IceStorm 98 Study

Glenn Gow (GG) was with the former Kingston Township Fire Department as a volunteer for 26 years. He came on as a career deputy fire chief 16 years ago, and took over as chief of what is now known as Kingston West four years ago. He’s now chief of Kingston Central and Kingston West and the co-ordinating Chief for all of Kingston, which includes Kingston East, or the former Pittsburgh Township. He is also the regional Fire Area Co-ordinator for the counties of Frontenac, Lennox and Addington, overseeing the co-ordination of fire fighting and education programs for 24 fire departments.

GG learned about the storm at about 10 or 11 on Wednesday night. One of the first calls had to do with major power lines (44,000 volt lines) that were down on Collins Bay Road. The lines didn’t blow any fuses, which meant that there was continuous arcing in that area. The fire department had responded, and because of the nature of the power lines, GG needed to go up and investigate. He knew it would be a problem at least through the night.

When GG came out of his house to respond to the first call, he saw major power interruptions and arcing on transformers and high-voltage lines throughout the whole Western side of the new city.

He started to set up the fire department on the West side. They’re primarily volunteer on the west side, and cover an area of about 88 square miles, with a population of about 40,000. GG immediately got started staffing the fire halls. Calls were already coming in at a much higher rate than usual, and it was almost beyond what they could handle. They had to start splitting up crews to respond to the large number of calls, and things continued that way for the next two-and-a-half to three days.

GG has about 90 people he can call on, including both volunteers and career fire-fighters.

Most of the calls they received early on had to do with wires down and arcing wires. There were also a few small fires caused by arcing wires, many of them at the point where power ties into the house.

GG responded to the heavy volume of calls by doubling the number of dispatchers in the Woodbine Road station. He also staffed it with members of the inspection division, who helped monitor calls and keep track of where vehicles were at any given time. The inspectors also helped with communications, putting up displays on paper boards in order to monitor the flow of vehicles and fire-fighters.

GG says his organizational structure worked “extremely well”: “We had the staff in, we had the lines of communication set up well, and we were able to stay on top and make all of the responses that we needed to make.”

There were, however, a number of problems and things he would do differently next time. For example, many of the newer vehicles in the fire department’s fleet were too big to travel down blocked streets and roads. “We had to get into cars and drive, where normally we would take a pumper or a ladder truck.”

GG feels the city was “extremely lucky” that the major fires it had were all in relatively accessible areas. He attributes this to the fact that people in hardest-hit areas tended to leave their homes, so there were fewer people burning candles in those parts of town. Power was also out in large areas of the city, eliminating arcing, one cause of fires.

GG defended Ontario Hydro against critics, saying they did as well as they could under the circumstances: “Ontario Hydro was extremely busy, and a lot of people I don’t think appreciated their work. Their area was so huge and so gigantic that I don’t think some of the local people understood that we weren’t going to have a truck on every corner or a team of people on every corner.”

Despite this, he acknowledges that it took longer than usual (and perhaps longer than it should have) to get Ontario Hydro’s co-operation. “We were a little longer than normal getting a good [Ontario Hydro] crew to work with our department,” he said. Eventually GG and his staff walked over to the front door of Ontario Hydro’s building and approached them that way. “We were able to set up better communications for what we considered to be an emergency over and above [the usual circumstances].”

The delay had nothing to do with Ontario Hydro being incommunicative, GG explained; Ontario Hydro crews were just overwhelmed with work. “We had no trouble rousing Ontario Hydro; we had trouble communicating with their crews. They had so many places [to go] that while they were responding to a call for us, they may have run across two or three that were every bit as important ... So the call volume was far, far greater than their capabilities of dealing with [it].”

The delays did not seem out of the ordinary to GG, especially in relation to what they were dealing with. “I’m in the emergency business, and unless something gets way, way out of whack, that’s what I’m hired to do, is to deal with emergencies. It’s routine for me. So knowing that we have high winds and I’m not going to get Ontario Hydro at every intersection at every minute is not an uncommon thing for me to know. We know that sometimes in a wind-storm we’ll be out there for two or three hours before the actual crew gets there. Our job is to make it as safe as we can for the area and make it as safe as we can for the residents of that area, and wait for Hydro to finally get there.”

“When I wanted to get the Hydro particularly to do a job that I thought was serious enough for them to do, I got them. I just may have known how to do that a little better than someone else.”

Communications with Ontario Hydro were problematic, however. Radio and telephone communications were down from time to time.

