IceStorm 98 Study

GC is a shift supervisor for an OPP platoon based in the former Kingston Township. He works regular shifts, days and nights, and is responsible for the conduct of police officers on the road. He’s also on the road a lot of the time himself.

GC got up on first day off, after finishing a number of midnight shifts, and noticed that the whole house was covered in ice. He realized there was a problem when he found that there was no TV and that radio coverage was sporadic. He called the office, spoke to his boss, who confirmed that there was a major problem. GC came in to work despite the fact that he was supposed to be off for several days. He worked night shifts throughout the ice storm.

He worked in the command centre in City Hall for a couple of nights, then worked in the OPP office at 500 O’Connor Dr. for a couple of nights, then spent one night working in Perth. He went to Perth (the night before city officials decided to stand the emergency down) because Perth was hit worse than Kingston, and needed more people.

GC still marvels at how well the community came together during the emergency. He recalls talking to a number of elderly people who compared it to World War Two, in terms of the spirit of co-operation it produced: “Elderly people will tell you that the first time they’ve seen a sense of community since the 40s was during this storm. You could go to your neighbour here during the ice storm, and they’d give you whatever they had to help out. A week prior to that you wouldn’t go to your neighbour for anything, because you wouldn’t get it. It takes a catastrophe like that to bring the community together ... It brought out the best in everybody. Even critical people, and even cranky people, and even people that don’t normally get along with their neighbours.”

The official response was a different matter. First of all, GC said, the official response was too slow at the start. City officials should have been alert to the problem as it spread through Quebec and realized that the storm was on its way.

GC also believes the response was too centralized: “Most of [it] was focused on the centre of the city, and yet most of the damage was not on the centre of the city. Most of the damage was in the outlying areas. So the people in charge of the whole thing were downtown, and the people suffering the most were not downtown.”

Decision-making was a particular problem at City Hall, GC recalls: “A group of people would make a decision, whether it was the military, the police, fire, or ambulance, and another person would arbitrarily change that decision, whether it was the Mayor or the Chief Administrative Officer of the City.” GC saw them [Mayor Bennett and Interim CAO Gardner Church] disagree openly in front of people, and found this destructive: “Personally, [I believe that] in a crisis situation people look to their leaders. And if the leaders are arguing and bickering and not working together, it causes dissension, and it causes lack of faith ... In a crisis, if you’re going to disagree and you’re at the top, you should do it privately, not openly in front of other people.”

GC saw other people and agencies disagree as well. Some of them, he says, guarded their territory “viciously” during the storm. One incident stands out in his mind: “All of the police officers and emergency service crews were attending City Hall for food and refreshments., because it was the only place you could get a hot meal. And one of the OPP officers was down there at 3 a.m. and came across a break-and-enter in progress in the Queen’s ghetto area. He arrested the person. They had just broken into a couple of homes, and the OPP officer turned him into the city police. I made a joke with my counterpart there, at the table, and he was annoyed that the OPP officer was in the centre of the city. And for me, when you’re dealing with this type of crisis, it doesn’t matter if you’re a cook or a pop bottle washer, everybody should work together for the same goal ... People should be able to drop these barriers in a major crisis, and not worry about how they look, or how they’re perceived, or how their organization looks or how their organization is perceived. They should focus on the problem at hand, and the problem at hand was the ice storm. If you’re the deputy of this or the deputy of that, that should not matter, what should matter is you deal with the problem. And that’s not what I saw there. I saw a lot of disorganization, I saw a lot of bickering, I saw a lot of animosity between agencies. There were a few key people there who tried to pull these people together, that tried to get them to work together, and I attended several meetings, high-level meetings with the top people there, the mayor and the chiefs and all that were there, and those meetings tended to go well. But when they left the room, people would drop back into their protective zones, and you had to overcome that to deal with the problem.”

He commented on the OPP’s decision to approach the Ministry of Transportation for temporary licenses to allow ten unlicensed vans to be used during the emergency: “We could have written a letter [allowing the vans to be used without licenses], but if you write that letter and someone kills somebody with one of those vans, accidentally, it doesn’t matter if there’s a crisis. People will sue. And they’ll sue me because I wrote the letter. And they’ll sue you because you were the driver.” (See interviews with Kingston Police Chief Bill Closs and OPP Staff Sgt. Glen Fowler for a full account of this incident).

