IceStorm 98 Study

Gardner Church (GC) was the acting chief administrative officer of the city of Kingston when the ice storm hit, and had been for the sum total of about three days. As Interim CAO he is responsible for four main areas: general administration of the municipality; interpreting council's directions to the municipality; representing the city to the province and other municipalities; and insuring that all the systems, primarily performance management, are up and running.

GC first became aware of the ice storm early Thursday morning. He was staying in the Holiday Inn, and at about 2 a.m., he noticed that the lights were affected in the hotel. This happened to wake him up, and when he stuck his head out the window he realized City Hall was dark. That was very unusual, and worse than that, there appeared to be darkness right up Brock Street to Hotel Dieu, GC said. That caused him some concern. He got dressed to go over and see what the situation was, and found as soon as he got outside that things were pretty bad.

GC phoned the Utilities building and was assured that power would be restored in due course, but that a lot of trees and branches were falling, many of them taking down wires. The city's various backup generators seemed to be where they had to be, so he went back to bed. About 6:30, he got up again and received a phone call from the mayor. A tree had gone through the roof of Gary Bennett's house, causing considerable damage, and Bennett had been up most of the night. GC returned to City Hall at 6:30 or 7 and took a quick reconnaissance around town, first by car, then touring the more hard-hit areas on foot. He then suggested to the mayor that he would be in touch with the utilities while Bennett tried to make contact with various emergency services. They scheduled a meeting for 10 a.m. to decide their next course of action.

GC then drove out through what he described as "a most bizarre scene" to the utilities building. He talked to Jim Keech about the severity of the outage, and at that time GC says he considered the main issue to be the power outage and the continuing risk of branches falling and the obstacles (such as live wires) in the city streets. GC, Keech and the police and fire services did a risk assessment, and at about 10 a.m. they all held the meeting where everyone was to report.

Before that, at about 8:30 a.m., Nancy Taylor of Utilities had produced the emergency plan. That makes her the first one to recognize that the city was facing an emergency, GC said. GC had neither seen nor read the plan in advance, but had followed its preparation through the transition board, so he had some knowledge it existed.

GC began putting the plan into action right away by phoning all the people who were listed in it and seeing where things were. He was able to get in contact with everyone except the Medical Officer of Health and Ontario Hydro. The medical officer didn't take long to call back, but GC says it was three days before Ontario Hydro contacted Kingston.

During that same round of calls, GC called the the Correctional Staff College, which was designated under the emergency plan as the city's primary EOC, to see if they were ready to receive city officials, but found that they were not ready. They had lost power, had a tree blocking their entrance, and the building was running on an emergency back up system.

Two thirds of the emergency people who were in the plan showed up to the first municipal control group meeting. Others were either represented by someone or attended over the phone, or sent their apologies. But GC said "we had pretty good response, given the impossibility of navigation in some areas and the fact that people were scattered to the winds." They heard situation reports from Jim Keech at Utilities, local fire officials, and police. The fire service had accelerated activity, and the police "had a pretty good situation." The OPP had done a very careful inventory of their area of responsibility, and it became apparent that this was a fairly major activity, GC said.

At that point city officials set up regular contact with Environment Canada, and were getting updates on the weather. GC remembers the noon forecast from Environment Canada was "positively terrifying," with a prediction of high winds and more ice. By noon that day, Mayor Bennett was persuaded that the city had an emergency on its hands, according to the criteria set out under the emergency plan. The Mayor and GC had a brief discussion about where they should place the command centre. The Staff College was hors de combat (out of the battle), they had no electricity, and the Woodbine Fire Hall seemed to be awfully far out of the centre of the action, particularly since keeping the hospitals in the central core in power was going to be the main challenge. If the city was going to set up shelters, it had to make sure there was a reliable power source for the emergency relief facility. So the decision was made to use City Hall. GC says it was "in some ways ... an inspired decision and in some ways a decision that created all kinds of problems."

"We needed a better located primary and back up facility in terms of this plan, and I gather we're getting one. [The PUC building on] Counter Street would have made a much more sensible location for everybody. It's more central, and it's a logical place to have continued. Woodbine Fire Hall is a long way from the population centre. City Hall was a good location, but City Hall is a poor building for this sort of function, because City Hall does have to continue to function."

City Staff began to get organized in City Hall by about noon. Lance Thurston was given responsibility for setting up shelters and arranging for city officials and volunteers to be fed. Jim Keech was asked to set up a process whereby he could operate 24 hours out of Counter Street, and Brian Sheridan was asked to put together a framework for beginning to clean up the city. The police were charged with getting a better situation report. The fire service was also charged with looking at issues that were of particular concern to them. GC got through to the medical officer of health. Each of the people specified in the emergency plan, with one or two exceptions, had useful roles to play, he said. Emergency planning had anticipated the people we should have had there. There were one or two people who, because of the particular nature of the crisis, were not involved. And there were one or two people who were not on the list, but who became involved anyway. (For example, Lance Thurston's administrative assistant, Tracy Newton, wound up establishing and running the phone centre at City Hall.)

