IceStorm 98 Study

The ice storm started on Wednesday evening. At that time, because I was primarily interested in equipment, it wasn't really an equipment problem. At that point, the hydro lines hadn't started to come down. I woke up about 5 o'clock the next morning with trees falling down in my neighbourhood. When I looked out around the neighbourhood - it's a fairly new neighbourhood, so not very big trees - I could see a number of trees had snapped. I decided to head into work to see specifically if the sanders were able to keep up with the work. I left my home in the former Pittsburgh township and crossed the LaSalle Causeway to get to the city. I tried to get to the City Works yard on Division Street. I ended up zigzagging all over the place because a lot of wires were down and at that point it looked like a war zone downtown. I stopped at the City Works yard and at that point there was not a real equipment problem. I bee lined back to the utility building here to find out what was going on from a corporate point of view. At that point Gardner Church had called a meeting. I took on a communications role at that point. That's when I left Joanne O'Marra and Brian Woodcock here and they took on their completely separate roles. I tried to start to put together maps for the city for the different departments. We had only been working in our new city roles for a few days and I hadn't even met all the staff yet. The main problem at this point was in the public utilities and public works areas.

Did you attend the first important meeting on Thursday morning and if so, what was the atmosphere like?

Yes I did along with the fire chiefs, police chief, utilities, public works, transit people. Canceling bus routes was an issue as well. There was a real line between the people who thought it was a big problem and those who didn't. It took me about half an hour to get from the Causeway to the public works yard on Division Street. I remember thinking that with the amalgamation that had just taken place, where would I find all the information that I needed. Fleet operations looks after the radio systems. We had five different radio systems in the trucks, and the people in the trucks couldn't talk to each other.

How about the question of authority in all this after the first meeting? Did you proceed as usual? Was the hierarchy still more or less intact from Gardner Church down to you people or was it more ad hoc because of the exceptional circumstances?

The mayor stepped in right away and we knew that he was making the calls on things. At first, it was very definitely Gardner and the mayor who identified that it was mainly a public works tree and utility problem. So they were the main people giving directions. After the meeting I began to think of all the problems that were going to come up with the communications. The phone lines were down between City Hall and here. Our first priority was to get rid of the wires and get the trees off the road. Later on the line of authority became a bit blurred. Because the control group only met once every 12 or 24 hours, in between it was really a case of going out and doing whatever you could to make things work. As things progressed and because of my former role as utility engineer in Kingston Township, I took on whatever role was needed at that time, e.g. finding out the status of the treatment plants which also led into the next role that I took on. Some of the treatment plants were without power and I knew the people to contact to get through to in order to get a status report and they were looking for generators to back up those plants. We had to get backup generators for places like old age homes. The next role I took on was coordinating the outside volunteers who were bringing in generators and finding wherever we could a supply of generators.

Was money a concern through all this?

With the generators and cell phones we got into some really major expenses and I was told at the time not to be concerned with money. We were looking first at getting generators to places like old age homes or medical care facilities. The welfare of the people came before the cost at that point and it was really up to whoever was looking after the generators to make that call.

Did you feel that priority was given to machinery and hard services at first and that communications were taken for granted or underestimated in their importance?

It was very difficult to get information out to people. Part of what I did at first was track down how to get hold of the person who could answer the question and I kept updating the list of phone numbers and contact people and who was doing what. The hard services were given priority. The cell phones were overloaded to such an extent at times that you couldn't even get through on them.

What worked well and what didn't? What would you do differently next time perhaps?

I don't think we will ever run into anything like this again, mainly because of the amalgamation happening just three days before the ice storm. People didn't know what other people's jobs were, they didn't know how to get in touch with them, they didn't know the streets, they didn't know the geographical areas, or who was in charge of what. All of that is not going to happen again. We are working on an emergency plan and the key is to have some of the essential information together. Some people really amazed me in how they stood up to the challenge. Joanne is an good example. Brian Woodcock is another. He called in volunteer line crews from other areas and coordinated the whole thing.

What was the stress factor like?

I didn't get a whole lot of sleep for about two weeks. I maybe got 20 hours of sleep in that whole time. It was very difficult to sleep. When I did go home I couldn't sleep for more than 3 or 4 hours. When my power at home did come on, my in-laws were there with my husband and for them time had almost stopped, whereas I was going at a very fast pace. I would come home for a very short time, basically just to have a short sleep. That was really difficult. As things started to shift gears and some people from the city corporation started to back out of emergency relief, for me things were still hectic.

Any funny anecdotes?

Gardner had left Lance Thurston and I in charge one night at City Hall. We had had a meeting with the Mayor about 11 o'clock and then the power went out about midnight after everyone had left. We were standing in the Loyalist Room and we hadn't powered up our cell phones. Lance's battery was down on his cell phone and we had to make a call to the base to get them to hook up the backup generator for City Hall. So we made a call to the base to the person and he wasn't able to get hold of the person we needed. The person on the line said he would call back. But the lines were not working! In another incident a military person called in to Lance's phone. Lance said, "You will have to talk to Cynthia because she knows about generators." So Lance passed me the phone and I was thinking this was the person who was coming to hook up the generator and he just wanted to know where to hook it up or whatever, but then the person said, "We want a generator to hook up for our community." My interpretation was that they were taking the generator from City Hall and redeploying it somewhere else. I said, "No. You can't take the generator." I ended up figuring out that this was a private citizen who happened to be in the military who was calling to see if we had any extra generators!

Did you have contact with either provincial or federal agencies and how did that go?

In the main part of the ice storm I worked in what we affectionately called the metro wing of City Hall which is the market wing. We had at certain points about 50 volunteers who came down from different Toronto fire departments, Metro Police and Toronto Hydro. We never would have made it through without these volunteers. The amount of work these people put in was unbelievable. The City of Toronto was also in the midst of amalgamation.

Is there anything you want to add?

We never did get everyone together in our department to talk about how things had gone and I regret that now. I am thinking that we probably should get everyone together just to talk about how things went and how people did their own job plus other things beyond that as well.