IceStorm 98 Study

Ms. Moore is responsible for all functions of the Ministry of Transportation within the region bounded on the west by the Durham/Northumberland Counties boundary, on the north by the middle of Algonquin Park and on the east by the Quebec border.

Also present for this interview were:

Dave Kimmett, Manager of Operations, responsible for all maintenance operation activities in the region including snow plowing, forestry and electrical trades crews.

Wayne Brydges, Head of Engineering Service in the Kingston District and the designated Emergency Coordinator for this event, (under MTO emergency plan which discharges MTO responsibility under the provincial emergency plan). Director of day-to-day operations in terms of MTO’s direct response be it self initiated or directed by Emergency Measures Ontario (EMO) or on request of heads of municipal councils where an emergency has been declared.

John Kenney, Regional Human Resources Consultant, whose task during the ice storm was to coordinate MTO employees who chose to volunteer once they had returned to work and where the ministry was not conducting their regular day to day responsibilities and where the ministry was getting requests from municipalities for support. John coordinated those volunteer efforts especially to municipalities in the Kingston area and was the main liaison with the City of Kingston regarding volunteers.

Gayla Campney, is Kathy Moore’s executive assistant, who “looked after everything Kathy wasn’t, and who was a volunteer in her own community.

Kathy Moore: The Ministry of Transportation’s responsibilities under the provincial emergency plan is very intense and 24 hours/day. The Kingston office was the regional command centre with specific duties to report and discharge. Volunteer coordination was “a step down” in priority “as we got our own feet on the ground” in terms of response and the use of MTO resources for the emergency plan. Only after meeting the responsibility to the central EMO could resources be deployed locally.

Policy decisions were an early concern of hers regarding the closure of such public services as driver exam centres and licensing offices. Also, with other eastern Ontario provincial government ministry directors, consistency of policy in response to and treatment of employees and management of resources was discussed. Morale boosting and safe & sound caring for her 1000 employees was a priority.

Wayne Brydges, as the Emergency Coordinator, had participated in the recent re-write of the ministry’s emergency plan and was very familiar with MTO’s role and procedures.

Dave Kimmett: A call was received from EMO late Wednesday afternoon. But by MTO’s own staff and weather reports they knew by Tuesday night that things were “getting pretty dramatic” in eastern Ontario.

Moore: The Ottawa District network of offices and maintenance patrol yards to the east and northeast, were experiencing freezing rain since Sunday (January 4th). The Ministry’s first responsibility is to keep the highways open and safe. This is vital because without the highway system the rest of the emergency response would have been very difficult to accomplish because most of it rolled on the highways. She is proud that MTO patrols, on their own initiative, kept the highways open. They kept working, non-stop, on the highways, inspite of being wet, cold, not eating well, and with families in distress. Fuel was hard to find and normal communication links were not maintained.

Brydges: They did not anticipate loss of all three back-up modes of communication: battery radio and cellular phones and LAN lines. Nor had they anticipated the inability to pump fuel and warm and feed staff.

Moore: They used to store their own fuel but now depend on private sector. “We had to rely on the same scarce and fragile fuel supply as everyone else.” A revised emergency plan will take these situations into consideration.

Brydges: Twice a year preparedness exercises hypothesize separate problems but did not anticipate they would happen all at once.

Moore: The primary communication with patrols is a series of radio towers with battery back-up but when power is out for 8,10 or 12 hours at a time, the batteries run down. Backup electrical generators are needed.
Brydges: It took two days to contemplate what to do to replace the batteries. In the end, the company which maintains the radio towers suggested renting backhoes to haul the sign trailers (arrow boards) up the hills to the radio towers and use their generators to power the transmitters. They were the only generators available at the time and this was done.

