IceStorm 98 Study

[Note: this is a follow-up interview to the longer one carried out by Dr. Stewart Fyfe and others at the beginning of the project]

Q: You've now had four months to think about the ice storm, hold your debriefings and begin revising the emergency plan. With all of that hindsight, what do you feel you've learned about the way the emergency was handled?

"It will take a long time before the entire event is completely documented. It'll be a lifetime of reflection as to what we learned from the experience .... I think overall I continue to be impressed by ... the ability of the staff and the community to work together so quickly. You never have time to prepare for an emergency ... sometimes if a hurricane is coming you have a few days to batten down the hatches and wait for the storm to hit, but in this particular case there was virtually no warning to the event. It wasn't as though we all sat around waiting for generators to arrive before the first bit of ice hit our community. I mean, all the weather reports and all the indications suggested we were going to be fine, it wasn't an issue, that it would miss us. In fact, that evening, Wednesday night I sat there watching The National and looking at the situation in Montreal and just counting my blessings that our community wasn't having to cope with that, and kind of thinking 'Gee, I wonder if there isn't anything we as a municipality or as a province can be doing to kind of assist our municipal colleagues in Quebec' ... three hours later, I had a tree stuck in my roof."

GB's tree actually went through the roof of his home. "In fact the roofing company is just there today tearing my roof out. They've had it patched for the past several months ... the insurance company is replacing the entire roof of my home. So it was something that not only did we manage our way through the storm as part of the municipal team, but we lived it and experienced it, as all our staff did."

GB had friends going back and forth to his house during the emergency, checking on it and making sure the pipes weren't freezing, and he would get regular reports on the situation from friends and neighbours who called or visited City Hall. But his own situation seemed minor in comparison to what people were going through all across Kingston and the region. "It [the roof] really wasn't a priority in my mind, in that when you were dealing with the degree of the emergency and the severity of the emergency and the lack of power and people literally freezing in their homes, and concern about the quality and sustainability of the water supply ...."

The first 48 hours were "really rough," GB recalls, because the situation wasn't improving -- it was deteriorating. "Even though the freezing rain had stopped, the ongoing weight of the ice on the power lines was just pulling the lines down ... It wasn't like the hurricane comes through and once again you can assess the damage. In this case here the damage and the severity of the situation was growing."

Most emergency plans start from the assumption that there is a defined emergency area that can be cordoned off, and another place outside the emergency area that can function as an emergency operations centre, GB pointed out. Such plans assume that you can coordinate from afar and send resources into the emergency area, that you can contain the situation, you can control it, you can keep the public away from the emergency. "In this case it was the entire city that was coping with it, so there was no way to control access to the emergency area, because it was the whole community."

He defends the decision to establish City Hall as the EOC, saying "In many ways it was highly functional. It was a good decision, because at the time we went through primary, secondary and tertiary emergency operations centres, there were restrictions or things that prohibited us from using each one of those facilities."

Q: Did the staff college really ask for 24 hours notice before being used as an emergency operations centre?

"Well, we never really got to that point in time. That issue emerged after the fact. I wasn't really aware of it at the time, because I knew I'd been out for two or three hours, and driving around and I was aware of the fact that you couldn't even get access into the college because there were large trees over the pathways coming in. They told me that they were on emergency power there. They didn't have adequate back-up power. We couldn't get a phone line in there to determine whether or not the phone lines were running. So there were a lot of unknowns. When you're sitting around a table and saying 'We have a state of emergency on our hands, we need an emergency operations centre, now,' we didn't have time to drive out and take a look and just see what the situation was. So I just looked at each one of the established EOC centres and I said 'Why don't we just make it City Hall? We just came from there, there's lots of room, there's light, there's heat, there's hydro.' Jim Keech assured me that it was on the primary substation number one, and he was convinced he could maintain that substation operating under just about any circumstances. Even though we failed to really understand, I think, the magnitude or the severity of the emergency at the time. So I said 'If you can guarantee me power at that particular site, I'll take it, that's where I'm going'."

