IceStorm 98 Study

Steve Cutway [SC] works in information technology at Queen’s University. He supports computer use at Queen’s, with a focus on people with disabilities. He has been involved in Kingston’s ham radio club for 25 years as an amateur ham radio operator. He served as the club’s president twice in past years and has held various other executive roles.

Francis Salter [FS] works for the federal government, and is an information technologist at Kingston’s Prison for Women. His job is to make sure the computers and the network function properly. He has been an amateur radio operator for 17 years, in three different towns: London, Bracebridge and now Kingston, as an amateur operator. He belongs to the radio clubs of all of these cities, and has been involved in the emergency communications part of it in London and Bracebridge.

Throughout this joint interview, SC and FS are critical of the way amateur radio operators were deployed in Kingston, saying club members like themselves were badly under-utilized during the ice storm. They blame Bob Boyd, who co-ordinated ham radio involvement in the emergency response, and say not enough pre-planning was done to identify ham radio resources or set up arrangements between the ham radio group and area municipalities.

SC says he became aware of the ice storm at about 1:40 a.m. on Jan. 8 when he first lost his power. He went back to sleep and woke up at 6:45 a.m. He had a battery radio, and turned it on, and was aware right away that we had a “fairly major problem.” He had no power. His initial thought was to wonder what the ham radio people were going to do. He turned on his hand-held radio, and found that the repeater was still operational. There was some talk, but nobody really got organized until later on that first day. There was no official emergency response on the part of Kingston’s amateur radio group until Saturday morning, Jan. 10. It became official within the ARES group, but SC wasn’t a part of that decision.

There was an ad hoc response in the sense that people were using their radios to report what they were seeing, and a few members of the Kingston ham radio club were doing some out of town work, in terms of communicating with other areas. Some local operators were also listening to traffic and advising people en route to the Kingston area. People were asking what the situation was in Kingston, and would call into the repeater with questions. SC said the organizer of ARES, Bob Boyd, was at the first meeting of the City on Thursday night. SC was talking to Boyd on the air that night, after the meeting (at about 10:30), and says Boyd “didn’t even mention then what ARES would do [to assist the City or the region].”

Asked whether that was an oversight, SC said he doesn’t know. “I think that probably most people were either concerned about their own situations, or they just didn’t quite know what to do. One thing I didn’t realize ... although I was without power, I didn’t lose my phone. Other people even in our area lost phones. If you lose both your phone and power, some of these folks may not have had portable communications ...”

FS said he has lived in Kingston for about a year and a half, and didn’t know what frequencies people were supposed to go to in an emergency. He assumed that it would be the local repeater, but as it turned out, this was wrong. If the local repeater goes down, then the common practice is that somebody gets on that frequency and informs people of the new frequency. None of this was done in Kingston.

He said: “So I look at this from an organizational standpoint. First of all, there’s nothing wrong with warning people that we have an impending emergency here, so stand by. The imperative of this is that in case of an ice storm, the telephone lines are going to go down all over the place. So you get the telephoning done to persons who are going to participate in it, early. You don’t wait until the bloody thing knocks down all the lines. And I think this is one of the things that happened here. It was an emergency with downed lines before anyone declared that it was an emergency. But even then, nobody bothered to call me. And I assumed being an amateur and being on the club and having a telephone number, I should be fair game to be asked. So what I see in this is that, first of all, the initial paralysis of the system of not warning people or not trying to get people on track before the electrical power went down and the phone went down, but even after that, why, I didn’t see a great effort to get persons out to assist with the emergency. Once it was out, the extent of the amateur assistance was to put radios out in four centres for persons who were without power, at emergency shelters.”

FS said he thinks the city made a mistake by excluding the Red Cross from the job of setting up shelters. [See interview with Lance Thurston for a different view of this; he seems to indicate that it was the Red Cross’s decision to stay out of the early stages of setting up the shelters]. “I think there was one shelter set up by the Red Cross. Now, the Red Cross has got experience in setting up shelters, and the reason that you turn this job over to the Red Cross is that they register people who go into the shelters, and if Joe Smith in Dallas, Texas, calls up and wants to know if his mother is OK, they call the Red Cross, and the Red Cross goes to their registry and says ‘yes, your mother is safe and she is at X location.’ These shelters here didn’t do that. They were run by God only knows who... This is I think one of those cases where that wasn’t carefully thought through.”