"The sole gaping hole" in all of this was that the city could not get a response from Ontario Hydro, GC said. City officials had no idea how much of the system was out. So early Thursday afternoon, GC asked the OPP to do an analysis of how much of the rural areas were out of power. GC said it was a difficult job for the OPP to do, and would have been unnecessary if Ontario Hydro been up to the challenge. But, he said, in fairness, Ontario Hydro had devoted its entire head office response to the disaster that occurred farther east, the previous night. Kingston happened to get the ice storm one day later than some other areas, and GC said he believes Ontario Hydro's resources were already completely dedicated. Some of those resources had been sent to Quebec, while others were dedicated farther east, "and our situation was simply either not of sufficient concern, or they didn't have sufficient capacity to respond to our situation." GC said "it was a very serious and dangerous situation for some time, working in a system in which we had no idea what was hot, what was not hot, what was going to become hot, what wouldn't."

Could Ontario Hydro have given you this information?

"Once we made contact with their line person, we were able to find out that there was no significant reconstruction going on, it was line-by-line work, none of the big systems were out, and we could very quickly begin to work together. But that took three days. I don't blame the line personnel. There's a tendency to blame the local folk. Local folk were up to their yin yang with downed wires and downed trees, and they shouldn't have been hanging around their offices on the phone. They had much more important things to do. That Ontario Hydro could not, as a system, find a senior manager for several, several, days -- Jim West finally arrived -- is, to my mind, inexcusable. And [it was] the only really serious glitch in our process."

The rest of the process went "swimmingly in some senses," GC said. By late Thursday the city had shelters set up in three and then five places. One went down, because the hydro went out there, another went up, then down again. Hydro was going on and off all over the City, and Lance Thurston's people did "a wonderful job of shifting from one place to the other as the power was available, and of being able to receive people and make sure they were comfortable," GC said. Communications worked fairly well early on, in terms of getting messages out to people that shelters were available, and the transportation system was used to pick people up and ferry them to the shelters.

By late Thursday it was clear that utilities workers weren't making progress getting the hydro grid back up. They were actually losing ground, and it became clear that they weren't likely to make progress until they had "very substantial help from the outside," GC said. City officials began to contact the EMO. They had to use ham radio operators to speak to Toronto for a while because all the phone lines were either down or overloaded. It was a rather complex communications job, he said.

At that point the city's ability to communicate with residents became the "number one problem." There was no point talking to the radio when the people who needed help didn't have radios. Since the days of the bomb shelters, the number of people with transistor radios has sharply declined. The city's own internal communications also began to fail when the cell phone systems started to come apart. ClearNet was the lifesaver. They came along with a whole bunch of phones and they continued to operate throughout the crisis. CanTel operated throughout most of it; Bell Mobility was down for a big chunk of it. But in terms of communicating with the residents, the electronic communications clearly was not going to succeed, GC said. "We became deeply concerned as the forecast turned colder that we had a lot of disabled or disoriented or elderly, frail folk, and so we called in the army, and the army came very quickly. We arranged for the police through officer Bob Napier to do all the planning, coordinating the visitations, and we began the process of visitations by the Friday morning."

The military search process began and continued throughout the emergency. City officials had a little bit of frustration in that when they got the first group of military personnel to help them on Friday, those troops were withdrawn and taken to Ottawa where the need was perceived to be greater. "It was quite frustrating to find out later that Ottawa did not have serious problems, and in fact we had moved large amounts of resources to Ottawa where ... I would suggest Spencerville to Kingston was much harder hit than Spencerville to Ottawa."

There was no way of knowing this at the time, GC said. "Quebec was the hardest hit, and quite appropriately they commanded most of the resources, but to have the resources that were right here, at the base, removed, was frustrating. However, to give the base commander his due, he did a wonderful job of putting together the reserves, the Fort Frontenac, the Signals people, and we ended up having a great set of military volunteers. Several hundred in total, counting RMC, and they did a wonderful job for us."

Q: Who was moved to Ottawa?

"They were a highly professional unit of soldiers. What we got afterwards was a unit who proved to be very good, but who didn't have quite the precision of the first group. Although I don't know that, I can say that on hindsight. At the time it was frustrating, but the people who came in were very good and did a wonderful job for us."

In the wee hours of Friday morning, city officials became aware that some of the other centres around Kingston were having trouble, and at that point Kingston began performing a regional role. At first this was entirely informal, but it became more systematic later when it was clear that Kingston was receiving the bulk of donations and resources coming in from the West, and that there was a need to re-distribute those inputs. "So we adopted what became a logistical nightmare of becoming a regional distress centre for, initially South Frontenac, then Central Frontenac, Southern Lanark, and then North Frontenac, parts of Leeds and Grenville and Lanark," GC said. "Brockville didn't get up very quickly. Brockville's response was slow, so we found ourselves in places like Athens and around that area. When Brockville got their system up and operating then we were able to withdraw from that area. We also became involved in forwarding generators to areas that needed them."

Kingston was simply responding to needs outside the city, GC said. The first request we got was from South Frontenac, then from Perth and Smiths Falls. The city basically expanded its search system to cover any area that didn't seem to have a response up and operating, GC said. "We concentrated primarily on the rural areas, but a lot of the small towns needed generators, or cots or something of that sort. We had an excellent provision system going. The city had set up through both Cynthia Beach and a whole variety of staff, a really good provision system. We were getting lots of generators and cots and food, from all over the place. Mostly from the West, but we had people talking to folks all over the country, and they did a wonderful job of getting provisions moving very quickly to Kingston."

