IceStorm 98 Study

(This interview began in an impromptu fashion as Mr. Norman and the interviewer were chatting in the reception area while waiting for Dr. Glynn. When Dr. Glynn arrived, he joined in the discussion. They each gave a verbal release for tape recording the conversation. Prior to the tape recorder being turned on, Mr. Norman was talking about what happened during the ice storm and what might be improved upon.)

Mr. Frank Norman, as the unpaid Chairman of the Board of Directors of Kingston General Hospital, feels he might be able to say some things that others may or may not want to say.

Not long after the ice storm, Mr. Norman had a conversation with Allen Hudson, the head of the Toronto General Hospital. Mr. Hudson, along with his senior management committee, was looking at what the Toronto Hospital would have done if faced with the situation in Montreal. Mr. Norman noted that all disaster plans are based on the fact that you decant back into the population but the reality is that the population decants to the hospitals. Mr. Hudson's comment was that, "No. 'Should' is what you may believe."

Mr. Norman's view is that what actually happens is what people feel should happen "and these [the hospitals] were places where they knew they could come. They knew, because of the support systems that were in place, that there would be power and various things like this." There is an organization already in the hospitals which are not in most people's normal ken. (Mr. Hudson is going to talk with some of the big hospitals in Montreal to find out what actually happened there.)

There are two things that stick in Mr. Norman's mind with regard to what happened here. The first thing is, "and I stand self-accused of this one, that we all looked to our own institutions. The focus was to make sure that this place [KGH] could continue to run and provide the care which it needed to do, and so on and so forth." There is an organization in this town called the Southeastern Ontario Health Science Centre but neither its executive or its board ever met during the ice storm. "It was because they all forgot it was there."

Mr. Norman says that they forgot that they had a mechanism in place. He says that he stands self-accused because he spent his life working out how to manage violent situations (in the military). Although there were incidental relationships that developed during the ice storm emergency, there was not the normal gathering that one might expect, even if it had been done as a conference call, on a daily basis. For example, when Hotel Dieu Hospital closed their acute care hospital, it took the Sisters less than an hour to do it. "This is not accusatory when I say this. But there was no reference to anybody else. Now the community didn't know that it happened." He says that this is a legitimate comment "because of the way this place works". People could go to the emergency department at the Dieu and then would be transferred to K.G.H. if that was required. But in the initial 3 to 4 days there was no consultation "to find neutrally interactive solutions to the community problem." There were daily meetings within the institution, but not with the others.

By putting these elements together, Mr. Norman says that you can begin to see how "'all the best laid plans', tested or otherwise..." and makes reference to the fact that in any disaster exercise, everybody is still aware that it is just an exercise.

Although the situation worked out well, it would have been better had the Southeastern Ontario Health Science Centre people come together more. It worked well because of the personalities involved and because of a long-standing basis of there being a trust. "The mechanism was there so that it could have worked right from the outset if the Chair of the Executive Committee had made the first telephone call...."

The other thing about this was that the control of that organization changes on the 1st of January each year.

Mr. Norman was "in and out" of the hospital and involved in a "broader arching" capacity, so cannot give details about the events at Kingston General Hospital during the storm.

Other bits: He says that with a whole mass of people at City Hall doing all the things they were doing, it took him an hour and twenty minutes to find the telephone number of the Base Duty Officer because nobody at City Hall had it on a board sitting in front of them. (He did not go down to City Hall himself.) He needed to contact somebody at the Royal Military College but couldn't get anybody to answer the phone. There is no phone number listed because they are all now on a central system (541-5010), which is not a switchboard in Kingston. It is in Montreal and they were in worse shape than we were. He was trying to contact RMC because we needed people to volunteer to help in the shelters.

He mentions that the Cadets took the initiative to knock on every door in the community, even though the staff told them that they didn't think the Cadets could. The Cadets answered, "We intend to. Would you please go and find out what needs to happen in order to make it legal. We're off." The Cadets have their own hierarchy and used that to make it work. But there was no way he could get in touch with them.

(At this point, Dr. Peter Glynn joined the conversation and Mr. Norman gave him a brief overview of what we had been discussing, including the fact that City Hall was not doing the coordinating because they knew that their hospitals were still functioning.)

Mr. Norman says that one of the more intriguing aspects was that they could not find out what parts of the City were getting power back so they could not discharge patients from K.G.H. back into a place that might have no power. Dr. Glynn adds that the bigger problem, in a sense, was whether people would keep their power once it came back on. Mr. Norman says, "So that became a relationship dependency between City Hall, the engineers here and the staff because unfortunately babies keep coming. And you don't control when babies are going to arrive over a 6-day period."