Gary Bennett confirmed that Mirka Januskiewicz was asked for 24 hours notice before using the Staff College, but he said that took place later in the emergency, when the EOC was being moved out of City Hall.

Q: If the Staff College really needs 24 hours notice, then do they deserve to be listed in the emergency plan as the primary emergency operations centre?

"You certainly couldn't ... I think you're going to have to ensure that you can get instantaneous access to an EOC centre. You can't quite simply hesitate and wonder 'Who are we going to call?'"

City staff had a lot of trouble reaching school officials to tell them about the need for shelters in the school system, GB recalls. "The schools were closed, there was nobody [there], we had difficulty phoning people, even contacting someone who could give us access to the schools to set up emergency shelters. It was impossible to get ahold of people because the phone lines in many cases were down, you didn't know who to contact, normally you call, and if you know that a storm's coming on the horizon, you can make some preliminary arrangements. So yeah, a lot of valuable lessons learned."

Q: Lance Thurston mentioned that school officials were putting pressure on the city to get out of the schools so that they could open to students again. That raises two questions: 1.) Should school boards be allowed to make those sorts of requests, when they're specified in the emergency plan as a potential shelter site, and 2.) Should shelters be located in schools if there is an imperative to get kids back to school quickly after an emergency?

"It's an interesting question. One of the first problems we had with the schools is ... we just established it, started advertising to people that you could go there, get warm, stay over night, get food, and we were sending resources there, and then the power went down. That was Frontenac High School, which was part of the Ontario Hydro grid, and the difficulty was we couldn't phone anyone up, we had difficulty getting ahold of Ontario Hydro for the first 48 hours, so we didn't even know when the power would be back on. So here we were establishing emergency centres, sending people there, sending resources in there, food, cots, everything, and we don't know if we're taking people out of a cold home and putting them in a cold shelter."

"Initially we contemplated moving [the Frontenac High School shelter], but we thought 'everything's in gear, we're just going to have to ... send in emergency generators [if the power fails], because the last thing we want to be do is be establishing emergency shelters and then moving them around, so that it's a guessing game as to where they are."

He recommended dedicating one or two schools in the area as potential emergency shelters, and arranging with the school boards in advance so that they know in an emergency situation the city could simply take over the facility. Any schools designated as emergency shelters should also be equipped with enough back-up generator power to run both lights and heat, GB added. "Not in all schools, obviously. That would be cost-prohibitive. But clearly one or two schools should be designated as emergency shelters with adequate back-up power. Generators that are big enough to run all the lighting, and the heat and the boilers in most facilities. There should just be a switch you can flip, just like the hospitals have an established and reliable power back-up."

Q: Were hospitals included in the emergency plan?

"Not really. They pretty well just went ahead and ... I mean, obviously they are included in the wider emergency operations group, but in many cases everybody just got up and running on their own. They just said here's a need ... especially Hotel Dieu did a remarkable job in terms of recognizing that there would be an immediate need for those who couldn't go to more standard high school type setting for shelter. [Those people] required some degree of nursing care and support, so the Hotel Dieu just opened their doors and everybody flooded in. So in many ways they provided a very critical need in the community, and that was addressing the needs of those who were a little more frail or a little more elderly, and that needs to be included as a permanent component in the emergency operation plan too."

It's imperative that Kingston's new emergency plan establish a hospital as an emergency shelter, GB said. "Something a little higher up in terms of the degree of care you can provide than just the basic shelter at the high school, [where they say] 'we'll give you a toothbrush, we'll give you a cot and a bowl of soup.' There are those that have more critical needs, and especially in this day and age when we encourage people to spend less time in the hospitals and more time at home, and there are a lot of people in this community that are at home and that are on critical medical support systems in their homes."

The city does not have a comprehensive list of people who are on critical medical support systems in their home, but those lists exist and they should be compiled for use in emergencies, GB said.

These are all recommendations that have gone to Bob Boyd, and a revised emergency plan has been circulated, which everyone is looking at. The city is taking a senior staff person [Mirka Januskiewicz, at this point] and assigning them on a permanent basis to emergency planning.