SC said ARES has traditionally worked with the Red Cross. That has been ARES’s ‘raison d’être’ in the past, but this connection fell apart during the ice storm because the Red Cross headquarters never opened up.

Q: Could that have been because the Red Cross was busy elsewhere?

SC: “No, I think it had more to do with the fact that the Red Cross people discovered that they had no power at their headquarters, and they didn’t know where to turn. And they eventually found their way to the City Hall.”

In general, both SC and FS said the local ham radio group didn’t do enough to help area municipalities during the emergency.

FS: “[We eventually found out] that there were towns around this area that were totally without communications. Their lines were down ... there was Seeley’s Bay, Verona, Westport, Howe and Wolfe islands ... who were without any communications.” Ham radio operators could have helped in those areas, but many were never called.

FS said this goes back to the issue of preplanning. “What it takes is some preplanning; you contact [municipal officials], you let them know you’re available, and then when there’s an emergency, you know where to go, and you know what to set up ... As a matter of fact, if we had wanted to act on this we could have sent somebody over to [Wolfe and Howe islands] and probably had a set-up in two hours, so that they could talk to each other. That one went by us. There was another outlying area around here that asked for communications because they were without it, and nothing was done about this. So essentially we did not do the preplanning [we needed to do], and even when asked, these places really got nothing from us. I feel concerned about that, since I’m in one of the outlying areas that may be affected by this. And I think what should be done is that if you’re going to have an emergency radio group in amateur radio is to get out and get some of this groundwork done beforehand.”

Part of this pre-planning should be to find out who is available to help out as amateurs, and where they’re willing to help out, FS added. “I wouldn’t expect someone from Napanee to drag down to Wolfe Island to be of assistance. These are things that have to go into your response to an emergency before it happens ... as I say, I was in this area for a year and a half, and no one from this emergency communications [the amateur radio emergency service group] ever bothered to ask me. And I’m fairly willing to volunteer on these things. And to the best of my knowledge there were a lot of volunteers around this area that could help out that I don’t think were asked.”

SC: “I never received a phone call, and I think that probably it’s fair to say that nobody did. And whether people felt uncomfortable because they didn’t know what people’s situations were, the fact of the matter remains that if we have agreed to participate in something like this, somebody has to find out, ‘can you help.’”

FS volunteered to help over the air, and one other non-ARES group member volunteered, but only did so because they were monitoring the frequency. FS wound up down at City Hall taking down messages for the ARES group, but he said none of them were of any great consequence because ham radio operators were not being deployed in areas where they were most needed, such as Wolfe and Howe islands.

Q: You’ve both said you were waiting to be contacted, but why would you expect this?

FS: “Because you’re an amateur. I have no hesitancy whatsoever if a person is an amateur to ask them if they’ll help out. The last thing they can say is no. And you have to understand of course that if they have a home situation that requires them being there, you don’t pressure them, for God sakes. You have to respect their feelings about this. My home situation was fine. We weren’t in any stress whatsoever.”

SC acknowledged that part of the problem had to do with the fact that residents were being urged to stay at home. Ham radio operators may have felt they were doing what they were told by the civil authorities by not leaving their homes. He said the group needs to make arrangements with police and civil officials before hand to allow radio operators to travel and go where they’re needed.

SC mentioned a former coordinator of the local ARES group, and said that person quit over conflicts with Bob Boyd during the ice storm. He wouldn’t give the former coordinator’s name.

Q: What role did Bob Boyd play in all of this?

