IceStorm 98 Study

Mr. Ward is responsible for the administration of Ontario environmental legislation in the region that extends from Port Hope, eastward to the Quebec border. It includes all of the territory in Ontario that was struck by the ice storm. The legislation administered includes the Environmental Protection Act, the Ontario Water Resources Act and the Pesticides Act. MOE deals with environmental issues including water and air quality, sewage treatment, industrial activities and waste disposal, which were issues dealt with as part of the ice storm response.

Significant event:
Brian Ward was in Toronto on Wednesday and Thursday, the 7th and 8th of January. On the 8th, he was to have been joined by one of his staff at an important meeting. Ward said that he first knew that “something was up” when his staff member did not make the meeting and ended up participating in part, from his home by conference call because he could not leave his home because he was iced-in. But Ward still didn’t realize the severity of the situation because the employee, who was unable to make it to Toronto, lives in the country and has a long driveway, which Ward reasoned would make him more susceptible to the weather than others.

That afternoon Ward went to Union Station in Toronto to catch his train home to Kingston. There, he learned that all eastbound trains were cancelled because of the weather. He realized that the ice storm was a significant event.

He made a series of phone calls and found out how bad things were. He called the Ministry of Transportation to find out what the roads were like and then caught an eastbound bus at 4:30 p.m.

While returning to Kingston by bus, Ward used his cellular telephone to contact a number of his provincial civil service colleagues including the Kingston manager of the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing who told him that 13 or 15 municipalities had declared emergency status. Realizing that the situation was serious, he telephoned his Assistant Deputy Minister’s office and learned that the Provincial Emergency Plan was going into operation, that the Provincial Operations Centre was being established and that his Ministry had staff heading to it at 5:00 o’clock that afternoon.

Nature and scale:
“Unprecedented on two counts.” “One is, the geographical area covered and the significance of the disruption to people’s lives… Having (half of) eastern Ontario completely without power and significantly affected in such a fundamental way, was one serious aspect.” Two, for this Ministry that is in the business of dealing with emergencies, “our own staff had the dual job of dealing with the emergency on the home-front and also having some role to play in the emergency on a professional-front, at their job.”

What did you do?
By the time he got back to Kingston, there wasn’t much that he could do. At 11:00 p.m. he got a call at home from people in another Ministry informing him that the Mayor’s office was requesting that the provincial ministries stay closed the next day, Friday January 9th.
That request was awkward to deal with given the difficulty of communicating across the ministries in the middle of the night.

Ward noted that his Bay Ridge home was not affected by a loss of electricity and that perhaps that was helpful as he needed to be available for his staff across the region and for the Ministry’s office in Toronto.

On Friday, Ward went to his office and contacted other ministries toward a common policy for the Ontario public service in Eastern Ontario. It was decided that all offices would be officially closed on Friday. The managers and senior staff, who made it in on Friday, were put to work telephoning to contact the other MOE offices in Cornwall, Ottawa and Kingston to check into personal and office wellbeing. They called municipalities and agencies to monitor such concerns as water and sewage treatment facilities that may have lost power.

Ward also commenced regular contact with the Provincial Operations Centre and the senior management of his Ministry to keep current on the emergency response.
MOE Kingston did not lose power during the ice storm but telephones lines were sometimes irregular. They did lose power a few weeks later for an entirely different reason. So their vulnerability to power failure is a concern. They are reviewing what can be done to install an effective back-up power system.

Initial monitoring found that things were in good shape. The Ontario Clean Water Agency (OCWA), a Crown agency that runs half the water and sewage treatment sites in eastern Ontario, reported that most sites were fine. Ward credits this to their having responded to MOE’s 10-year campaign to encourage municipalities to install or have stand-by power available. Others, non-OCWA, were the same.

On the first weekend, Ward received some calls about water and sewage. The utilities were informing the Ministry of notable but not serious situations, which the Ministry needed to monitor but which the utilities were handling. Being a regulatory ministry as opposed to a service ministry like the Ministry of Transportation, MOE did not have things like large generators to lend to sewage plants that needed back-up power.

Early the week of January 12th, Ward’s office learned about oil spills from downed transformers. They knew that a small percentage of them would contain PCBs in the transformer oils. Unless they were threatening, the spills were a secondary concern to restoring electricity to communities.