In the wee hours of Friday morning, city officials discovered that the province had twinned Kingston with Toronto for the purposes of dealing with the emergency. GC said the partnership worked very well. On the fourth and fifth days of the crisis, reinforcements and people from Toronto arrived en masse. "They brought generators, they brought crews, they began to create a more systematic kind of a response ... Toronto's a bit like an elephant; it's hard to get their attention, but once you do, watch out, because they really come at you. They had lots of resources and they did a wonderful job, they helped us out tremendously."

Meanwhile, the city was continuing to help out the rural areas, so a lot of the people from Toronto found themselves driving out to Sharbot Lake, up to Kline and out to Perth and Smiths Falls -- all of these surrounding areas -- to help hook up a generator, evacuate an old folks home, deliver materials and goods, GC said.

Asked how everyone managed to get around in unfamiliar territory, GC said "The military and the police are really good at that; they're good at setting up ... systems. People knew where they were going. We also had excellent communications by then. We never did establish good communications with the broader community, because basically the broadcasting systems were off the air, and when they did come back on, most of their customers still didn't have electricity. "

City officials were feeling very smug because they managed to get Global TV to start running Kingston messages, GC said, "and then it dawned on us that it wasn't doing any good because the people we were trying to get to didn't have any electricity. It wouldn't work." So they began communicating with residents through writing. The military would drop standardized messages off at people's homes, giving them information about the location and availability of shelters, etc.. For four nights in a row, the military delivered messages to people, telling them about things they could do and including information about the white flag campaign. The white flag campaign was a system for getting the attention of emergency workers; anyone who needed emergency help was asked to stick a white flag or piece of fabric out the second story window or a roof, somewhere where people would see it driving by. White was chosen because there wasn't a lot of snow on the ground, making it an easy colour to see, and because people tend to have a lot of white things around the house. The campaign didn't get too far along, GC said, because the emergency was largely resolved by the time it got underway. But for a while it was the only method emergency workers had to effectively get the message out to people that there was a way to attract emergency workers' attention without calling them on the phone.

In many instances, the people who were going door-to-door were just reassuring residents that help was available if they needed it. "[They were saying] 'we're here, we care, here's what you do in a crunch. If you need out, here's how you can get help.' We got a lot of positive feedback from the community who really appreciated it."

The group that got virtually no credit but deserves credit is the OPP auxiliary police, GC said. "They did a wonderful job." That was just one example of a job well done, he said. "One of the glories of quarter backing the thing was that I didn't spend an awful lot of time on any one of the operations. So from my point of view a lot of what happened was magical; we set a plan, we figured out the plan, we made somebody responsible, and we'd move onto the next issue, and then when I came back, golly gee, it was all done. And we had very few cases where I found myself getting involved the second time around. There were very few times when the first cut didn't work, or the first effort didn't succeed."

The door-to-door search process was something city officials decided they needed, but they had no idea how to undertake it, and knew they needed to cover a huge area, because by this time the city was thinking of itself as two counties and a large, large area upward of Lanark. Bob Napier was given the task of figuring out how to do it. GC saw him about four hours after the request was made, at about 6 a.m., and he had it all figured out. The military were going to be coming in the next day, and they were going to be fed, and food appeared when it was supposed to appear, GC said. "I got sufficiently dragged out that it always struck me as a small miracle that things were working right. I went at quite a long haul, and I got to the point where I couldn't actually get anything done unless somebody else was doing it. But it was magical, and it really did work. It was proof that folks, when given the opportunity to make virtually all their decisions, do it."

"Peter Glynn (director of KGH) came in from the hospital and understood that we had a problem in terms of moving folks around between hospitals, and he figured it out. He fixed it. The sisters at Hotel Dieu realized that we hadn't adequately provided for some of the things that they needed to provide for, and they fixed it. People fixed things because they knew it had to be done, and it was really quite an extraordinary experience to see how little direction was needed. Once people understood what the general direction was, what we had set out to do, they did it." What this teaches you is the danger of rules, GC said. "When you free people from the obligations of bureaucracy and the obligations of secondary accountability, they are prepared to do what they think is necessary and do it right. When you tie them up with process, then people want to follow the process because they can get into trouble if they don't follow the process."

At one point a relatively junior person out at Utilities (Joanne O'Marra) found herself requisitioning a helicopter because it was needed. "It was done. That would not happen in the normal course of events, and probably should not happen in the normal course of events. But it does teach you something that I have always argued: the public service grossly over regulates itself, because the public, of course, is completely intolerant of large errors, and so we have made it so that we don't commit large errors. Instead we commit massive process to prevent large errors from happening."

During the emergency, anyone who wanted to defraud the city could have found a way to do it, and they knew that, GC said. But he says he's certain the city was not defrauded by anyone during the ice storm. There were instances in which they lost track of what they were doing, but not by any large amounts, he said.

Individual decision making was hardly ever subjected to second-guessing, because it didn't need it. "George Sutherland, the councillor, just threw himself into making sure that there were enough generators going around the rural area to milk the cattle. It was a massive task, and he did it. And he did it by making commitments here and there and the next place, and grabbing some people who happened to be coming through town to help others and putting them to work, and he just did a wonderful job. He exhausted himself completely, but he did a wonderful job of getting it done," GC said. "Now, we're still sorting out the accounts from that, but there's certainly no fraud there. There's lots of folks we owe a bit of money to here and the next place..."

The whole process of dealing with the ice storm was very difficult and tiring, GC said. One of the things he tried to do at City Hall was prevent emotions from running too high. He set a rule for himself that he would never run or shout. "It required a moderate, steady, an almost emotionless approach to the job, which isn't my normal approach to a job, but it was clearly required."

