IceStorm 98 Study

As the staff sgt. For Kingston West, GF is responsible for 47 uniformed OPP officers and 12 civilians who work within the city of Kingston

GF first became aware of the ice storm when he was awakened about 6 a.m. by a phone call from his wife, who was on her way to work in Belleville. She told him what the driving conditions were like and recommended he get out of bed and get to work because the radio was talking about a state of emergency in Kingston. GF headed into work early, arriving at about 7 a.m., and quickly began receiving reports from his overnight officers about power outages and roads blocked with downed trees.

He spent the first few hours just trying to grasp the extent of the damage. The former township had extensive tree damage, but there were fewer trees in total [in Kingston West], and fewer overhead power lines. There weren’t as many large, mature trees, so the damage was considerably less until you got into the suburban areas. Even in the township, there was considerable damage.

Some major arteries were down. Unity Road was out of commission due to Hydro poles laying all over the road. More came down later on in the day, but the first day there were something like 13 or 15 poles down, all across Unity Road. There were a number of other roads that were blocked with wires.

It took about four or five days before Unity Road could be cleared. There were so many other hot spots that it took a long time. Hydro and city crews cleared the road but Hydro was facing a shortage of new poles and couldn’t get them to Unity Road quickly enough.

Despite criticism from other city officials and police about Hydro Ontario’s slow response, GF believes Ontario Hydro crews were in the area [Kingston West] working on downed lines almost immediately. The only delay was on the administrative side; the city’s emergency control group talked to a Hydro representative, but that person didn’t show up to a meeting of the emergency control group for about two days.

GF attributes this to the fact that the problem was so widespread: “The devastation for Ontario Hydro was all of Eastern Ontario, it wasn’t just the city of Kingston. So they had to prioritize where they would put their resources initially. People attending meetings wasn’t at the top of their priority list. So they tried to meet the needs right across the Eastern end of the province.”

They were also in Long Sault and around Roxbury, where the devastation was even worse. GF thinks that may have been where Ontario Hydro was concentrating its efforts.

The fellow who was in charge of the Ontario Hydro office on Sydenham Rd. arrived the first night. The next night there was a fellow from Hydro’s Belleville office and a fellow from the Sydenham Road address. The fellow from Belleville then attended all of the meetings.

GF praised Ontario Hydro’s response: “As they got geared up for it, they did an excellent job and they were providing the briefing notes that were required. Initially there was some frustration by the emergency control group that they weren’t being updated [by Ontario Hydro] ... they wanted to know ... what was done and the timetable on when it [power] was going to be coming back up. So they were rather critical of Ontario Hydro because they weren’t there to make that representation at the meetings. It didn’t last forever. They were there within a couple of days.”

Ontario Hydro was doing repairs in the township at about the same rate as in the city. The city had more devastation. GF noticed some frustration among city staff over the fact that they were powerless to inform residents when their power would come back on in areas served by Ontario Hydro. “People from within the new city who were serviced by Ontario Hydro were calling the city and the city was saying ‘We can’t do anything for you because we don’t service you.’ But at the same time that doesn’t mean there wasn’t anything going on out there [in the former townships]. There was. The repairs were being done. Things were coming back on line at regular intervals, same as in the city.”

City staff may have been upset because they were unable to provide solid information to people in the former townships: “This tied into the fact that Ontario Hydro wasn’t at the table. The city couldn’t pass on that information. So if you’re living in Reddendale and we know that you’re about 48 hours away from having your power re-established, they didn’t have that information, so it became awkward for them.”

Within a day or two, Ontario Hydro was not only attending all control group meetings but also issuing regular press releases to the media, with schedules for the restoration of power.

Getting back to the chronology of GF’s own response to the storm: he basically just managed his officers throughout the first day. The mayor had been on the radio, and he talked about driving around the city, looking at the devastation and what the state of emergency could possibly do. GF gathered information from his officers and called the mayor to give him a brief status report on Kingston West, including what roads were blocked, where power was down, etc.

At about 10:10 a.m. GF received a phone call from Chief Bill Closs, who said the emergency control group, or all the senior managers of the city, were meeting at the Utilities building on Counter Street, that the meeting had started about 10 minutes earlier, and it would probably be a good thing he got down there.

“I was kind of an afterthought.”

He attributes this to the fact that the city was still very new, with incomplete lines of communication. “It’s pretty evident that there are two police forces there, it’s just that nobody took the initiative to notify the OPP of this meeting taking place.”

