IceStorm 98 Study

Denis Leger (DL) was at home when the ice storm hit. Some of the big beech trees on his property were falling on the house and on the car. He and his wife were watching and feeling a bit panicked to see branches fall so close to the bay window. He woke up his son and they watched the storm together, and saw trees falling on both sides. Very little damage, if any, was done to his home, in Kingston West.

The next morning he went to look after his insurance affairs. He hadn’t realized the extent of the damage in the downtown until he saw it. He figured it was just that they had old beech trees at his house and they were possibly rotted inside. He called Gardner Church at the Holiday Inn to tell him he would be in shortly. Church didn’t indicate at that time the severity of the disaster, although it was about 7 or 7:30 in the morning and he may not have known himself at that time.

DL came in slightly after the emergency had been called and when he heard it on the radio. No one had called him at home. He thinks Church and others had called in those who were largely impacted, such as the public works groups and Utilities.

DL said it became apparent throughout the process that he was needed to set up a purchase order system. This emergency was more chaotic than most because there were all sorts of people volunteering to come in who did not know exactly what they would be doing and were making purchases. It was DL’s responsibility under the emergency plan to implement a purchase order system.

DL said he was listed in the Kingston Township emergency plan (he worked for the township before being hired by the city) as a designate to the chief administrative officer. He is not sure if the city’s plan has a section for the chief financial officer, but he is sure that he is the chief designate to the city’s CAO.

DL is not sure if, under the city’s emergency plan, he would be part of the emergency control group. He said the architect of the plan, Robert Boyd, had asked him if the tasks assigned to the chief financial officer in the plan are correct, but DL said he hasn’t had a chance to respond.

As designate of the city’s CAO, DL inherits all of the CAO’s emergency plan duties, as chief advisor to the mayor, if the CAO is absent.

DL said he did fill in for Church at certain points when he needed a rest, as did Lance Thurston. [Church said the job often went to LT].

DL said one of the two key duties he had involved purchasing. One of the major purchases by the municipality was food. Food was needed for the volunteers at City Hall, the works crews, and the linemen at the Utilities building. That process of feeding city staff, volunteers and outside crews was in place from day one, DL said. The cafeteria at the Utilities building was run by Joanne O'Marra, who did an excellent job, DL said.

DL said people at City Hall didn’t realize how many people needed to be fed. There were line crews all the way from Etobicoke, Toronto and all sorts of volunteers from Kingston, and all of them needed to be fed.

DL headed a crew of business analysts and people from the economic development commission who had volunteered to help out during the emergency. They have a lot of contacts through KAEDC, he said. One of them, Kelly Shaver, a business analyst who reports indirectly to DL through a budget manager, was instrumental because of her contacts with the restaurateurs. She had once been in the hotel industry, and used those contacts to arrange food.

Ann Pritchard, Lynn Jordon, Pat Villebrun (administrative assistant to Dave Cash at KEDCO), Amanda Flynn (DL’s assistant) and many others contributed to feeding the workers. They worked 18 hour days just to make sure these people were fed. They were making the food, catering, and making sure people were paid (although because of their contacts they were able to get quite a bit of food for free).

The emergency lasted so long that by the end the city couldn’t expect restaurateurs to continue providing food for free, but in the initial stages they did what they could.

Another key area DL and staff helped with was setting up generator logs with Barclay Mayhew, Jamie Brash and Cynthia Beach. Many generators were loaned to the city by other municipalities and private businesses and individuals. “We had to make sure that they were logged in and logged out and dispatched to other municipalities such as Wolfe Island and South Frontenac. We helped develop that log and made sure there was a process in place for Jamie and Cynthia and Barclay to follow.”

“We did lose track of some of them,” DL said, but that was inevitable, given the number of generators and the widespread need, not just in the city but in other parts of Eastern Ontario. When generators were shipped to other municipalities, the system to an extent broke down because some of the logs there were not as well maintained, DL said.

“We’ll probably end up having to pay for replacement of some generators. We’re still amassing [details on] that,” DL said. “We’re looking at those as bona fide emergency costs that we can get reimbursed from the province because we were looking after the bigger picture, not just the city of Kingston.”