GC noted that the OPP’s volunteer patrol corps (Cop Citizens on Patrol) were not welcomed into the emergency response at City Hall. “They [the volunteers] work with us at night, just like the city’s volunteered do, and our people wanted to come down there, but they weren’t accepted. They weren’t wanted ... I had to intervene in one particular case and say ‘I want you to take this fellow out. He’s one of our best.’

In fact, GC said, regular OPP officers were not warmly welcomed into the emergency response either: “Again, it was jockeying for position. And I’ll tell you honestly, I felt sitting around the table as a police officer that the OPP was not welcomed there by our counterparts. I’m not saying that because of the controversy,* and I don’t want to cause any problems ... but the whole time I would be there [from 6 p.m. to 4 a.m.], all I would hear every 20 minutes was ‘You can go, we don’t need you, you can go, we don’t need you.’”

* [Before, during and after the ice storm, City Police and the Kingston OPP were competing over who would have responsibility for policing in the new amalgamated city. At the time of this writing, City Council appears ready to hand over full responsibility to the City Police. If this happens, the OPP will lose a major part of its policing duties in the former Kingston Township].

The OPP has unlimited resources when it comes to an emergency like this, GC points out, but the OPP was under utilized “because people were afraid that we were going to look good, and they were going to look bad.”

He admitted that there was animosity and petty behaviour on both sides. “There was problems, OPP officers who didn’t want to work with other people. There was animosity. And it was caused by bickering by leaders, and it was caused by a lack of focus on the problem.”

“What happens sometimes in crisis is people rush in to help, but then they want to be recognized for everything they’ve done. And those are the people that cause problems. There’s a lot of heroes from that storm, and you’ll never hear from 95 per cent of them. They just go about their business. There’s people that gave blankets and soup and helped hundreds of people, and we’ll never know who they were. But we’ll hear about the one or two who ran up to get their picture in the paper, or jumped on the TV all the time, or on the radio. And that takes away from the whole focus of the whole incident. In my opinion, when you’re in a command centre in a major crisis, everybody had to drop all the barriers and work together.”

GC noticed a serious lack of leadership during the storm. “The whole time I was there [in City Hall], I never knew who was in charge. The entire time I was there. I knew the mayor was in the end the boss, or Gardner Church in the end was the boss. But they came and went all the time, [and] they did not always agree.”

He recalled one incident in which the Mayor and Gardner Church disagreed over bussing. “There was a meeting held, [and it was decided that] the buses were not going to run publicly for the next couple of days. That was agreed at the meeting, I was at that meeting. So we’re trying to co-ordinate the military response to check homes, and Gardner Church comes around the corner, and the buses are not available, because the Mayor has gone out of the meeting, and he’s got some pressure from some constituents, and he tells them the buses are going to run. And he tells the guy in charge of the buses that they’re going to run. So Gardner Church gets all upset in the hallway, ranting and raving, he has to go upstairs to have a big argument, the buses don’t run. Everybody agreed they weren’t going to run anyway, the Chief of Police, the Fire Department, Ontario Hydro, everybody agreed they weren’t going to run.”

GC criticized Ontario Hydro for taking too long to “come to the table” -- i.e., join the emergency response -- and he attributed this to another war over turf: “It took days for them [Ontario Hydro] to come to the table. Two or three days. They should have been there immediately. Again, it’s a turf war. The PUC [Public Utilities Commission] is taking over these areas, the PUC is eventually going take over from Ontario Hydro, and Ontario Hydro wants to look like they’re doing a really good job, and they did do a really good job. All those guys worked their buns off. But they couldn’t work together. And that’s where the whole problem lies.”

All parties to the crisis entered into it with good intentions, GC says, but these didn’t last: “Initially when it starts, everybody jumps in and it’s ‘hi, how are you,’ and they jockey for a position at the table, and they want to do well, and they want to do the job right. But then, the territory starts to fan out, and people see ‘We’re not going to look good when it’s all over,’ so people start to protect their areas. And that’s where it takes a strong leader to come in and say ‘Hey, this has got to stop.’ That did not happen. People fanned out. They did their jobs. It went surprisingly well. But there was a lot of turf problems.”