GF attended the remainder of the first meeting, which was basically a briefing to bring the mayor up to speed on all the different departments and what type of situation they were in that morning. The next official meeting was scheduled for City Hall later that afternoon.

GF was mentioned in the emergency plan as one of the people who needed to be called and included in the emergency control group.

The emergency itself was not as much of a police emergency as it was a utilities emergency, and a service delivery sort of emergency, GF noted. The OPP spent much of the first day trying to deal with traffic control and flow problems. Many stop lights were out across the city and former township, including about six or eight major intersections. One of those was at Bath and Gardiners roads. The traffic lights at that intersection were out for two to three days.

Initially the OPP tried to staff those major intersections with officers, but that sapped a lot of people power. So within the first 24 hours they decided to let the intersections “go free wheeling or uncontrolled” and appeal to the public to respect uncontrolled intersections by slowing down. The public was asked to treat any intersection without working lights as a four-way stop sign. The city was doing the same thing in the core.

The strategy was a success: “It actually managed beautifully. There were a few minor fender-benders, and [those were] not at intersections. People acted very responsibly and did a wonderful job. It was as if we didn’t need the lights after all.” The city’s first major accident at an intersection took place at Princess Street and Midland Ave. about an hour after the lights came back up.

Traffic concerns were the first thing they noticed, but after about 24 hours, city staff and the OPP began to worry about people with no heat and hydro. “That progressed on as the days wore on, whether people were going to have water or enough food and flashlights and batteries and all the rest of it.”

Within the first 24 hours, the idea of doing door-to-door checks was set up, and the police initiated contact with the military. There was very quickly a commitment by the military that they would help with door checks in areas where residents didn’t have any heat or hydro.

OPP officers were attending all the control group meetings at City Hall. They set up a command post to deal with the military and the door-to-door checks. Joe Marshall was the OPP’s representative in the command centre. He was there every day. On the first or second day there were two teams or more that worked in the old Kingston Township area, and they did door-to-door checks. GF thinks they canvassed the entire area twice by the end of the emergency.

When things didn’t improve in a hurry, it was decided that they would re-do those door checks just to see if things had changed at all.

GF knew the crisis was going to last at least three or four or five days, but then it seemed to drag on after that. Things initially got better, but then they got worse again after that. “The thing that slowed it down was just the extent of the power outages. That prolonged the whole emergency. There were so many outages ... if the only outage had been, say, Unity Road with those 13 poles, it would have been a one-day job for Ontario Hydro and they would have had it all fixed. But you look at the entire city and all of Eastern Ontario, and all of a sudden it takes you two weeks to get it done, or a week and a half to get it done. It was just everywhere you looked.”

Joe Marshall was down at the command centre basically all the time. GF would go down to City Hall two or three times a day to attend meetings, then come back to OPP headquarters to supervise things there. He would receive reports about outages, street closures, and traffic control problems, note where they were, and relay that information back to the control group.

Normally OPP headquarters are open from 7 a.m. to 2 a.m., with the front office open to the public, but hours were extended during the storm: “That first night it was quite obvious that we should be open 24 hours a day so the public could walk in and get warm or talk to somebody at the front desk... so we took our people in reception area and put them onto a 24 hour shift, and started basically offering a service 24 hours a day, so that if you needed a policeman and you didn’t have a phone and you had to drive to this office, then you could be assured somebody would be here at 3 a.m. if you arrived at that time.”

GF got about four or five hours sleep a night for the first five nights. “So it was getting to the point where you were just coping. There was a lot of extra hours in. I know by about the third night we were down there at City Hall until 1 a.m., and you knew you had to be back in the next day very early. But I guess ... everybody was doing that kind of thing.”

It was challenging to get all of the members of the emergency control group together at one time. They all worked different time schedules.

The OPP kept normal shifts during the storm. At the same time the OPP in other areas sent reinforcements. The crisis was worse in Eastern Ontario, where they mobilized a whole lot of extra people, and Kingston got a spin-off from that. After the first 24 hours the OPP had 10 extra people in the detachment to work and supplement their own shifts. In the first three or four nights, they had an extra 10 on a couple of the shifts and an extra five for the following three or four days. “This allowed us to get out there and have a real presence in those areas without hydro or heat, to make sure that there wasn’t any criminal activity to flare up and victimize the people who couldn’t protect their own homes or didn’t have any communications by telephone.”

