IceStorm 98 Study

Lance Thurston (LT) is Commissioner of Client Service and Community Development for the city. That includes a mandate that encompasses social services, social housing, licensing and permits, building inspection, bylaw enforcement, development review, customer service, community development and culture and recreation. It’s the ‘people’ side of the corporation. Before taking on this role, he worked in the planning department of Kingston Township for 16 years. He’s a planner by training and profession. But his academic background focused more on social planning and health care planning in particular. So he’s come around full circle.

According to the emergency plan, LT was responsible for establishing the emergency operations centre, which ended up at City Hall. He was also responsible for the social service aspect of the emergency, such as shelters and making sure people were clothed and fed and taken care of. Through the customer service side of his mandate, he was also responsible for the communications side of things, setting up the telephone system at the call centre.

He didn’t do all of this alone. He has a staff of managers and assistants who helped out.

He was fortunate in that social services had a departmental emergency plan, and many of the staff in social services had gone through emergency training courses in Arnprior. They also had an “extensive and vast community network to call upon. So when there’s a problem, they know who to call within minutes and can network right across the community.” Social services relied quite heavily on its own well-documented emergency plan to make sure it had the shelters and the proper connections with the proper people.

The city’s plan was a starting point. When his group had its initial meetings of the mind at the Utilities building on Thursday morning, that was the starting point that laid out generally what the broad mandate of the client service and community development commission was. “We then took it from there, assembled the people within the umbrella that we thought we needed at the time, including social service people, and then took it from there.” So social services was able to take it’s chunk of responsibility -- which was the shelters, primarily, along with food, clothing and all that. The fit between the social service plan and the overall city plan was quite good because there was quite a clear identification of who was responsible for various things, and the linkages with Red Cross and with Salvation Army, who were the two big actors on our side of things. Those were very clearly identified, even in the corporate (ie., city) plan. And social services just went from there, with greater detail.

[A bit of background here: Social services is a business unit or a division within the Client Service and Community Development group. LT is the commissioner of the group, and he has managers, including one or two managers within social services, who report to him. Tanie Steacy is the manager of the program delivery side of Social Services, and Adele LaFrance is the manager of administration.]

They are two very integral components of this emergency response, and if they haven’t been spoken to, they really must.

LT got up early Thursday morning, saw the ice storm through his windows, and made a few calls to his managers to advise them not to come into work. At that point they were starting to advise people not to go into work unless they had to. After making those calls, LT ignored his own advice and came into the office, just to make sure everything was well. He’s the boss of the building, so he needed to make sure everything was OK. There were some people there. Tracy Newton was there. The building had partial power.

“We were kind of standing around, trying to decide, ‘Gee, this is starting to look worse than we think,’ and we were listening to the radio, and it became clear that things were really starting to degenerate. And Cheryl Mastantuano was also here at that time. There was a call from Gardner Church indicating that we needed to get together as an emergency control group, just on standby. This was 9 a.m. or so. He wasn’t sure if a disaster was going to be declared. Chief Glenn Gow then came by maybe half an hour later and said ‘Get yourself over to the Utilities building, the emergency control group is meeting, and get over there.”

He called Tanie Steacy, the program delivery person at Social Services, and arranged to meet her at the Utilities building. Although she’s not part of the control group, per se, he knew that as soon as he had his marching orders he would be calling upon her. Cheryl Mastantuano and LT headed over to the Utilities, where they met with the police, fire, Gardner Church, the Mayor. They went around the table, Gardner outlined to people what their areas of responsibility were, and were then told to go off and implement the plan. LT was assigned the shelters, the operations centre, and communications.

The decision was made early on to use City Hall rather than either of the places designated in the plan. There was no power at the Staff College, City Hall still had power, Mayor Bennett was uncomfortable in locating the operations centre outside of the city core. “I believe he was more comfortable with ... he knew the city core, he knew City Hall, and wasn’t too sure what lay beyond that. So City Hall was selected, and that was a good decision, in hindsight, because except for a very brief time, power didn’t go off there, whereas it was off and on all over the place. So that was a good decision.”

City Hall did become a zoo, but anywhere would have become a zoo, he said. “City Hall was chosen, certainly as I recall, because it was in an area that had been determined by the Utility people to be in a fairly stable situation in terms of power. It was an area that the Mayor was familiar with, it was a large building that could accommodate people, it was central, and in hindsight I think it was a good location. The difficulty with that location was that in setting up the operations centre, not a lot of time was taken to assess what would be the best physical location within the building to locate certain things, and that is where more planning could improve. Had it been logistically organized differently at City Hall, it would have worked much, much better. I think it worked very well. People say ‘Well, it was chaotic, communications weren’t good, or different groups didn’t know what was going on...’ Yeah, that’s a fair comment. But I think it worked pretty darn good, considering we were making up the plan by the seat of our pants. Because the emergency plan called for the Staff College, then number two was to be Kingston Township fire department, which again was an area that was very unstable. I think it was a great decision. And in hindsight? Yeah, I think we could have done it much, much better, logistically. But I think it worked quite well.”