One media person threw a "temper tantrum" in the front foyer of City Hall, GC recalls. "I don't know who the guy is. Somebody else escorted him out. Obviously he had personal pressures and all kinds of things. And he threw a temper tantrum. And you just can't do that in a situation in which you're trying to maintain an orderly management of a crisis. We had several people whose personal situations were deeply distressing, and who came in very distressed, but we had systems to manage that and people to manage that. And that doesn't cause as much concern as when someone who should know better throws a fit. We had only one instance, in nine days, of someone who went overboard."

Aside from that one problem, which he found understandable given the pressure the person was under, GC said "the media did a wonderful job for us."

City officials worked very hard to maintain a calm emergency response. At the same time, he remembers with "great clarity" when Jim Keech realized that saving the system was impossible, that it was going to collapse. This happened on the Friday after the start of the storm. "That was a very emotional moment, because they had worked 48 hours non-stop with everything they had, to win, and they lost. The system went down, and we had to start all over again, and we had to have hundreds of people help us get the system up. People often wonder why it took so many people to get the system up. Well, it's because the entire above-ground system was on the ground. You had wires that were covered with this amount of ice [he indicates about 2/3 of an inch], switches that you couldn't switch, it would take ages for linemen to do a job that would normally take moments. So these people reached a point of depression that was quite understandable. Jim had the wit to call them off."

That decision caused "a lot of excitement in Toronto," and GC fielded a lot of phone calls from people that night, asking him why Kingston Utilities quit trying to keep the system going that night. "And the answer is we had to get a rest, we had to get started again. In the bigger, broader assault of the job, having a few guys drive themselves completely bonkers wasn't the answer. And Jim had the management capacity to say 'No, this isn't going to work,' [and to call] everybody off work. And of course it upset a lot of people who had come to be heroes and found that they had to sleep for a night before they got going again. And he had a lot of people saying that was a terrible mistake. But of course in hindsight ... that was a brilliant decision. That was the toughest decision made during the process. It was made by Jim Keech, operationally, at the site. He just phoned into one of our control meetings and said 'I can't do it. I'm calling it off.' The mayor instantly supported him, and that was done. That was the only really emotional moment in the whole process, when we realized that the city was not going to be out of power for a couple of days -- the city was going to be out of power for a very long time. And that was a shock. It was difficult."

As a result of that decision, Kingston went from being in "a kind of a holding pattern to recognizing that life and security issues were going to be important to us, that we were going to have to [set up] double and triple back-up systems at the hospitals and the shelters. We were going to have to start dealing with the social consequences of [people] being out of their homes for long periods of time, basements flooding, that sort of stuff. All of that stuff that hadn't previously been part of the emergency response became part of the response on the Friday. So that was the only time where I recall that we got really strong emotions. I don't remember euphoria, I don't remember great depression. I remember a lot of jokes and jiving. People were in generally good spirits, the people who did the worthwhile work and worked hard at it."

GC recalls that there was "a little bit of conflict" between the players in the response, but not much. One thing the city didn't do well enough was manage conflict when two or three people did the same job at the same time. Obviously it was wrong to have two or three people doing the same job at the same time, he said, but it was inevitable.

"When you had resources being sent out of Brockville, resources being sent out of Kingston, resources being sent out of Ottawa, and resources being sent out of Toronto, it wasn't surprising that occasionally a crew would get to an emergency site and find out that somebody else had already solved the problem. And it was deeply frustrating to people, and we had a lot of people getting angry around those issues: 'God dammit I've wasted an hour driving all the way out to the boonies here, and lo and behold the Red Cross has been here for an hour and a half, why wasn't I told?' Thump, thump, thump. Several people responded to an emergency call, because the person in dire straits phoned everybody they could think of, and we all responded. There were some instances in which we got there first and heard later that others had gotten there."

GC doesn't think the problem was that we had multiple responses, but that people weren't prepared to expect some overlap and deal with it patiently. "Frankly I think it's inevitable that someone in trouble is going to call for help wherever they can get it. What we have to do better in the future is understand that that'll happen, prepare people for it so they're not as frustrated as they were when it happens."

"People know they're putting themselves out, and to find that they're not being useful, and that somebody else sent them on a goose chase, is frustrating, deeply frustrating, and we got vibrations from all kinds of people who felt that."

The redundancy occasionally originated in City Hall, but in most cases it was because the person in distress called several people for help, and several people responded.

"I think it's something we can anticipate, and it's something we can ensure finds its way into the emergency preparedness manual. [We can] recognize that as the emergency continues, more than one group of people are going to be in a position to respond to distressed people. And recognize that, sure, you can try to coordinate those folks, but folks have to get used to the fact that somebody's going to get there before them, and be ready to deal with it professionally."

Other key things that happened: It was a challenge to "keep slogging" when city officials realized they were in it for about ten days. At one point they thought the city would be in it for much longer than that.

When it started to get cold, Dave Cash came up with the idea that they should send buses out at various places in both the rural and urban areas, "so that people who didn't want to go to shelters, but just got too damn cold, had a place to go." The buses sat on strategic corners all night and served as warm places for people to go. They were equipped with warm coffee and soup. A "handful" of people used each one, GC said. "It was not a massive service, but the purpose was to handle anybody who got into distress. Nobody got into distress during those nights. We didn't lose anybody. There were no storm-related deaths as a result of this exercise, and I have a feeling that some of those people might have been."