GG did most of his communicating by radio and cell phone. Unlike some others, he didn’t have any trouble with his cell phone. “I don’t think there was three times in the whole emergency that I got a busy signal.”

He felt the leadership at City Hall was excellent. “From the standpoint of what I needed to get and who I needed to deal with, it was exceptionally good.”

Regardless of that, he would like to have seen the city follow its emergency plan more closely. “We didn’t follow the plan that was in place. We had an interim plan and a committee that had been formed during the transition process. Sam Davis was hired by the corporation to do it, with Bob Boyd as his advisor and consultant. And we didn’t follow the plan. The location was the wrong location, we first met in the wrong place, and that may have been because we had to, I don’t know about that. The secondary place was in the Kingston West fire hall, and we didn’t meet there. And never at any time was City Hall ever designated as the place to have the command post.”

Asked why he thinks the first and second emergency operations centres were not chosen, GG said, “I would suspect people had not read and were not familiar with what procedures were supposed to be in place. That’s the only thing I can think of.”

Control group meetings got to be too large and were not always succinct enough, according to GG. “I’m not so sure that the people going to the emergency control centre went for the right kind of reasons. The emergency control centre, in my opinion, is [a place] to plan and keep on top of, oversee the whole emergency, and not be as operational. And we had operational people coming and talking about operational items. I could have very easily on many occasions talked about the hourly work that was being done by the fire service, [but] it was not of anybody’s interest in that room at that time except mine. If I had a major problem that I couldn’t deal with or a major problem that all should be familiar with, then that’s the place to take it. But because I took 10 ladies out of a house or 10 men, is not an issue. Because I went to 45 or 50 calls that had wires down was not an issue for me to take [to the control group meetings].”

GG told the emergency control group that there were times when his fire-fighters would not have been able to reach fires in certain parts of the city, particularly the South end of the West side. “[I told them that] in fact if there was a major structural fire, I physically could not get to that fire, and I would have a major, major incident on my hands before I could do anything.”

On one occasion, six of the Cities fire halls were without power. This was at about 10 p.m., and the weather was going to drop below the zero mark overnight. He informed control group members that water freezes in fire trucks when it goes below 32 degrees Celsius, and let them know that the fire service needed to find a way to keep the trucks warm.

Both of those matters belonged in the control group meetings, GG said, but a lot of the detailed operational talk that took place in those sessions was unnecessary. He recommended sticking more closely to the emergency plan and inviting only designated group members to the meetings. “We’re to have a certain number of players that are identified in the plan ... Everybody else is there by invitation only. And when I sit there and have a number of members representing each department, and they’re starting to freelance on our communications in that room, I think it’s non-productive.”

“We all need to be there to know what each other is doing in general terms. I don’t need to know how many busses they have to move the people. What I need to know is, do they need my assistance to help carry some people that may need the kind of help that I can supply them. That’s what I need to know. How they do that is their business.”

He recommend better controls on the emergency control centre, and better training so that all players have a better understanding of their role during an emergency.

Asked what might have motivated people to give such detailed accounts of their work during the storm, GG said it has to do with a lack of training and exposure to emergencies: “I think the thing that drove it, and why everybody wanted to be there ... is that these people don’t deal with emergencies. Emergencies are exciting to non-emergency people, and they can even be to emergency people. This is the first time that the fire service in this area ever experienced this kind of an issue ... and it did take some talking to some people to say: ‘Listen, we’ve done all of this before, we’ve just done it at a less frequent [pace]’ ... Other people, it was a brand new thing for them. You can tell by watching them and looking at them and seeing how they responded. I am in the business, along with ambulance and police ... we spend a fair amount of our time talking about this thing, and a lot of our time going away to courses to understand how to do it, and how to develop it.”

One thing GG would do differently next time is try to make sure he had a staff person or alternate close to the command centre at all times. He found he couldn’t attend all meetings, and needed to know what was said when he was not there.

He also needed a better system for keeping his own staff informed about everything that was going on in the fire service. “They were wondering what other parts of the fire service were doing, and I didn’t have a good mechanism in place to do that. So we’re on our way to try and improve that.” He is thinking of designating one person to handle inter-departmental communication during emergencies.

That person would also be in charge of making sure someone was checking in on the families of volunteers and career fire fighters -- many of whom worked much longer hours than usual during the storm. And he or she would be responsible for keeping up-to-date information about the movement and whereabouts of all fire vehicles and staff.

