IceStorm 98 Study

Gardner Church (GC) is the interim CAO of Kingston. [See main interview for more details about his position.]

It took nearly a day for the EOC to realize that surrounding areas were responding effectively. GC said the EOC had trouble contacting Granite Power, which is partly outside the city's area. One of the decisions GC said he would make a lot more quickly in similar circumstances in the future is to check the city's boundaries and make sure that municipal neighbours are responding so the city knows the area it is responsible for. He said the city's response spread way into North Fontenac, Lanark and Leeds and Grenville.

The city first became aware of the lack of response in neighbouring communities about 24 hours into the storm when Gary Stefan and one of the South Frontenac councillors came in to get help and a few specific things they wanted. GC said the city worked out some assistance for them but the reeve, Phil Leonard, turned it down. GC said he never understood why, but he hadn't followed up on the reeve's decision.

That incident twigged the city to the fact that neighbouring communities were not responding to the emergency, and it began contacting them. Kingston officials came to the conclusion that they had to respond for all of Frontenac, because the county had no external help. It also assisted Perth and Smiths Falls and responded into Athens and that area and into Leeds and Grenville. There may have been some external and some internal response in Brockville. An emergency co-ordinator from the province who had been working with the EOC in Kingston was sent to Brockville to get it organized and until it was, Kingston was heavily involved in Leeds and Grenville, GC said.

Contacting the surrounding municipalities should be part of the emergency plan, GC said. The plan didn't contemplate this type of disaster. One of the first steps should have been to immediately isolate the area affected and figure out who was responding for each area right away. Emergency Measures Ontario perhaps should have done that. Kingston eventually did it, in a fairly rough way, GC said. The EOC was never able to be certain that it wasn't duplicating efforts because occasionally it would send crews off with a generator, only to find that some other relief centre had already sent one too.

Perth and Ottawa crews bumped into the Kingston response people on a couple of occasions, but still, GC says it is better to duplicate services than to not serve at all.

The city was eventually asked by the province to send its emergency response effort into the region, but the city had already done so on its own and had talked to the province about it. There was some nervousness about it on the part of the EMO, and even some denial, because, bureaucrats being what they are, there is some question about what happened. Most of what Kingston, as the western-most region affected, did that was regional was freight-forward materials that had been shipped from Toronto to make sure everyone got what they needed.

Emergency Measures Ontario did a wonderful job, GC said, but hadn't planned for the ice storm any more than Kingston had. Kingston's response was neighbourliness, not an effort to expand its influence, GC said.

The EMO made an effective decision to send Randy Reid down to Brockville together with one other person.

Others have said the EMO was less than helpful because they were two days late in responding, but GC disagrees. Within 24 hours he had been on the phone to the EMO in Toronto, and a Toronto partnership had been set up. They may have been a bit late in making their appearance in Kingston, but GC says their presence was not critical. What was critical was their effort to make sure the various parties were working. He had nothing but a good experience with the EMO and received a lot of suggestions and ideas that were then brought back to the control group. The EMO was the city's most constant resource. The difficulty was communicating with them because all the lines were down. An example of the confusion: At one point GC was trying to get hold of Mike Garrett, the CAO of Toronto, but the ham radio operator couldn't get through to Toronto because of the noise. The message wound up going through Sarnia to Orillia, and someone in Orillia who knew Garrett was able to get a neighbour to phone the police station across from Garrett's house and had them get in touch with him.

The ham operator element was part of Bob Boyd's plan. It was certainly worthwhile, and was used, although not as much in the actual emergency response, GC says. This may have been because GC did not know how to make use of the system. He was not aware of the potential of having mobile ham operators. City staff were very frustrated at not being able to communicate with the public, and GC says they might have had more effective communication if they had set up command posts using hams. He agrees with criticism that the Kingston area ham resources were under-utilized, and if he had to do it again, that is one of the areas he would improve. "We didn't use it as effectively as we could. They were valuable to us a couple of times."

Some of the EMO bureaucrats asked Kingston "what the hell they were doing" in places like Perth. Getting generators to people in trouble is what Kingston staff and volunteers were doing. There were some people who felt Kingston was confusing the job, and GC has no doubt they were, but as he said, better to serve someone twice than not serve them at all.

One of the things Kingston staff needed to be aware of was post-incident stress, GC said, and they received help on that from KGH director Peter Glynn. Kingston didn't deal with that as systematically as they could have, GC said. Some parts of the organization did, like the fire service and Utilities. Works and the other parts of the corporation didn't do it as extensively. They should have been making sure that everybody had an opportunity for post-incident stress management or counselling, he said. The city did offer it to everybody, but didn't follow that initial offer up as rigorously as it should have, GC said.