Criminal activity dropped substantially during the storm, GF said. In the first four or five days there were two break-and-enters in the whole former Kingston Township area, which is very low. There were two attempted thefts of generators, which GF considers a low figure. “It was quite reasonable. Even though it was not acceptable, it was reasonable.”

There were many calls for assistance and service and those sorts of things, but the main tasks for people were going around and constantly monitoring the areas, especially in the darkness when there was no hydro. There were a number of people that were out and about just looking after the generators.

In areas where one side of the street had power and the other didn’t, some people ran extension cords across the road. “Things like that that you’d never see any other time, ever.”

One of the two attempted generator thefts was especially notorious because the thieves were trying to steal the piece of equipment from a fire hall: “[It could have] deteriorated into a very dangerous situation. One of the fire substations north on Hwy. 38 didn’t have any hydro for quite some time ... on night three or four, one of the volunteer firefighters went by the station and noticed there was a vehicle parked behind it. Knowing that there probably shouldn’t be anybody in there, he pulled in to check and there was a half ton truck at the back door and they were just about to lift the generator into the half-ton truck. So of course he pulled over and stopped and walked up to the one fellow. One fellow immediately jumped into the truck and the other one waited there to confront him. He [the vol. firefighter] asked him what he was doing, and there was a confrontation as a result of that, and he got knocked down and hit in the face. And they ultimately took off in the truck. They didn’t get the generator, but had there been maybe a person with a little different personality, it may have been a lot worse assault. So that was a dangerous situation for himself [the volunteer firefighter], and we felt that the two people who were doing this were not only victimizing the community, they were victimizing the firefighter and threatening the safety of the people in the area by trying to steal emergency response resources.”

The OPP had a partial license plate and a reasonably good description of the vehicle, and the victim had a reasonably good look at the two suspects. The OPP gave a press release for two or three days running and did get a Crime Stoppers tip that identified the person who allegedly committed the assault. He was subsequently arrested and charged with the offense, but the Crown withdrew the charge because there wasn’t quite enough evidence to pursue it. “I talked to the firefighter and he was really concerned and sort of devastated by the situation. But I think the thing you need to keep in perspective here is that he did the right thing, he made the right notifications, he supported the community, and we’re going to see that he gets an award for that through the province. He’ll get a commission of citation for bravery. That’s the important thing to focus on and not the fact that we couldn’t prosecute this fellow.”

The only other thing that sticks in GF’s mind: in the first 24 hours there was a Hydro worker, possibly on Unity Road, who fell off a pole because of the icy conditions. He had fairly serious injuries and was taken to hospital for a while. “It just kind of speaks to the idea of how serious the conditions were. How often do you hear of a Hydro worker falling off a pole?” The worker probably pushed himself too hard, GF said: “It’s just a guess on my part, but [he] probably pushed it because of that need to feel like you’re helping people out, and you take risks that you maybe shouldn’t take.”

There was a baby death in Storrington Township, in the first two or three days of the storm. GF doesn’t know if they ever determined whether it had anything to do with the storm. “I heard it both ways, one was that they thought it was a SIDS death, and the other was that they thought it was related to the way the house was being heated.”

Talk to Tom Varga. He’s responsible for Storrington Township and that area.

GF said the hours took a toll on him during the storm. His wife works in Belleville. She was supposed to go to Toronto for a meeting on one day, and was planning to take the train. But the trains were not running because of the ice storm. This was the second or third day of the storm. It turned out that the crossings for the trains run on hydro. They have backup battery power, but if the hydro has been down for two days or a day and a half, and those things have been running on battery power, it will be used up.

“The extra hours and the pressures of what’s going on with your family as you’re spending 16 or 20 hours work ... you get home and you barely have time to get to sleep and then you pop awake, thinking about all the things you should be doing. The personal management of time is probably one of the most important things you can consider.”

GF is one of the only officers in the Kingston OPP office who doesn’t work on a shift rotation. “So you end up just like the department managers in the city; if you’re not on a shift rotation, then you’re ‘go go go,’ and you feel like, if everybody below you has got a job to do, and they’re on a rotation with somebody, who replaces you? You have to make a point of saying, ‘OK, for the rest of the emergency, you are my backup now, and we will just rotate. Otherwise we’re just heading for problems.”