Emergency planning has a tendency to get placed on the back burner, GB noted, but that can't be allowed to happen. "It was kind of something you did every five years or three years, whenever somebody would impress upon you the need for emergency planning, then we would go off and put some resources into it and do it."

Mirka Januskiewicz has been coordinating most of the emergency planning up until now, and the city will work with Mr. Boyd and the emergency planning group to put together a more comprehensive plan that incorporates long-lasting and widespread emergencies. "Because normally in an emergency plan you don't figure you're going to lose your communications ability, the public broadcast system is inoperative and you don't have any power in the community ... normal modes of communications are all relied upon in the plan ... I mean, you can't even read the plan without electricity. You need a candle."

GB said he talked to emergency planners from Toronto who said that in a mock disaster there is "no way ... that they would ever throw this many things at a control group. You'd just be overwhelmed, you couldn't deal with it, and yet somehow we did."

He credits amalgamation with making the emergency response easier than it could have been under the old municipal arrangements: "That was one of the real successes, the early successes, of the restructuring and amalgamation of the area, was the fact that you had only a single layer of government for the area. It wasn't a question of the former city of Kingston having to coordinate a relief effort with the former Kingston Township and the former Pittsburgh Township. There's no question there would have been an enormous duplication of effort."

"I don't think we'd be speaking about the successes of how we coped with the situation [if Kingston were not amalgamated], I think we'd be talking about the deficiencies and what went wrong. I think what went wrong would have been a much longer list. Because there's no question that the ability to try and coordinate services across the whole area would have been extremely difficult, because you would have had to get the concurrence of myself and the reeves of the other two townships, and there was an inability to communicate with people in your own community, let alone trying to communicate with the surrounding townships. And then if you had to coordinate meetings and coordinate what they were doing with what we were doing, clearly it would have just been a logistical nightmare."

But he acknowledges that the newness of amalgamation created problems of its own. "We didn't have a staff directory or anything like that. People were going by me and introducing themselves and I hadn't even met them. And I felt bad about that, but we'd only be running for a little better than a week. About eight days. There wasn't even enough time for people to adjust to [questions like] 'Is this my desk? Is that your desk?' So we had to pull a diverse group of people together very quickly."

The emergency plan was so new -- and so geared to contained, single-point incidents -- that it could only be of limited help, he said. "There was a plan, it was a rudimentary plan, but it could have worked. No one had really read it ... I had read the previous one, I'd flipped through this one, and I knew where the EOCs were, and I knew the keys to the Staff College were in the left-hand side of my drawer, and the key to the radio room and all that. I keep it all there, so I knew that in an emergency, you get the City Hall, you get the keys, and you go the Staff College, away you go."

"But it was a little discouraging to have the emergency plan and look at it and realize 'Well, it just doesn't fit. We're going to have to write this as we go.'"

GB was impressed by how easily staff slid into their new roles during the ice storm. "That's what really amazed me, too, was the ability and the resourcefulness of the community and the people around me, to recognize that we gave them a responsibility, they went and did it, and the jobs got done."

Control group meetings [made up of people designated in the emergency plan and anyone else who needed to be there] were held every few hours, and followed a system that came to be known as the Sheep Rule. Bennett or Church or whoever was running the meeting went around the room and asked everyone three questions: 'What happened since we last met, what should have happened, and what needs to happen before we meet again?' GB said the system "just kind of evolved ... out of the discussions," and worked very well.

"We wrote [the questions] on the blackboard, and [they] survived on the blackboard for ten days. Everybody knew when they came [to the meetings], it was kind of like going into an exam, you were given three questions, you knew what you were going to be asked. And it wasn't a question of criticism, there wasn't any time for criticism, everybody just knew that if what was supposed to have occurred didn't occur, just tell us why it didn't occur. And nine times out of 10 it was a question of miscommunication, because there was an inability to communicate, or somebody else didn't come through. For example, if somebody said I'll go out and get 1,000 cots here or 10 generators here, and they came back and said 'we called here, here, and here, and everybody's already sent their generators out, but what we've got is we've compiled a new list of people, and we're phoning them now to see if we can get the generators. So no, the generators are not at locations A, B and C like we said they would be, but we hope before we meet again they will be.'"

