IceStorm 98 Study

Gerry Coady runs Co-Tal-Co, which is an acronym for Coady's Talent Company. It is a people placing company, as a well as a team leading and consulting organization. He specializes in putting retired military and other personnel in touch with employers for short-term projects.

Co-Tal-Co was working with Capital Van Lines to coordinate city staff’s move into new offices while renovations were being done. When GC went in on the Monday morning after the ice storm [Jan. 12] to see if the move should continue, he was drawn into the emergency response, as the team coordinator of two northern depots.

Because of his military background, GC was asked by Gardner Church and Gary Bennett to become part of the overall emergency team. What the city wanted to do was start moving its response to the northern parts of the city and co-ordinate the shift of responsibilities at City Hall so that it could return to its normal duties, because as the core of the city came back to life, so did all the daily requirements.

Church asked if GC’s company would consider putting together two or three control centres in the northern areas of the city. That was at about 10 a.m. on the Monday and GC was asked to brief a control group meeting at 2 p.m. that day.

He grabbed someone from his company who happened to be volunteering at City Hall and put that person in charge of looking for decent locations for the centres. GC started considering who to put in charge of the centres, did some planning and at 2 p.m. met with the municipal control group. He told them his group had identified two sites east and west of the Cataraqui river. One was the Woodbine Rd. fire station, which used to be the emergency centre for Kingston Township and was still designated as the secondary EOC for the new amalgamated city. The whole second floor was ideal, GC said. The second was part of the warden’s building at Pittsburgh Institution. Both sites had backup power and telecommunications facilities, and they had the added benefit of being near the centres of the communities they were intended to serve. That way residents could come in to talk to the people running the depots directly, and they could respond more quickly to anything that City Hall wanted them to do.

After the meeting, Church asked if GC’s group could be operating by 6 p.m. GC agreed, and by 5:50 p.m., both centres were up and running. This was a reasonable time frame because it was in his group’s military background to mobilize quickly, GC said.

By 2 p.m. GC had asked City Hall for some added personnel and asked the police-military co-ordination cell for some specific telecommunications equipment and experienced communications staff.

GC is of the opinion that the police-military cell at City Hall was not used the way it should have been used, GC said. “It was used, but it wasn’t exploited to its full potential. They tried to tell people what they could do, what they were connected to .. and the rest of City Hall would use parts of them, but they were capable of so much more and wanted to produce so much more. I knew what they were capable of; that’s my background.”

GC used the police-military cell to organize people to help run the communications component of both northern depots. He had also consulted his own employee database to find the people -- mostly retired or former military, officers and senior NCOs -- who would run the centres.

Once the centres up and running, they had to careful about their role in relation to the city centre, because City Hall was still functioning as the key emergency response centre. They had to be careful to keep those functions that should be controlled centrally were kept at City Hall and those that should be spread out were spread out.

“One of the key problems the City had during the ice storm was the division of power, temporary power to various places and organizations. There was a pecking order of who should get power (ie., electricity, generators) and how far down the track you had to be in order to qualify for power.”

Cynthia Beach and her people were controlling generators centrally and there were also people in from outside, “all A-type personalities,” GC recalled, and a lot of them had the capability of providing mobile power. GC said his group “ran into a problem” with one of the individuals who was visiting from Toronto. City of Toronto fire and police had sent down a mobile generator unit that was dispatched four or five times to different sites, and when they got there they sometimes found that the requirement had disappeared or was being handled by someone else.

“It caused us a problem because what we were trying to do was filter back any requirement that came to us to City Hall and then, after the resources were deployed, control the people so that if necessary, City Hall could tell us ‘well all right, we’ve now got another one over here that we agree you should go to.”