For the first two or three days everything was fine at the OPP office. They had hydro and telephone service. Everything was normal, except for the surrounding area. Then on about day three, the phone system started going down on them. It would just quit. It didn’t receive any incoming calls, and you couldn’t call out either. Fifteen minutes later it would come back up, then it was down, then it was back up. The OPP learned from Bell Canada that the system was overloaded. It would be down for some time before they could reboot it or bring it back up.

“At one point here we had the ham radio operator in the next room communicating with City Hall, so we could get messages back and forth. Even though City Hall had telephones and most of the township had telephones, ours were down.”

Bell’s system was stretched to its limit, and the cell phones were being overloaded as well. You just couldn’t get through. “So cell phones weren’t working and neither was the Bell system. This only lasted a day and a half. But it was a little unnerving at that time.”

The OPP’s radio communication system in the vehicles was still working. They have a system called ‘V-Net’, which is part of Bell. It allows them to call directly to other detachments across the province. “That worked perfectly, but we couldn’t call across the street and we couldn’t call City Hall.”

Members of the public normally call 911 during an emergency, but if they didn’t have phone system they were off on their own and had no way of contacting the OPP. “That was sort of a dangerous part of the whole emergency for us. Emergency services, even though they might be available, might not be accessible because your phone system wasn’t working.”

GF doesn’t know of any emergencies that fell through the cracks as a result of this.

“Most people had the resources and pulled together very well. Especially the rural people. They’re the ones with the wood stoves, they’re the ones who are already prepared for flashlights because their hydro goes out probably three or four times a year. And they’re used to relying on their neighbours. So they pack up and go to a neighbour’s if they had a problem.”

Asked to reflect on what worked and what didn’t, GF said he thinks City Hall was the wrong place to establish the emergency operation centre. There were two established emergency operations centres, ready to be used, and they weren’t used. Even the PUC building would have been better than City Hall, he said: “City Hall became a bit of a circus, I found. It was too big and uncontrolled, there were people walking in off the streets, just coming in to get something to eat, and you could walk anywhere in that City Hall and there was no control ... no security at all. At the same time there were so many volunteers working there, maybe it was difficult to control it. To have a very businesslike and slow methodical examination of what was going on, I think it would have been better [to have] a little bit smaller [control] group, and in a better controlled area, a little more private area.”

GF identified two problems: The scale of the emergency was bigger than we had ever seen before, and the emergency plan was too new for people to have really understood its contents.

The first thing to remember about an emergency, he said, is that “You’re never going to see the same two emergencies twice. Every one of them is going to be different. They’re going to test you in different ways. So don’t expect that it’s going to fit into a pigeon hole of what you’ve practiced or what’s written in a book.”

Reading the new emergency plan was not considered a priority: “People [were] too busy just trying to get their departments together ... And guess what, the first test is on the emergency plan. I think they did a remarkable job to do everything that they did get done. All the city staff.”

Utilities people bore the brunt of the pressure to perform and to get repairs done to satisfy the needs of the people with no heat and no hydro, and they also did a great job, GF said. “They called on resources because there was no way they could handle it themselves, and they got any outside resources that would allow them to get the job done in a reasonable time.”

Volunteers came from all across the province. Most were from Western Ontario; some were from the traffic unit of Metro Toronto. “They just basically picked those people up and said ‘Head East, you’ve got a job.’”

The OPP was in a unique position because they were part of the local emergency in the city of Kingston, but at the same time the OPP had its own emergency plan, and its own command centre. “Behind the scenes they [the OPP] were looking after us without us even asking for extra people, extra equipment, resources, generators, things like that. They set up their command centre in Long Sault, and they were experiencing the worst devastation down there. As they asked for 150 people, they said ‘by the way, the first 10 of those people stop in Kingston, because that’s where it starts, right there.’ And as they went down the line, the people filtered out, right down to the Quebec border.”

After about day five, the last five people the OPP had ended up going to Perth, because their needs were far greater than those in Kingston. “We were serving quite nicely with our regular shift people working, covering all the needs and the expectations of the public as far as safety and security. So we allowed those people [volunteers] to go along further and get into an area where the problems were much greater.”

There was basically no interference from the OPP command centre. They just wanted some updates; GF or an assistant would fax them the same reports as we gave to the city once or twice a day, letting them know exactly where the Kingston area and detachment stood. “When we knew we didn’t need the manpower, we let them know so that they could re-allocate them.”