Cynthia Beach would know how many generators were missing. She has provided DL with a listing but he is not yet sure if it is a comprehensive list.

One thing DL was doing was calling around to remind people not to forget to keep track of their costs.

He was also a part of the emergency control group meetings, where he provided updates on the setup for the generators, the setup for the restaurants for the food, and also he did issue some orders, with the help of Linda Lamb and Bob McConachie, to have a centralized purchase system.

Part of their job was not only to remind people to log their expenditures, but also to make sure they got purchase orders. In this kind of emergency, purchase orders did not work, except perhaps for the bigger orders. With so many different people doing so many things, much of it by phone, it is very difficult to maintain any kind of central purchasing system.
People did an excellent job under the circumstances, DL said, but normally there would be people designated to purchase goods and services. In a situation like the ice storm, many people were forced to make snap decisions and they were instructed to do so, just to make sure things went as smoothly as possible.

In terms of accounting, “they did an excellent job,” DL said. They dropped off folders of invoices daily, or the folders were picked up, and Debbie Bowen, from the clerk’s department, input them into a log and Sharon Simpkins (Bob McConachie’s secretary) maintained that log. “We had control in that folders were being returned to us and we were inputting these on the log because we knew that the province of Ontario would be asking us how much the emergency cost . . . if not on a daily basis, on a semi-weekly basis.”

DL said they were in constant contact with the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing (the local office), Emergency Measures Ontario and also the city’s insurers and insurance brokers, so they could determine their responsibility versus the city’s responsibility.

The city has two insurers. Frank Cowan Co., which insures most of the municipalities in Ontario, insures Kingston’s property but not its utilities. Another company, Mearie [?], insures the utilities separately.

The city had to find out the coverage for property damage and also what was covered from the utility infrastructure point of view. The city also had to find out from both what the city’s responsibility was for damage to third parties, such as trees falling on cars etc. Most of the damage caused would have been from city trees or from failure of water, electricity or sewage failure. For example, basements were flooded because the electrical failure meant that sump pumps were not working.

Fortunately, there were no failures at sewage and water treatment plants. “We kept our fingers crossed and that didn’t happen, so we were fortunate there,” DL said.

Asked whether the city would be liable if a city tree falls on someone’s house, DL said no. That would be covered by the homeowner’s insurance plan.

Asked how much the ice storm wound up costing Kingston, DL said he provided estimates to the province in mid-February, indicating damages somewhere in the area of $22 million to $23 million. A large part of that was infrastructure costs needed to rebuild the city’s utility system. That alone was in the neighbourhood of $10-11 million. These were not costs that had been incurred, they were estimates provided by engineers from Toronto who evaluated the utility infrastructure. [See documents from Toronto Hydro, under the name Sironi].

So far the province has forwarded $2 million, some of which was for emergency help costs. An emergency help fund was set up to provide food, shelter, batteries, things that people needed immediately, and could not wait for the disaster relief committee to look over and process their claims. DL said the city probably spent about $500,000 on those immediate needs and another $1.4 million on the emergency cleanup costs and food. The city also spent about $133,000 on other municipalities’ emergency costs.

Other municipalities were very generous to the city by providing knowledgeable staff and paying them. Most of the municipalities provided trained staff at no cost to the city except for the travel, hotel, food and possibly the incremental payroll costs. “If they worked overtime and it was over and above what Toronto was prepared to pay, then we would bolster that.”

Some of those incremental payroll costs have come in from those other municipalities, but others are yet to come, DL said. They are waiting for the province to issue directives on how to process those claims.

DL said it was his understanding that some of the utilities from other municipalities volunteered their time, with the understanding that Kingston would be expected to do the same in similar circumstances elsewhere in the future.

Kingston and Smiths Falls were twinned with the city of Toronto. “Judging by the amount of money that we’ve incurred so far -- and I do stress so far ¬¬-- which is $133,000, we haven’t been billed for their day-to-day costs. We’ve been billed, if anything, for the travel, for the lodging, and we expect to be billed for any incremental payroll costs.”

But DL said whenever there is an emergency, you never get fully reimbursed from provincial or federal governments. “We always hope to, but the experience has been in the past that there aren’t enough dollars, either available federally or provincially, to pay for all emergency costs.”

