IceStorm 98 Study

Carl Holmberg (CH) worked side by side with the mayor throughout the state of emergency, serving as a sounding board for Gary Bennett and attending all municipal control group meetings. “I prompted him and helped him and provided an extra set of ears and eyes.”

But he feels that his real role was a more informal one: he became a sort of self-appointed cheerleader for the troops at City Hall, raising people’s spirits when needed, ordering people to go home when it became obvious that they needed sleep, and generally trying to keep the emergency response ticking along in a harmonious way.

CH reports having to kick a number of people (city staff and volunteers) out of City Hall after they’d been up, in some cases, 30, 40 and more hours in a row. Some people refused to leave the building; the most they would agree to do was go downstairs in City Hall and sleep on a cot for a little while before coming back to work.

“I found through the entire agonizing process that I had to lift the spirits of the people here that were putting in hours and hours and hours, excessive hours, beyond the call of duty, to the point where I almost had to kick people out, send them home, and they wouldn’t go. They would lay downstairs on a chair or lay on cots or lay on the floor and have a snooze for an hour or so. Because I had some difficulty trying to get people to take time off and pass their duties and responsibilities onto others, I found I had to cheer lead a whole lot. I had to walk around and lift spirits up and just be regularly a very happy and upbeat person.”

“I wasn’t really an official part of the emergency response team except to be the mayor’s sidekick and his shadow, and to sit beside him and provide an extra set of lips, ears and eyes to spin some new ideas off, and some other thoughts off, and I think he found that I was quite helpful in that regard. Nevertheless that meant that my responsibilities or duties probably weren’t as intense in that area, in a way that would keep me from doing other things, which was walking around and serving a cheer leading role. And I’m pretty good at that.”

Q: Was this understood, or is it something you discussed with Mayor Bennett directly?

“It was an understanding, I think, as much as anything else. I think the mayor felt comfortable that my role in giving him somebody else to spin some thoughts off was great for him, to give him a little bit more confidence in a few areas where there were some pretty troubling decisions that had to be made. Gary and I get along extremely well, we complement each other very well, and he recognizes the fact that I can be a little bit crazy, and I don’t take things all that seriously. So it was unspoken.”

CH remembers that city staff and volunteers sometimes seemed to be under intense pressure. There were tears, he said, but most of them were “self-inflicted” by people who refused to sleep or who found they couldn’t delegate responsibilities to others: “People tend to become very protective of their roles and become completely consumed by their self-importance, I guess. Everybody’s important, but everybody’s also replaceable, and we have to have enough confidence in our [colleagues] to understand that there are a lot of people capable of doing whatever we’re doing.”

In general, CH recalls, there was not enough torch-passing: “I think the relay system should have been a lot tighter. Not every person on the relay should have been running a mile; they should have been running 200 yards, then passing the torch. People carried it too long.”

“When you get caught up in it, you become charged with your little area of responsibility, and you want to do the right thing. You forget that doing the right thing sometimes is not possible when you don’t have a clear head as a result of sound sleep, water and food.”

He recommended establishing a clear organizational chart -- visible on a wall somewhere for all to see -- identifying who is in charge of each area of responsibility, and their alternates. This would help guarantee an efficient flow of information, ensure that shifts are established right away in the event of another emergency, and establish clear areas of responsibility.

“Sometimes [during the ice storm] it was a little bit tough to figure out who was in charge of what ... We kind of knew, as we ran through the hallways here, who was doing what, but if somebody were to walk in and say, ‘Who do I turn to for generator information right now, Carl,’ I would say, ‘Is Barclay [Mayhew] here or not? Who’s on duty now?’ A little more organization in that regard would go a long way.”

CH felt that the city’s emergency plan was geared to different kinds of disasters, and that it wasn’t necessarily a big help when it came to dealing with the ice storm. “This was an entirely different disaster than the kind described in the emergency plan, and required so many people in so many different areas.”

CH’s clearest memory from the “disaster” was of a chaotic City Hall: “The one thing that comes to mind right away, if somebody walked through the front door of City Hall, [it looked like] mass confusion. Bodies running all over the place, seemingly in every which direction, but not really sure of where they’re going. People would wonder, ‘What the heck’s going on here?’ Yet there were so many different groups all working within the same confined space, that were all organized, and knew what they were doing ... they were just all there at the same time. It was just crazy to look at from an arm’s-length standpoint, [but there were] logical pockets of people.”