“It was a good time for this thing to happen as far as working relations because you got in there and you met all of the city staff and some of the city politicians. You had to work with them ... and co-operate. There was a good co-operative atmosphere between the city police and the OPP, because you each had your own duties.”

“Using the military was the best example of how to share resources. The fact that Joe Marshall [of the OPP] worked with Bob Napier and Al Melvin [of the City Police] goes to show you how well they can co-operate together. Everybody has the same problems, it’s just a matter of a different geographical area.” [He’s alluding to my question about ongoing battles over who will be responsible for policing in the new amalgamated city of Kingston].

Q: Were there any differences in style or culture or operating rules between the city police and the OPP? One thing I heard is that the city and the OPP were faced with an offer of 10 unlicensed vans for use in the emergency response, and that the city agreed to use the vans while the OPP didn’t want to risk getting into an accident with the unlicensed vans. [See interview with Chief Bill Closs of the City Police].

“In fact that’s not sort of representative of how it happened. What really happened is that the person in charge of fleet came to one of the emergency control group meetings and said ‘We have these 10 vans that we want to use, we’d like you to give us a letter just like Chief Closs has given us that allows these vans to be driven on city streets, and we’re not going to charge anybody because they’re unlicensed.’ Sort of putting us on the spot, saying ‘We’re doing it, are you going to do it?’ My answer to that was I said ‘No, we’re not going to do that. What we’re going to do is we’ll ask the MTO if they’ll give us a 72-hour license permit so that we can allow them to be driven legally on the streets.’ I made the arrangements to call MTO, I made the contact there, and not only did they say they’d agree to do that, but they’d do it free of charge, and the only thing the city had to do was show up with proof of ownership of who owned the vehicles and proof of insurance, and they would give us these things free. It was a matter of showing up and a few minutes later you had 10 licenses, 10 permits to stick in the window. Everything was legal ... there was no liability red herrings that are going to come back and haunt you a year later because one of those vans ran over somebody crossing the street someplace, driven by a volunteer for the city police.”

“What I’m saying is that short cuts don’t always make sense, and I knew for a fact that I could call MTO and that MTO would solve that problem. Even if we had to pay $10 a permit or whatever, they’d tell me the legal aspects of whether those vans could be driven legally on the road with a letter from the Chief of Police, and in fact that [letter] was nothing more than window dressing. It hung them out with a liability issue that could be devastating to the city in a lawsuit. This made much more sense. As far as the record goes, in fact the people looking after those 10 vans did go to the MTO, did get the licenses and did use them in that fashion. So the idea that they ran on that letter is a total misconception. And you can check that with the [guy in charge of fleet].”

GF said his biggest problem was trying to get updates from his staff. “People would go out on the road and do things and not report back. You were constantly saying ‘I need that information; you have to feed it back to me, we have to write it down, record it, and we have to be able to talk about it as to where we are. Otherwise we’re just spinning our wheels.”

You have to know exactly how many streets are out of power and which areas had power. “Are we talking about five miles of Unity Road, or how much is out there? The next shift that comes in, we have to be able to say ‘OK, you guys are heading in this direction, these are the areas we know to be covered.’ So co-ordinating that information was probably the biggest challenge.”

Normally somebody else looks after that. Hydro issues don’t normally affect us; “but all of a sudden you have half your area out, it becomes our issue, because you’re in a state of emergency and that is an issue now, who are those people who are vulnerable.”

GF has taken a variety of different emergency training courses and found them helpful. “There are some things that they teach you in emergency measures courses that are a little hard to swallow sometimes, but if you have a tendency to follow those, you have a good basic structure that you can follow. Like picking your emergency centre. It’s like, ‘it’s in the plan there, but we’re going to choose something else because it seems to make more sense, or it’s more convenient.’ Or who’s at the table? Do we go by the list, or do we make up our own list?”

GF believes you should follow the fundamentals of the emergency plan, “because somebody didn’t just sit down and dream that up; it’s evolved over the years from many disasters, and you have to put your faith in that.”

He praised the emergency plan written by Bob Boyd for the city. “It’s not the be-all and the end-all, but it does have the fundamentals down there, and it does have the main structure for those people that are going to come on board in the new city over the next 25 years, if they can’t sit down and read that plan and have some idea of who they call and who’s in charge of what, then they’re going to be like a lot of people who arrived at that table: they don’t know what to do, they just sort of answer questions and listen and fly by the seat of their pants.”