“[Fire fighters] need to know what equipment has been tied up that they can’t call upon. Under normal circumstances, if they wanted a ladder truck, for instance, they would know automatically that this is what they’re going to get, and this is roughly the time they can expect to get it. And they didn’t always have that information at their fingertips. And they need it. Because if they had gone from limbs and wires being down to a structure fire, especially in a high rise, we need to know how fast they can get those vehicles in there. Not that we don’t do things without it, but we do different things without it than we do with it.”

Fire-fighters also need to know when a vehicle has frozen up, or when a vehicle is committed somewhere else. “This station here, at least three times, went outside it’s jurisdiction totally as far as what it responds to, and the other one that would [provide] back up needed to know that ahead of time. And we didn’t have the good communications to do that, because the phones were down.”

What’s needed is a more formal way of getting it information to all of the stations, GG said.

“If that technology is going to fail, then whoever is going to look after the communication part owns that, and has to figure out alternatives, he said. “That may be the point where he has to put something down on paper, run off 10 copies, and make sure they get distributed to all the stations. Whatever is necessary to get the information out there. But we need somebody monitoring that, because there’s so many other things going on.”

The Woodbine Road fire station lost power twice, but there was sufficient generator power to keep the building running at all times. Other stations had smaller generators capable of generating electrical power but no heat.

Asked what he thought of the regional response, GG said he wasn’t very involved in the regional response, but had some pick-up points for supplies in Brewers Mill Fire Hall which is Fire Hall Number 2 on the East side. He also had one at Black Road station, which is the Number 2 fire hall on the West side. “They’re not good places for pick-up points anyway. Other than that, we didn’t have a lot of involvement in that.”

GG helped with the city’s regional response by calling around to all of the control centres within Frontenac, Lennox and Addington and compiling a list of phone numbers and contact names for each municipality’s EOC. While making those calls, he also picked up information about fire-related issues. But he said it would have been ideal to go through the list at least once or twice more.

The only request for help he got out of that initial series of calls was from Bedford Township. Officials there were looking for 10 gallons of water, and to GG that did not seem like an emergency. “I told them to walk over and pump the handle on the number one station, because I knew where the outside pump was.”

[At this point I turn to the prepared questions, which takes us back to his discovery of the storm on the first Wednesday night].

GG says he knew the scope of the emergency right away. As soon as he took his first drive through the north and south ends of the city at about 3 a.m., he knew “we were in major trouble.”

He saw “a tremendous build-up of ice on all the wires and all the trees, and overhead signs and just every place. And I could see the potential of losing a lot more wires. A lot of the trees and limbs and other things that were loaded with ice had the potential of falling and maybe puncturing ceilings, causing I don’t know what kind of damage inside, maybe even possibly bringing down some buildings or parts of buildings, which would cause entrapment of people.”

GG could see from the extent of the damage that there were many areas that would be inaccessible to fire trucks. This would have major repercussions for the volunteers and career fire fighters, who would have to do a lot of work by hand. “There would be no laying hoses by truck. It would all be laid by hand. Not only is that difficult normally, but now you’ve got to climb over trees and under tree branches to be able to lay the hose. So what would normally be a 30-second lay for an inch-and-a-half hose may end up being a half an hour lay for the same hose. And if it was a major fire, one inch and a half doesn’t even make a dent in it. You need two or three two-and-a-half inch hoses to do the job. So I knew the potential of something that could get out of hand in terms of fire was very, very high. [The danger of] entrapment was high. The danger of people being hurt by falling limbs and us having to get into help and assist the ambulance and that was very, very high.”

Q: Did you think there would be deaths?

“The potential for it? Yes, the potential was high.”

The fact that there were no deaths is an indication that “We had a lot of good things going for us,” he said.

Q: Did you think about your authority to act, and where did you see your authority coming from? Gardner Church? The Mayor?

“I accepted what I had to do as fire chief of the Kingston area, and that’s primarily what it was. I was going to take full control, which is what I’m hired to do, of the fire service and do anything that the fire service could do within its realm of responsibility, and anything else we could do above that to help.”

One of the things he felt he had to do early in the stage was “get a good handle on his staff.” He always kept staff in reserve. “My staff could not have the luxury of shutting down after they get tired. When they’re tired I have to relieve them with fresh crews. So I knew I had to get ahold of my staffing, and that was all independent of anything that may have been done by Gardner Church or the Mayor or Council or anybody else.”

GG also had to offer support to the emergency control centre. Primarily, he said the control group and top administrators wanted to know whether he was going to be able to stay ahead of the kinds of responses that typically go to the fire service. They also wanted to know what kind of help he could provide in case it became necessary to evacuate people from their homes.

