IceStorm 98 Study

CM awoke the morning after the storm and didn't realize anything was wrong until about 6:40 a.m. when she started receiving phone calls from some of the daycare staff saying they couldn't get in to work. At this time Cheryl was still the supervisor of one of the City's daycares. CM had power so she had no idea the severity of the situation until people started calling her. She says that after receiving 2 or 3 phone calls she thought it was odd that the staff who lived in different areas were experiencing the same thing.

Cheryl got a hold of the director of the other daycare. She says they couldn't get a hold of anyone in authority to tell them whether they should be shutting down operations for the day. They decided to do this on their own. They shut down the programs for the day and phoned the radio stations to spread the word. About half an hour later she got a call from Lance Thurston, the Commissioner of Client Services, telling her not to come to work for the day. She and her kids curled up on the couch to have a quiet day. Lance then called back and asked her to meet with him and others at the Midland Avenue office for an emergency meeting in 20 minutes time.

Cheryl left her kids behind (for the morning she had told her daughter) and took off for Midland Avenue. She ended up over at the P.U.C. for the first of what was going to be many emergency response meetings. She says that basically she didn't see her kids again until Saturday morning. She ended up sending her mother over to her house by taxi to pick up her children and take them home with her. Eventually Cheryl's mother's house lost power and she and the children ended up moving back into Cheryl's house.

She says that they (the City) thought the storm would be over by the end of the weekend. She says their thought on Thursday morning was to set up the shelters assuming that they would probably be needed through the weekend.

Cheryl and Lance had the responsibility of calling in the Salvation Army and the Red Cross who she says were their "key partners". A meeting was held with these organizations on the first morning of the storm. They talked about where they were going to locate the shelters, what schools could be opened, etc. Through the course of the rest of the day (Thursday) the target was to get the various shelters up and operational by 3 or 4 o'clock in the afternoon. She says one of the biggest problems that they had was trying to get a hold of anyone at the school boards because all of their contacts were by phone and the phones were out. She says this was a real learning curve in terms of things that need to happen next time. Addresses as well as phone numbers need to be obtained for all contacts so a police vehicle could be deployed to find people.

The Salvation Army looked after the food. The Red Cross provided the volunteers. Social Services provided the staff for the shelters. Cheryl then moved down from the P.U.C. to City Hall and set up operations from the P.U.C. She says that it took her an hour to get to City Hall because she got lost on Queen's campus because there were so many lines and branches down. Operations continued from City Hall for the duration of the storm.

Cheryl continued to manage the shelters from the sidelines (i.e. from City Hall). She had to make sure that supplies were getting out to the shelters and that volunteers were being sent. She used a cell phone for this. Radio communications were also set up part way through. She says there was a whole team of people down at City Hall ensuring that the shelters were equipped. She laughs and says they all ended up with nicknames by the end of the crisis. She says they actually had a great deal of fun. "It was like being away at summer camp". "We were literally all living together".

Cheryl says a couple of people were assigned to "supply distribution" for the shelters. As the process continued, the Red Cross were built into this and eventually took it over. A supply depot was set up at the Princess of Wales Regiment building. This continued to grow. Huge convoys of things came into town. It was difficult to do "inventory control" because there was so much stuff coming and going. She says they are still looking for the odd generator that went missing. Cheryl received progress reports from the shelters on a daily basis. There were a number of incidents that happened at the shelters--some of them not so positive.

Cheryl laughs as she recounts her first night shift working at City Hall. There were about 12 people working at the time. The phone centre had been set up and people were feeling pretty much as though they had a handle on the situation when the lights went out. Nobody had a flashlight. No one knew where the light switches were, where the fusebox was. None of the staff had worked out of City Hall before. Fortunately, the power was only out for about 5 minutes.

Cheryl says that Mike Stoneman from the Red Cross spent most of the storm at the shelter located at QECVI. She says they would talk during the wee hours of the night. She feels that he needed someone to connect with at City Hall.

Cheryl describes the shelters as being "very much a microcosm of things happening in the community". There was a lot of education to be done (i.e. concerning public health). People were under a lot of stress. Families had been moved out of their homes. Some of these families had been under a fair amount of stress before they had to go into the shelter. This resulted in some instances of having to call the Children's Aid in to help out.