On one occasion, Bob Crawford had gone out, through GC’s people, to Seeley’s Bay and called back to say no one was there. Cynthia Beach and GC agreed to tell him to come back to one of the northern control centres and stay there until another need arose so as to save the trip downtown. But one of the Toronto fire-fighters who was sitting in on the depot overheard this and took it upon himself to call Crawford on a cell phone and advise him to go back to City Hall. The fire-fighter felt that he would not want to “come [to the northern depot] and sit here on [his] ass,” so he went around GC’s group and gave Crawford a private direction.

The miscommunication resulted in Cynthia thinking that GC’s group was trying to interfere with her operation by controlling people themselves. She had been up 48 hours by this time, and the misunderstanding -- coupled with her exhaustion -- caused a confrontation. “She is a smart, smart lady, and knew what the hell she was doing, but everybody gets tired ... We almost had a falling out over that. Fortunately, we recognized what had happened and were able to mend the fences quick enough that we carried on.”

GC noticed a tendency for the Toronto emergency group to stay separate from the locals, and he believes they felt superior to others involved in the emergency response. “They kind of maintained their own little group of Toronto people down here to help you poor little guys down in Kingston who don’t know any better, which sometimes came out.”

GC said this is just an example of one of the things that can happen in an emergency response, with different groups coming together under the same roof. He thinks there may have been some resentment directed at his group because they arrived late in the game, setting up the northern centres on the 12th. “Once you’ve done all the ground work and set things up, you don’t feel very good about ‘Johnny come latelys’ coming in and apparently over-ruling what you’ve been doing,” he said. “Everybody gets a little territorial.”

It didn’t take long to recognize these power struggles and decide to emphasize that the northern response centres were at the beck and call of City Hall, GC said. “We would do what they would tell us and we told them what we were capable of doing and what we were going to do out there. And what we were going to do out there was, in fact, be their eyes and ears in the north and be the collation centres for any requirements that we found out there or that were phoned in to us.”

Another miscommunication occurred when GC’s group established emergency phone numbers for the north-east and north-west centres. Something went wrong there; the media never publicized the numbers, or publicized them as an alternative to the City Hall numbers. GC thinks the media, print, radio and TV, just missed the boat on that one, because he knew the information was sent out by Lynne Jordon.

One of the reasons for these kinds of problems was that the two northern centres were “an afterthought” rather than a key part of the city’s response from the start.

Ron Aquino, a retired captain, ran the north-east control centre with eight-hour shifts, and Larry Wilson, a retired major, ran the north-west centre. The two of them worked through GC’s chief of staff, Bill Stevenson, a former PUC worker and former Toronto emergency planning and response team member. GC’s usual chief of staff was in Florida.

GC said he knew he would have to keep up a presence at City Hall, so he needed a second-in- command -- Stevenson -- to run the day-to-day functions at the two operation centres and make sure they were doing what they were supposed to do and had the resources they needed.

Stevenson and GC were in constant contact. GC was also careful to make sure that what was being done at the two centres was not taken the wrong way by “a very tired city staff.”

The two centres worked well, GC said. Part of their role was to co-ordinate the door-to-door visits, which were taking place almost on a daily basis. Many people in the city’s rural areas did not want to leave their homes, and this posed a problem, GC said. Many of them were out of power, heat, water, or had basements flooded, or couldn’t milk their cows. GC was under the impression that most large farms have backup power, but City Councillor George Sutherland, who distributed generators to a large number of farms in the former Pittsburgh Township area, said many farms in the north-east did not have that backup. GC was somewhat doubtful about these requests. “I [didn’t] know whether that was a plea to get more power, or whether they really didn’t have backup power sources,” he said. “As it turns out it was only a few. But when I was talking about it to some farmers from around the Trenton area, they looked at me and laughed and said ‘it can’t be much of a farm if it didn’t have a backup power source.’”

GC was somewhat critical of George Sutherland’s role. “In George’s mind, he was the saviour of north-east Pittsburgh Township. ... And at the front end he did go around and help a whole lot of people. [He has] a heart of gold. But he would not release [his grip on the task], and when it was our turn to come in and start doing the co-ordinating -- particularly of very scarce resources that were being funnelled through us by city central -- George became a pain in the ass. ... I had him booted out of our op centres I don’t know how many times.”