Keeping in mind that at the time the “city was just crashing,” and nobody knew whether the Staff College had a generator, let alone whether it would come on in time for the building to be used as an emergency operations centre. “Again, it comes back to this emergency plan not being fully understood, and certainly not being vetted by the current administration.”

LT received his copy of the emergency plan sometime between Christmas and New Year’s. It appeared at his old farmhouse in a brown envelope with his name written on it. It was set inside the mud porch, on a bench his family uses for removing and putting on boots. “I betcha it was probably a day before anyone realized it was there. If you’ve ever seen our place, with four kids, it’s chaos. So there’s this envelope sitting there. I pick it up, open it up, my name’s on it, ‘Oh, the emergency plan! Gee, I should really look at that.’” He did sit down between Christmas and New Year’s for maybe half an hour and browsed through it, very casually. He spent about 10 minutes reading the client services and community development section, thinking ‘Gee, that sounds like a lot,’ and that was the end of it. And he was one of the fortunate ones, because he had taken those few minutes to browse through the thing. For many administrators and staff who had never done that or even seen it, the ice storm would have been even more of a shock.

When he was organizing the social services department for the new city, some structural changes were made, and as a result, the former social assistance administrator, Bernie Mason, was not hired back. Tanie and Adele were hired to replace him. When he was talking to Mr. Mason at the time about his exit process ... his last piece of advice to me was, “he said ‘Lance, for gosh sakes, keep your emergency plan up to date. He says you have one in social services, it’s up to speed, it’s been vetted, we have trained people in social services, keep it up, don’t let it slide.’” That would have been the first week of January, maybe two or three days before the ice storm hit.

“Of course when he said it to me, I thought ‘Yes, OK, intellectually, that needs to be done, but in reality, Bernie, that ain’t gonna happen. Lo and behold. It was prophetic.”

LT doesn’t think the emergency plan could have been vetted by the current administration to any greater extent than it was. The plan was just too new. Fortunately, some people in the old city were familiar with the draft, he said, and people from the former townships who had emergency plans of their own were at least familiar with some of the notions and concepts of emergency planning. LT himself had worked for the township of Kingston for 16 years and had never seen the township’s emergency plan and was never involved in any of the emergency planning. He never had any emergency training, and had no idea what emergency planning consisted of. So when he saw the huge mandate outlined for him in Bob Boyd’s draft plan, he said to himself “Whew, thank gosh I’ve got managers to do some of this!”

Getting back to the narrative of what LT and his managers did during the storm: immediately after the first meeting of the control group, he got together with Tanie Stacey, Cheryl Mastantuano, and Dave Morgan (manager of culture and recreation), and a few others. They took over a conference room on the second floor of the Utilities building as their “war room,” and began putting together a strategy and a set of priorities, and assigned tasks.

Tanie Steacy took over shelters, and started making calls to the Salvation Army and the Red Cross. They then started working through a lot of scenarios on the shelter side. The decision was made to locate them in high schools if at all possible. They wanted to keep them close to the neighbourhoods, close to the people, they wanted them in facilities that were large enough to accommodate potentially a lot of people, they wanted to make sure there were washroom facilities and enough space to accommodate cots and heating facilities, and so forth.

This meant they needed to contact the school boards and gain access to the schools, but just getting in touch with school officials was one of the most difficult obstacles they faced early on. They had some names in the emergency plan, those of the heads of the school boards (Barry O’Connor and Mr. Cosgrove), but at that time the phone lines were starting to collapse, the cell phones were almost maxed out and were not reliable. So they were having great difficulty. But the benefit of having such a large group in that war room, LT said, was that they all have an “amazing network, community network.” There are social services people who are very well networked. The community development coordinator, Cheryl M., had her own excellent network of people to call on. Dave Morgan had a huge network of people on the recreation side. So together they started to come up with alternative names. When they couldn’t get a hold of Barry O’Connor, they thought about who else they might call. It took probably an hour, if not longer, to connect with the school board, to actually get a voice, a person with some authority who could then start the ball rolling to get the schools set up as shelters.