"I think there almost certainly [could have been deaths]. If we didn't have the military helping evacuate people, and we didn't have the buses sitting in strategic areas, I think there would have to be a real chance of exposure deaths. And that's what the military felt. Not a lot. I'm not necessarily saying there was a dramatic situation, but there certainly was some life risk."

Cheryl Mastantuano has exact numbers on who was in the shelters. City officials don't know how many people were evacuated from their homes, but know how many used the shelters. Many people who were evacuated went off with neighbours, or left under their own steam, but just couldn't get out without help, for whatever reason. (Blocked driveways, doors, downed wires, etc.)

GC's own aunt was an example; she was blocked in by several trees for several days, and the military helped her out. As soon as they helped her out, she got in her car and drove away, or her son drove her out. He's not sure. She was too frail to clear a path out of the house by herself, but once she was in her car she was able to get to GC's mother's house and put herself up. All of this took place in Perth.

Getting back to what happened on the first Friday after the storm: "We changed our tenor at that point. That night, from about 11 o'clock on, through till 5 o'clock in the morning, we changed our planning to a more long-term kind of process," GC said. He sent a number of people home who had been up for three days, and suggested they get some sleep. He got some sleep himself at that point. Both Gary Bennett and he had been up for three days; "both of us had gone too long. We expected the situation to be resolved, so I think we both did about 36 hours at that point."

Because he was well rested when things started, GC never became totally exhausted. He got tired and went to bed. He and Gary adopted a shift system at that point, with both of them spotting in and out during day and night shifts. Joe Hawkins and Bill Bishop became the quarterbacks of the night shift. There were many others working the night shift, but they were the ones who worried about being in strategic charge. Jim de Hoop was also on night shift. Carl Holmberg basically kept things going when the Mayor was away or when Joe was away. Carl probably put in as many hours as anybody, and GC tended to bridge the night shift and half the day shift. He tended to take off in the late afternoon, sleep about two or three hours in the late afternoon and sometimes two or three hours in the early morning before coming back in.

Decision-making seemed to come to a head late in the morning and late in the evening. "So it was our late night emergency measures meetings and our late morning emergency measures meetings that tended to create the activity."

Everybody was working on a 24-hour day, GC said. Most people were getting eight good hours of sleep, while some got five or six and a few got much less. "People like Cheryl Mastantuano and Tracy Newton, and Joanne O'Marra at the Utilities building, I don't think they ever slept. They were just nuts. They just kept going and going and going. We ordered all sorts of people home, and some of them just said no."

Military people would have ordered their people home, but "I felt early on that this was not a time when we should take any extraordinary measures. It was time to be reasonable."

The hydro people were acting almost independently at this point. There were two or three key moments. Brian Sheridan's group had done a pretty good job of keeping the emergency routes open; access to the hospitals, access to the major fire stations, GC said. The public works department worked "unbelievably hard" to keep things open. "When people look at a normal city they say 'What's the big deal?' Believe me, it was a big deal. They moved an awful lot of wood. Time and time again they'd clear a street and it would be filled again. People began to throw wood out on the street behind them, to get it out of their own properties. So they cleared it. They clearly weren't going to make a lot of short-term progress during the outage itself. So near the end of the response period we brought in a large number of private sector crews to clean up the streets and get the streets cleared."

Kingston brought in a lot of people, and it cost the city a lot of money. "We moved an enormous amount of material in two or three days. We made a policy decision to leave stuff that wasn't obstructing us where it was, and we'd get around to it eventually." [At this point we turn to the prepared questions.]

Re. lines of authority: "Clearly, there were people who were in charge, but they tended to take full charge. Jim Keech took full charge, Brian Sheridan took full charge, Lance Thurston took full charge, the police chief took full charge. We didn't have a lot of people looking back for authority to make judgements. They knew what they were expected to do because they were at the meetings. The Mayor would chair the meetings, people would go around and give their situation reports, and GC would generally sort out the four or five or six things they had to do. He would ask people for their advice, and he would then instruct people on what to do next. "

"It worked remarkably well. Near the end the meetings got huge. We had one meeting in Memorial Hall and it struck me that a significant proportion of the city was there. But it meant that we had a much larger number of agencies that we could give instructions to. So we got a lot of people activated. But hardly anyone felt the need to check back for approvals. They knew what the objective was and they made their best efforts to get that objective met."

The Mayor made it clear that there didn't have to be a paper trail, GC said. There had to eventually be an audit, and city staff were told to keep track of what they spent, when they spent it and why, but were told not to bother with the usual protocols. So there wouldn't necessarily be receipts for everything. A note would suffice, ie., 'Authorize Smith to do such-and-such, cost, question mark.'"

The emergency plan laid out GC's role and the Mayor's role, and they tended to divide that role fairly cleanly. The mayor basically co-ordinated, and GC did the allocation of responsibilities. CG noted that the "political leadership worked brilliantly. The three politicians who were running the show were self-selected, he said. "They were the guys who were there again and again and again. Many other politicians were here and working and helping, but they were the three who became the triumvirate. Gary [Bennett], Joe [Hawkins] and Carl [Holmberg]. Through the hard and long periods, they were there providing credibility and accountability. And I think the process worked extremely well."