Brydges: Fuel was maintained by patrols running to areas that did have fuel and by taking fuel from unused equipment. Eventually some gas stations got generators but the first 24-48 hours were problematic. Lack of cash was a problem. Debit and credit cards were not useable as they rely on electrical power for their transactions.
Moore: During the second week, after dark in Alexandria, she came upon one of those bank machines in the middle of a parking lot. It was hooked up to a generator and there was a Brinks truck feeding it money. “ I bet there were people from 50 miles around there to get money from this bank machine.”

Was communication maintained with Queen’s Park?
Brydges: There were a number of times when the phone systems failed. There was a power spike late one afternoon which cut the power to the building for two hours and took out our switchboard. There were times when communication with EMO was out. Each MTO region has a Regional Action Group (RAG) which receives calls from its region and forwards them to the MTO Ministry Action Group (MAG) located in St. Catharines. Each ministry MAG has a senior executive who sits with EMO whose role it is to oversee all responses to the emergency, taking information from all MAGs. EMO then assigns back duties to the MAGs who in turn assigns duties to the RAGs. That’s the process. Moore: We were doing two things: one, reporting in every two hours particularly on road conditions and two, responding to requests from EMO through our MAG. Periodically, when we had a problem we couldn’t resolve or we needed some guidance or help, we would call the MTO MAG. All manner of issues might arise. e.g. regional request to EMO that some kind of announcement be made to ask non-essential trucking to not enter the ice storm zone to keep things open for emergency vehicles and prevent diversion of police, MTO and other emergency services.

Was the authority there for you to act when you needed to?
Brydges: Sometimes there was frustration that they (MAG) didn’t sense the emergency because they weren’t here on the front line. My #1 priority might be #10 on their list because they were responding to a bigger area. “They were hearing the need but we were left to direct the operation pretty much ourselves. They really didn’t interfere with us a lot. They were quite helpful actually. I don’t know of any issue that was left undone.”
Moore: “Under the Emergency Plan, once an emergency is declared, my relationship with my chain of command is suspended.” Ms. Moore no longer was accounting to her ADM nor to the Deputy Minister. Her relationship was with the MTO senior executive and the MAG. When she needed to talk to anyone, she had to contact her MAG contact under the emergency plan because that person was “dedicated” to that exchange i.e. what was EMO’s need and how could MTO help and what was MTO’s need and how could EMO help. Everyone felt frustration on a daily basis because the need was all around us. However, discipline was necessary to decide on the priority. Triage in an emergency room is an analogy.
Brydges: Broken communication links between Kingston regional and Ottawa district inadvertently helped. It left Ottawa communicating directly with the MAG. Upon reflection, while there was some mis-coordination as a result, it helped Kingston because of the load that it was already under. (Normally, Kingston would take the calls from Ottawa and the other field offices and channel it on as necessary.) That’s the plan.
Moore: Ontario’s emergency plan did not anticipate a disaster of this scale, affecting so many people and affecting communication. Brydges: “We thought that we had the communications but we didn’t.”
Moore: “What has been very satisfying, observing my staff as well as all of these communities, is that people intuitively responded to do what needed to be done. It is absolutely amazing, with the scope and scale of this, that we had as few deaths and injuries as we did.”

Contact with the media?
Brydges: In the plan, there is one media liaison person who sits on the MAG and all media inquiries go through her. Requests from local media may come to the localities or the region but are referred to that office. It formulates the common response. Moore: There is a regular winter (road condition) reporting schedule. During this crisis the reporting was required more frequently, every two hours. No provincial highways closed because of the ice itself. Some were closed due to downed hydro wires.

Had Highway downloading to municipalities occurred?
Moore: The “who does what” highway transfers had taken place. In all cases, agreements were made with the municipalities that MTO would continue maintenance until the end of winter. For Hwy 43, which was closed because of tree damage, MTO forestry crews were responsible for getting it open again.

