IceStorm 98 Study

John Bishop is responsible for the district field activities of his ministry for the counties of Lennox & Addington, Frontenac, Leeds & Grenville, Stormont, Dundas & Glengarry and Prescott & Russell.

Significant event:
John Bishop lives in the "old" City of Kingston. He awoke on Thursday January 8th to no electric power and the damage that had been done by the storm. Based on previous experience with ice storms, he knew that this one was far more significant because of the accumulation of ice and the amount of damage to trees and other things. After chipping the ice from the car, he was able to drive to the office. It was open. The office never did lose power.

Bishop had spoken on Wednesday to staff in the Cornwall office and gathered from them that there was some impact from a winter storm they were having. By Thursday, after the Wednesday night storm, Cornwall was "big-time out of electric service" and everything east of Kingston was affected.

Nature and scale:
Bishop's initial concern was the welfare of his staff.

From a work perspective, his immediate questions included: How bad is the situation regarding power supply? Are the water plants producing? Are sewage treatment plants and pumping stations operating? The great majority of those kinds of facilities have stand-by power. But even with stand-by power, you can run into difficulties. Did it start automatically? The initial feedback was that there were very few problems. Things worked as they were intended to. There were a few spots, for example in an older city like Kingston, where there are sewage pumping stations without stand-by power. In those instances priority was placed on getting those locations back in service as quickly as possible. By and large, the environmental impact of the storm was minimal.

Typically, the electrical back-up for water and sewage systems are provided by various sizes of diesel generators. They are designed to operate for a long period of time. As time passed, the difficulty wasn't in the mechanical operation of the pumps but getting diesel fuel to them. But no one had a major problem getting fuel. From what Bishop heard, if it became a serious enough problem, the Army was prepared to engage some of its all-terrain vehicles to reach the fuel tanks.

Another major concern of the MOE is PCBs. In an ice storm, there can be damage to hydro facilities including pole-top transformers that, depending on their vintage, may be filled with PCBs. Hydro lines pulled down are a problem. But if a pole topped with a transformer should come down, there is a chance that the oil in the transformer will spill. That leads to the question about whether the oil contains PCBs and what can be done to control the spills. Generally the questions were: Are things running? Who has problems? Are they able to cope with them? How bad a situation is it?

As time passed and MOE heard from Ontario Hydro and some of the utilities, it was apparent that there were so many spills that their task became an exercise in keeping track of how many and where the spills were. From Bishop's perspective, a PCB spill is usually contained and "given the nature of the weather. as long as we knew where (the spill) was, at some point, somebody could go and clean it up. It wasn't an immediate emergency. It was more a case, in my opinion, of trying to keep track of the stuff."

Particular issues:
Because of the length of the power outage, one community was having trouble having its water tower filled. Eventually, they used a fire department pumper truck to get additional water to the tower.

A big problem right across eastern Ontario was what to do with milk that cannot be processed. "Milk can have a significant environmental impact if you simply dump it."
Eventually, arrangements were made through MOE staff in Ottawa to have tanker trucks with waste milk dump the milk at the Picard Centre, which services all of Ottawa-Carleton. It is a full, secondary treatment plant that was able to treat the milk as waste. Milk requires a high level of oxygen to break down and the only treatment plant able to deal with the milk was the Picard Centre.

Farmers, who were unable to get their milk into tankers, may have dumped it on their fields. That would have a localized impact, provided it didn't go off in a stream, and the impact would be minor. The problem arises when there are larger quantities. Bishop understood that there were fleets of tankers full of old, raw milk, because the milk processing plants were unable to accept the milk because they were shut down by the lack of power.

What did you do?
Bishop made it to work on Thursday but few others did. The decision was made to declare the office closed. Those who had made it in, phoned other staff to check on their welfare.

He said: "Thursday was actually fairly low key: I think more from the perspective of 'ignorance is bliss'." They were able to contact the Cornwall and Ottawa-Carleton MOE offices and were aware that the storm was affecting both of those areas as well as Kingston. But it wasn't until Friday that they grasped the nature and extent of the situation and how seriously the areas east of Kingston were affected.

On Friday, Bishop was able to contact his Cornwall supervisor at his home. From that call, he had a better idea of the state of that area. The Cornwall office was closed on Friday.

He received calls from the Ontario Clean Water Agency, which is a Crown agency that operates a number of sewage and water facilities in eastern Ontario. The Agency was just keeping MOE aware of their situation. Liaison was maintained with the local utilities. MOE chose not to be intrusive, knowing that the local authorities would be concentrating on their local problems. But they wanted the local services to know that MOE was available if needed. In the meantime the services should deal with any emergency and worry about the paperwork later.

The Kingston office was officially closed Friday but Bishop was in, his Kingston supervisor and a couple of other staff were in. They started distributing some of the equipment like small generators, to people in need. It was also on Friday that the work with the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs (OMAFRA) started regarding waste milk.

On the weekend Bishop concentrated on personal things. He lives in a newer subdivision in the "old city". All the services are underground but still they had no power. By the weekend, he had a better sense of the severity of the problem at home and that it was going to take a long time to make right.

By Monday, the office re-opened and he had to spend time dealing with "administrivia" like how do we account for people's time last week when the office was closed. He also needed to find out what the situations were throughout his district. Who was still out of power? When might power be restored?