Some people were moved out of houses that had no heat or power. A high priority for the fire service was to move people on emergency health or life support systems out of their homes and into the hospital.

Money was not a concern for GG. The fire service spent a little bit more in wages than normal for this time of year, he said “but it wasn’t an exorbitant amount.” He estimates the fire service is about $85,000 over budget for this time of year, as a result of the storm.

Q: How did you make decisions?

“The emergency response part of it is our business, so we practice for it all the time. When you make decisions, you make sure that you get all the facts from everybody, and you talk to the people who are going to have to carry out whatever it is, and find out what the best methods are for doing that under the conditions we were under. So we just followed those procedures. There wasn’t anything that was really difficult for us to make decisions on.”

For example, he says he had “no trouble” deciding to shut down the Number Two fire hall at Brock Rd. and Highway 38 when the building went too long without heat. GG shut the fire hall down for two and a half days and ran staff and vehicles from the next closest fire hall, which was the Number Four stations in Glenburnie. “It was an easy thing for us to do at that time because we only had one fire hall in the north end up until 10 months ago. So it was almost like old times.”

Q: What about communications? What issues came up there?

“We had good communications with everybody. I had very, very little trouble meeting with anybody I wanted to meet,” GG said.

He had radio communication with all of his volunteers, some of who carried radios and all of who carried pagers.

The equipment was used more extensively than usual, so they had to set up procedures for re-charging batteries at a faster rate. But that was just something they built into the system, GG said. Certain people were given the task of making sure all of the batteries stayed up, and of checking all radios to make sure they worked.

Some people did have trouble with their cell phones, but were able to switch to their two-way radios when necessary. The two-ways are primarily used for confidential information, but fire fighters and volunteers wound up using them for standard operational information when the cell phones were down.

GG was happy with the way the news media conducted themselves during the storm. “They were easy to get ahold of when I wanted to get ahold of them, they were receptive to printing stories. We ran about five or six major safety information dealing with candles, carbon monoxide, generators and those kinds of issues. They seemed to cover everything that we wanted extremely well. From what I heard on the news, I have nothing but praise [for the way journalists and the media handled their end of things].”

Q: What was your biggest problem?

“I’d better be careful what I ... I guess for the fire service itself, just for our own organization, the biggest problem was probably just not having enough generating power in the fire halls. The other fire halls need major equipment. At the Brock Street station, if we’d had any more problems there, we would not have had the capability, and if we had had colder weather, we wouldn’t have had the capability for getting any comfort zone whatsoever for the fire-fighters. And one of the things we have to do with fire-fighting equipment and fire-fighters is that we must have a place to get the equipment get back and shape and heated up, so that it’s not frozen on them, and also you must have a place to rejuvenate and get your people back in good shape again. So generating power was probably our biggest problem. Then again, had we had colder weather, gosh only knows what we would have had to deal with.”

Next time he thinks the fire service would try to do a better job nourishing its own people. Volunteers tended to look after themselves at meal time, which is normal practice, but GG feels they should have been fed during the ice storm. “People can’t live on fast food all the time. They need some proper nourishment.” The same person who looks after inter-fire departmental communication might also look after nourishment, GG said.

GG was impressed that a number of fast food places in the area brought donations of food to the station. Some of them took whatever was in their ovens and gave it to the crews. But he said it’s important to have somebody taking care of the logistics of such donations: “You just can’t have it floating in all of the time and not have any control over it whatsoever. You need to have better control of it.”

In future, GG said, the fire service will have positions identified to look after communications within the fire service and the logistics of food and other support equipment. “It just needs to be better controlled. We got through everything. But we recognized as we were going through it that we had people freelancing. And the danger of freelancing, is that one shift gets something and the next shift doesn’t, you have to have some organizational structure about who gets what, and when.”

Some fire fighters stayed out too long, working eight or nine hours before getting back to a hall. “[That’s] too long if you don’t make sure that you get them some warm drinks and nourishment and make sure they’re dressed well. [You need to ask] ‘Are they in an incident that they’re standing in the road, or are they able to stay in the vehicle?’ Because if they’re standing outside they’re starting to get wet or damp ... we could just do better on that.”

GG still ponders over the ‘what ifs’ that could have made for a more serious incident. “What if we’d had colder temperatures? Not only in terms of what would have happened to the trees and the wires, but people could not have stayed in their homes. And some people may have tried to get back [into their homes] ... That would have been a big issue. People would have got in and tried to put on some kind of heat to save their operation or to save damage in the house. Because you start busting water lines on the second level of your home, you’re going to make an awful mess of the first floor in a hurry. So we talked about the what ifs, those things, and how we would have dealt with them. Could we have done it with the kind of staff we had? Were we organized well enough in staffing to have a good rotation that would last six, seven or eight days?”