He cites one flagrant case of a waste of manpower: the decision to patrol the Bayridge subdivisions. Bayridge was not subject to any lasting power failures during the storm, GC said, but it was decided that the area had to be canvassed for political reasons. “I sat at the table with the police and said that is a waste of time, I tell you we have cruisers in that area, the people have power, they’re not in any need. But they took literally hundreds of RMC soldiers and made them canvas that area, so the Mayor would look good. And I think that that was a waste of manpower that could have been used somewhere else in a more important or a more devastated area. But it was done. This is not being done because people need help; this is being done because it was a political move. And in my opinion, that makes me nauseous. We’re dealing with a crisis here where we have to feed people, and get people heat and clothing and moral support, and we’re sending hundreds of soldiers to walk around subdivisions that weren’t even struck by the storm. Literally three hundred soldiers were used that day to walk through the subdivisions.”

GC recalls being told outright that the decision to send soldiers into Bayridge was politically motivated. “It was said openly that ... the Mayor wants this done for political reasons. I sat there with the Staff Sgt. From the city and argued with him black and blue that it was not necessary ... there was not one complaint from these areas coming into our communications area. There was no telephone disruption, there was no power disruption. It was done so that they [city staff and politicians] could sit down and say they’ve done the whole city.”

Asked whether there was anything that reflected badly on the OPP, GC recalled an OPP officer who misused his time at City Hall by trying to court the media all day. “One of our guys comes down there and his job is to work with people, and he spends the whole day trying to get on TV or on radio interviews. I had to speak to him myself and say ‘you’re causing animosity here.’” GC believes that the OPP officer was trying to win some good publicity for the OPP; “four or five days into the storm, the turf war was underway.”

GC spent 11 years as a military police officer before joining the OPP, and he believes that the only thing that gets an organization through a major crisis is solid leadership. But this was exactly what was lacking at City Hall: “In my opinion, we had a new council, and we had a new Mayor, and they were all struggling to stand on top. And that affected the response. It was a good response, but it could have been a lot better.”

The leadership problems stemmed from the fact that different people were in charge at different times, while no one other than the Mayor seemed to have ultimate authority, GC said: “One day the Mayor was in charge, one day Gardner Church was in charge, the next day the Deputy Mayor was in charge. They would spell each other off, but if something happened, they had to call the Mayor at home. If you’re left in charge, you should be able to deal with [problems]. I thought that was wrong.”

GC also questioned the wisdom of putting the city’s top political figure in charge of the emergency response: “In the command centre, the Mayor should not be in charge. Somebody should be appointed, whether it’s a volunteer off the street who has this kind of management, or Chief of Police. I personally thought the city Chief of Police should have been in charge of the command centre. He’s the ultimate authority for law enforcement or crisis management in the city. Or the Fire Chief. They weren’t there at all; the police chief would drop in occasionally, the fire chief would drop in occasionally. They left a constable and a staff sgt. there. But were they really in charge? They couldn’t make the big decisions. They would come up with plans, and they came up with some good plans, the city staff sgt. and that constable there, they made some good plans.”

Given the lack of clear leadership at the top, GC felt responsible for all of his own decisions. “There was no directive [as to] who was in charge, and for example, if there were people on a boat stuck in a river with no power, I would have to make the decision to help those people. There was nobody I could go to and say ‘Here is the problem.’ At 2 o’clock in the morning, I had to deal with the problem.”

Fortunately, GC said, it never came to that: “All the problems were minor. People needed flashlights or batteries or fuel. Those were easy problems to deal with. There was no major emergency for me to deal with.”

Money was not a concern. The OPP doled out everything it had, from flashlights to batteries to jackets. OPP officers gave away countless raincoats, pairs of gloves, and many other necessities. If the Kingston OPP needed more supplies, OPP regional headquarters would provide them: “They just threw all the stops out, which is not normal. It’s like any bureaucracy; you have to fill out 20 forms and talk to 10 people to get a light-bulb. Well, during the storm, whatever you needed, you could have. Anything from boots to helicopters, you could have.

GC does not know how much the OPP spent on its part of the emergency response. “There is an account of the cost. I saw some numbers flying around, for equipment and personnel. I’m sure it’s in the millions, but I don’t have those figures. The OPP did exceed the normal budget with the emergency. Talk to East Region Headquarters, the Chief Superintendent’s office. CS Eamer out of Smiths Falls.”

Communication went well, GC said. The OPP’s communication centre is in Belleville, and they were not hard hit. The office did lose it’s phone service sporadically throughout the storm, but all of the OPP teams had cell phones. The cell phones occasionally became overloaded, but they worked well 99 per cent of the time during night shift. GC says there may have been more trouble with the cell phones during the day.