Answering critics of the emergency plan who say it’s geared to single-point emergencies rather than a city-wide shutdown, GF said an emergency plan has to be vague enough to cover all eventualities. “It’s a guideline. It lays out fundamentals, basics of what you have to do, who the people are, where you meet, what your basic responsibilities are. It’s not going to tell you how to do the job. It’s not going to tell you how big the disaster’s going to be. It’s like, ‘take the Ten Commandments; build your life from there.’”

Asked whether he thinks the plan was followed closely enough, GF says no.

And he said there were problems with a lack of decision-making in the command group meetings. “There was very little actual decision-making done at the table [during the control group meetings]. So I felt like it was an airing of what was going on, but there was not a whole lot of decision-making.”

GF said it would have been better to make decisions with everyone present, so that everyone could be kept up to date.

Another problem was the tendency for groups to gather spontaneously or schedule meetings independently of the control group: “There were times where there were secondary meetings that were done without the whole group there. You’d either arrive and there had been another meeting, and you wouldn’t know what they were talking about, you’re out of the loop, or you went down for a 4 o’clock meeting and found out it was supposed to be at 6 o’clock.”

GF admits that these things may not always have been preventable. “Because of the nature of an emergency, sometimes those things are just going to happen, I guess.”

Communication at all levels seemed to become more informal during the emergency. A tremendous amount of it was verbal. GF went into as many shift meetings as possible to keep them apprised of what was going on downtown; he would normally leave that up to the shift sgt., and some days there might not be a briefing at all. During the storm, briefings were help regularly and GF tried to attend regularly.

When asking for resources, OPP officers didn’t always write things down. There was no consistent paper trail for requesting resources from OPP headquarters or other sources. At one point the OPP needed more flashlight batteries. The request was made over the phone. “You didn’t know if they were coming or not, but the next day, bang, they arrived. You didn’t even know who delivered them, but you had this skid of batteries and flashlights that arrived in the garage.”

That particular shipment was donated by Energizer Canada. GF is still not sure who was responsible for making it happen; they just arrived.

Costs were kept to a minimum throughout the storm. The OPP’s biggest cost is overtime, and there wasn’t a whole lot of overtime used during the storm, because of the use of visitors.

Visiting police were being paid, but because it was a provincial emergency, the province will be picking up the tab. “It became an OPP response to that provincial emergency, and they [the OPP] are not billed for that. They are only billed for the people who actually worked here. The province paid for the overtime.”

“The overtime comes through the OPP, but they basically showed that as an ice storm cost. The way the contract works with the OPP is that we bill for the overtime for the 40 officers we have, but if we bring in 15 extra for an emergency response, we’re not billed for that.”

There was more overtime in January at the Kingston OPP, but not to the extent it would have been without outside help.

Other than that, “There were a few batteries bought, a few meals bought...”

Most of the OPP officers who worked the storm got their own meals the normal way. But the front-end reception people were asked to work in 24-hour shifts, so meals were bought for them for about four or five days. “They had shifts, they just couldn’t take breaks.”

GF has had emergency training through the OPP on several occasions. He has taken the basic emergency preparedness course through the province, and he’s taken a site-management course. He found all of it helpful during the emergency. “It puts a lot of it in perspective. To give a person a sample emergency plan without any training, your first reaction would be, and I suspect there were a few people at city hall who hadn’t had the emergency training, and that’s why the emergency plan looks so out of proportion for the event, for the emergency, because they don’t know how to apply it, they’ve never even been in a classroom or walked through a scenario.”

Told that one of the most vocal critics of Bob Boyd’s plan was former base commander Col. Gerry Coady, who presumably has had a great deal of emergency training, GF cast doubt on Coady’s management of the crisis.

GF was critical of Coady’s strategy for putting together regional command centres near the end of the emergency: “On his arrival there, the first thing he did was split up the command posts into three different areas, which ultimately didn’t really work. You had three command posts trying to coordinate. The one out here was never really fully manned; it was kind of too little too late, and it was a waste of manpower and resources. [He’s referring to the Woodbine Road fire hall]. The one in Pittsburgh Township ultimately became the main one. I think having three command posts within one municipality initially would have been a disaster. Too de-centred. I think it would have been better to have a more suitable location for the main one and to have it in one spot. The city isn’t that big; it’s not like Metro Toronto.”