Although his heart was in the right place, Sutherland refused to believe there was anybody else around capable of looking after those people other than himself, GC said.

He suspects that a couple of farms may not have had a backup power supply, but that number suddenly escalated because when they went out in their mobiles looking [for farms without backup generators], they could only find a couple.

The control centres controlled the searches and the visits and worked with the military, Red Cross and police, to check on people, buildings etc. and to hand out supplies that were needed, GC said. Most of the supplies that were handed out came back.

On the Wednesday [Jan. 14], they stood down the north-west response centre. On Thursday evening they were doing one more series of door-to-door checks when they found a woman with three kids. She had refused to leave their house, and the family was on its last legs. They were rescued and brought to one of the centres. They were frozen, and had no food or water. The soldiers and Red Cross were happy to have found them.

GC’s group also designed a questionnaire, checklist, to help people determine if they were in good condition and had the supplies they needed.

They also looked at some of the houses and saw that some of the contraptions being used, or jury-rigged, to produce heat were quite dangerous, GC said. The centre workers had a mandate to ensure the safety of those who decided to stay at home, so they did what they could to keep back-up power as safe as possible.

When things were a bit slow, the soldiers and fire-fighters, and even some communications workers, would get together and go and pump out basements and things like that.

On Friday [Jan 16], the north-east centre in Pittsburgh Institution was stood down.

A lot of GC’s crews’ efforts were regional, rather than strictly confined to the rural parts of the city. As Gardner Church was getting City Hall back to normal, the regional role expanded. On Wednesday [Jan. 14], Church, with the blessing of the mayor, took Mirka Januskiewicz, the commissioner of corporate and strategic planning, and told her to establish a regional operations centre away from City Hall, and to plan for the future in case the ice storm was to return again the following week. Mirka and Lynne Jordon settled on the former Pittsburgh Township offices on Gore Road as the site for the new, regional EOC.

Mirka J. asked GC for his assistance and advice as she took on this assignment. He took two people from the western operations centre, which had closed on the Wednesday evening, and put them in the Gore Rd. EOC starting Thursday morning as the operations officers. GC advised on how to set up in the Gore Rd site, in the Pittsburgh Township. council chamber, but that got overtaken when it also became a Bell telephone call centre.

The Gore Rd. call centre worked out “Okay,” but there were problems, GC said. The call centre was required, he said, but it needed a single phone number that could be picked up by a number of people. What he wanted to set up was an operations centre with the key cells represented by people who also knew what else was going on. As the calls came in they should have been able to answer the phone and then hand off to the appropriate person in the small group.

Instead, volunteers staffed the phones, and if you wanted something done you went from the volunteers, through a co-ordinator, out to wherever they had set up the cells - for generators, power, gas, food, vehicles, logistics, etc. “That was a disorganized screw-up in a big way,” GC said. “It was not an efficient system.”

GC said he thought they had set up the structure of the call centre, but when he left it was altered “for a variety of reasons,” he said. Personalities had a role to play in how this was handled, he added.

While this was going on, GC said, none of the planning they needed to do for the next emergency -- or the next day or the next step -- was being done. “If something had happened, I was scared that we would be caught right back where we were before in a world of hurt, with a lot of tired people on our hands and no planning done to actually cater for another emergency. As it turns out, that didn’t happen ... but it could have happened.”

GC said his two operations officers were not used the way they should have been and the way he thought they had agreed they would be used. He had put them in there because they had experience in those kind of operations.

Mirka J. and Lynne Jordan were the bosses of the Gore Rd. EOC, GC said, they had to have the wide vision, keeping in mind that this was a regional response centre and a planning unit.

