IceStorm 98 Study

Greg Taylor (GT) is the manager for EMO’s four field officers and is generally deployed to wherever an emergency is. In the case of the Ice Storm he was at the Provincial Operations Center (POC) for the first 8 or 9 days securing supplies.

EMO is a branch of the Ministry of the Solicitor General in the Public Safety Division. EMO deals with “big E” emergencies, not the “small e” emergencies police and fire deal with all the time.

When an emergency is a “big E” emergency, EMO’s response varies from place to place since bigger places have more resources.

There are four components to emergencies - prevention, preparedness, response and recovery.

Prevention and recovery are normally the business of other agencies.

EMO deals with preparedness (planning, training, exercising and public education) and response (responding to an event whether anticipated or actual).

Legislation varies from province to province because public safety is the responsibility of the provinces. This created some confusion during the ice storm between the Ontario and Quebec responses.

Federal legislation lays out Federal responsibilities; the federal government is in a supporting role to EMO.

Federal legislation defines four types of emergencies - war, international, (ie. Gulf Crisis), public order (i.e. Oka), and public welfare emergencies (fire, epidemics, ice storms, etc).

Provinces are responsible for public order and public welfare emergencies. Public welfare emergencies are the most common. Ontario has an average of 30 declared emergencies a year -12 in 1997; and 66 in 1998 for the ice storm alone.

The Ontario Emergency Plans Act was passed in 1983 in response to several big emergencies - Mississauga train derailment, Three Mile Island and large forest fires.

The Ontario legislation requires provincial planning, a provincial emergency plan, a provincial nuclear emergency plan and various Ministry emergency plans.

At the municipal level planning is permissive, except if you are close to a nuclear power plant and then you must have a nuclear emergency plan. Some provinces like Alberta require municipalities to have emergency plans.

Municipalities are the first line of response in an emergency (police, fire, ambulance).

About 90% of Ontario’s population is covered by an emergency plan, but some municipalities don’t have an emergency plan.

Declaration of an emergency can only be done by the senior elected official (premier, mayor, or reeve). The Ontario Act is very open-ended. When you declare an emergency you can do anything within the law. An emergency is an extraordinary event that requires a co-ordinated response by a number of agencies.

Declaring an emergency is not the bureaucrats’ call, they can only advise the politicians. Sometimes politicians don’t declare early enough because they see declaring an emergency as an admission of defeat.

Under the Act, responding is the municipality’s responsibility. Lots of people think EMO is running the show, but they are not - EMO provides advice and assistance. There was some criticism of EMO for not responding enough or quick enough but that is not their role.

GT has four area officers located in Kingston, London, Sudbury and Thunder Bay responsible for over 600 municipalities and more than 130 first nation groups. Area officers spend most of their time visiting municipalities and helping them plan for emergencies.

EMO also runs training courses and will help train municipal staff and help with exercises.

Sometimes EMO identifies an emergency before one is declared, by reading papers and monitoring situations (i.e. flooding). EMO tries to begin response before an emergency is actually declared - can often do this with flooding but not something like a train derailment.

Area officers provide advice on when to declare an emergency and provide advice to municipalities. EMO is a coach, they cannot order. The odd time when an emergency is declared EMO does not think it is warranted. Some municipalities think declaring an emergency gets you money, but that’s not true. There is no connection between emergency declaration and money in Ontario. Sometimes it is hard to get a municipality to rescind an emergency declaration.

Under an emergency declaration, anyone who volunteers becomes a municipal employee and is covered for liability and workers’ compensation. Whether volunteers are being used is a key criteria for declaring and rescinding emergency declarations.

The assistance part of EMO’s responsibilities includes being a window into provincial and federal government resources.

Municipalities typically have agreements with other municipalities. Under the current legislation, Counties don’t have a role but GT is hoping to get legislation changed so they do. Counties cannot declare an emergency. If municipalities can’t deal with emergencies on their own, or with neighbouring municipalities, then they turn to the province.

A municipality can ask the province for something they need; then EMO can go beyond the province to the federal government. That’s how the military gets involved from EMO through the Toronto office of Emergency Preparedness Canada. EMO also has a direct link into army Headquarters in Toronto and into the Canadian Coast Guard.

When troops come in, they almost always become Provincial troops. EMO (the Province) negotiates and gets a letter of agreement with Canadian Forces Headquarters in Toronto as to what tasks the troops will do; troops are not to go beyond that. There were a couple of problems in the ice storm with troops clearing the sides of roads days into the storm - the military shouldn’t be doing routine work. If a contractor can be called in, then troops shouldn’t be doing the work.

A municipality needs to ask for the military’s help.

GT worked the first 8 or 9 days securing supplies. The problem they had in Toronto was they had never anticipated an emergency of this scale. Over the years they have had some philosophical debates about how involved EMO should be in securing resources - decided they shouldn’t be involved because they have access to the other ministries’ resources and then federal resources.