Amalgamation was more of a problem than a help during he storm: “It was problematic because it was new to those new politicians, having been in office less than a month, and all of a sudden there was an emergency response on that proportion. I don’t think anybody could conceivably be ready for it. There were people who were elected who had never been in politics before, never worked in emergency response before, never even been involved in the utility before.”

GF doubts that anyone in the city had been involved in an emergency response of that scale before. He personally hadn’t seen or been involved in such a widespread emergency at any point in his career. The closest he came to anything of this magnitude was as a participant in what he called “an Armenian crisis” in Metro Toronto back in about 1986. An Armenian group had threatened to blow up the Metro Subway, and for about a week GF took part in an emergency response to calls of suspected bombs on the subway. “It was like running scenarios every day. None of them ever turned out to be real, but we had a live audience in Metro Toronto, where we had to deal with issues like evacuations and control of people.” He was part of the team that did explosion disposal.

“Natural emergencies are fairly few and far between. If you find anybody who’s been involved in more than one or two in their lifetime, you’ve probably got somebody who’s deeply involved in emergency response.”

The OPP was running under the city plan. The only aspect of the OPP plan was the fact that we were sort of laterally reporting to another body behind the scenes.

GF’s view of Emergency Measures Ontario is basically as a resource to help guide the municipal response. “When you run into a problem, they’re there, and they were at every meeting of the emergency control group. As you went around the table they would offer advice, saying ‘perhaps you should look at doing this or look at that’. So they were good resource people.”

The thing GF found a little “disjunctive” was the fact that Emergency Measures Ontario sent different representatives to Kingston at different stages of the crisis. “Randy [Reid] was there for a while, then he left and somebody else came in. I thought to myself ‘why don’t you keep some continuity there and have the same person there the entire time,’ but I guess I’m not on their organizational end, so I don’t know why they make those decisions. I’m sure there was a good reason for it.”

GF’s contact with the media was limited. Various media wanted to interview him immediately after the first control group meeting, but he didn’t have much information at the time and declined to comment. He says he invited them to meet with him at OPP headquarters later the same day, but they never showed up. He never had any other direct contact with them, other than sending out press releases.

The media were helpful in publicizing the attempted theft of a generator at the fire substation. “They pumped that out over the airwaves and in the paper continuously for two or three days, and that did have the ultimate result of finding out who had done the deed. And I think that’s one way that the police and the media can work together, to get that message out to the public.”

CKWS-TV came down and did a personal interview with the victim on more than one occasion to get that story out to the public. They were broadcasting again by that time, using their emergency tower.

GF didn’t think about where his authority was coming from. “Basically we just acted. You would go to those meetings and basically get a sense of what your job was,” but people relied on their own judgement and authority after that, for the most part.

“The role of the police in that situation is pretty well left up to the police.”

GF’s family coped well with his long absences during the storm. He has two children, an 18-year-old and a 15-year-old. They’re both at home but pretty self-sufficient. “They had two or three or four days away from school, so that wasn’t a big downer for them.”

His own power went out for only about two hours one day. He lives in the former Kingston township.

“You almost felt guilty. I remember this one situation where we went to Tim Horton’s. We went in for a coffee and stood at the counter, and these two people came in, and they looked like they’d just spent two or three days in a sleeping bag ... their hair was all greasy, and they looked rough, they hadn’t shaved. The lady at the counter asked them, ‘Oh, how are you making out? How many days have you been without power?’ And they said ‘Oh, four or five days now we haven’t had a shower. We’re surviving, though.’ And they went off and huddled with their coffee and got warmed up. And we stepped up and she said ‘Oh, and how are you doing, how many days have you been without power?’ And we felt guilty. We had to say, well, two hours. You couldn’t come up with any war stories ... unless you’ve experienced it, you didn’t do it on the same level as those people who went a week without power.”

“People outside the area had no real concept of what you were going through. If you drove to Belleville, they’d say ‘How bad is it down there, what’s the big problem?’ People 45 minutes away, and they didn’t have to experience it at all.”

“The biggest thing for me is the fact that it built a rapport with the people you have to work with, and that’s a tremendously positive thing ...You feel like you know the staff people down there, and it all happened in about eight days, so that’s really good.”

“The thing too is that it could have been a lot worse, and we should really learn from that. We could have had 25 deaths or something. It could have been a worse disaster.”