City Hall was “functioning,” he said, but it may not have looked that way to an outsider: “People were going about their duties. A lot of the people, a lot of the rushing and the bustling back and forth were people running with a piece of paper to and fro, were people looking for someone else, trying to get a message to that party, wondering where that party was, because a few minutes they were at this end of the building, now they’re gone, who knows where the heck they are.”

CH became aware of the ice storm early Thursday morning, at about 2 or 3 a.m., when he looked outside his house in the former Pittsburgh Township. He listened to radio reports later in the morning, and as soon as he heard that the Mayor was about to declare a state of emergency, he left his insurance business and came to City Hall. “This was obviously a lot more important, so I basically closed the shop up and told my wife that she may not see too much of me for a little while, depending on the situation.”

The building housing CH’s own business, at the corner of Kingston Mills Road and Hwy. 15, had a flooded basement. “It was in terrible shape. Everything was falling apart in that home. It was not a pretty picture. Nevertheless I had to bite the bullet and set my priorities, and my priorities lie with this community ... So I suffered certainly some flood and some loss and some damage, like most other people. I’m still cleaning up, in fact ... But again, I asked for the job, and quite frankly, I felt it was important for me to be here.”

CH reports that four city politicians spent a good deal of time at City Hall during the emergency: Gary Bennett, himself, Joe Hawkins, and Dave Clarke. “We pretty much carried the political aspect of [the storm].” Clarke was in City Hall for shorter periods of time than the others, but his presence was helpful because he’s had emergency planning.

The Mayor had to rest occasionally, and when he was resting, CH took over. CH attended numerous control group meetings during the wee hours of the morning while Mayor Bennett was resting up. Bennett handled things by himself for the first few days, but he started to wear out after that. “I think he took a place over at the Holiday Inn so he could be accessible. And I was here for the early morning briefings, the 5 a.m. briefings, and sometimes the 2 a.m. briefings and de-briefings. I got a couple of hours [of sleep] here and there, and I ran myself through the car wash a couple of times to get cleaned up.”

“Gary and I went out into the rural area a few times, in the middle of the night, to check on a couple of the rural command centres, to visit and let people know that we cared and we knew they were out there.”

CH’s wife received a distressing phone call from a family out on Woodburn Road, near the golf club. They were isolated, without heat and without electrical, and they sounded pretty distraught about the whole situation. CH called for an OPP car to check on them, but he wasn’t sure how long it would take the provincial police to get out there, because they were spread pretty thin, so he went out there himself. “I knocked on some doors at 11 or 11:30 at night and disturbed a few people, and I couldn’t locate the problem, and I couldn’t get into this person’s driveway, either, because the power lines were right down, right across the driveway, about two feet above the driveway, and ... finally at about 3 in the morning I found out that they in fact had gotten moved to their daughter’s place or to some other place.”

There were several of those kinds of incidents, but none that ended in disaster.

One of the closest calls he remembers involved a family in the Joyceville area: “We had sent some soldiers to check on some houses in the rural areas, and I heard one report that a family was isolated on a side road ... so I went over there with a couple of soldiers, and there was a woman that was with her 16-year-old son and two young children, around seven or eight years old, in a little bit of a ramshackle home, huddled around a candle, and in a distraught, upset state of mind. In that particular instance it was a good thing that we had the soldiers out to find the stressed people and be able to move them. We moved that family to a shelter.”

CH met with the media on a number of occasions and tried to play “a calming role” on radio and television: “I tried to act as the voice of reason and calm, I guess, and impart information and try to update people as much as possible.”

Only one of four local radio stations, CKLC, was up and running during the better part of the storm. “It became our umbilical chord to the public.”

CH had high praise for city staff and volunteers who helped with the response: “People showed a tremendous amount of dedication and enthusiasm towards doing the job right. That worked so well, and it shows that in tough times, the right people are here, willing and able to take charge. If anything else happens, I have absolutely every confidence that the people who are in senior positions, and in fact all positions, that volunteered their time and put the effort in, will pull this community through.”