"The [emergency] plan, which was a wonderful plan, was not designed for a massive response like this. It was designed for an event, a crash, a spill, but not for the whole city shutting down. The plan assumed we would have communications. It assumed we would have all kinds of things. We didn't have any of those things. So communications did not work well with the community, but I don't know how they could have. Apart from being able to distribute in advance two-way radios to the entire population, which we seriously considered ... Glenn Gow had an assignment to see if he could find 50,000 radios that we would distribute. That's one of the ones where the answer was no."

"There was no real problem early on; the systems were down, and no one could communicate then. It was later on, when some of the radio stations were back on ... this was one of the things people were most exorcised about, the radio stations broadcasting, why weren't we rushing information out to the radio stations? Well, the fact is all the folks who needed the information were down. We had good opinions from the emergency people that very few transistor radios were out there, so folks weren't in a position to communicate. Instead what we did send across the media was 'If you know your neighbours are out on their own, go talk to them, see if there's anything they need. Phone us, call us, come see us.'

"We gave lots of information [to the media], but we did not make it a priority to have the mayor camping in the radio station, which one would normally do. As in Ottawa-Carleton, the mayor gave regular, almost hourly reports ... But here, because of the paucity of folks who could receive it, the only folks who were reassured in Ottawa were folks who had sets and therefore had electricity and therefore didn't have a problem."

An important piece of the puzzle: On the Thursday night, GC phoned Dave Cash at around midnight and asked him to get together a group of business people to phone all of the folks who worked downtown and get them not to come to work. "That was a remarkable piece of work. I forgot it simply because it was so smooth, it was a wonderful example. I got Dave out of bed, he got a number of other people out of bed, they started phoning at about 2:30 in the morning. I remember [one woman] coming in all charged up and phoning literally hundreds of people and telling them to call their employees. And as far as I can see, a huge proportion of the community got called and didn't come to work. And that greatly simplified the relief effort."

"The downtown was dangerous. We needed to get quick passage through it, and we were trying to access at a fairly steady rate the hospital corridor, and so we made the call. Actually I made that call to shut the downtown down for the next couple of days."

"Lots of businesses were open. We concentrated on the large employers. I don't think we were trying to shut businesses down, we were trying to shut traffic down. And by and large we did. We didn't have a traffic jam in downtown Kingston in the entire 10-day period. It was really quite remarkable. The streets were open. Where there were live wires around the streets, most people just stayed away. People were still picking up trees around their own houses and whatnot, but ... I don't suppose any of the small businesses stayed closed very long. For one thing a lot of them had water in the basement and they had to pump it out."

GC kept in close contact with the provincial emergency measures. "We had two people sitting on the desk at Queen's Park at the provincial response centre, in contact with me pretty much constantly. It grew less frequent as our needs became more predictable and the situation was not changing, but it was always there to help if we needed them. They were very good. They were easy to talk to and understandable. We had one very important conversation with the people who did the situation briefing for the minister of defence and the joint chiefs committee. He simply called us directly and I spent about an hour giving a very careful situation analysis, which led almost directly to a change in the way the military was deployed. And that helped us a lot. I was impressed with the speed with which the military got their intelligence, how local they went to get it, and how well they responded to it."

In that meeting, he told the military that "the Kingston response was no longer a Kingston response, it was a much larger response, and we now had detailed information about the needs in a variety of other areas, and those needs did need addressing, everywhere from the Islands to Cloyne. Quite a long reach. Major General Stevenson arrived, I think, two days later."

"By now we were talking about the fact that we had a distressed community, and we were having trouble getting people focussed on the things that needed to be done. At one point I got a call asking us if we needed Zodiac boats. Well, it was pretty clear that people didn't understand our situation. We weren't in a flood. It was somebody who probably had boats left over from the Winnipeg flood, and it was a very kind call, but it was not focussed on our issues. And after that telephone call to the military, the feds were quite focused."

Provincial emergency measures were also effective, GC recalls. They sent their local people (such as Randy Reid) to Kingston for a while. Randy was sent onto Brockville to get it up and going, because Kingston seemed to be working. They sent in someone else to back him up while he was in Brockville. They were available, they were helpful, they helped us make decisions that were relevant to how one deals with these situations.

"They [the EMO people] didn't actually handle a lot. They didn't interfere in the relief process. They advised, they listened, they communicated, they were really very good. Now in Brockville they had quite a different role, where they actually had to take things over and get them going. But here it was more a matter of monitoring and assisting and advising and basically providing a support service. [It was] very, very comforting and very worthwhile."

Some city staff were well-trained in emergency training. GC has been in senior management for 21 years, so it's been "a day or two" since he had any EMO training. He was involved in disaster relief for the province in the early to mid-70s. But he couldn't remember any of the lessons from those days: "It was completely gone. Those neurones died a long time ago."

GC had praise for Bob Boyd's plan, but said it was ultimately of limited use in the ice storm: "It was an excellent plan. It allowed us to get going. It got us set up in the right way, it got the emergency measures committee going, the EOC [emergency operations centre] going, we used all the contacts right away. It didn't give us a lot more guidance on the individual process. Now I believe, now that I've been through it, that we could do that differently. We did not set up a really rigid EOC. Virtually anyone who was involved or interested could come to the emergency operations centre, and when the EMC [emergency management committee] met, it was supposed to be very rigidly run. And basically Gary [Bennett] had anybody in the room have their say, and I put a saying up on the blackboard that stayed there for the whole time: 'What happened today? What should have happened today? What must happen tomorrow?' Those were the three questions that we answered at every briefing, at every meeting, four or five times a day. And occasionally we'd have four and five people at these meetings, and sometimes we'd have 50 people at these meetings. It really varied depending on how urgent the situation was. The key people were always there."

