I don’t really have a lot of time for crap, when it comes to that.”

“I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. I was very, very fortunate and lucky, I think, to have been part of it, particularly what we did. I was tired. We had some issues, I guess that are political issues, that obviously are still at the forefront. And we would like to put those all behind us. But like I said, as far as I’m concerned, we had a job to do. I didn’t have time or the patience for people who were pissing around, and that’s what I felt was happening. I don’t have time for a guy who won’t sit in the command post and parks his ass down the hall. I don’t like that. That’s now why we’re there. I felt that the Kingston Police sent two workers, and the OPP sent their media guy. Maybe they didn’t think it was necessary to do the checks, and maybe Gary Collins is right in that regard, but he didn’t have all the information to make that judgement. Because as time went on, it became more of a communication issue.”

The new city was just eight days old, and people were still feeling out their jobs and responsibilities, and that created a problem, BN said. “At the same time, I think this whole ice storm has been good for the city in terms of making people have to work together.”