Responding to claims that the Staff College asked for 24 hours notice before being used as an EOC, GC said he didn't hear this himself. He only made one contact with the Staff College very early on. As soon as it was apparent that the Mayor would declare an emergency, he called the Staff College, and they told him that they were without power and not in a position to accommodate the city as an EOC. GC and Mayor Bennett then prepared the back-up facility, which was the fire hall at Woodbine Road. The wiring has to be set up in a particular way to accommodate the EOC, and that was done. Mayor Bennett decided to use City Hall instead, but the Woodbine Fire Hall remained ready throughout the emergency. "The mayor's view was that it [the Woodbine Road Fire Hall] was not propitiously located for the type of crisis we were dealing with, and I think he was probably right, but we probably could have done better than City Hall. But it was the best available [location] at the time," GC said.

The priority was to keep the institutional core of the city operating, "because clearly we were going to be a long time getting the city back up," GC said. Everything from the prisons to KPH, Hotel Dieu and KGH, and possibly also RMC and Queen's, were the critical areas. Clearing the roads to those institutions and keeping them powered up was a major priority, and it made sense to be closer to the scene where they needed to achieve those results, GC said.

In retrospect, GC thinks the EOC should have been very close to City Hall but not in it. He's not sure what the emergency planning committee has come up with, but they're looking into a primary EOC that would be close to City Hall. The Holiday Inn is one possibility. It just had to be a place where 50 or 100 people could organize and stay, steadily, for a long period of time. One of the advantages of a hotel is that the food's already there.

City Hall is not well-structured for what it needed to do during the emergency, GC said, but "it served admirably" once Sheila Hickey had re-wired it, and requisitioned all the offices and shut the place down. "It served very well, and it did stay largely up, and it was a good call on the Mayor's part. But we could have been prepared with a facility that was better aimed for this kind of massive response."

Sheila Hickey outfitted City Hall with a large number of new wires virtually overnight, GC said. There were relatively few in-and-out lines at the beginning of the emergency, and City Hall ended up with a "vast array" of in-and-out lines. He's not sure of the numbers. Hickey worked with South-eastern to pull in those lines. "I don't know, frankly [what was installed], except that suddenly we were able to phone in and out. She'd done the job," GC said.

The downstairs call centre that was being run by Tracy Newton was given extra lines as well.

Brought back around to the issue of whether the Staff College asked for 24 hours notice, GC said he'd heard about that, but wasn't personally the one to contact them the second time. But that's what he was told: the Staff College wanted 24 hours notice from the city before being used as an EOC. "That's what we were told. I don't know whether that's the case or not." The first time he contacted them, they were simply not ready because they didn't have power. They just said they were closed and they weren't ready for the city to come in.

A generator would have solved the problem at the Staff College, but they either didn't have one, or the city wasn't aware they had one, he said. "At ten o'clock in the morning, when we've just decided we've got a disaster, and a team of people have opened their books for the first time, you have to deal with what you know. We knew we had power at Woodbine, we knew we had power at City Hall, and so those were the two adequate places."

"Perhaps we should have pursued the command structure more, but frankly I was just as happy to go to Woodbine as City Hall. It made no difference from my point of view. Frankly, to be stuck out at the Staff College, which is well out of the line of circulation, wouldn't have been as good as being at City Hall ... Well, I don't know. It's not that far out. But it would have been more difficult to maintain the foot, pedestrian, connections that we had."

GC said it would be foolish to assume that the ice storm was a 100 year type event. "I think you have to accept that El Nino is doing whatever El Nino is doing, in a more predictable sort of way." When he was told that Bob Boyd is still wedded to the idea that the Staff College would have been the best place for the EOC, GC admitted he may be right. "It may very well be I didn't pursue it forcefully enough. When I was told it wasn't available, I dropped it like a hot cake. I must admit I didn't give it 20 seconds thought. It wasn't available, it didn't have power, they didn't particularly want us ... fine. Move on. I never thought about it again until we had to find the maps, in which case we had to send somebody down to the Staff College to get [an elaborate set of sectional maps of the city]."

There are about 12 sectional maps that make it easy to plan who's doing what where. They were mounted in the Loyalist Room at City Hall and used extensively during the emergency. These big sectional maps allowed city officials to divide the city up and assign certain areas to certain groups, and Bob Baird from Technical Services then supplied the actual crews (hydro, trees, works, army, police, fire, volunteers) with hand-held maps for use in the field.

Mayor Bennett went to the Staff College and retrieved those sectional maps himself.