Will these agreements continue?
Kimmett: “No! As of the 15th of April we’re out of the business. We’re not likely to be back into it again.” A lot of local roads were closed because the local municipal crews did not keep at them. In some places the road system was down to the Provincial highways. Many township roads were impassible for weeks after the storm.
Moore: The freezing rain was so heavy and long lasting that it would have gotten ahead of any road authority that wasn’t out, right at the beginning, with the right salt application and kept on with the application consistently. If they couldn’t get to the road because of fallen trees or power lines, they were in real trouble.
Bridges: One of EMO’s big issues was getting ice blades for graders of municipalities who got so far behind that the only way to get the ice off was with the ice blades. A hundred blades were called for. That is about a ten-year’s supply. EMO did get them. Moore: On a tour during the second week, there was ice 4, 5, 6 inches thick on some roadways. Because of road conditions, even when power was restored to the driver testing centres, it was up to a further two weeks before some of the local emergency organizations would allow road tests or before MTO felt it safe to do them.

The role of MTO enforcement officers.
Moore: MTO enforcement and driver examination officers assisted local police with traffic control, keeping traffic away from dangerous areas where wires were down. They helped on “911” phone lines. In Front of Leeds and Lansdowne they assisted OPP in doing door-to-door checks. MTO officers checked 2500 homes in a 48 hour period in the North Augusta area. Later they assisted the OPP and army to do the checks in other areas. The important reason that the MTO enforcement officers and driver examiners were called upon was the reassurance that their official government uniforms offered rather than having complete strangers knocking at the doors. Without the authority to force people from their homes, their job was to check that people were alive, that they had safe heat, food and potable water and if in health jeopardy, the MTO officers would notify the local officials.

What about stress?
Moore: MTO staff, including maintenance workers, are experienced in working in high stress environments: dangerously heavy traffic, major accidents and fatalities. Over the last several years, MTO has run post-traumatic stress counselling sessions for all maintenance workers “to help them deal with, in the normal course of their work, the types of stresses that pile up and pile up and pile up.” MTO has not set up anything specific for this crisis. What they are concerned about are the long hours of work, being away from home, lack of rest and working on the job and working at home as well. To address the heavy fatigue factor, MTO has brought in relief staff from other parts of the region and hired some unclassified staff. They recognized the potential conflict between highly professional commitment to the job and possible neglect of family and home.

The ministry has, in several ways, recognized and expressed appreciation and thanks to staff. The Minister has been amazing in his presence in appreciation of his staff with events, presentations, visits to patrols, statements to the media and a letter to staff across the ministry. As Regional Director, Ms. Moore has thanked her staff and held a luncheon in Kemptville for those who were directly involved in responding to the emergency.

Kimmett: the professionalism of the maintenance patrols in their job insecurity.
Moore: The MTO maintenance operations have been designated by the government to be fully outsourced. “All of the maintenance workers know that the expectation is that we will outsource, privatize, all of that work by the end of the decade.” (Their jobs will no longer exist in this Ministry.) For those who were working on highways that have already been transferred to the municipalities, they had been told that there will be no jobs. For some, it was just a matter of weeks before they lost their jobs. Despite of all this, there was absolutely no relaxation in any of their efforts to keep the highways open. “Absolutely remarkable!”

John Kenney commented that the volunteerism from all over was incredible. In Kingston alone MTO volunteers shoveled, picked up food donations, served food and cut wood. They worked all shifts at the PUC (4am-8am, 8am-4pm and 4pm-midnight) preparing and serving food to the utility crews from out of town.
Moore: Lots of people were willing to do chainsaw work but were not certified to do so. MTO brought in a retiree to train and licence people to operate chainsaws safely.
Mr. Kenney has a list, which illustrates the range of jobs that the volunteers did and where the volunteers had come from, some from as far away as Sudbury and Thunder Bay.
Moore: Volunteers came from across the province. EMO was sending volunteers from all across MTO to help the municipalities; particularly those who were forestry experts.