Control group members seemed to understand that this was no time to worry about protecting their own egos or reputations. "There's just no time. People are in their homes, they're cold, you've got senior citizens' homes going down, you've got the water purification plant that you just knew had to keep running, because you get into a whole other range of issues when you can't guarantee a clean water supply ..."

At first, staff at the purification plant assured senior administrators that they could keep the plant operating on back-up power, but the situation changed dramatically as the crisis wore on and new information came in. "I called them [at the purification plant], and said 'Everything's OK? You can operate?' And they said 'Oh yeah, we can operate, everything's A-OK, we can operate with back-up power.' Well, 24 hours later they're back at the table, saying 'Well we need to back-wash the filters now, and we can't back-wash the filters just using back-up power, we have to have full power going through there.' The idea behind the back-wash and the filter is that the filters filter the water, they build up contaminants in it. It's no different from a pool at your home. What you do then is you shut the water off, you reverse the flow of water, and you actually flush the bacteria and the contaminants out of the filter bed, and you flush it back out, and then you reverse the flow, and the flow starts going again to purify the water."

[Without this], it would get to the point where the quality of the water would be significantly compromised, to the point where they couldn't guarantee a clean supply of water. So I learned that you can't backwash the filters of a water purification plant on back-up power. I think it was important to know that, because normally you would never ever be confronted with the fact that, well, we have a capital need for back-up power to back-wash the filters. If someone came to me and said 'Why would you would want to spend $100,000 or $200,000, whatever the amount is, for that one instance? What are the odds of having to backwash a filter when you have no power, and how could the power possibly be off for three days?' Well, but that plant was engineered and built in the 1950s, and it's never confronted a situation like that, so for 45, 50 years, it was fine, but now, once again we recognize that there's a need for more capital investment in something that probably wouldn't be done otherwise."

Changing weather patterns may mean that we have to adapt to more frequent severe storms, he said. "It may not be the storm of the century, it may just be the storm of the year. Or the storm of the decade. But there's no question that once you've experienced weather like that, I mean, a tornado comes through the middle of your home one day, it can come through the middle of your home another day. And an ice storm like this is no different. It could occur again, and more than likely it will occur again in our lifetime."

He recalled watching the news the night before and hearing about the mud slides in Italy that killed hundreds of people. "There's no question that there's enormous shifts in the weather patterns. The fact is we're paying the price for a lot of ongoing, unsustainable development. So I guess we're all a bit of a culprit."

Capital projects will have to adapt to this reality, he said, but some things will not be affordable. "In this case here, you can't afford to bury the entire electrical infrastructure of the community. You can begin an aggressive program in which all new development is underground, which is fine, and we're going to begin a capital program over the next 10 or 20 years where we'll start taking some of the more critical feeder lines and getting that infrastructure underground. But it's, what, $200,000 a kilometre for overhead wiring and $2 million a kilometre for underground wiring? So it's a factor of 10. And they tell me that that's not a conservative figure. If anything it could be double that ..."

Q: What recommendations are you going to adopt from the Toronto Hydro report on Kingston's electrical system?

"He [Sironi] did a good overview, but it doesn't matter what state of the integrity the electrical system of the city of Kingston was; no electrical system is designed to cope with that degree of an ice load. The ice loads that were on those lines is far in excess that any line has been engineered for. In fact, in many ways I guess we did a bit of an experiment in terms of what is the maximum ice load that you can put on the lines. But he talks in there about the idea of creating ice-prone insulators and overhead wiring and some improvements there, and we're going to begin working towards that. But it's a massive investment in capital needs that we don't have the ability to do tomorrow. But we'll commit to the plan [the Toronto Hydro plan for Kingston] over time. We'll clearly commit to it and keep moving forward."

"This city is one of the oldest communities in Canada. Some of the sewers pre-date Confederation. This is a very old community. And in many cases you have to recognize that a lot of the infrastructure is older, and we will continue to replace it and upgrade it over time. But no community can just overnight decide to rebuild its electrical infrastructure. It's impossible."