Q: And what was your response to that question?

“We feel that we still could have taken some cold weather and some high winds. What we decided we would have to do, though, was be just a bit more disciplined in how we dealt with our staff. In fact, we had to eventually just tell people to go home and rest, there’s enough people here to do the job. We need to take earlier action in doing that. It’s hard -- when you’re not into it very often and don’t think about it -- it’s hard to send your people home when you might need them, because most of the incidents we have are short-lived.”

Most emergencies last a few hours or, in rarer cases, up to a day or more. The fire service is not used to dealing with emergencies lasting eight days or more, GG said, so it was difficult to know how to handle staffing and volunteers.

Another issue GG and his staff encountered was the problem of people wanting to use fire halls as reception centres, and as places to feed people. He said a fire hall is “one of the worst places” to use for the general public, because you never know when you’re going to need the building to warm up cold fire and rescue vehicles or to house fire fighters.

He tells the story of one fire department that had its hall totally dedicated as a command post and a reception centre for the general public. GG flew over the station in a helicopter with the military one day and saw five fire vehicles parked outside on the street. Had it turned colder, this could have been a disaster. “We were very lucky because it was only bouncing around 32 and 30 degrees. Had that cold weather come, it would have frozen every truck. He wouldn’t have been able to start them, he wouldn’t have been able to drive them, he wouldn’t have been able to get to the incident. His people would have been frozen on their very first incident.”

He wouldn’t name the fire hall, but said there were a couple of similar situations, including one in the southern part of the region.

There is pressure to use fire halls for the public “because [in] a lot of rural areas, the heart of the municipality is around the fire department,” GG said. “But fire chiefs have to be firm in what they want the fire hall to do. You must make sure you keep it as a fire hall. People are expecting you to respond to an emergency. If you don’t have your staff or your equipment ready for that, then I don’t think you’re fulfilling your responsibility.”

Because of the lack of communication between fire departments during the emergency, some fire-fighters thought the devastation was restricted to their own area, GG says.

GG and his staff discussed what to do if a major house fire broke out during the ice storm. As luck would have it, the first such fire took place as GG was preparing to take his first real hiatus from the action -- a badly needed dinner with his wife, who he had seen for about 10 minutes a day for four days. “I phoned her and I said ‘get ready, we’re going to the restaurant for supper.’ And I went down and changed my clothes quickly, climbed in the car and the alarm went off and they had a major structure fire. That debriefing that I had, these people here knew, the staff that I had there, they knew the structure of the building, and before I could even pick up the radio to call for additional help, it was already on the road. And when I got there, the staff had everything beautifully under control, and what could have been a total loss of a building was kept to the garage and the upstairs portion of the house. The people were able to sleep there the next night.”

GG estimates that about 80 percent of the calls the fire service received during the ice storm were directly related to the storm. About half of the remaining 20 percent may or may not have been related to it. The fire he just talked about was an electrical fire, with a number of appliances plugged in to one socket that may or may not have been installed properly. “But the type of appliances he [the occupant] had plugged in there, he may have had them plugged in the garage anyway. One was a heater, another was a light. So we didn’t count that one as being directly related, but it may have been.”

Some people got into trouble when they tried to cook on camp stoves and other makeshift ovens. One couple started a fire in their downtown Kingston home [or apartment] this way. A neighbour just happened to hear the sound of someone falling on the floor, and called rescue workers to report a problem. Fire fighters arrived and were able to save the couple but not their cat. “That’s how close they were,” said GG.

Another fire in Kingston East resulted from a camp stove being used to cook and heat a house. The garage and the kitchen were damaged.

Fire also broke out in a student rental on Johnson St. when candles were left burning. This caused the greatest single amount of damage of any house fire during the storm.

The fire service also dealt with several chimney and wall fires resulting from the prolonged use of fireplaces. Overusing fireplaces can result in paralysis of the wood, which is where the wood starts to dry out and can ignite at much lower temperatures.

A volunteer saved a store in Reddendale from possible fire when he noticed three candles burning in the window. The volunteer, who was part of a group patrolling the area every four or five hours, forced his way into the shop and put the candles out, then contacted the owner.

“Had [any of] those fires occurred in areas where we weren’t able to take the big trucks because of the wires that were down, the potential for more fire loss was very, very high.”