GC questioned the decision to use an emergency control group of 10 or 12 people, despite the fact that this was called for in the city’s emergency plan. “I would think during a crisis there should have been a clear person put in charge, with a clear office in charge, where people could go to directly in that building -- not a committee of 10 or 12 people who met twice a day. At 4 in the afternoon, if there’s a problem, I should be able to go down the hall, knock on the door and say ‘This is the situation that’s developing now; how do you want us to direct our energies?’ That was not there.”

The model to look toward for future emergencies, he said, is the military: “In a crisis in the military, there’s a clear command structure, somebody is put in charge, someone is second in charge, and people are given responsibilities. What we had was a large body of people in charge, so at times you didn’t know who was in charge, if they were in the building, if they weren’t in the building.”

Police officers fell back on their own authority to make decisions, he said. “Normally I could not get a helicopter, as a sergeant in the OPP, I’d have to go through 10 people. But during the crisis I could get whatever I want.” [He never had to order a helicopter].

GC was disappointed in a large group of his own rank and file officers (and those from the city) who failed to come in to work during the crisis: “A lot of people did not come in to help, whether it was the city police or the OPP, because they weren’t called at home, and they didn’t have phones. I believe they should have known enough to come to the stations and offer their services ... I believe that when you take an oath to be a police officer, that in a crisis like this, this is what people want to see; they want to see their police officers out there. I had a family too, and we didn’t have power. I would have to ... run home two or three times a night to check this or that, but that’s what we’re here for. I was disappointed by [the lack of response], and that affected my outlook on my career. It took me a month after the ice storm to really balance that in my head. I was very disappointed, in my people and in the city people.”

The OPP sent 260 people to Kingston from the East region, GC said. But there were people in Kingston who were off the whole week and who never came in to help. About half the OPP staff stayed away during the storm, while the other half came in.

The figures were roughly equivalent in the city police force.

GC openly expressed his disappointment: “They [OPP officers] heard about it from me. The ones who work with me heard about it. Everybody’s got an excuse, but in their own hearts, they know they should have been here. But that’s just my outlook on it.”

Generally it was the younger police officers who stayed away, he said: “In my opinion, the younger officers have a different value system than people in their mid-30s or 40s or 50s. The sense of commitment is greater for the older people than it is for the younger people.”

GC didn’t make use of the city’s new emergency plan during the storm. He used the OPP’s own plan instead. And he believes that city staff interpreted the city’s new emergency plan very loosely during the storm, altering it as needed: “There really was no overall emergency response plan; the plan was made up as they went along, as far as I’m concerned.”

The OPP emergency plan was useful during the storm, GC recalled. He said the OPP has an effective reporting structure that gives the responding officer immediate access to more people and resources as needed: “For example, for the city to go through the military, we can do it in a phone call, the city can’t do it as easily. In a crisis, we can get whatever we want, and I know how to access that stuff in an emergency.”

“We have a reporting procedure [in the OPP emergency plan] where if I respond to a fire and it turns into the entire city on fire, as I respond I can bring more people and resources to bear on the problem. The authority initially lies with me when I arrive; when it escalates, they would bring regional managers on scene who would take over and bring more resources and people and materials to bear. Our plan is test-proven over 75 years, and I’ve used it many times, for prison riots and major accidents on Hwy. 401, and it works fine.”

GC has been given substantial amounts of official emergency training, both by the military and the OPP. He has taken several courses in the military, and he’s also taken leadership courses in the OPP. Those courses dealt with both leadership and emergency training.

GC was military police officer for 11 years. He was a sergeant in the armed forces. He joined the military when he was 16 and a half and left when he was 27 and joined the OPP.

CG had no contact with Emergency Measures Ontario or its federal counterpart.

His contact with the media was limited to one interview. “We’d be in the command centre and they’d come in and stick the camera in your face, but we had PR people there to deal with that. But any time they spoke to me, I would talk to them if I had the time. I gave one five-minute interview to somebody with a cassette deck.”

Nevertheless, he says he found the media “very helpful” during the storm. “They weren’t critical; they concentrated on the problem, and they gave people information. I thought the media was a good source of information. They didn’t deal with heroes during the storm, they dealt with them after.”