Q: Someone I spoke to from Toronto (one of the relief workers who came to Kingston during the ice storm) described Kingston's electrical system as a 'disaster waiting to happen.' Did you ever hear that?

"Not really. Actually, when I look at our electrical grid and look at the investments that have been made in it over the years ... in some cases some of the grid has aged, in other areas, the grid is highly up to date. And I guess you could apply the same criticism to any municipal infrastructure in North America. You'd like to have everything up to 110 per cent standard, but it's just not possible in terms of the cost. And I don't think people in Ontario are willing to tolerate double or triple electrical rates in order to raise the engineering standard of the entire electrical grid to that level. But in many ways, no, I was satisfied with the integrity of our system. In some areas it was definitely aged, but whether it was aged or new, in terms of the ice loads that we experienced, it wouldn't have mattered if they were brand new pristine lines. As long as they were overhead, with the combination of the trees and that ... if anything, the ice storm has allowed us to start rebuilding an older system in a way in which we might not have been as aggressive. But if it had been a brand new system, with the combination of the high trees and the overhead lines, it still would have come down. Because there's just no way that any system is designed to take those ice loads, in combination with the high, mature trees. Really what it is: a mature urban forest and overhead lines are unfortunately a deadly combination."

Q: So what do we do about the trees?

"The most cost-effective thing is to cut all the trees down. A real pure analytical engineer who is looking for the most cost-effective solution will tell you to just buy 12 chainsaws and take all the trees down. And we certainly don't want to do that. I think what we need to be doing is, certainly when we're planting new-growth trees, we need to be a little more conscious of the reality of the overhead lines. We need to do probably a lot more pruning of the urban forest to ensure that it's pruned away from the lines. The difficulty is that it's beautiful to see tree-lined streets with beautiful old-growth trees ... regrettably, I'm not sure if we kept pruning them all back if they'd all look like popsicles. I don't think we want to just plant poplar trees or anything like that. So it's extremely difficult. There is an ability, though, to be more sensitive to the fact that you need to ensure that you keep the lines and the growth as separated as possible. Unless you prefer to bury all the lines, it's just not possible to keep a degree of clearance that from an engineering point of view would be acceptable."

Q: Is it true that Toronto Hydro crews wanted to leave early, and that Gardner Church put in a call to [Toronto Mayor] Mel Lastman to stop them from going home? What other strings did he pull?

"Well, he was very resourceful. I spoke directly with Mayor Lastman, and he assured me that the City of Kingston would be able to access the resources of the City of Toronto. It certainly was an emergency of an unprecedented nature, and he was certainly prepared to ensure that we had the resources that this community needed. And there was no discussion in any of my conversations with him as to who was going to pay for it, and when did I want the resources back. Around the sixth, seventh or eighth days, as things started, not to wind down, but we were clearly getting ahead of the situation, there were demands to send some of those resources back to, not just the City of Toronto, but other municipalities as well.

GB confirmed that the pressure to return Toronto Hydro crews was coming from the utility, not the City of Toronto.

"But overall, I think we had a high degree of cooperation from everyone across the province. I think people from all municipalities were extremely generous and supportive of our needs in this city. In fact, if anything, we were probably overwhelmed with the resources that were offered to us. Sometimes you felt that the resources were coming, coming, coming ... now mind you, we didn't have them in the first 48 or 72 hours, but once you had about three days behind you ... once again it takes time to phone every community and get them geared up to come here, and for them to make arrangements with their own crews... But there never was an argument between this municipality and any other community about giving resources back. But there was clearly an interest in getting certain individuals back to their previous municipalities and that."

GB enjoyed talking to crews from other municipalities, and views the ice storm as an odd sort of tourist booster for Kingston. "I was amazed, and this is why I've been after my tourist development people. I said 'I've been talking with people from Toronto and Hamilton ... and first of all they all want to move here. They said if there's ever a job opportunity, we'd really like to consider moving here.' Because they said they thought the people were wonderful, the community was wonderful, and they'd never been here. I said here you've got all these people from Toronto and Etobicoke and Oshawa and Hamilton, and just about every one of them I spoke to said they'd never been to Kingston and they loved the community and they wanted to come back this summer."