EMO set up a resource team from scratch, invented processes and started off focusing on generators (large ones in particular) to keep key facilities running. They had great difficulty the first few days finding out what was going on because of the communication difficulties.

EMO called out to municipalities and asked what they needed- this was probably a mistake because then municipalities expected EMO to get them whatever they asked for.

They had a meeting in Toronto after GT had basically been asked to re-supply a whole community. They decided EMO cannot and should not replicate normal re-supply processes.

EMO decided on Monday or Tuesday (January 12th or 13th) their response would be to encourage normal supply processes to get going. EMO was telling head offices what the situation was and asking them to start delivering to eastern Ontario that day, not on their normal day.

EMO did get some commodities, mostly by donation. EMO was looking for big-ticket items like generators large enough to power a hospital.

GT normally has 2 area officers for each emergency.

EMO does a situation report every day and on a normal day could be monitoring a situation. On Wednesday (January 7th) EMO realized there was a potential for something and went to the next level of response which was activating a duty team at the EOC in Toronto which basically does enhanced monitoring.

On January 8th GT didn’t have a job at the EOC so he observed what was going on. In this case it was difficult for EMO to find out what was going on because of the communications problem. They had people calling out but with restructuring (municipal amalgamations that had taken place January 1, 1998) they didn’t know some names and didn’t have phone numbers. Often EMO couldn’t get through to the municipality, so they used other means such as having the OPP drive places. MNR was twinned with Akwesasne and Wolfe Island, two places EMO couldn’t get in contact with.

The Manager of Response for EMO was in charge at the POC (Maureen Griffiths). At the POC every 2 or 3 hours there would be an exchange of information at the working level. At the policy level decisions were made by the director of EMO, the deputy minister, and assistant deputy minister, in a board room where the shades can be drawn. Lots of key decisions were made here.

Things became routine after the first couple of days. They started with two 12 hour shifts, then moved to three 8 hour shifts with a skeleton staff on the midnight shift.

On Thursday (January, 8th) the generator group got underway. On Friday, GT was supposed to be heading east but was called into Toronto since they now appreciated the resources thing was bigger than they thought and GT was put in charge of the resource team in a room separate from the EOC.

Hydro restoration was not EMO’s problem, EMO was not directing the restoration.

The resource team had EMO staff, people from the Fire Marshal, who were good because they were used to working in a fast-paced response environment, and Ontario Hydro electrical inspectors who knew generators.

The inspectors drew up a list of questions to ask if someone wanted a generator, and questions to ask if someone had a generator.

GT applied a bit of pressure to get more telephone lines and computers in place. GT’s role was to be the interface between the policy level and the resource team, so he went back out into the operations center to observe.

By midday Friday, GT became very aware that the scale and scope of this thing had the potential to overwhelm them, if they were going to micro-manage and get involved with every kind of request but they could probably deal with the generator problem. Over 600 generators were resourced through EMO.

GT didn’t have an answer at that point as to how they were going to deal with other resources. He decided not to do anything about it at that moment and began to return a bunch of telephone messages. Among them were two messages from Emergency people at Durham and Toronto asking “can we help?”.

What they meant was do you need help at the POC but the germ of an idea jumped into GT’s mind (probably because most emergency assistance involves helping neighbouring communities). GT asked the people from Durham and Toronto if they could theoretically provide mutual aid to another municipality, would they provide whatever they could. Both said ok, they would get back to GT.

The guy from Toronto said where do you want us to go - the trucks are ready. He had gone to the CAO but not to the mayor, but the CAO had a meeting already scheduled with the mayor. GT wanted to match Toronto (a big city) with another big city. His sense was Ottawa was coping well so GT thought what’s the next biggest - Kingston.

The mayor of Toronto (Mel Lastman) was on side and off they went.

The Durham response was not as extensive because there had already been a lot of “free-lancing” going on because people know people. In fact when GT saw out of town trucks when he came to Kingston he thought it was by plan but found out it was “free-lancing”.

Durham had already sent out some resources and was worried the storm might continue east. GT set Durham up with Ottawa.

The idea was not well articulated at this time. It became more formalized later and came to be known as “twinning”. It became a popular thing but the complication was it fell into place as a doable thing late Friday afternoon. GT thought “Uh-Oh, it’s the weekend, how am I going to get a hold of people”.

GT just started making phone calls. He started in Belleville and worked west; typically he called the police and asked them to get a hold of the mayor or CAO or engineer and ask them to call back to GT.

On Saturday a supervisor from the Fire Marshal’s office used his contacts through the Fire Departments to get a hold of municipal officials west of Toronto. He eventually took over the resource team from GT on the 14th or 15th.

On the 16th, GT’s responsibilities became to supervise response in Kingston and Frontenac, until the 26th or so.

Q. Was money a concern?
EMO’s basic ground rule is respond to the problem, EMO doesn’t care about the money issue, assume it will be sorted out later.