If he was to do anything differently next time, GG would try to have a bit smoother operation at the control centre. “Just a little bit more discipline in what everybody’s job and function was. But by that I don’t mean to take away ... I’m just impressed to no end at how well the new city had come together in such an unusual incident. Most of the players in that room didn’t know each other before, and to be able to pull this off, was a credit to everybody involved.”

Nevertheless, he would like to have seen everybody named in the emergency plan get together a little sooner. Within the fire service itself, he would try to improve communications. He would have around-the-clock staff at the emergency control centre, rather than trying to do everything himself.

GG has done some soul-searching about why he was unable to delegate more of his own duties during the emergency. He has already set up a system whereby he (or any future fire chief) will be relieved more frequently during an emergency, but he still wonders why he delegated so little during the ice storm, and reflects on how hard it is for chiefs to give up control of an incident when they need rest. “I don’t think it’s in our nature for chiefs, or even deputy chiefs, to leave it. But the point [is] that if you don’t get other people involved, you can think you’re doing a good job, but other people can realize you’re taxed and you’re fatigued.”

GG already monitors his fire fighters for fatigue every 25 minutes during most incidents, so he understands the need for rest and recuperation. His fire fighters carry half-hour cylinders most of the time, and this forces them to come out of any structure fire on a regular basis. “The reason I do is I want to see my fire-fighters every 25 minutes in a burning building, and the reason I want to see them is to see what condition they’re in and to see if I want them out or in. Because fire-fighters traditionally will not give up. They’re usually past the point of no return before they’re willing to say anything, and then it’s too late for them. And I still think that most of the fire fighters that are not injured but seriously trapped in a building, it was because they went past that 50 per cent recovery part, and the point of no return. Then not to do that myself is kind of the [most important] thing to do, because if you don’t have a capable staff to replace you, then you’re a failure as a chief, and I don’t happen to think I’m a failure. So if that’s the case, then why didn’t I use them more than I did? A number of them were prepared to do the job for me, and I did use them in a couple of instances and knew how great it was for them and me. I just need to do more of that. So that will happen. That will happen.”

GG recommends running a city-wide ‘tabletop’ emergency exercise every year, with a major mock exercise no less than every three years. A tabletop exercise can be carried out in two or three hours, with all of the players at the table at the same time.

The fire service has its own emergency plan. But because they’re already in the emergency business, their plan doesn’t need to be as formal as the city’s. Under the city’s plan, he said, the fire chief has to be able to prove to emergency control centre staff that he can do everything he says he can within the plan. “If not, I need to be able to tell them where I’m going to get the resources to do the job. For example, if I needed 500 fire-fighters, where would I get 500 fire-fighters. I should be able to tell them how I’m going to do those kinds of things.”

GG points out that the two emergency plan advisory committees for Kingston West and Kingston Central were established before the ice storm. They both agreed that when the time came, they would approach the city’s transition board, and set up a committee to get an interim plan in place and have it ready for Jan. 1. And the plan was ready on time. It was in place. The main problem with it, however, was that it mentioned positions but very few actual names. Nobody knew who all of the players in the new city were as of Jan. 1, so the plan couldn’t identify them by name. This slowed down the response somewhat.

The city’s emergency plan was an amalgam of the plans from the former Kingston Township, Pittsburgh Township and City of Kingston. It was an interim plan. Another committee needed to be established immediately, and in fact there was a budget struck to do that, with Bob Boyd and Sam Davis as paid consultants. Now that’s done. They’ve finished the second part of the plan, which deals with evacuation during an isolated emergency.

GG said the city needs to have in-house generators in its fire halls and better capability for supplying outside generator power. Only two of his fire halls have that capability, while the other two don’t. The fire hall buildings are needed for “all sorts of things during an emergency,” he said, “so they have to be fired up to be able to do that.”

Making sure all fire halls have adequate generator power for a prolonged blackout has not seemed like a priority until now, because no one really believed the power would go out for as long as it did. “Until you hit something like this, you don’t think [about it]. We get so accustomed [to brief blackouts] that the downed power for two or three hours is not an issue for almost most residents. Unless you have a health-related problem, it’s not an issue. [People say] ‘So the power was out, so what? I’ll go someplace else.’”

Some residents even had fun during the storm. “I don’t know how many parties went on in this community because of what was going on. Some people had a good time for a few days. So you don’t think of all of those sorts of things. You just can’t think, ‘What does a fire hall need in the middle of a major emergency?’”

