IceStorm 98 Study

The Brockville Recorder and Times is a daily newspaper with a circulation of 16,000. It has been published in some form since 1821.

David Taylor [DT] lives about three miles outside of Brockville in a house on the St. Lawrence River. On the evening of Wednesday, January 7th, he was on the phone with his girlfriend in Ottawa and they were comparing notes on storm conditions. He awoke Thursday morning at about 5:30 with the wind howling through the ice laden trees. The power, which had gone off at about 3 am, would not be restored to his home for 11 days.

He scrapped the ice off his car with a paint scraper and headed to his office in Brockville. Although the lane to his house was covered with downed branches, the main road to town was in good condition. Driving into town at 7 am, daylight was coming up revealing power lines down all over the place. It was raining heavily and the town was dark with no power [the whole city lost power at 7 am when the main transmission lines into Brockville came down].

DT arrived at work shortly after the main power failure. By 8 or 9 am it was obvious that they wouldn’t be able to publish a paper that day. The publisher started calling around to alternative press sites were they could publish from.

As editorial staff supervisor, DT sent the reporting staff out to collect stories. “The rest of us kind of hung behind and collected batteries and flashlights.” DT had a small battery powered radio in his office and they listened to the local radio station “...which was really kind of a life line to the community through all this. They provided the basic survival information for everyone.”

The rest of Thursday is a blur. DT was concerned with getting coffee and food to his staff and keeping things going. “Thursday was a novelty day”.

He swapped his car for a 4 wheel drive vehicle in order to get around more reliably and drove around town to have a look and perhaps do some reporting, “...it was amazing to see the whole city just pitch black. ” The roads were covered with snow and sleet and driving was terrible. DT stopped by the city works garage and talked to the mayor, they were in the process of declaring a state of emergency. He got the information on what the City’s plans were and went back to his office. He slept there for the night.

As they realized that there would be no paper published on Thursday “...the push was on to try to get a paper out on Friday.” But the printing presses are on site and, without power, were unusable. They thought they would go to Cornwall to publish but then Cornwall lost power as well.

In the mean time they moved some equipment to a private school, Grenville Christian College, which had a generator and was set up as an emergency shelter. The connection with the school was made through a former employee of the paper. They took a number of pieces of equipment and relocated the newsroom with hardware and typesetters to the college. This became their new base.

The lack of cell phones was a problem but some of the staff had their own, and they managed to borrowed a few more.

People went out and did their stories and seemed to enjoy doing their work.

The thing that worried people the most was the seniors and concerns about hypothermia, fire and carbon monoxide poisoning. There were cases of people dying from carbon monoxide and in one case a women died from burn injuries when her night-gown caught fire from a candle.

They didn’t publish from Thursday until Monday. Along with the problem of no power to print, the publisher felt that the conditions were too unsafe for the kids to be delivering papers. They got in touch with the Kingston Whig-Standard and made arrangement to have the Monday paper published in Kingston.

They had taken hundreds of photos so the goal was to get their own darkroom up and running in order to prepare the pages. They managed to get their hands on a large generator and an electrical engineer to wire the generator into the building.

The Monday paper was completed by 3:30 am and then taken to the Whig-Standard press in Kingston to print and returned to Brockville by 12 noon. By then the power was back up in downtown Brockville and they resumed their normal production schedule.

But there were several employees still without power for a number of days; “It was two worlds for the balance of the week.” Those with power, and those without.

Since the storm, they have been actively searching for an appropriate alternative power supply and access to cell phones. “As far as the operation goes, it’s all about communication and electricity, those two things are absolutely essential.”

Stress wasn’t a concern initially, since people “...really just drove on adrenaline for the first week” However, DT noticed that, as they got into February and March, “...that the hangover was significant, and it didn’t really break until the weather broke.” He noticed a decline in productivity and that people’s tempers were short. It “...took a lot out of everyone. I know, I was feeling it.”

After they were back into production they published a lot of updates and progress reports on the power situation. They dealt with Tom Smith at Ontario Hydro. It took a little while to get the communications link worked out. Initially “they wanted to treat the media the way they do their other customers, and tried to cycle [us] through to call centres in other cities, [but] we wanted to speak with supervisors who were actually on the ground telling us what was going on.”

“It was one of those things that, well, obviously you never forget. What was different about it, for a little paper like us, is that [normally] you spend a lot of time looking from the outside at big stories. Whether it’s an earthquake in Afghanistan or a nuclear blast in India or, who knows what, or even the Saguenay floods and the Red River floods, [this storm] was really, for a lot of people here, their first experience at being at the centre of attention and having to play the role of the medium of record in a community on a national story. And I think, for a lot of the people here, it was tremendously exciting and a unique experience, one that I hope we never have to go through again. I’m happy with the nuts and bolts, meat and potato [reporting] that we do rather than big disasters.”

“I’ve covered big stories in other countries before and as an outsider you drop in, you cover the election, you cover the disaster, you cover whatever the heck it is, and then you leave, you go home. Here, you cover the disaster and you go home and the disaster is still there. That brought a depth to coverage you wouldn’t normally get because you know exactly what’s going through the heads of everybody who you talk with.”

“I think, as a result of [our reporters] being out in the field so much, they ended up bringing new voices to the paper, and finding people who we didn’t know because we had no excuse to go talk to them really, and so you end up with new contacts, you learn new geography and points of view and all those sorts of things that are all valuable.”

Professionally, this was a positive experience.