GC acknowledged that the municipal control group meetings got larger and looser than they were supposed to be, but he saw an important reason for it at the time. "It certainly offended the sensibilities of the people who'd been trained in emergency response, as the meetings became story telling meetings as well as decision making meetings. My own view was that people were going through enormously difficult times and needed to have some validation, and that we weren't dealing with time-sensitive issues. Well, they were time-sensitive, but not by second or minute but by the hour and month. They were time-sensitive to the extent that we had to do something in the next 12 hours. I found no difficulty, and still see no difficulty, in allowing those control groups to become also opportunities for people to get validation for what they'd done."

There was one meeting they ended up holding in Memorial Hall that got to be virtually "convention sized," he said, and that one did get a little unwieldy. GC ended up having to get "quite military" in his own behaviour to assign jobs to people, which they hadn't normally done. At that point he thought they'd let it get a tad out of hand.

Col. Coady's group led the rural response within Kingston, and they were largely put there [in the Woodbine Road Fire Hall and the Joyceville Pen], as a result of discontent among the rural population that they weren't getting the same level of attention that the city area was. There was a feeling that the urban situation was largely under control by the time Col. Coady's group got started, but that the agrarian response (ie., dealing with the cattle) was "still very much an issue." Coady's group had nothing to do with the regional response, which is something Kingston did on its own, with help from the military. (By that time Kingston was responding wherever they were asked to respond. The regional response was coming out of City Hall).

Door-to-door checks were confined to Frontenac County, with the exception of one period in Athens that was checked because the city had heard there were problems there. That's partly because by the time the door-to-door checks were being organized, Brockville was starting to show "murmurings of being organized," and Randy Reid seemed to be in control there. So Kingston didn't feel the need to extend its regional response into Leeds and Grenville. They did move into Lennox and Addington a little bit, when they found out there was some trouble in Camden East, but for the most part the door-to-door checks were restricted to Frontenac. They did dispatch some people up near Perth on one occasion, but GC couldn't remember why. It may have been in conjunction with a generator.

Somebody [from Kingston?] went to visit GC's mother's house in Perth.

GC fully supports finding a way to make sure the families of city staff are taken care of during future emergencies. GC says he was "the only person in City Hall who didn't have this split problem," because his own family was safe and comfortable in Toronto. "We have to find a better way, if this ever repeats itself, for people like Lance [Thurston], and Jim [Keech] and Cheryl [Mastantuano], who have just enormous jobs to do on the response and worked 24 hours a day, literally, at it ... we have to do a better job of making sure their family situation is taken care of, because in many instances, their families felt they abandoned them."

The city may be able to organize a group of people to go around and focus their efforts on the families of key city staff who can't go home. "There are some people who, as a result of their position, simply have to be doing their job. Jim Keech is probably the most glaringly obvious ... he couldn't afford to be away at all, and his family was in some distress. And we should have, could have, and now would have, helped them."

Asked about conflicts between Col. Coady's staff and the heads of the new EOC at Gore Road, GC said there were "some personality challenges," but that Mirka J. and Lynne J. had full authority, and they resolved the problems fairly quickly. He attributed the conflicts to one person in Coady's organization (but not Coady himself) who was "particularly acerbic," and who "created a higher temperature [in the new EOC] than one would like." But, he said, the problem was handled very effectively, "by Mirka's authority."

GC called those disputes a "tempest in a teapot," and said it was not a matter of structural problems or jurisdictional conflicts. "It [the new EOC] functioned fine. There were people who's nerves were jangled, but there was no difficulty in the functioning of those offices. And I still, and at the time, thought it was a non-issue. There were personnel issues to be resolved, and they could resolve them. It was a matter of 'go on and get on with it.'"

Asked about Gary Collins' opinion that the head of the EOC should never be a political leader, and that the job is best handled by someone with military or police background and extensive emergency training, GC disagreed strongly. "I think it demonstrates that he doesn't understand how a city works, and the fact that he's a cop and not responsible for the city. I was insisting that the Mayor stay at the helm. I had operational command, no question about it, and gave as much of it as I could to the military people and the para-military people, who were the best able to do it. But I probably shouldn't have been the person doing that job. I think the plan is wrong in that respect; it assigns the wrong responsibilities to the CAO. [Operational duties]. I think that job probably belonged to the fire chief, and in future I would think the fire chief is the one who should be doing that job. He has the greatest overview in terms of public safety, and probably the right training. But having done it, I was insistent that the Mayor be there, be present, and be seen to be engaged, because that is the political job. It is his job to say 'I was there, it's under control, we're moving ahead as fast as we can. Gary did a remarkable job of calming this community during the storm, and he couldn't have done it if he hadn't been there."

Politics is more than being a figurehead, he said. It involves a degree of leadership. Gary Bennett did a "wonderful job" of not interfering in the operational activities. GC doesn't think Bennett once challenged a decision that GC made, although he often made suggestions. He was very helpful in pointing out things GC or the city hadn't done. "Considering I've worked with him for such a short period of time, I was really knocked out at Gary's leadership."