At the end, when the meetings were getting very large, GC admits they were "less wieldy than they should have been." But he maintains that the process worked well overall. "They served a purpose. If I were doing it again, I would keep it much tighter. I would make sure that we had the communication system set up, and I would make sure there were shifts of people who were in command there. It wouldn't have made it nearly as stressful on those of us who were in command, who were running all over hell's half acre within City Hall. It was probably more heroic but far less functional than if we'd all sat in a room and done our telephoning and got our lines... It took us almost a day... Sheila Hickey did a wonderful job of getting phones into City Hall ... City Hall had one line coming into it, and we added a bunch more."

The phone companies brought in phone sets, they set up the Council chambers as a secondary response centre. "They really did a job." They dragged tons of wires in to City Hall. We didn't have enough lines. The jacks were connected to a limited number of lines.

"The emergency operations centre is described very well in the plan. We interpreted it very loosely. I think both Gary and I, who were responsible for interpreting it loosely, would have interpreted it less loosely, would have followed the advice a little more closely, next time. Not a whole lot. I'm talking about degrees here. Participation was still important, but Chief Gow who is expert in these things and Chief Closs, who is expert in these things, both felt we were getting a tad democratic, and it was time to get down to the nub." People were basically disciplined during the meetings, GC recalls, and when they weren't, Mayor Bennett brought them back on topic. "There were some war stories, but not a lot. It was mostly just 'This is what happened, this is what should have happened, this is what we're going to do next time.' If people weren't clear or they didn't have the resources, they said 'We can't do any more without [such and such],' and my job was to find the way to get it done."

Press conferences were held "pretty steadily" with Gary Bennett and Carl Holmberg, who handled the media most of the time, GC recalls. Dave Clark also did some work on that end. "The CBC was constantly sticking their mikes into the operations area. I spoke to them often, Jim Keech spoke to them often." The media were not always allowed into the operations area, but they got in there anyway. "I feel the media did their job pretty well and pretty responsibly ... we did some proactive messaging, but the biggest communications work was done by Donna Pothaar and Sheila Birrell, who ran a communications program, issued press releases on a regular basis, issued oral statements on a regular basis, had the mayor deeply involved in those things, and I think that to the extent we needed them [the media], they were there. One of the great frustrations of people listening to the television was they didn't get a lot of Kingston news. Well, the answer was they were listening to Ottawa and Toronto stations, so they didn't get a whole lot of Kingston news ... Although we did talk to Global and the CBC, they were reporting on the whole place, and Kingston was just one small part."

One other thing GC would do differently is ask for help sooner: "We didn't realize soon enough how desperate the situation was."

But he said generally speaking the response went well: "I was very impressed with the city force. I think it was probably the best team-building exercise we could have asked for. Our political leaders did very well, we did well as a group, the employees did well as a group, and the volunteers did very well. The food service here was absolutely extraordinary ... here and at the PUC and the shelters. Where they got it, how they got it, how they got so much is beyond me. I've read the outline of how they did it, but it's still extraordinary."

Basically they got organized and got all kinds of people and companies involved. "People like Tracy [Newton] and Joanne [O'Marra] just moved heaven and hell to get it done."

"Joanne O'Marra did a remarkable job. At times she was ready to strangle City Hall because she didn't feel she was getting the co-operation. It was really interesting. Joanne had the entire system [in Utilities] closing in on her. She was the focal point for making it work. The boys, if you like, were out working in utilities, and she was the one getting all the supplies and the provisions. And at times she felt she was not getting the support, because she was unaware of the massive relief process going on elsewhere. So we went through periods where she got very stressed. And our job was to serve her as much as we possibly could, and we tried to do so. She was making the whole system work for utilities. She was the core, really, of the provisioning system for the electrical response."

Joanne even commissioned a helicopter from the Ministry of Defence at one stage during the relief effort. "She talked to colonels and generals and just got the job done."

"Not only was it empowering [for her] but it was very frustrating to discover that you weren't getting what you needed from your own people. You could get generals jumping high in Ottawa, but you couldn't get your own people to get you a hospital bed."

"This was where it was very helpful to have a command system. Because you could in fact go to people and say 'I understand she was rude to you, but the reason she was rude to you was this and this and this, please try to understand, there's an enormous amount of stress here.' Now ... we should have had it set up so that she didn't have to do everything she did. On the other hand, who the hell is going to criticize somebody who has done that kind of wonderful work. I'm certainly not."

Asked how it happened that one person became responsible for so much, GC said "She took it on, did it well, she got it organized, people began to depend on her, and it worked. It happened here [at City Hall] as well. Tracy Newton became the lynchpin for our volunteer recruitment system. Cheryl Mastantuano became a lynchpin. People become lynchpins because they put themselves into a position where they can do the job, and they do it ... Then a manager's job is to make sure you cycle them out and someone else in often enough that they stay sane."

Asked whether Joanne O'Marra managed to sleep enough, GC said no. "None of us did. The key people were all inadequately disciplined or inadequately relieved. But because it was a relatively short crisis, it never really did become a physical problem, although several people got very ill. Bad colds and flu's and things."