GC wanted to set up a chief-of-staff to work under Januskiewicz and Jordon so that while one of the two (working in separate 12 hour shifts) would oversee the operation, the chief-of-staff would be responsible for the actual operation of everything within the building. They would run the call centre, be in charge of the op centre, be in charge of the new logistics etc. so Mirka would be free to oversee things and be free to stick her finger in if she saw something wrong. This this never happened, he said.

What happened to prevent that?
“Personalities got involved, events overcame some of the things.”

Mirka had asked GC for suggestions on who to choose for chief-of-staff. He had recommended Cynthia Beach, Dave Morgan or Barclay Mayhew. All three were still quite tired and were also involved in getting their parts of the city back up and running. Beach had to return to fleet and communications and was still running the generator side of things. But, GC said, “She was too smart not to be used as chief-of-staff.”

Dave Morgan would also have been good -- GC described him as “one of the most capable people in the whole city structure” -- but Morgan was pulled off to the logistics side of the operation.

That left Mayhew, but GC said he never got fully established as chief of staff. There were lots of reasons for this, GC said, not the least of which was the presence of a “panic artist” in the Gore Rd. EOC. He would not name the person for the record, but said he would have jailed him if they were in the military. Right from the start, GC said, this person was a “panic artist and a grandstander.”

He is also “smart as a bloody whip,” GC said. “So what we tried to do, knowing the personalities and knowing what was involved ... was recommend to Mirka that this particular person be put into planning because he is capable of doing good, good staff work. And pulling him the hell out of the day-to-day operation of what was going on because all he was doing was pissing off people left, right and centre.”

The ‘panic artist’ would interrupt important discussions to get help with his own problems, which were often insignificant in comparison to other things that were going on, GC said.

GC said he spoke to the person and Mirka spoke to him, but none of it got through because he was so “wound up.” He must have realized that he was a problem, because after it was over he apologized to GC.

GC said it was rapidly becoming obvious to him that they could not get the “panic artist” out of the EOC. It also became obvious that the good work that should have been done by GC’s two operations officers, Larry Wilson and Gary Hayes -- “who are experienced beyond any capability that anybody else in that building had in dealing with emergencies” -- was being wasted because of the personality problems in the whole setup. They weren’t allowed to organized things the way they should have been, he said.

No one knew where people were. Various cells were searching for space wherever they could find it, and Mirka’s office was taken over by the Toronto fire-fighters. “Here was the boss, thrown out of her office, which should have been used primarily as a place to think and a place to do orders.”

GC said he couldn’t stay in that environment because he would have overstepped his bounds “by a long shot.” He wouldn’t have allowed any of it to go on if he were running the place. And that would have meant undercutting Mirka J. So he backed out, initially pulling out Bill Stevenson, and later removed his two ops officers as well. [He made the decision to remove his ops officers after of them was barred from an important meeting, while one of the people working for the officers was invited in. This was the last straw.]

Mirka J. got things sorted out once the regional responsibilities eased and was eventually able to get Lynne Jordon working on both the post report and the plan for another ice storm. Mirka had asked GC to take a look at the post report, but he never did see it. He said he was supposed to get a copy of it but didn’t. And when he gave her his report, it was after she had submitted hers, GC said.

GC had high praise for Gardner Church, saying he is “probably one of the smartest men” GC has come across in a long time. He has the capability to manage an emergency and proved it by running a wide range of things without losing his cool. “He is also an actor,” GC said, but declined to explain what he meant by that or give examples.

Church solved an allocation problem that came between GC and Cynthia Beach. Church also had his own agenda, GC said. It was a good chance for him to take a look at all of the people involved and do some testing, to determine the strong ones and the weak ones.

GC also spoke highly of Joanne O’Marra, saying she “rose about 15 steps above where she was ever designated to be,” demonstrating exceptionally strong people skills and organizational skills.

Tracy Newton is another person who rose above the crowd. She had to make the call centre work in Pittsburgh Township. Gore Rd. site. She went 60 hours straight.

The lack of a shift system was one of the reasons they needed an ops officer or chief-of-staff in charge, GC said. Everybody, from the day the state of emergency was declared, worked straight through, he said, and “That's bloody wrong.”

