IceStorm 98 Study

GE had been originally contacted by Cornwall P.U.C. since the storm had hit them a day in advance of Brockville. On the 7th of January it had been raining all day in Brockville and it didn’t turn into freezing rain until later on that evening. At about 11:00 p.m. calls were coming into the P.U.C. reporting downed lines, so all of his crews were out repairing lines. At 1:30 a.m. the calls had died down and he was able to send all but one crew home.
At 6:30 the next morning, Ontario Hydro lost the 230KV line which fed power to the city and plunged the City of Brockville and outlying areas into the cold and dark that would persist for the next five days.
“There’s two lines feeding us but they’re on a common tower and its very rare that we lose both lines at the same time but that certainly occurred.”

As GE explained it, power is fed to the city by a line that runs from Brockville to the Smiths Falls area and connects to a power line that runs up from Cornwall. The line between Brockville and Smiths Falls was lost first; the line from Cornwall to Smiths Falls was soon to fall as well.

At 7:00 a.m. GE and his staff were faced with a serious problem. The first thing he did was to call in all of the line crews.
At the beginning of the emergency, misinformation circulated quite quickly. They were originally told that power would be restored in 4 hours. But as the day wore on and they got more timely information they realized that it was going to take much longer to repair.

As the ice continued to build, lines began to collapse under the weight. As GE pointed out, the general public finds it difficult to tell the difference between a phone line, a cable or power line.
Reports of downed lines would come in but it took the crews to identify them as Bell, cable or actual power lines. On Thursday morning, crews were dispatched to clear the main arteries of the city so that traffic could move without interruption. The crews then responded to calls reporting that large branches had fallen onto power lines.

The P.U.C. building was itself without power. Once a generator had been located it had been used to power up the phone system in the building. Computers were plugged into a power bar attached to the generator and things went fine. This small Honda generator was the one and only source of power to the building until power was fully restored by the following Monday. Naturally one of the many recommendations proposed by GE is that a backup power generating system be installed in the building to guard against future problems.
The building can handle short outages, but if the problem persists they will not have sufficient supply. “When you have a major outage like that where the whole geographical area is out , a simple thing like getting a cup of coffee becomes a rather significant issue.” Aware that his crews would be exposed to the elements, the staff organized a simple soup kitchen where they could provide hot soup to the linemen.

Realizing that he would need help, GE contacted Cornwall to get his men back and contacted someone he knew at Brampton Hydro who sent four crews with equipment to Brockville that afternoon, “they got here late Thursday night and we put them up in the finest accommodation without any electricity of course, and they started working with us on Friday morning”.
On arrival the Brantford crews were fed at the station. For morning meals, a local restaurant was provided with a generator to cook breakfast for the men, then the generator was returned to the P.U.C.

The task of feeding all of the crews was raised during one of the co-ordinating meetings and Dorothy Theobald of Social Services arranged to have a local banquet hall set aside for the feeding of Ontario Hydro, P.U.C., Police and Fire personnel. It was set up in time for Thursday supper. It took the pressure off the P.U.C. and as GE stressed “without that support our crews would have really suffered”. Once the feeding arrangements had been made, GE knew that his crews would be provided with hot meals and that they could return to the task at hand. This also freed up his support staff for other jobs.

“What we found throughout this emergency was that having a well defined and active emergency plan and implementing it at that stage of the game was certainly opportune because it allowed.. nobody operated in isolation .. and one of the most significant factors was that as we were sort of the key player at that point ... we could update the committee (along with Ontario Hydro) on just exactly what we were doing... to try to be ready for when the power did come back on”.

GE assigned one of his members the task of ensuring that the generators at the various shelters were hooked up properly and service them, if necessary, during their use.
“Without that good co-ordination and that communication and quite frankly that support, because when you’re going through a process like this there’s a lot of energy, there’s a lot of concerns and when you started hearing how other people were set up then you could start making informed decisions ...”.

On Saturday night about 8:30, GE heard that power had been restored to the substation in Brockville. At the co-ordinating meeting held that night the decision was made to wait until the morning before returning power to the city.
“... from fire and police the concern was the security of the general population and the aspect that if we’re bringing power on after people have bedded down we don’t know if stoves are on , we don’t know if newspapers are sitting where they shouldn’t be.. so we had a real concern about the general safety”.
The safety of his crews was also a concern. Trying to re-attach and power up hydro lines was a dangerous enough job in the daytime, an attempt to do so at night would expose his crews to serious risks.
Although there was some dispute about this decision, it was pointed out that it was better to wait until the morning.

GE announced on the radio station the next day that power was being restored and what people could do to prepare for it.

As other communities called in to offer support, GE wondered how he could accommodate them. He received another call from his friend in Brampton who offered more help. GE chose to accept help from Brampton and he got 5 more crews plus a supervisor. He now had a total of 9 crews from Brampton. The reasoning behind this decision was that the Brampton crews would be familiar with each other and their procedures. In calling up his friend in Brampton, GE had made an excellent decision. He spoke with someone he knew who, because of the size of his workforce, could afford to send several men down to Brockville to help out. By relying solely on one utility, he was saved the headache of dealing with several utilities and countless meetings. Brampton could act as one unit and effectively assist Brockville without hesitation.

Power was restored to all of the north end and part of the south end by Sunday. Complaints came in about why the north side got power before the south. It was a matter of system logistics. Most of the lines on the north end in the newer subdivisions were underground. Malls and businesses were restored “all the nice things like stores and banks” were returned to full power so that the community could return to normal. About 90% of the power had been restored to the city by Monday evening. The crews then concentrated on the most damaged areas where trees and lines had fallen and by Tuesday 6:00 full power had been restored to Brockville. Clearing up took a few more days to accomplish and on Friday when things had returned to normal in the city, GE offered his crews to Ontario Hydro.
Ontario Hydro accepted his offer and for the next week and a half his crews were dispatched to areas in the vicinity of Brockville. He didn’t want them to go too far away just in case they were required back in town.