Under Ontario legislation, money and recovery is the responsibility of the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing (MMAH). In other provinces this is not the case. GT is convinced the better approach is to separate money and response. It allows EMO to focus on the emergency and not be distracted by other things.

EMO is probably the best staffed provincial emergency organization with eighteen professional staff. Manitoba for example has about eight professional staff but they have to handle all the funding. At the peak of the Manitoba flood they had one hundred and forty staff doing damage assessment and claims. Today they still have thirty people working there, still working twelve hour days. If they have an emergency, they’re tired before they even start.

GT is quite satisfied to have MMAH look after the money issues.

GT thinks the ice storm helped convince the OPP they need an emergency plan for big E emergencies, for incidents separate from what they deal with every day.

Q. How effective was the Provincial Emergency Plan?
GT says it was generally effective - deficiencies were the Plan had not catered for large scale resource problems and staffing levels were not high enough. The mistake people made at all levels was thinking it was going to be over tomorrow and they over-extended themselves.

GT made a conscious decision to set things up so they could have continued indefinitely.

GT would like to train Fire Marshal people so they could be used for back-up during emergencies. Fire Marshal people are used to dealing with people in municipalities and acting in an advisory role. GT might use MNR as well- they are used to being in charge in the north but you can’t count on them in the summer time because they are busy with forest fires.

EMO has encouraged everybody involved to do reports and give EMO a copy. GT would like to use reports as backing for changes to the legislation.

Q. How did this emergency compare to other emergencies?
The difference was the scale and scope, other than that it was similar to other emergencies.

“What surprised some of us was the lack of negativity from the media” - everybody is suspicious of media, thinks they’re looking for bad news, but we didn’t see any of it. “You want good news, people helping people, just my perception they (the media) made a conscious decision not to publicize bad news”.

People in the media were bending over backwards to put things in the best possible light.

Q. What have you learned?
The only transportation issue was Shell asking for generators on the 401. GT told them “you’re a big company, get your own.” Shell kept calling and trying to get into the system.

A similar issue was the railways - the wigwags weren’t working and they wanted the province to put OPP at the level crossings.

The Ministry’s Communications Branch did a good job. GT was impressed by the co-ordination of issues; a lot of media was through the POC. It would have been unworkable to have media at all the ECG meetings.

Q. Was stress a concern?
GT was personally conscious of stress but because of his military background understands how fatigue and decision-making create stress.

Part of GT’s role in the field is to make sure his people are OK, he can tell his people to go to bed. GT deliberately had a plan in place to get his people out of the situation.

This is the first time one of the staff was impacted personally (Randy Reid who lives in Kingston).

From time to time there was miscommunication and testiness which is typical when people are fatigued and need to make fast decisions.

GT brought his Critical Incident Stress (CIS) teams to look at people dealing with the emergency. There is a network of teams in the province. The teams came in and said some people were stressed out, typically mayors or reeves, CAO's and Emergency Preparedness co-ordinators.

EMO provides advice - one of their functions is to tell a mayor to go to bed and appoint a councillor to make decisions instead, you are now ineffective. It is easier for EMO to do this than staff.

A lot of emergency preparedness is common sense, not rocket science. Wolfe Island had a large map with the roads marked where power was coming on. Location of generators by type was done with coloured pins - a small engines mechanic was in charge of this system.

EMO teaches an "all hazards approach" to emergency planning. They teach how to handle an emergency without being specific. Need a framework to handle what is unanticipated.

GT's experience includes 25 years in the military dealing with emergency-like situations. He did planning and training of exercises.

GT has been with EMO two and a half years, the first two years as a staff officer liaising with the federal government, doing exercises, and working as back-up to the operations officer.

The ice storm was the first time GT was deployed as a manager.

Q. What was EPC's role?
EPC has an office in Toronto. They had a rep in the POC. They had three managers there throughout handling requests of the federal government that weren't already set up. The feds were trying to get generators across Canada and into the United States.

Health Canada had a huge stock of cots during the Cold War. Someone wanted to get rid of them, but someone from Health Canada said no. There is a standby relationship between MCSS and Health Canada.

The hardest hit were rural areas - Casselman and Van Kleek Hill. During the end it was hard to get people to understand that three thousand people without power in a rural area is different than three thousand people without power in Ottawa.

Q. What's happening now?
EMO is doing an internal debriefing. There will be an EMO report and a provincial report. The RFP for the Provincial report is out now.

Q. What lessons were learned, what do you want to change?
Arrange legislation to change role for counties or include a mechanism to deal with larger areas.

Large scale emergencies will become part of emergency planning.

Do more work with DND.

Address staffing levels - new hires or cross-training.

Institutionalize "twinning".

GT thinks we will get more large scale emergencies in the future from weather, but this is only a "gut feeling".

Look at getting power to compel EMO staff to work. EMO staff reacted positively - most people understand that's the culture they're in but in a unionized environment there are issues, and health and safety issues.

GT is used to making things happen. On the whole it was great, [he’d be] happy to do it all the time.