Asked what happens to Kingston’s budget if the city is not fully reimbursed by the province, DL said “I've got my fingers crossed on that one. I’m hoping, having said what I said before, that the province will come through. The province has to negotiate any emergency cost funding with the federal government because it is, to a large extent, a joint responsibility.”

DL said the city realizes it will take some time to assess all costs and he is sure all of this will not be finalized until some time late in 1998.

“So far, we’ve actually spent a little over $2 million ...,” DL said. “We’re expecting to spend a lot more than that. We have programs under way for brush removal, which are going to cost us some money. We’re also very fortunate that the HRDC came in with a federal program to top up people that are on unemployment insurance for the brush cleanup. We’re very fortunate that federal assistance is coming in more ways than one.”

The HRDC project will be for brush cleanup for individual homeowners.

DL said the most recent figures he saw from Brian Sheridan for the cost of cleaning up public parks was in the neighbourhood of $500,000 to $600,000. That doesn’t address the issue of replanting trees, the maintenance of trees that are damaged, but may not have fallen down.

The brush cleanup is necessary, not only for safety reasons, but also because it doesn’t do the city’s tourism industry, or residents’ morale, any good to have branches sitting around for a long time. But the community has really pulled together, DL said.

The Jewish Community Council, for example, has set up, with the city’s assistance, a trust fund for the purchase and planting of trees in certain parks. “I think that will go a long way to making this city as attractive as it was prior to this ice storm,” DL said. The trust fund has raised more than $20,000 and is buying trees of a certain circumference at about $100 per tree. Organizers are hoping the city will chip in to plant and maintain the trees, which is quite a chore in the tree’s first year. Brian Sheridan has estimated that for every $100 tree, you can expect to spend $150 to plant and care for it in its first year.

Did you think about your authority to act?
“Being chief financial officer has its advantages, so if I were to decide to make any purchase or direct people in certain capacities, I didn’t feel I needed authority from Gardner. I think Gardner made that quite clear from the onset, because we were meeting fairly frequently, that [you] do whatever you can to get the job done. That’s a directive he gave to people. We have 13 or 15 senior managers. You know what your authority is. Just get it done. It’s never been an issue.”

Nancy Taylor at Utilities expressed frustration about being pestered to keep receipts and logs of all purchases at the same time she was being run off her feet trying to deal with the emergency itself. She felt that to do so, she would need more help, and suggested that you send over an accountant. Was that a common reaction?
“Accountants take it for granted that things can be recorded and recorded with ease,” DL said. “But people being placed under those stressful situations could not keep up with our requests. But I think they knew well enough to set up key people in their departments to handle that kind of thing.” As long as they had someone good at administrative detail, they didn’t really need extra help, DL said. In that particular office, they had Joanne O’Marra keeping a lot of the financial records.

It may sound like a broken record to ask people to keep an account of their expenditures, DL said. “But when it all comes down to it, if you don’t have that accounting mechanism, you may not get reimbursed by the province of Ontario. So it’s to everybody’s advantage to make sure they maintain those records, and I think people under those circumstances are frustrated by such a process, but nonetheless, they did a good job.”

DL said he often felt like the bad guy, bugging people for receipts and invoices, but he thinks everybody recognizes the role he plays.

DL said one decision that was handled in a very different way was the decision to contact Emergency Measures Ontario and the ministry of Natural Resources to get some very expensive mobile telecommunications equipment. Getting rare equipment like that can’t be taken lightly, DL said, because some other municipality may end up needing it for an emergency elsewhere in the province. “You don’t take it lightly because you insisting on them and then not using them could have an impact on another municipality somewhere or another key emergency situation.”

“We didn’t end up using it, quite frankly,” DL said. Randy Reid (councillor and Emergency Measures rep) was able to help the city procure the expensive equipment from either Long Sault or Sault Ste. Marie (DL is not sure which), through the MNR. “At some point or other it was thought to be needed either in South Frontenac or Frontenac Islands because of the telecommunication breakdown at that time, the phone systems being down.”

DL is not sure if it was ever dispatched to one of those municipalities. “It did cross our mind at some point in time that somebody might have been in dire need of that equipment elsewhere.”