SC: “Structurally speaking, ARES, the group here anyway ... they had an emergency coordinator and three or four assistants. Bob Boyd was the emergency coordinator up until a year and a half or two years ago. And then the fellow whose name I’m not mentioning became the emergency coordinator. But, at the risk of calling a spade a spade, Bob [Boyd] interfered. Bob did not let this individual do the job in the way he wanted to do it.”

Q: So he quit in protest?

FS: “It was a little bit more than a protest. The emergency coordinator told Bob to change the location at City Hall and he [Bob] refused to do it.”

SC added that no one could hear Bob Boyd from City Hall at the beginning of the emergency. Boyd created problems for ARES by choosing a poor location within City Hall, and no one could pick up his messages outside the building.

Q: That’s interesting, because when I talked to Bob Boyd, he said he was placed at the back of the building, where there was no clear signal.

FS: “And he was told by the emergency coordinator to go to the fourth floor, where he would have a clear signal, and he refused to do it. Later, he did go up to the fourth floor, and I was there, as a matter of fact, and there wasn’t a problem with communications up there. If you look at this structurally and the emergency coordinator tells you to do something, the conventional wisdom is that you should do it. In this case, it wasn’t done. And I think I would have done the same thing that the emergency coordinator did, which is say ‘fine, I quit.’”

Q: In the middle of an emergency?

FS: “Well, I’m sorry, but the only way you’re going to get the point across is, if you’re going to create an emergency within an emergency, then do it. And you know the next time that this happens, then there’s going to be an example out there.”

Q: So he did quit in mid-storm?

SC: “Well, in fact, he didn’t, but he was interpreted as having done so.”

FS: “He did eventually quit over this.”

SC added that he believes Bob Boyd may have had a conflict of interest because of his involvement with the city as a consultant. The two roles -- emergency planning consultant and local ham radio operator -- were “complementary yet conflictory,” he said. “If he had some involvement with the city and was attending the cabinet meetings and had some knowledge in that way, he could have contributed to both sides, and he didn’t do that, in my view. The only reason he set up where he set up ... was because he wanted to be where the action was, quite understandably. But he also realized he had a problem, and it’s one thing being where the action is, but another thing if the people he’s supposed to communicate with can’t hear him.”

FS said a lack of preplanning was the biggest problem of all in the way things were handled from the standpoint of ham radio communication. He compared it to Noah building an ark before the storm, and said Kingston’s ham radio community simply failed to build its ark in time.

“We’re all sitting around here and nobody even noticed that there was going to be an ice storm. We had to go outside to see this. And not peek or boo was said about this until the whole thing came crashing down, and then nobody was contacted to participate in this, to get the group together. And finally the whole thing’s dawned on us, and they’re running around picking up a few people on the air to do this ... how many steps have we dropped the ball on here? At least three so far. And then the next thing along with this is that people are out in places where at least three out of four have phone communications, they passed an average of one message every half hour, some of which consisted of ‘I’m coming down to City Hall.’ So you look at the total of amateur radio in this whole thing, and how do you spell, ‘pretty minimal,’ in an area that has 325 amateurs and has 60 odd in the local amateur radio club. I can understand where an emergency coordinator would start getting a little uneasy about this somewhere along the line. And then if you tell somebody to do something, they refuse to do it, you have a person who can’t be understood because he’s in a bad location, who refuses to move, there are so many parts of this, that if you were running an organization, you would jump up and scream ... it comes to the point of saying ‘this was not handled well.’”

Q: And who bears ultimate responsibility for that? Was Bob Boyd really in such a position of control that he bears the main responsibility?

Both SC and FS: Yes.

At this point I ask them for more background, and they point out that Bob Boyd is in ARES, while SC and FS are in the Kingston Amateur Radio Club. Members of the club can also choose to become members of ARES, but they’re separate. The Kingston Amateur Radio Club is a social club, while ARES is ostensibly supposed to handle the emergency responses with amateur radio participation.

FS said his concern is “this is not a city club, this is an area club. We have members from Gananoque virtually over to Napanee. Our total contribution to this was to handle the centres in Kingston, not even the outlying areas.”