He also realized that people west of Kingston, MOE in Toronto, had no appreciation of what was being dealt with and the disruption that the emergency was causing.

By Monday, things were beginning to come back to normal. Communications all remained up at the Kingston office. Bishop began to get normal business calls, mostly from outside the area, "from Toronto and so on." By Monday or Tuesday the Cornwall office was also operational. From a staffing perspective, there were some staff who live in the former Kingston Township who never lost power. Bishop and a couple of others who live downtown had power restored on Tuesday and Wednesday January 13th and 14th. Other staff, who live on Wolfe Island and in Portland, still had a long time to go before they regained power.

The role of Queen's Park:
MOE has a Spills Action Centre (SAC) which receives reports on and coordinates response to environmentally threatening spills and accidents. Staff from the SAC went to work at the provincial action centre (Emergency Measures Ontario) once it was established. Most of the contact with the SAC was through the Regional Director, Brian Ward. Bishop's contact with the SAC would be minimal. He would get faxed information from SAC about things like the numbers and location of transformer spills.

Bishop gave a detailed explanation of PCB use in electrical transformers and its concern to MOE only when it becomes a waste, such as when equipment that has PCBs or PCB contamination in it, is taken out of service or when PCBs or PCB contaminated oil is spilled. It is the responsibility of the utility to properly deal with the spill. It is the responsibility of MOE to monitor how the spill is cleaned-up and to make sure that the waste goes into the proper storage location.

Exercising authority:
Bishop felt comfortable exercising the authority regarding issues and the responses to environmental accidents. Specifically with regard to PCB spills, if these are oil spills that aren't going anywhere and pose no immediate danger, "certainly it is acknowledged that there is a need to protect the environment but health and safety is a higher priority and that is acknowledged by our Ministry... There is no way that you can take a line crew and have them spend a day cleaning up oil spills when you had entire communities without power."

What kinds of decisions had to be made?
An example of decisions MOE participated in is: what to do with waste milk? It was not MOE's decision but it provided information to OMAFRA. It made the connection with the Picard Centre of Ottawa-Carleton, which enabled OMAFRA to take action.

One of the Kingston staff, Vic Huggard, recalled that the Ministry has a mobile lab in an older Winnebago that has a couple of high capacity generators in it. He knew that the equipment was in Toronto, got in touch with the people who have responsibility for it and got permission to borrow it. Someone from Toronto drove it as far as Trenton and Kingston staff drove it the rest of the way. It was sent to Portland where it was driven around town and hooked up to people's furnaces for a couple of hours to get the heat back up in the houses. Then it would be moved to hook up others' furnaces.

Expenses:
There was some money spent on fuel and oil for generators but they were not significant expenditures. Furthermore, although staff worked many more hours in support of their communities than they were paid for, Bishop said that no one has put-in for overtime.

Biggest challenge:
Communication! Making sure that staff had the correct information about conditions in other parts of the region and how their colleagues were doing was a big challenge. It was important to get factual information and avoid rumour.

What worked particularly well?
Working with other people. Aside from relatively minor property damage, no one got hurt.

In terms of the environment and his job, Bishop was very pleased that the back-up equipment worked as it should and that there was no permanent damage to the environment.

Bishop said that for years MOE has been urging utilities to install stand-by generators in case of power failure. The ice storm is an event that proves their value. "It's kind of like Hurricane Hazel. In terms of designing for things in the future, we will be able to point at Ice Storm '98 and say, there is an example of the kind of thing that we are trying to guard against."

What has been learned?
In terms of utilities, MOE will review if things went as well as it seems or were they not informed of other critical incidents. Were there common glitches?

They are also looking into how to run the office if power should be lost. Can they keep some phones and computers operating?

"During the ice storm, who cared about wood waste? It was one of those things that you had to get out of the way. That is one of the major problems today, for both provincial and municipal agencies." MOE is working with the Ministry of Transportation toward alternatives for the disposal of wood waste. At the same time, Bishop's district level of MOE has alerted municipalities about the transfer and eventual disposal of their wood waste.

Bishop discussed the complexity of dealing with wood waste including the recent amendment to Ontario environmental regulations, whereby, if wood chips are used as a mulching material, it is not considered "waste" as defined in the legislation.

Emergency Plan:
As a regulatory agency, as opposed to a service agency, the MOE participation in addressing the emergency was through the actions of other organizations. For example, MOE advised OMAFRA on waste milk disposal and supported the actions of municipalities with regard to the water and sewage problems that arose.

Stress:
The approach that MOE took to the individual situations of their staff was intended to support the efforts of staff whose personal situations may have been more difficult than for others. MOE also has an employee assistance program.

Ministry debriefing:
Debriefing has taken place and will continue on the specific issues mentioned earlier. The manager of the MOE Spills Action Centre, Gary Zikovitz, has presented a review document to the Emergency Measures Ontario (EMO) Action Centre. A draft was sent to the region and regional staff supplied feedback to the draft before it was submitted to EMO.

Other comments:

Glad that there was not loss of life.

The line crews deserve tremendous credit, especially those who volunteered to come here from out of town.

Other contacts:
Wayne Herrick of the regional office, had a lot of involvement as the person responsible for contingencies.

Gary Zikovitz at MOE Headquarters in Toronto regarding his report.