There were some things at the organizational level that were done wrong only because people were overtired.

GC was highly critical of the emergency plan, saying it didn’t envision the kind of widespread, ongoing crisis presented by the ice storm. “Gardner Church will tell you right off the bat, you can drive a Mack truck through the bloody plan for emergencies in the city,” GC said. “It was too general, too generic. It was not detailed enough in some areas.”

GC also cited a number of specific problems with the response and made a number of suggestions: * City Hall is not the place to set up an emergency response centre * You need a centre that is ready to be turned on at the snap of a light * You need to know that, regardless of what the emergency is, there is a core of people who will always have to do their own job in that emergency. * That leaves a whole raft of people who should be aware they will form the emergency response cells and once designated as such, they should receive some training in how to do it. * the people who will be the potential bosses should know they will be the bosses in those areas, they should know where they are going to be and have made themselves familiar with the emergency operations centre. * If there is a city-wide emergency, they should know they will require one or two control centres and should know where they will be. * They should know what their communications capabilities are * They should know they don’t need to own all of the communications, but they should have call-on communications.

GC described the excellent efforts of a Clearnet representative, Joanne Nedow, who brought in equipment Toronto, and on a volunteer basis, with her company’s backing, set up a fax machine in the police-military co-ordination centre and set up Clearnet cellular radios and made them work.

The plan should have numbers for organizations such as Clearnet so they can be called on to help and those organizations should be called every six months to see if they still exist, GC said, because even though the emergency plan was only a couple of weeks old, there was outdated information.

The problem with the emergency plan was that it tried to be all things to all people, cover all types of emergencies, GC said. Granted, no one predicted that an ice storm of such magnitude would hit, but at the same time everyone knew the power system was fragile, he said. So that should have been recognized as a potential.

There needs to be a mechanism in place for someone else to objectively question the emergency plan, because it’s natural for the creator of the plan to be subjective about it and defend it even if there are serious gaps there.

GC also criticized the decision to set up a regional operations centre in Pittsburgh Township. The staff college would have been a better choice he said, laughing off suggestions that it was too small. “It certainly wasn’t too small for what they were trying to do with a regional op centre.”

What would have been better, GC said, is a Kingston regional op centre owned by Kingston so other organizations and the province don’t have to get involved.

GC had some critical things to say about Emergency Measures Ontario. He recalls an “egomaniac” representative of the EMO who came in to the city and “gave shit” to Gardner Church and several other people involved in the response. That didn’t help the situation, he said.

“I don't trust them (the EMO) very much,” GC said. “They think that they really know everything and they don’t and they aren’t willing to use or get some of the talent that exists in the area.”

“But, if you ask me at the end of it: what did I think of the whole scenario? I think that the end result was bloody good. Now, why was it bloody good? It was bloody good because of people.”

Some of those people paid a heavy physical and emotional price, and some showed themselves to be more capable than anyone would have imagined.

“People rose to areas that you’d never on God’s green earth dream they’d ever get to by their normal walk of life. Some people didn’t rise who you might have expected to rise, and that's all right, that happens. They were in the minority.”

“I have never seen a group of people who had no training in it, no background, no experience and no plan to work to, in effect, respond and produce the way these people did.”

GC said he has had some discussions with Church about possible training/consulting sessions but he knows there is competition from larger, powerful consultants who come-from-away, but they are “useless,” because they don’t understand the area they are coming into.

He would like to be handed a contract to set up the emergency operations centre for the next time it might be needed. The place he thinks should be used is Tercentennial Lodge because the city can use it as a city training centre and it can be wired and powered immediately. The conference centre itself can be turned into an op centre with all of the phone hook-ups. There is capability to run a call centre where necessary. There are enough rooms for all of the cells, conferences and media. There is capability next door for storage or sleep areas. All the appropriate telecommunications towers, satellites, cable etc, would be part of the set-up.