SC added that ARES is an international organization ,but that in many situations -- most, in fact -- the ARES function is provided by the club in any given community. Historically, some years back, the ARES group felt it should be run as a separate function from the club because they thought they could have tighter, better control, “which isn’t true,” he said. Twenty five years ago, when SC first started as an amateur, the club did provide an emergency preparedness function and worked with Emergency Preparedness Canada and the Red Cross to ensure that ham radio operators could participate effectively in local emergency responses. “So it was a club function. And it makes sense that the organization with the numbers, because we can call on those people, should be able to perform the function.”

SC pointed to two diametrically opposed things that happened during the storm. The first was positive. It happened on Sunday, and was, SC said, “probably the most effective thing” local amateurs did during the ice storm. Phil Leonard, the reeve of South Frontenac, had lost his phone service. The reeve went to a shelter and asked a ham radio operator to pass him Mayor Bennett’s cell phone number, because he needed to call him. A local amateur filled that request. The second thing that happened was negative, and stemmed from the fact that local amateurs were not being used to serve outlying areas in need. Early on Sunday evening, there was a request for help out in Sunbury. The power and phones were both down at the Sunbury fire hall. It took ARES close to an hour to decide whether they could dispatch somebody. “That would have been a perfect role. I mean, if you don’t have land-based communication, you can use radio. And we should have had people that could have made their way out there. There were even people out there. Now, we couldn’t contact them because they had no phone service either. At one point, one of the controllers said we just don’t have the people to do it. At that point I said ‘well, then we really probably shouldn’t have been involved at all. What really have we done?’

FS: “The question here that underlies this whole thing is: why don’t we have the people to do this? It goes back to the fact that, like I say, I was here a year and a half, and nobody bothered to ask me...”

SC: “Well, I think that’s one [factor]. I think the other one is that we have to do a better job of establishing linkages that everyone within the organization understands, with the municipal authorities, so that when we say ... and maybe, Red Cross knows. Mike Stoneman of the Red Cross knows ... and would have known to contact ARES right away, if he had been in that position. But he wasn’t in that position. The city should be, the police or somebody should be saying, ‘I think we’re going to need some radio help, so I’m going to call on these people.’”

FS: “The really ridiculous thing about this was that it would have taken a couple of amateurs out there [to Sunbury] ... what happened was they had to send the army out to do this. So you’re tying up an army vehicle, and the personnel on it, for something that a couple of civilians could do, and the army sure as heck had a lot of other things to do in an emergency like this. So we could have made a contribution here on two ends: first of all, provide the communications, and secondly, free up a resource that it seems to me was needed somewhere else. My feeling about it is that we just dropped the ball.”

Q: Correct me if I’m wrong, but it sounds as if Bob Boyd and the ARES folks are trying to set up an elite corps, and then trying to distinguish themselves as the ones who can really handle an emergency, whereas the amateur radio club is just there for less emergency related functions.

FS: Has she been listening to...? SC: Were you a fly on the wall [during our last meeting]? ... That’s how I would interpret it.

One of the problems with the local ham radio involvement had to do with the fact that Bob Boyd’s group was using a Simplex [?] frequency rather than the repeater, FS said. There was a repeater in operation, but they didn’t use it. What happens, if you don’t use a repeater, is that each radio has to broadcast in to the next radio. It just cuts down on the distance signals can travel, and may explain why radio operators couldn’t hear Bob Boyd and his group from City Hall.

Q: Why would he not use the repeater?

FS: “This is a story I heard from the repeater owner [John Lewis], so you’ll have to take this as here say ... they asked about using the repeater, and the fellow who has the repeater had it on battery power, and he said ‘yes, you can use the repeater, but I need a generator out here to make sure that it stays on the air.’ They [the ARES group] refused to bring a generator out. They had three generators. They didn’t use any of them, by the way.”

SC: “There were a couple of other instances where ARES could have provided a generator, and they didn’t. I think in this particular case where we would have benefited from the use of that repeater, I think loaning him the generator would have been quite an easy thing to do.”