Kimmett: Then there was the equipment. Big trucks, bucket trucks, chippers, all kinds of equipment. Anything we wanted they’d ship it or somebody would get in it and drive it down overnight. Chainsaws! Chainsaws by the hundred.
Brydges: Generators large enough to run small hospitals. One generator from Thunder Bay was lost when the tractor and float it was riding on hit a moose.
The requests for equipment would come here. We would contact our MAG and they would get it.

Kimmett: The ferries kept operating. Fortunately the ferries in Kingston have their own back-up capability of raising and lowering ramps because the power at both terminals were out. Their schedule was pretty well maintained throughout. There were even extra trips to get special vehicles and equipment to the islands.
Moore: Capt. Bennett sailed The Frontenac to Howe Island to use it as an icebreaker to free the Howe Island ferry’s cable so it could land. It was a risky voyage but necessary to allow the Howe Island ferry to complete its trip.

What time would be paid for and what would be unpaid?
Moore: Ontario cabinet met and decided that anyone who was performing his/her job, including managers, would be paid overtime. This is extraordinary insofar as it applies to managers. The only other time it was done was for the OPSEU strike a couple of years ago. When employees came to work and agreed to volunteer for duties beyond their job descriptions, if they worked beyond their normal hours, they would be paid overtime. None of this will come anywhere near the overtime hours given to their communities. Someone who did not report for work and volunteered tremendous hours for his or her community would not be paid. They did so on their own time. By her own authority to grant leave with pay for compassionate reasons, Ms. Moore granted leave for the first few days when the office was closed and later for those who had “pressing personal or community needs”. The Provincial Emergency Plan did not contemplate human resource implications of a widespread, prolonged disaster. The Eastern Ontario Regional Directors have recommended that sub-policy be developed under the provincial emergency plan, which would clarify the rights and entitlements of provincial employees under similar circumstances in the future.

To what extent have your resources been spent?
Moore: It is remarkable how little of the equipment was lost especially given that items were passed from person to person Brydges: Losses were 3 of 100 generators, 13 of 260 chainsaws and 1 chipper recently stolen. Even MTO property that didn’t go out through this office is being returned here.
Kimmett: Amazed by the generosity of people and businesses it was remarkable.

Moore: MTO staff, volunteering in the Alexandria area emergency shelter, noticed the need for diapers. They called their manager in Ottawa, who called Kingston. One Kingston staff made calls. Another noticed diapers at the Princess of Wales Own Regiment and asked for some. MTO got 2 vans and drivers to get material to Ottawa where they encountered the Army who wanted the van. They regained the van by opening-up (in the middle of the night), an MTO garage in Ottawa for the army to use as a distribution depot and the army got the MTO guys to deliver something else before they headed back to Kingston, arriving home at 4:00 in the morning. “All you had to do was ask.” MTO senior executives went to the road-building industry to ask them for use of generators. They responded with generosity. Restrictions and requirements to transport over-sized, over-weight and otherwise restricted items were waived to facilitate emergency response.

Brydges: There was to be an emergency test at Darlington in April, which would include evacuation but the decision was made to postpone it for a year because of the ice storm experience.

Moore: We need to beware of the second wave of ice storm damage: tree damage when leaves add weight to damaged limbs, fire danger from debris, fatigue factor of municipal workers and officials. MTO is about to tender a multi-million dollar contract to cleanup highway rights-of-way. To make them safe, get trees and debris away from hazard zones, clear ditches so that they will flow and mend fences. Total recovery is long-term.

MTO’s big task right now is to, safely and in an environmentally sound way, dispose of a half-million cubic metres of wood chips in eastern Ontario. That is enough to cover Highway 401 from the middle of Toronto to the Quebec border to a depth of 5 cms. There is hope that technologies, such as biomass conversion to energy, may emerge to use the chips as a resource. In the short term, MTO is researching the opportunities to stockpile the chips. MTO does not want to landfill or otherwise dispose of something that might be a resource.