DL thinks the city had instructions from Emergency Measures of Ontario that the equipment was not to be dispatched without hearing directly from them or the province.

The fact Wolfe Island was without power for such a long time is probably what got the equipment here in the first place, DL said.

DL said he assisted film crews from the Toronto fire department and the Metro Toronto police who were here. Joanne O’Marra was instrumental in getting a helicopter crew to go up and videotape the damage, not only to the infrastructure in Kingston, but also to see the damage done to some of the poles and some of the infrastructure on Wolfe Island and up to Seeleys Bay. Unfortunately for the city it was not done in the first couple of days, so a lot of the cleanup had already been carried out. “Had we been able to secure that helicopter maybe a little sooner, we may have gotten a better indication [of how bad things were].”

The main purpose of the visual record film crews was to prove to the province how bad things were and substantiate the plea for financial assistance. DL is not sure if the tape has yet been forwarded, but expects it to be a thorough visual record.

Bob Crawford and Stefan Powell, both from Toronto, were part of the video unit, DL said.

What was your biggest problem? Picking up the pieces when you returned after leaving the building. When you left, you would often come back and find you had inherited different responsibilities. You didn’t always pick up where you left off. “Sometimes people felt strongly that if they didn’t stay around the clock, and sometimes I felt that way, that the job just wouldn’t get done, because there were too many people assigned to certain tasks.”

Sometimes you didn’t know who was the person most responsible for certain tasks and that made things very difficult when they changed shifts. The person most responsible was no longer there when you returned, DL said.

Was there a lack of clarity as to who was the ultimate boss of any area?
“I think so,” DL said. “Or else in some cases we had too many people assigned. And if the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing, it’s very difficult.”

An example of this occurred in the generator area, he said. It was very difficult at times to find out if Cynthia Beach was in charge or Barclay Mayhew or Jamie Brash. All of them did a good job, but people in other parts of the emergency response had a tough time knowing who of the three to deal with.

What didn’t work well, aside from that?
In general, DL thinks the response went relatively well, given the city was in the midst of an amalgamation and that many at City Hall had new jobs. “If each department had duties that were better stated and we all knew what our duties were and our designates duties were, the city probably would have had a better sense of control, at least initially,” he said.

Were city officials consulting Bob Boyd’s emergency plan throughout?
No, DL said. Part of the problem was that the emergency control group and EOC were not in the location they were expected to be in. If they had had the amenities of the Staff College -- the flip charts, the boards etc. -- it would have helped. But DL heard that there was no power at the Staff College and wonders if, by the time its power was restored, it might have been too late to change venues.

He also has mixed feelings about City Hall as the site for the emergency control group.

DL’s own emergency training is limited to a few mock disasters and table top exercises he observed or took part in in the former Kingston Township.

What will you change as a result of the ice storm?
At this point nothing has changed much, DL said. But once the new emergency plan is ready and formally adopted by council, the city will be in a better state of preparedness because each individual unit will know what it must do. He will have to come up with his departmental plan and that will be crucial, DL said.

DL said the Emergency Measures Ontario was very helpful and it helped having Randy Reid on council for advice on who to contact. The Ministry of Municipal Affairs was also helpful in getting the city in contact with people.

“In hindsight ... we probably could have gotten somebody (from EMO) here earlier. I don’t know if it was because they knew Randy was going to be involved in it, but Randy I think was assigned to a little further East in Ontario.”

Randy was torn between this place and further east, he said.

DL’s contact with the EMO was great, he said. Mainly they discussed financial and telecommunications issues and to find out what other resources they had.

DL had some contact with the media regarding with financial side of things. He gave a few interviews.

Asked whether he felt stressed out during the storm, he said yes, but that he saw people around him putting in even longer hours, and realized he had it relatively easy. He doesn’t recall putting in any more than 15-16 hours a day. He never worked around the clock -- as some did -- because he knew he would be of little use. It was difficult for his family to not have him around, but they only lost power intermittently at home, so they were in fairly good shape. It was stressful not being able to be with his family during that time.

Asked for more details about the damage at home, DL said his beech trees fell on his roof and took part of the roof and eaves trough off. They also fell on the cars, one of which needed some body work. The roof repairs were fairly costly, but there was no structural damage.