GC didn’t feel particularly stressed out during the emergency, but he became very tired. He worked 18-20 hours a day for a week. So he slept a lot when it was all over, but the emergency itself was actually a positive thing that rejuvenated him and made him feel good about his profession: “I enjoyed it, actually. I felt a great sense of purpose. I felt good about being a police officer, and a lot of times on this job you deal with so much crap, that you just don’t get a sense of well-being. We helped a lot of people, and a lot of people thanked us personally. When you go to someone’s home and give them flashlights and batteries, they genuinely appreciate it ... It made me feel great, and I had a whole new outlook on my job when I was over.”

Nothing particularly funny happened during the emergency that GC can recall: “I found the mood very serious, very concentrated.”

He questioned the decision to maintain the state of emergency for a full two weeks, and said the final days were unnecessary: “Again, I thought that was held for political reasons, to get money from the provincial government ... I felt it was, ‘the longer this goes on, the more money we’ll get from the provincial government when the city cleans up’.”

“We could have stood it right down. But we didn’t. What we did is we moved it to other fire halls; we moved it to the Woodbine Fire Station and the Pittsburgh fire station. That was a total waste of people and a total waste of time. And it was all done in the last couple of days so we could send a big bill into the provincial government, saying ‘we went 14 days, and we need $90 million, whatever it was.’ There were too many political decisions made rather than disaster decisions made.”

GC said the emergency command centres should have placed in the regions in the first place, but they weren’t: “They were put out there for political reasons to make it look like there was an overall regional response. There were no power problems the last two days. Very few. Just maybe two or three blocks or areas. They [the regional command centres] did not need to be there. And police officers, military people, cooks, volunteers were kept at those posts for political reasons only. And I don’t care what anybody tells me. I’m not blind. I can see that. I was working, and I know that. And I heard comments. When those people were out there, you couldn’t find the mayor on his best day, and you couldn’t find the deputy mayor either. They were not involved at that point.”

GC believes it was a waste of time to designate fire halls as regional command centres: “They should have been up and running from the start. What we had was a big commogle of people pouring into City Hall for a week, and if they had doled it out properly with the commander in charge and deputy commanders at each [regional] station, people could have gone there instead of pouring into the city. City Hall looked like a YMCA. And it’s because it was totally unorganized, and nobody clearly in charge. And people in the [sub] burbs and people way up north of the 401 had to come downtown for flashlight batteries. And I’m telling you that that’s wrong. It was poorly thought out.”

Police, Hydro and fire crews from other parts of the province and the United States were often kept waiting for long periods of time before being assigned tasks, GC added: “There were people pouring into the city from all over Ontario and from the United States. Hydro crews, fire trucks and ambulances. They would arrive at City Hall at 3 a.m. I remember one ladder truck from York regional arriving, and he’s got this beautiful truck on the street worth millions of dollars, and he says ‘I need a garage to put it in’. There’s nobody there to direct him. There wasn’t a fireman in the whole place. So we directed him here [to Kingston OPP headquarters] ... There were so many people arriving, and nobody knew what to do with them.”

“Imagine being woken up in Toronto at 2 o’clock in the morning, [with someone] saying get your truck, you’re going to Kingston, there’s an emergency. And you arrive there, someone gives you coffee, and you stand around for eight hours. Well, that’s a disgrace. And that happened all the time ... because nobody was in charge. Nobody knew what to do with them. The Hydro guy would come in and say, ‘Oh, you’re from Hydro in New York State? We’ll use you here.” Well, somebody should have been there to look after Hydro.”

The only people who were properly looked after, he said, were the police: “We knew that there were 260 policemen coming, they would come here, there was someone waiting for them here, they were assigned positions and equipment and so forth. That did not happen at City Hall. I ran around the building several times looking for someone to re-assign these people. Nobody knew what to do with them.”

GC concluded that the military was the only organization in the whole response that was “100 per cent efficient and 100 per cent organized.” But he said the military is geared for such things: “They’re trained for that. And the police forces are trained for that, and the fire departments are trained for that. But somebody needs to be in charge, and there was nobody in charge. For four hours a day, the Mayor was in charge. And I think you have to have a figurehead who’s there, all the time.”

“The Mayor gave a lot of himself during the crisis. I’m not going to say he didn’t. He was in and out of places, he slept probably three or four hours a day. But in a command centre, someone needs to be clearly in charge, all the time.”