CM says Penrose was the last shelter to close. There were some people there that had moved through the other shelters. They were homeless and were being put back on the streets. She says for two weeks the City's prime goal was to house and feed people. No one wasn't going to have a place to sleep. Then suddenly at the end these people didn't normally have a place to sleep. The shelter couldn't stay open because the storm was over. Cheryl says there weren't a lot of homeless people but enough to make an impact on her. She has since started to do a lot of things with homeless people in the community. This came to life because "we had a homeless community". Everyone knew how it felt. She found it quite upsetting that there were people living better in the City's shelters than they live on a daily basis. She says now that the storm is over, this needs to be looked at.

CM says Councillors were very good at going out and visiting the shelters through the night. She says a lot of them got really involved. George Sutherland got very involved with the rural populations in making sure that the farmers got resourced properly. She says that it was very much a team effort from the top down. The mayor hardly left City Hall.

Cheryl says she thought it was really strange that on her drive into work in the mornings the Cataraqui Mall was open and people were shopping. She had heard that the bars were busier than ever because people weren't going to work. She says that she almost was angry at the people who were shopping.

Before the decision was made to close down the shelter at Penrose, Cheryl and the people from the Red Cross met with the people at Penrose. They talked one on one with everyone down there and made sure that they had some place to go. People were given assistance in getting home. Nobody was sent home without workers making sure that they made it safely. People were incredibly appreciative for all the staff had done. Some people received homecare for the day to get them settled.

Cheryl says the City did have some affiliation with the hospital shelters. She says they received calls at "operation central" from school shelters with medical problems. People with medical problems were sent on to the Hotel Dieu shelter/hospital. CM says Mark Edmonds from the Dieu was an amazing resource through the whole thing. CM says they had a conference call from operation central out to the hospital shelters to talk about how they were moving people, who was going to occupy what kinds of beds, etc. At some point nurses from the Health Unit were brought in to work on some of the City's phone lines. They were able to determine in some instances where people should be sent.

CM says although communication was as good as they could make it, it could have been a lot better. Things were co-ordinated but not nearly as well as they could be the next time around. She thinks this is partly the fault of the emergency plan. She says it doesn't clearly address who's doing what, identifying the key players. Another part of the problem was that City Hall also became the focus for too many activities in one spot. It was the emergency call centre and the operations centre. This was almost too frantic because calls were coming in going out. "Having all of this activity in one spot was a little overwhelming".

CM says they didn't have the media. She says they would have made a huge difference if they had been available all of the time for them to use. This would have cut down on the number of phone calls. People wouldn't have had to call in for information. Every kind of phone call was coming through on the same phone lines (i.e. volunteers, donations) etc. CM calls it "semi-organized bedlam". People still came into pay parking tickets in the middle of the storm.

CM says she was in awe of the range of community support throughout the storm. She feels there should have been more psycho-social support at the shelters during the storm (and after). CM found the storm stressful and she didn't have the outside stresses that some other people had. It got worse as the week progressed.

Resources and equipment came in from other communities from as far away as Stoney Creek. After the storm was over, people dropped by City Hall with homemade pies, etc. to thank the staff for the great job they had done. When the distribution of the emergency fund began at the Midland Avenue office, the wonderful community effort started to get greyed by people double dipping, duplicating vouchers, etc. The same thing happened internally with staff. Some people expected to be reimbursed for all of their extra hours. There were a lot of others that didn't think this way.

CM says there were extra costs incurred by the City due to the ice storm but no extra costs to her department specifically. Overall documentation is available from City Hall as well as the logs from the shelters. She says the shelter operations were expensive to run but no where near as expensive as paying the hydro and electric crews. It was an expensive week. The City replaced all of the food that came from the Salvation Army. This is an expense that would not normally have been incurred.

Cheryl says the City is in the process of trying to think of something that can be done to thank the community. A list is being compiled of possibilities.

Within two weeks of the shelters closing, Cheryl met with the people who were involved with the shelters to discuss what could be done better next time. There was a list that came out this meeting of ways to attack things a little bit better next time.