He singled out Gardner Church as an “impressive” leader who rose to the occasion and got things done: “I don’t believe this community would have gotten through the way it did without Gardner’s leadership. His contacts, his ability to collect a problem into his hands and analyse the problem, and I guess realize different solutions, is just tremendous, tremendous. I have a greater respect for him now as a result of watching him operate. Tremendous.”

One thing that could stand to be improved is organization: “There needs to be a flow chart of some kind put up on the wall, so that everybody, not just the command post people, but all of the front-line workers [can] rush to an area and find with a quick glance chart who they should talk to, who’s in charge of what, what their phone numbers are.”

For example, CH said, there should have been a central place where all shelter information was being updated on an hourly or more frequent basis. “[There should be] ongoing updating as to what shelters were open, what the space availability is, where a person can call, or how does a person get to that shelter, and what shelters are capable of and what they’re not capable of... some of the shelters needed to be supported with generators, and our generators sometimes weren’t kicking out anything other than electricity, no heat. You needed to know those things. If you had a physically disadvantaged person, for example, you didn’t want to send them to a shelter that only had lights, you’d want to send them to some place with heat.”

CH recommended a military-style approach with a central flip chart for all of this kind of information: “We should have had somebody there, just like they do in a military command centre, updating the map ... Most of that stuff was being done in some way, but not in a way that was visibly, easily accessible. These are all fairly quick decisions that you’re trying to make out there, so it’s frustrating when you have to scurry about, searching for information and wondering who you should talk to.”

CH did not incur any costs on behalf of the city, but he lost business as a result of the storm. He calculates he lost about $800 or $1,000 worth of income every day for the five or six days that he kept his business closed. But the real costs are higher, because he lost clients who went to other insurance brokers. (He runs a brokerage network of people across Eastern Ontario; they come to his office and he’s a resource for them to sell to their clients. When he is unavailable, they go to someone else.) “So it [closing up shop] was a fairly dangerous thing for me to do, and I certainly paid the price for it.”

CH didn’t have any special contact with federal or provincial emergency measures, but he sat in on all the meetings with the EMO. He said Emergency Measures can co-ordinate all of the areas where you might need help, ie., Ontario Hydro, access to generators and supplies that you need.

Q: Do you think they played a central role, or did Kingston primarily go it alone?

“Quite frankly, I’m confused as to what the role was of the Emergency Measures Office. Gardner [Church] may have a clearer sense than me. But I get more of a sense that we kind of ran our show, but maybe he was doing more behind the scenes administratively than I’m aware of. He may very well have a lot more to say. He’s had contact with emergency measures, and so has Randy Reid.”

CH recalled one instance where the local representative of Emergency Measures Ontario tried to carry out a job that was already being done: “I had already co-ordinated a lot of the military help, and Randy Reid came in -- and I’m not trying to downplay his role -- but Randy came into co-ordinate the military help. Well, it was already co-ordinated. I was already doing it, I’m already well-connected on the base anyway.”

CH recalled a visit from two South Frontenac Township officials -- Gary Stephan and Michelle Fox, a councillor -- who were concerned about their rural residents. Stephan and Fox came into City Hall at about 10:30 p.m. to talk to city officials. “They were distraught. They were in a very upset frame of mind. Fox was distraught, and they needed help, because they were worried about their residents who were isolated out there in the rural communities, who were potentially in harm’s way, and what were they going to do.” CH had already organized another 100 soldiers for the following day, to come in and help the city. When he heard about the problems in S. Frontenac Twp., he called Kirk Thornton, the assistant commanding officer up at CFB Kingston, and talked him into releasing 20 or 30 of those soldiers to S. Frontenac. The plan was to have the soldiers make door-to-door visits (just as they were already doing in the city) to make sure people were OK. [At this point CH went off-record and explained why those soldiers never wound up going to S. Frontenac Twp. The decision had to do with another official within the township].

Most members of the public seemed to tolerate the blackout fairly well and understand that city staff were doing their best to provide essential services, but a few people became irate, and one or two prominent Kingstonians behaved badly: “Everybody, when they’re isolated, is acutely aware of their own personal problems. And after a time, the toleration level gets very thin, people get upset, and rightly strike out ... I witnessed personally verbal abuse and intolerant behaviour by people I respected as leaders, and people who I thought would know better or perform better. Right in the lobby of this City Hall, about their own problems: ‘I don’t have heat, I don’t have power.’ They came in and started to scream. These are people who are intelligent, well-known, respected people in this community, coming in, [saying] “I don’t have heat... my basement’s flooded,” like little children.”