"In many ways it did have a tourism component too, in that it did bring a lot of people into the community who wouldn't have been here otherwise. And I was on national TV, and I had friends call me from as far away as California and Europe and say 'I saw you on TV.' And I said 'Oh, great, what was I doing?' They said 'You were being interviewed by this media or that media.' [He confirmed that these were CBC interviews]. So in many ways it did give the community an international profile, I mean, you know, a very fleeting and short-lived bit of international fame, and it wasn't the sort of international fame or attention you want, but it did give us, for a very brief global moment we did have the ability to tell a lot of the world that we were having some difficulties."

GB also did an interview with C-PAC that has been broadcast about a dozen times. They did an hour-long program about the storm and the municipalities' response to it. "They showed up about three or four days into the emergency and got in the van and said let's go for a drive. I took them all around, showed them my own home, and all the parks and that, and went into a couple of the shelters."

Call Liz Cashman (the mayor's assistant) to get the name of a C-PAC contact.

Q: Gardner Church had high praise for Emergency Measures Ontario, but in your first interview you pointed out that they were three days late. Were they effective once they got to Kingston?

"I think they played an important role once they got here. The difficulty for EMO, once again, is they have limited resources and they were dealing with ... normally they deal with 20 or 30 emergencies a year, and this year they've dealt with something like 200 already, because there were so many communities across Ontario that declared emergencies. In fact ... they said the number of municipalities that declared emergencies was actually three times that [if you think of them in their old, unamalgamated state]. So I think [Emergency Measures Ontario] was no different than anyone else in the province, they were just absolutely overwhelmed with the magnitude of it. In fairness to them I think they were in the same situation as someone like Ontario Hydro, the cable companies, Bell Telephone or whoever. Nobody has those kind of resources just sitting on a shelf, ready to pull off."

"And actually a lot of the [EMO] relief effort was further East from here. There were parts of Ontario that had already felt the effects of the storm, so a lot of EMO's resources had already been dedicated further East, and I'm sure they were probably cooperating with the province of Quebec too ... So the Ontario EOC was an important participant in the process. It's just that initially at that table there wasn't anybody there with us. And I guess that was my comment, that in an emergency you have to recognize that you have to be prepared to deal with the situation, probably at least for the first 24 or 48 hours, on your own, so you're going to be in some ways isolated, and you're going to have to be resourceful and just rely on yourself, your wits and your own resources, initially, because it takes time to bring resources to bear on an emergency situation ... It's not a criticism; it's just a recognition that that's the way the system works."

If it had been a train derailment or a plane crash, the situation with EMO might have been very different, GB notes, but the ice storm was unique.

Q: It's just a little ironic that one of Kingston's councillors is a full-time employee with Emergency Measures Ontario, and here we are unable to get their attention during the first two or three days.

"Isn't it. Actually he [Randy Reid] had been sent on to some community further east from here. He'd already been sequestered and gone. So I couldn't even call him. He'd already been resourced out of the community."

Q: Has Toronto Hydro charged the city for sending people here? And do you know how much they spent?

"I haven't seen the break out or the numbers ... I just know that with the municipalities when they sent the resources here there was no discussion about whether we were going to pay for all of this. They just said 'You need the resources, we'll send them to you, and we'll sort this out after.' And they've all been excellent."

The ice storm generated a lot of goodwill with other communities, GB said, and this has translated into low bills from municipalities who sent staff to the area. "Everyone has been extremely generous with their billing, in terms of what we asked them to do. It just happens that there are 500 or so municipalities in Ontario, and many of them have their own electrical hydro commissions, so you had the ability to draw resources from a lot of communities very quickly. I'm just glad that this emergency wasn't spread over an area including Toronto, because then I think we really would have had some difficulty, because then those rich and significant resources to the West, we wouldn't have been able to access. This [Kingston and region] was pretty well the end of the line [for the storm], going West."