The fire service always thought it had plenty of backup power to ride out the most difficult emergency, GG said. In Kingston West he has “tremendous, tremendous generator capability.” One truck has 25,000 watts, and all other vehicles carry their own independent generators, plus a spare. There is also one spare for the emergency control centre. “So we always thought we had lots of capability. Why did we have to worry about number one station? The wire came outside, so all you do is plug it in, it automatically switches over ... and it runs the furnaces and all of those things. I have another fire hall that’s all heated by electric. Tremendous power capabilities. There’s no way I can generate that place to be able to heat that building. If you’re bringing a truck in there that’s 10 below zero, with 5,000 gallons of water you want to heat up to 70 degrees, you’d better have tremendous power capabilities. So that building we have to look at. We may have to try and change it over to propane or some other capability.”

From one side of the street to another would often be a totally different story. GG recalled one man who came into number 1 station more than once during the storm for help with problems at home. “His wife was bedridden, and his basement was flooded, but they wouldn’t leave their house. Until it collapsed they weren’t going to leave their house, that was all there was to it ... He had generators, but we went up and did an oil change for him on it at one point. Like most other people, he didn’t know you had to change the oil on the generators; you can’t leave them running, you’ve got to go out and do those kinds of things or you end up blowing them out, which we had many, many blown throughout the community ... Anyway, he came out on I think it was day three or four. His neighbour across the street started talking about how pretty it was, and he immediately broke down and cried in front of his neighbour across the street. This neighbour never even understood why he was so emotional about what had just happened. For three days, having to the bail his basement out and having to try to keep his wife warm in the bedroom, coming down to the fire hall to get drinking water. He just didn’t understand.”

Neighbours were generally very supportive of each other, GG adds. Many people phoned the fire service when something seemed wrong on their street. He recalled a fire in the Chrystal Springs area near the end of the ice storm. A doctor had emptied his fireplace, put the ashes in a cardboard box and put them in his shed. At some point during the night, the shed caught fire. An old woman living nearby phoned the fire service, and they were able to keep the fire contained to the shed. “Had it not been for that senior citizen taking the initiative to phone us about it, there’s no doubt in my mind that he would have lost that end of his house, at least his kitchen anyway, along with that shed,” GG said. “We were able to get there because of her call. So the neighbourhood watch increases I think, during these kinds of incidents, it just increases. People really look out for other people.”

“I think the success of what we got through and how we got through this was people helping people, as much and in some cases more than emergency services. Because we [emergency workers] didn’t even know what was going on in a lot of cases. And I think that happens just about any place in any incident you have.”

The longer the brush from the storm stays on the ground, the drier it gets, and the more garbage that may join it, the greater potential fire hazard, GG pointed out. He spent some time with [former parks director] Brian Sheridan, who assured him that certain high-traffic areas in the city would be made a priority. The clean-up isn’t going to end this year, GG said. It’s going to go on for at least a couple of years.

GG said he’s concerned about branches that are still hung up in trees. “Not only in the residential areas but also in the bush, where people go for walks, where people do their hunting and their snow mobiling and their four wheel driving. [The branches] are just hanging up in there ... If we have a bush fire, normally we can head in with a lot of confidence. Right now we won’t be able to do that; we’d better have one eye up on top all the time when we start marching into these bushes. It was only a couple of years ago when I had a bush fire that I had 135 fire-fighters working on. Trying to keep track of what’s going on over the top of their heads, and that’s going to go on for years and years and years.”

Nobody should be burning brush without getting permission from the fire service. And that happens; certain people are granted permission to burn if the fire service is confident they can do it safely. Many people are turned down, and this has been causing friction. “I won’t tell you what I was called yesterday because I wouldn’t let somebody burn. People are very, very emotional; they want to clean up their properties, they want to do it well. They’ve burned for years, and they don’t always understand the problems that we’re in. Because if I let Nancy burn, you can bet there’s 40 Sally’s out there who want to burn exactly the same thing. And it becomes a big problem.”

GG has taken emergency planning courses in Arnprior, along with others held across Ontario. He tries to take one emergency planning seminar every year. That’s a one to three day course, dealing with what the government is doing and plans to do, as well as how to run a good emergency. They usually have tabletop exercises with emergency workers, councillors, engineers, city staff, etc. “You get a good viewpoint of what everybody’s trying to do out there, and I’ve found that very helpful.” These are funded by the federal government and run by Emergency Measures Ontario and Emergency Measures Canada.