As one of the last stages in the emergency response, the city realized it had to move the emergency centre somewhere, because the north was still in a state of emergency. So Mirka Januskiewicz and Lynne Jordon became a secondary emergency response centre. City Hall returned to normal, and the city opened up a field office north of them as well. Gerry Coady, the former base commander, opened up a couple of field depots in the northern part of Pittsburgh and Kingston townships, reporting through Mirka and Lynne, and basically provided a rural response system and continued the regional distribution system. By that time they had the entire Princess of Wales regiment warehouse filled with goods, and were moving a large amount of goods through there every day. They ran that process, while GC went back to Toronto and slept for three days.

"They really did a good job of getting that process through. I went to Toronto and met with the Toronto representatives and the Toronto people and made sure that our support system in Toronto remained intact. That process worked well. At our request they [Mirka J. and Lynne J.] developed a plan for what would happen and how we'd mange it if there were another ice storm this year and our system remained fragile."

The city also has its emergency planning team under Bob Boyd reviewing and revising the main emergency plan.

Probably the most important record is the record of the emergency management committee meetings. The minutes of those meetings are being put together, and they must be monstrous, because they document hundreds of hours.

"People tend to figure you learn more from these things than you can ... I'm sure there are people who are specialists in human response who can learn things from them, but as a political process, it's over."

GC says he was "one of the very few people in the emergency response team who didn't have two different loyalties tugging at him. I was living in a hotel, my family was safe in Toronto, and I was focusing on this job. Almost everybody else had their families in various states of distress. A few people had their families in very acute states of distress. It is a remarkable testament to them that not only did they continue to devote themselves to the community, but that their marriages have by and large survived at least to date. There are one or two people who had terrific conflicts as a result of the pull between the community's needs and their personal needs, and those people suffered."

"You had people with houses that weren't secure, flooded basements, people who were split up into two or three different places just to find accommodation, and the mother or the father was spending 20 hours a day away from that situation, not resolving that situation, and instead working on the common good ... tensions all over the place, 'how can you do this to me at this point in time,' and perfectly appropriate. Other times people had to leave at a very critical period of time because of a crisis at home..."

"I spent a lot of time giving people permission to not feel guilty, giving people permission to just go and deal with their personal situation until it was under control ... the Mayor himself had a personal situation that was quite critical. His stack was down and it wasn't going to get up and he didn't have electricity for a long time." [The stack is the system that extends from the pole to his house, so that even if the rest of the community is up, his house wouldn't be.]

"All kinds of people that would love to have been part of the city response couldn't be because their personal situations were sufficiently difficult..."

GC didn't order anyone in. He called people in as needed, but generally took the position that "if people aren't here, it's because they have something else that they have to do. And we did not discriminate between those folks who were here all the time regularly and working hard, and those folks who never showed."

Some employees may have stayed home for other reasons having nothing to do with family emergencies, but the city made no attempt to track their reasons for staying out of the emergency response. "We made no attempt to track it, and no attempt to deal with it, and no attempt to discipline it."

Everyone was still getting paid during the crisis, whether they worked or not. "The people who worked hardest probably earned very little more than the people who did absolutely nothing."

Nevertheless, those who worked hard for the city during the storm will be rewarded in other ways. "We know who the champions are. That's a huge factor. You know who the champions are now, you know who really pulled the wagon, and you know basically who you can lean on. That's not to say the others aren't, but some folks got a lot of visibility who wouldn't normally get a lot of visibility. And there are compensations. We did provide overtime for some people, we did give time off to some people, and people got a lot of thanks. And those things go a long way."

"But there was a policy decision and it was made very early on, that this was not going to be a pay administrative situation. We're not going to punish people who don't come or particularly reward people who do."

Employees were offered counselling during and after the storm. "We were very concerned at various points during the response that people were not properly accessing the [employee assistance] system, particularly after the response. Some of the units very systematically took their people through EAP counselling, de-briefing and ordered people [to take advantage of it]. Others who felt there was less stress simply emphasized that it was available and encouraged people to take advantage of it."

Because it's a confidential service, GC has no idea which units or departments might have used the EAP system the most. But he said his guess is that the Utilities used it "pretty extensively."

"I wasn't particularly stressed. I was stressed by the demands of the time, but nothing else. I had probably the least stress in City Hall."

"Time tends to build myths that aren't founded in reality, and I think that's a danger here. What we had was an electrical crisis, pure and simple. I suppose we had a tree crisis as well. What made life dangerous here and what made life difficult was the fact that a lot of people didn't have the needed support from society as a whole ... this was not a story of people hanging from cliffs being rescued. This was just municipal administration accelerated to deal with the reality, but there were a significant number of people who needed neither reassurance or help. I was listening to some folks from Ottawa telling ice storm stories recently, and it occurred to me that they were doing a disservice to the whole process by turning it into a dramatic event. There were parts of it that were quite dramatic. And the effort of some of those linesmen and the impossible working environments was dramatic. But by and large it was just good slugging, and I hope it doesn't get turned into a Sgt. Custer in the Yukon kind of bullshit, and is seen as a systematic response to enduring, difficult circumstances. Emergency and disaster are the wrong terms in some sense, although those are the terms that the system has approved and used. There were aspects of it that were disastrous, and there were aspects of it that were emergent, but mostly it was just a need for accelerated levels of performance by an organization, and judged on that basis it was a brilliant piece of response. It was a response by a system that was very effective."

"I've heard some fish get pretty huge, and I know for example that downtown Ottawa had no real impact at all, and it sounds now as if the Parliament building was on fire."