IceStorm 98 Study

Kingston This Week is published on Wednesday and Saturday and distributed free of charge to approximately 47,000 households in the Kingston and surrounding area. Their office is at 677 Gardiners Road in the former Kingston Township.

Dan Donohue [DD] got up Thursday morning and could see the damage outside. He also heard about the storm and school cancellations on the radio. But he never lost power for any length of time at his home or office throughout the storm period.

When DD went to work he found that he had electricity but no staff. Most importantly, no photographer [the paper’s staff photographer lives in the country]. So DD packed his camera and headed for the downtown area. “I just kind of followed my nose to see where a lot of the damage was.” He also listened to the one local radio station that was still on air and “they were mentioning how much damage there was in the Johnson St. area.” He explored the downtown area taking pictures, talking to people and “just seeing what was going on.” He spent most of the morning downtown.

Thursday is a deadline day for the Saturday paper. “So it’s actually a busy day usually.” But the storm was the story that day. When DD got back to the office, he noted that their photographer had made it in to work and had gone out to take photos as well. The next thing was to get in touch with the rest of the staff to see who would be coming in. “We were still on deadline, we had power and our printing plant had power. So we were going ahead to publish for Saturday.”

“We were looking at basically putting together as much information as we could about the storm and getting that in the Saturday paper.” The next paper is the Wednesday paper. Writing and editing are done on Monday, with finishing touches done on Tuesday morning and it goes to press at noon Tuesday.

They were initially short two staff members, but much of the staff was without power for varying lengths of time. “So, we were juggling around, getting people in and out, trying to accommodate them as much as possible...”

“We weren’t hit too hard so it wasn’t really a hardship on our part.” The phone remained functional most of the time.

“Were able to continue working almost as normal. It was kind of a strange feeling in one sense, because you were reporting on this great disruption, which is only a few blocks away, but at the same time we were running along pretty much as normal...”

Their priority was to get useful information out which might be helpful to people.

They had no big problems; “it was almost odd in how well things ran here as compared to just a short distance away.”

For the first couple of days city hall seemed unorganized, but it was soon issuing “a rhythm of press releases and information from various places.” In fact, access was easier during the crisis in some ways since they were geared up for issuing information.

“If we had to cover it again I would have put more resources into covering activities at the city hall emergency area. As opposed to trying to find stories.”

The paper met all their deadlines as per normal.

DD notes that, although they were roping off Johnson St. because of the branches and lines coming down, “there were so many people out it almost felt like a day at the park, everybody was looking at the damage, people were out talking and wandering around. The lucky thing was that there was enough power out that none of the lines that were coming down were live, because as people were walking around the branches were dropping and the lines were still coming down. The strange thing was, we never saw a police car, we never heard anybody warning people to get off the streets and most of the people I talked to down there had no radio...no way of getting any information. I think that’s where the emergency plan broke down. People didn’t know where to turn for information if they didn’t have a radio. [They] should have had somebody on the streets telling people to get of the streets. The fact that there was nobody doing that gave it an air of calm that was deceiving. The sense of calm was strange.”

“It would have been great to publish extra pages and write up all the stories. If we’d had the time and the resources to do so but we didn’t.”