FS said it’s an “imperative” to use a repeater during an emergency rather than Simplex frequency, if you possibly can. That allows you to involve the widest amount of amateurs.

Q: It sounds like he may have been trying to exclude amateur operators, or keep the group very small.

SC: “We’ve heard all this before, and it’s the biggest crock. The comparison is Watertown. The Watertown emergency went on for ten days, there was amateur coverage that whole time, somehow they kept that repeater up the whole time ... and it was a much less formal arrangement that they’ve got, and they were stationed, they were clearly getting cooperation ... they were very well organized, and it just came together ... People just knew, instinctively, that they should help if they could. I often heard people come on the repeater and say ‘do you need a hand’ ... We didn’t have any of that kind of support at all. And I think we might have -- I know we would have -- if there had been the coverage ... I have never thought that that notion of small is better, and the need for formality ... that’s just not [can’t make out this word] ... and he knows my feelings about this.”

FS: “I don’t see how in an emergency you can adopt the idea that you need this little elite corps that’s going to do everything. Obviously, this guy’s never been in a big flood in Louisiana. You don’t need very much training to put those sand bags into place, I’ll tell you, you just need tons of bodies.”

Q: Is this comparable to radio work?

FS: “To tell you how much training you need, they grabbed some kids out of Christian Academy in Brockville [Grenville Christian College] and turned them into operators [during the ice storm]. The amateur emergency radio group down there used them.”

SC: “There were a lot of things that were done differently in Brockville, not just in amateur radio. I was listening to their AM radio station down there on a Sunday afternoon, and they had stopped all broadcasting other than welfare messages and updating information. They didn’t play music and things like that, like CFLY and CKLC did. That’s my strongest criticism. As a former broadcaster, I thought that the broadcast coverage here [in Kingston] was abysmal.”

Q: Well, they lost some of their towers, right?

SC: “Yes, and I know they worked hard to get information out, but ... I had more people say to me ‘I turned on the radio to get updates, and all I’m getting is music’ ... CBC Ottawa broke away from national programming every half hour or every hour and had local newscasts.”

FS said it would have been helpful if Kingston’s local emergency group gave a summary of what was happening on the air every hour or two during the ice storm, but nothing like this happened.

SC: “That’s true ... it was Tony Orr who I guess at one point got quite hot under the collar, and talked to them and said they didn’t feel they were getting much of a response from the City. I think the City should have designated, and they didn’t appear to, a spokesperson. And yes, the media want the guy, they want the mayor, but they could easily have had a press secretary, a spokesperson...”

Q: They had a communications centre that was issuing press releases constantly. So they were constantly faxing press releases, four, five and six times a day, and receiving phone calls. So are you saying they should have handled it differently?

FS: “I think they should have had a designated person to deal with the media.”

SC: “Because the media’s response will always be, ‘well, OK, here’s the fax, now we’ll go after the person.’ What there should have been is an individual, probably with some media experience, who [could be contacted], and you say ‘you can’t talk to the mayor right now, but I’ll record a minuter with you or whatever.’ They were more concerned about hearing it from the horse’s mouth, rather than, in a lot of cases, getting the information out to people.”

FS offered a summary: “I think I can say with a good amount of justification that the amateurs here could have done a lot more, and certainly could have been useful in a lot of places. Basically what was lacking is that nobody has asked them.”

FS ended up down at City Hall, writing out messages every half hour or so. None of these, with the exception of getting the mayor’s phone number, were anything of any major account. Then he found out that the reception centres had telephones, and he felt it wasn’t a very useful exercise to have also had radio operators there.

FS: “If we had gone out and participated in a meaningful way, like getting over on Howe Island and Wolfe Island, those two communities then would have a radio link with each other ... And then have a connection back to the City Hall, because this is a regional centre. Certainly, in that case, there’s a justification for having someone at City Hall recording messages. I’m not really quite sure whether the City cared about the fact that we had reception centres out there, because what comes out of these reception centres is not really relevant to things like lines being down and telephones being out ... it was a very modest contribution, I’d have to say.”