“There were a few phone calls that I personally received as well that had the same kind of intolerant, self-serving kind of attitude on the telephone, failing to understand that there’s a ton of problems out there, and they’ve got their health, and their lives aren’t in danger, and they’ve got enough food. They’re just uncomfortable. Those calls were few, though. And I think that’s a positive statement rather than a negative statement. Because there were few, that means there are a lot of people out there who were biting their tongues and suffering through it.”

If he were to face another emergency of this kind, CH said he would spend more time out in the shelters meeting people and trying to comfort them: “I would spend more time out on the front lines, out at the shelters, and shaking some hands and extending some hugs, I guess, to people who were down and out and distressed. And that includes the workers as well, not just the people in the shelters... everybody deserves to have somebody stroke them a little bit.”

CH had high praise for councillor George Sutherland, who spent the whole emergency delivering generators to farmers in the former Pittsburgh Township and wider rural region. “George was a one-man show. I kept giving him hell for taking on too much. He took on far, far in excess of what any reasonable person could expect, and he took abuse for it from some quarters. He actually took abuse. George should have had a sidekick or two to help him through the rural part of the disaster he took on. I don’t think he had to take on as much as he did, but George is one of those people who just jumps in with both feet and can’t get out and can’t say no. He has one huge rural community to cover. Huge. District 1 is so big, and the farm communities were all suffering because of a lack of generators for their animals and so forth, and that on top of their own heating, of course. Fortunately a lot of them had wood stoves.”

CH has no paper trail from the emergency: “I don’t have anything at all, other than what’s fading from my memory.”

He also had a lot of positive things to say about Tracy Newton [see interview], who spent the whole emergency working in the phone centre at City Hall and later doing the same at the Gore Road offices, after the emergency command centre moved into the former Pittsburgh Township offices: “She was one of the people that I couldn’t get out of here; she was a real workhorse all the way.”

Newton, who is now administrative assistant to Lance Thurston, used to work for Pittsburgh Township. CH thinks he noticed a greater proportion of former PT employees in the emergency command centre than other groups: “It was very noticeable, in fact, that there was quite a contingent of ex-staff members of the old Pittsburgh Township that were here, well above and beyond in total numbers what you would expect of the old city.” He attributed that to “spirit and caring. People in the old Pittsburgh, the employees of the old Pittsburgh, regarded their community as family, and I think that some of that may be apparent here, too, in the city, and some of it may have been apparent in the old Kingston Twp., but I didn’t see the kind of spirit, I guess, the examples of it that I saw in Pittsburgh Twp.”

CH said he wasn’t particularly stressed out during the emergency, but he did get tired after a while, and tended to feel guilty whenever he went home to rest. “I felt guilty and I wanted to get back in again. But I think the importance of what we had to deal with, and watching it being successfully dealt with, charged me up.”

In dealing with the military and arranging to have troops visit people’s homes, CH said he used both formal and informal methods. He was able to get around some of the normal procedures for requesting military assistance, but he still had to provide detailed information about what troops would be doing and how they would be deployed: “The military is very organized and systematized, and you still have this pecking order to go through ... Yes, you’re getting exceptions made, and yes, you’re getting around the bureaucracy, but there’s still that tendency to have to follow the steps in the process. If I made a phone call to the base commander, he and Col. Thornton were extremely co-operative, but once you start to trickle down beyond that, there is, rightly so, a system. After all, am I going to send troops into the city tomorrow to go door to door, or are they going to pick up brush, or handle chain saws? You need to know exactly how to dress them, how long you’re going to need them for ... you’ve got to tell them what you need.”

The RMC cadets were not well equipped for exterior work (picking up brush and so forth); they weren’t outfitted in the full military gear. So the things they could do were more limited to the door-to-door; work that was not so physically labour intensive.

CH’s own military background helped smooth relations with base officials. CH was a commanding officer in the intelligence corps., and served as a long-range sniper (artillery man) in the RCHA (Royal Canadian Horse Artillery), until the late 1960s.