As far as stress was concerned, there were a number of factors in play. His crews were out on Tuesday night fixing lines. Tree branches were falling around them as well as live wires. This situation continued until Thursday when Ontario Hydro shut the whole system down. A major safety risk had now been eliminated and stress levels were correspondingly reduced.
“It wasn’t as stressful as it could have been...”
Paradoxically, stress didn’t appear until after the emergency had subsided. GE read an article that was circulated by one of the health units about stress experienced by emergency workers that emerged after the emergency situation had been stabilized. It was a case of “post emergency depression”. Jobs and personal anecdotes from family members now seemed to be insignificant compared to the challenges that went on before. GE circulated the article through his departments to let people know that this was a normal consequence of the whole experience.

During the storm when power had been shut down by Ontario Hydro, the crews were busy clearing lines of ice and debris. Also, they were concerned about “what was going to come back up into the line”. Trees which had been weighed down by the ice had swung down below lines. As the ice melted they would swing back up into the lines causing problems. Crews would have to locate these limbs and deal with them before power came back on. A forestry crew from Brampton and Ontario Lineclearing worked alongside the P.U.C. crews. At the end of the day they were pretty well exhausted.

Although cost was not a factor, GE estimated that the total cost was around $ 400,000.00.
A supplier from Grafton, just outside of Cobourg, accommodated by earmarking all of his supplies for eastern Ontario and was re-supplying his inventory for the exclusive use of the area.
When GE called Brampton he sent a list of materials which he required and received a transport trailer loaded with equipment. The trailer had also stopped at Grafton to load up supplies which GE had ordered. When it arrived in Brockville “it doubled our stock for that period of time, we looked at it that’s its better to have it than not to have it... ”. Most of the equipment was used.. The balance was added to existing inventory.

Over the last 10 years Brockville has had “an aggressive tree trimming program. In addition, the P.U.C. had done a lot of re-building in some of the older areas. This resulted in very minimum damage to the hydro poles. One pole came down and three were split which was quite amazing given the extent of the damage.

The large industrial operations which are located to the north of the 401 highway shut all of their systems down and waited out the storm. As power was re-connected on the Sunday night, the plants began to return to operational status. An announcement on the radio informed the city that many of the plants would be fully operational on the Monday morning and that they were expecting their employees to show up but “the community was really upset with them because we still had whole neighbourhoods out... and they were saying we’re not ready”. A later clarification indicated that if people were able to make it in without difficulty they were welcome. If you were still unable to do so, that was fine. Come in whenever you are ready to do so.

The obvious complaint was made as to why the big plants had power while the residential areas, particularly in the south, were still without power. GE was not about to shut the large plants down and re-start them again especially since he had contacted Ontario Hydro and was told that there was no shortage of power. It was simply a matter of the configuration of the system and people would have to accept that as a satisfactory answer.

The Water Treatment Plant falls under the jurisdiction of the Brockville P.U.C. and while the plant has a diesel powered generator to supply back up power, the engine was having cooling problems. A couple of technicians ‘gerry-rigged’ a system and kept it going until power was fully restored. This had GE quite worried “ it’s one thing to lose your electrical supply, you lose your water supply and you’re in serious trouble”.He doubled up his staff at the plant to make sure that it was totally covered around the clock.
As it was, the water plant was one of the last facilities to come on line even though efforts were concentrated on re-connection. It is located in the southern part of the city where there are a lot of older trees which collapsed during the storm.

What to your surprise worked well?

“...In emergency planning you can go through the session and you can do these dry runs and all this type of stuff .. it’s a real paper chase to be perfectly honest, but when you’re actually in it, it was... interesting to see how people who were receiving information utilizing it to the fullest and then making decisions... the element that you had was that you couldn’t study it, you had to make the decision based on what you had at that time... decisions such as should we inform the public of this or not inform the public of this..”. A vivid example of this was when the Mayor was informed by Ontario Hydro at an early meeting that power would be down for 7 days. The Mayor broadcast this to the community. At the next meeting, the Mayor was informed by Ontario Hydro that power would be fully restored in a day or two. While it certainly was welcome news, what was the Mayor to do now? How could he explain this new assessment to the community? GE sat with a Hydro lineman at one of the evening meals and it was explained to him how they were able to accomplish this task. They had managed to repair 50 towers in one day. A superhuman feat - but this led to the early resumption of power to the community.

GE was extremely impressed with the co-ordination of emergency efforts by the Emergency Planning committee and the support of the various agencies in getting the job done.

GE remained at his post at the P.U.C. building during the day and returned to his unheated home later on in the evening. Staff would leave at 10:00 p.m. and return by 6:00 a.m. the next morning and be fed before returning to the field. One crew would stay overnight to handle any emergencies that might arise.
His family stayed with friends who had a gas fireplace. They emptied the freezer onto the gas barbeque “and basically camped out”.

Interestingly enough, there was a supply of hot water that could be utilized and as GE pointed out those with “high efficiency” water heaters would not fire, while those with “low efficiency”, could. “There’s efficiency and but then there’s the ability to operate..when you don’t have electricity.” A ‘self-sparking’ fireplace would certainly provide heat as long as you had a sufficient source of gas to feed it.

On an amusing note, GE related the story of the lineman from Brampton who after a drive of some several hours wanted to know “who didn’t have their seat belt on because man oh man that was one hell of a drive”, another lineman from another truck pointed to the driver and replied “well he didn’t because he couldn’t get his hand off the steering wheel”.

But the camaraderie of staff and the fact that everyone stayed focused on the job provided moments of fun in a rather stressful situation.