With power down for almost a week in some areas, industrial operations were being affected. An example that needed rapid response was the dairy industry. Without power, milk processors had to stop production and the material in process became waste. Without power, refrigeration was lost which jeopardized storage of both finished products and raw milk. Milk as waste, is a very difficult substance to deal with and while it was important to keep milking the cows, much of the milk had nowhere to go to be stored or processed. Ward worked with the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs senior management in Guelph, the Milk Marketing Board and processing plant managers in addressing the milk problem. The role of MOE was one of consultation and to “broker solutions” which they did in this case by finding a way for the milk waste to be processed at the large sewage processing facility of Ottawa-Carleton.

In a similar fashion, problems faced by other industries were resolved with the limited support of MOE. It is the responsibility of the industries to deal with their problems. MOE’s expectations were that the Ministry would be informed as required and that the industries or utilities et al. would make their “best efforts” in dealing with the problems.

Why is milk so difficult to deal with?
Ward explained that milk has “very concentrated organics, a very, very heavy B.O.D.” (biological oxygen demand) which is a measure of how much oxygen it takes to break material down. The B.O.D. of milk is at least 100 times the B.O.D. of regular sewage.

Dilemma of the Mayor’s call for the closing of offices:
The initial problem was the inability of Ministries to contact one another after hours and the lack of a standard protocol on office closure. Although, Ward thought that a protocol would not have likely worked because of the particular circumstances of this storm and its effect of immobilizing the whole region. Ultimately, closing offices on Friday was obvious because of the inability of most people to get to work. Ward interpreted the Mayor’s request as being in the interest of keeping people off the roads and streets of the City. He felt that, as few as ten of his staff were needed to deal with any emergencies that might arise and he assumed that the closing of the office did not preclude the calling of the staff needed to deal with the emergency.

What discretion did you have?
As a regional director, Ward can make judgment calls based on, among other things, priorities of life. At the same time, MOE was asking everyone to do the best that they could in the circumstances. He felt that there was excellent cooperation. For example, hydro needs to report spill locations. In the circumstances they were told to keep track and only report every couple of days.

How were decisions made and how effective were they?
Open communication was maintained internally and with outside organizations. Staff had contacts and the confidence of the regional director to carry out tasks independently while keeping their seniors informed. Ward felt that open communication with competent staff made for good, effective decisions.

Communication:
Ward communicated regularly with the Provincial Operations Centre and his Assistant Deputy Minister. He communicated regularly with his own key staff, who in turn were contacts to other organizations in the field. He also communicated on an ad hoc basis with issue related contacts.

The local MOE team comprised five managers and a few “key staff”. They met at least twice a day to identify issues, to organize and to report.

Biggest challenge:
For most people it was dealing with the home front. There are staff who are permanently on-call to respond to emergencies like oil spills or process breakdowns. In the event of a problem, they would be called upon, whether at work or at home, to respond to the emergency. In this situation, most everyone was already a participant in the emergency.

The Ministry did what it could to assist the communities. Here is an example of supporting staff volunteering in their communities. MOE has a mobile lab in a converted Winnebago. The lab is powered by two generators. When it was learned that the village of Portland was without power and would be a long time being reconnected, an MOE staff person remembered the mobile lab. Arrangements were made to get it to Portland, where it went from block to block, being temporarily connected to home furnaces, which helped people regain some heat in their homes.

Ward commented that he thought that “It was very difficult for people who didn’t live through it to really understand (the impact of the ice storm).”

The sixty regional and district staff of MOE did a great job in supporting one another, especially those who seemed a little shy about asking for help. The Ministry’s Employee Assistance Plan is available for those who wish to access it.

Emergency plan:
The MOE emergency plan was used in part insofar as the Ministry in Toronto was part of the Provincial Operations Centre.

Ward felt that the local operations of the Ministry could have structured things a little more with single points of contact that might have made communication with Toronto more efficient, although it wouldn’t have really changed the outcome in eastern Ontario.

Anything else:
After a week into the storm, the Eastern Ontario Directors’ Council became a vehicle for communicating within the provincial ministries in Eastern Ontario. It helped familiarize the senior people of each Ministry as to what other ministries were doing and what was being discussed and decided about issues of common concern like hours of work to be credited, overtime calculation and work in the community in working hours.

There were also operational linkages such as the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs with the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing working on financial relief.

MOE, the Ministry of Transportation and municipalities are working on what to do with wood chips. The producers of wood chips are responsible for dealing appropriately with the material. MOE is advising them as to how the wood chips can be used or disposed of in a safe manner.