Dr. Glynn showed up at City Hall on the Thursday night to touch base and discovered that there was a meeting going on, a debriefing of the day, which he sat in on. Out of that, Gardner Church said (the next morning), "We need more hostels. Will you organize them, please?" That was reasonably easy to do because he talked to St. Mary's and K.P.H. and, by the end of that day, St. Mary's had another approximately 40 beds and K.P.H., which had two hostels going in the building in addition to the later Penrose shelter.

At about the same time, says Dr. Glynn, the Hotel Dieu Hospital discovered that "they couldn't cope with what they'd created and needed to decant some folks." The K.G.H. hostel was filled basically with people going over from Hotel Dieu, people who had a particular set of needs. This was all organized within a few hours.

Dr. Glynn also says that, "The other thing that's important here is who you knew." He was able to track down some mattresses through a friend who is involved with Corrections Canada. The Base surgeon is a friend of his so he was able to obtain 10 beds from him. "So that it was a very informal system. Kingston can do that because people tend to know each other."

What they quickly discovered is that, yes, City Hall got them some beds but the beds were only 4 inches off the ground! "Excuse me. You want these folks to get on them? And then they'd flip over as they're getting on them? I don't think so." Dr. Glynn thus points out that there were things that people did not understand that the elderly, in particular, needed in terms of bed accommodations.

Dr. Glynn feels that City Hall was reasonably organized but that there were not enough people or phone lines. But he quickly figured out that the most important thing was to get things to the people who needed them, as in, metaphorically speaking, "get food for the troops" or "a generator for the General". He went into action and was able to get deliveries.

Mr. Norman says that it worked because of the informality, but adds that "one of the things that City Hall needs to do is to go to the Staff College, which sits in this town and did not play a role, to the best of my knowledge. Although there are something in the neighbourhood of 60 officers in the place who could have played a role, who are all trained to do this and [City Hall could] have said to them, 'Devise for us a basic operations centre'." What it needs to have from the point of view of communications and information should be done now. That needs to be part of the planning.

Dr. Glynn comments that there has been discussion for a few years regarding getting a community-wide disaster plan between the previous municipalities, but that they could never find out who was responsible for that so things didn't happen. The other thing was that City Hall did not have a concept of what the hospital facilities were.

He says that Gardner Church was a real asset and that we were lucky that he was around because he took charge but was reasonable and clear. Dr. Glynn was the only hospital C.E.O. who showed up at City Hall even though he had not been contacted. He went to ask if they needed help. He says that it's also important to know how to "keep it simple". But he says that it came together quite nicely. That was interesting because there were three different phone systems, CanTel had gone down, and there are only so many cell phones in stock at one time in the City and they couldn't find access to the cell phones....

The biggest problem, says Dr. Glynn, is that "this was a creeping disaster" and there is very little experience with creeping disasters. People were of the mindset that "this would just be one night and the power would be on". But it kept getting worse and worse. "So it took at least two days for people to figure out that this was a wholesale disaster."

Another thing that was confusing was that Mark Edmonds, who is the President of the local branch of the Red Cross, is also one of the managers at the Hotel Dieu Hospital. This was confusing (not to Mark) because he would show up once as Hotel Dieu Hospital and another time as Red Cross and he kept having to say 'I'm Red Cross'!

Mr. Norman, who chairs the Board of Directors of St. John Ambulance in Kingston, added that it was intriguing because "at no stage of the game in the thing, until Peter and I were talking at one stage of the game, was there any understanding that there were people who could do specific bits and pieces." They are now doing their own post-study regarding this. At one point, Mr. Norman had passed on a call for help but he couldn't get in touch with the contact point. The switchboard could not find him. In the meantime, they were being asked to go and help in other areas where St. John Ambulance, in fact, had a much larger role. Brockville and Cornwall, for example, because the broader range of resources that are available here were not available there. So they were off doing things outside of the "Kingston orbit".

Dr. Glynn says that another thing that complicates this issue is people's own personal situations. He mentions a man who had no power, a newborn baby as well as a 3-year-old and "we're saying 'excuse me but you work in a hospital, get in here, we need help', and his wife is saying 'excuse me but I have this baby and little child, no heat and no power'."

Mr. Norman, reflecting again on how one does disaster planning exercises, says that when a disaster actually happens and happens in the way this one actually did, "then you have a different problem on your hands". His own family had no heat and no power, had to find some way to cook food (and their Coleman stove was in Halifax). His wife says, "It's really quite intriguing how long it takes to hunt and gather."