The fire marshal contacted GG two or three times during the incident. The fire marshal’s office supplied special CO detectors for fire departments that were lacking them. They were analysers; a better class than normal CO detectors. Those were made available throughout eastern Ontario. Kingston fire services got about 900 CO and smoke alarms, along with seven of these special CO detectors. The marshal’s office also sent detailed hand-outs for the detectors, with other information about good safety procedures and things you should look out for during a prolonged power outage. Those dealt with propane heaters, catalytic heaters, space heaters, cooking stoves you should and shouldn’t be using, etc.

Randy Reid of EMO was playing two roles, GG said. He was doing his regular job for EMO, but as a city councillor he also attended most of the meetings of the emergency control group. Of the complaint that Randy Reid wasn’t on-site early enough, GG said “People have to realize that this was not Kingston’s issue. Randy Reid is a councillor, alright, but his job is emergency planning for Eastern Ontario.” GG says he received a call from the Chief of Belleville, saying he couldn’t get a hold of Randy Reid. GG gave him a number, but also said he would try to call Reid. GG reached Reid within five minutes.

Regarding complaints that Emergency Measures Ontario had no one on staff at 11 p.m. or midnight when city officials first tried to call, GG said very few organizations can afford to staff their offices 24-hours a day. “Those days of having those kinds of resources 24 hours a day are gone. I used to be able to pick up a telephone and get a guy over here when I wanted to do a fire investigation in the middle of the night. I don’t do that anymore.”

“I don’t mind people questioning, is there a better way, can we do things differently, but I’m not super-critical .... I just have a little trouble sometimes with people saying these things too quickly, because they think the whole world’s going to drop right on them.”

GG received a phone call at about 1 o’clock on the first day of the storm, offering him 500 students out of RMC. “I’ll tell you, that happened a lot faster than the city deployed those 500 people, and I didn’t need them, so I just gave them to Gardner Church ... But it takes a while [to deploy volunteers]. Somebody hands you 500 people, what are you going to do with them? You don’t want to bring them over to City Hall, that’s for sure. You’d better to sit down and figure out what you’re going to do with them. And that doesn’t take a minute or two. That takes a while, to organize those kinds of things.”

He noticed a general lack of co-ordination in the use of volunteers. And he admits that his own department didn’t show visiting fire officials enough hospitality. But he says that was because he didn’t send for them or know they were coming. “I don’t know how many people from the Western side of this incident came to the fire hall because they were fire-related people, wanting to know what I was going to do with them, and I didn’t tell them. And I didn’t call them. I didn’t know they were coming. That’s probably another point of me getting involved in the control centre, is that these people were coming, and the fire service did not treat the other fire services well. Only because we weren’t ready for them coming through the door. Even just having a pot of coffee. Our people were extremely busy. We didn’t have time to make coffee for people. But had they known that this resource was coming, we certainly could have housed their equipment.”

GG only requested the help of one outside group during the storm. That group, which was from a municipality West of Toronto, brought a 55-watt generator. Initially it was brought in for use at the Bell Canada office on Princess St. Bell had put the city on notice that the entire phone system was about to go down. When that potentially major crisis was averted, GG was told to divert the generator to the Frontenac School Board. Later it was used to power up the Howe Island bubble system.

The people who brought that generator to Kingston drove it down themselves, trained Kingston fire fighters how to use it, and came back to retrieve the equipment when the emergency was all over. “They didn’t charge us a penny.”

Asked about his dealings with the media during the storm, GG said he gave one or two interviews and had “no problem” with the coverage of the emergency. “We were able to contact the people we needed to contact, we had the coverage we needed, and that included the paper, the radio and the TV. I had no problem with that.”

The inspections division issued news releases and gave interviews when needed.

GG advocates the use of press conferences in future. “As a corporation, we had lots of opportunities to have a general public information meeting, where, had we kept it to five or six senior people at the top, with these people invited to answer questions, that would have been of some help to the community, and to the players.”

Press conferences were held with small groups of officials, and information tended to be given out in a piecemeal fashion, GG says. “That’s not the way it should have been done ... When they talked to Jim Keech about power outages, I’m sure that would have twigged some questions [for fire and police officials]. I would have been able to say something about fire safety ... All those things could have been said [at the same time]. As well as the police, the military, and the RMC, and the people who went door to door.”

Stress was not a concern, GG says. “I felt tired because I over-pushed myself a little bit, but I didn’t feel stressed.” He feels the whole issue of stress is overplayed these days.

GG concluded by saying Kingston actually benefited from the storm in some ways. Like any crisis, it brought people together and cemented budding relationships. “The new city has gone two or maybe three years ahead of where it would be ... I think it tore down a lot of uncertainty, a lot of walls that were up. They had to come down just to get this done.”