Asked about the allegation that GC and Mayor Bennett argued openly, in public, about whether city buses would run or not, GC says there was "no argument" but that there was "some confusion about whether the bus routes should run." They ended up resolving that the buses would only run if there were buses left over after the buses had been assigned to other mandates, GC said. He remembers some members of council feeling that that was inappropriate, but "that was just a discussion. I don't remember it ever involving a disagreement."

There was only one heated discussion in the open area of City Hall, GC said, and he remembers it very well. A reporter thought the Mayor should be down at the radio station full-time. "I ended up suggesting he [the reporter] leave City Hall or I'd have him thrown him out. He had lost it. His family was in a difficult situation, and he had every reason to lose it. But it was the only time that voices got raised, as I recall. There may have been an instance in which the mayor may have expressed a point of view that I disagreed with, but I don't recall it."

Asked about allegations that there was no one person clearly in charge at City Hall, GC said it was clear to him that he had operational control throughout the emergency, and that Gary Bennett had political control. When GC wasn't there, he assigned operational control to people. Most of the time it was Lance Thurston, but Jim deHoop also took over from GC on occasion. But the operational control remained exactly as the plan said it should be, in one person. Gary was the overall leader of the process, and when Gary wasn't around, Carl Holmberg played that role, and Joe Hawkins played that role.

Civilian leadership is really critical in these situations, GC said. These other organizations have enormous roles to play and play them well, but he really thinks there's a misunderstanding of leadership. There may be people who want to offload their responsibility onto one guy [by installing a single military leader to head up the crisis], but that's not how responsibility works, GC said. "Accountability and responsibility should be matched. If you've made a field decision, and you've made the wrong decision, that's fine, you're accountable for it. And there are folks who aren't comfortable with that kind of accountability, and my answer to them consistently is 'then, step aside and let somebody else do it.'"

GC was the emergency provincial response coordinator for a couple of years in Toronto, but that was mostly post-disaster, setting up the response committees.

Asked about tension between city police and the OPP within the police command post at City Hall, GC said that's probably a manifestation of the wider issue of who will police the city, rather than anything that happened during the ice storm itself. GC was on the street a couple of times when he witnessed city police and OPP functioning very effectively together, and no mention was made during the control group meetings of any tension between the two groups of police. The OPP did a "marvellous job" of collecting data when Ontario Hydro wasn't around. Because of Ontario Hydro's absence, the OPP went out and collected data on what was on and what was off in the former Kingston Township, and where the crews were working. It was almost 70 hours before Kingston saw Ontario Hydro, and in their absence, the OPP did a wonderful job of keeping the city informed. GC never heard a "murmur of criticism" of what either one of the police forces were doing during the storm. Complaints coming out now, he says, are probably "more a function of current relationships than relationships during the storm. I've heard a bit of it too, now. I don't think it happened."

The emergency planning officer's job was vacant at the time of this interview, and the city has asked Chief Glenn Gow to identify some candidates. Bob Boyd is chair of the emergency planning committee, and as soon as an emergency planning officer has been appointed, they'll go through the plan carefully and revise it.

"It's still an incident plan," GC said, "and it still needs to have some overall thoughts about what we do when the entire city is involved in the malfunction. There needs to be a couple more pages in the plan."

The hospitals and medical officer of health were brought in on the second day. The city had been dealing with Peter Glynn (of KGH) from almost the moment the emergency was declared, but the hospitals were not officially part of the city's response until later. Same with the medical officer of health, who should have been on line sooner. But the only really glaring absence was Ontario Hydro, GC said.

Kingston officials followed the emergency plan in terms of its conceptual advice but were free with the details, GC said. "The plan was not designed to deal with what we were dealing with, so we were pretty free with it."

GC hadn't seen or read the emergency plan. Nancy Taylor gave him her plan, and that was his first glimpse of it. He knew one existed, because he'd see it on the transition board. So he was one step ahead of Mirka J., who never saw the plan.

"Mirka should have had a plan," GC said, "but did it matter? Probably not."

"The plan didn't fail," GC said. "It was a very, very useful document. It just wasn't designed for the breadth of the reaction we were facing."

At one point during the emergency GC asked Chief Gow if he could find enough single band radios to distribute to every house in Kingston or a greater part of those homes. That's something the city has to decide for the future, GC said. It's not a huge investment, but it's a huge logistics challenge, he said, because you have to ask yourself whether it's worth it to have that kind of store of radios and frozen batteries to take out and start distributing. He's not sure whether it's viable, but it's something that was considered.