It was a connection Dave Morgan made with Jack Hamilton, who is the VP of LaSalle High School and who was a former member of Pittsburgh Township Council. Dave Morgan comes from the Pittsburgh administration, so he had that link. Jack Hamilton was able to give the group a whole bunch of phone numbers that aren’t normally available to the public. So they got all kinds of home numbers of various principals, VP’s, etc. The way the school board is organized, you have to work through the principals or the VP’s to get access to the schools, which do really run their own show.

Some of those connections were made, and the group was eventually able to locate shelters at QECVI and LCVI. At the same time, they were making connections with the Red Cross to start coordinating cots and bedding. The Salvation Army came on board to arrange food for the shelters. The Red Cross came on board and said they would help in any way they could. The liaison was Mike Stoneman, who was identified in the emergency plan. He came very early, and was very easy to get a hold of.

LT had high praise for the Red Cross and the Salvation Army. But he did acknowledge that the Red Cross was slow in taking over responsibility for the shelters, according to their designated role in the emergency plan. “When you read the plan, it talks about the Red Cross being responsible for the shelters ... Mike Stoneman came in Thursday morning, and started making calls to organize resources ... But the Red Cross, for whatever reason, and this is not a criticism, did not step up to the plate and say ‘We will take it over from here, thanks very much for calling us, we are now in control, you support us.’ That didn’t occur until maybe two or three days in.”

The Red Cross took over at about the same time Thurston’s group began consolidating the shelters. The school boards wanted their schools back, in order to get the kids back in the classroom, so they consolidated the shelters at Penrose, which is part of KPH. At that point, the Red Cross stepped in and said ‘OK, we’ll take it from here,’ and organized it, and staffed it, which was a great relief, LT said.

He’s not sure why it took the Red Cross several days to make this decision, but figures it has something to do with the time it took to organize themselves. “They aren’t just standing around waiting for an emergency to happen. They have to mobilize their people as well ... It was probably very much a situation of getting their resources organized, and probably wanting to assess whether it was going to be the major disaster it ended up being. I don’t think people fully appreciated until much later that day [Thursday?] that things were really, really bad.”

He recalls standing on the second floor of the Utilities building facing north towards Hwy. 401. “Of course everything was just collapsing. There was very few vehicles on the 401, and my home is actually, you can almost see it from there. Everything was dark and dreary, and it was at that point that I started to realize ‘Gee, I may not get home for a day or two.’ It was this sinking feeling of ‘Oh, my God. What’s going on? This is not what the restructuring called for!’ It was not an epiphany, but a real turning point. It really hit.”

That first day everyone was so focussed on just getting things set up and making sure that people were connected and schools were located, that they didn’t have time to think about what was happening. It was when he took a moment away from all of this frenetic planning that it hit him just how serious and unusual an event it was.

He managed to get through to his family by phone and told them not to expect to see him “until who knows when.” He did wind up going home that first night, but not until well after midnight, in the wee hours of Friday morning. He spent a few hours trying to sleep, didn’t sleep all that well, then went back in. That second day wound up being a 28 or 29 hour day for him. On the third day, he physically collapsed and had to sleep.

In hindsight, he says, it was “really stupid” to go that long without sleep. “Not good for you physically or personally, not good for the team. But it was circumstance, a huge sense of responsibility, and ... just the whole scheduling of people.”

On the second day, when it began to seem that the emergency would last a long time, city staff tried to assign people the task of developing a shift rotation for the various duties at City Hall. That proved “very difficult” to accomplish just because of the press of other things to do, phone calls to make, people running around, responses, etc. They did start the process, but had they put one person in charge of establishing a shift system (or gone into the emergency with a shift system already in place), that would have “really, really helped,” LT said. “You wouldn’t have had people burning out.”

Aside from just establishing the shelters, one of the other key hurdles LT’s group faced early on was just locating cots. They were working through the Salvation Army, and it was suggested to LT that they should be going through the army, and through Col. Gerry Coady, who was the former base commander at CFB Kingston and who would have access. There was nothing in the plan that talked about this, so they just started making phone calls. They contacted CFB Kingston, began wending their way through the protocol and screening process required before the military can offer any help whatsoever. Gardner Church was able to give LT the name of a commander at CFB Kingston who had promised to donate all sorts of cots and bedding. LT couldn’t get through to him, but got through to one of this people, who said ‘You can’t get that from us, you have to go through EMO. Here’s the number to call.’ LT thanked him, hung up and called the EMO office in Toronto, where he got recording that was so scratchy and poorly delivered that he had to re-dial the number four times just to get a phone number to call in an emergency. With the lapses between calls and the difficulty getting a connection, LT estimates this took him half an hour to finally get through to EMO. Once they did, an EMO official told LT’s group that they could get cots and bedding, but that they would have to go to Ottawa to retrieve them. “I said, ‘well we’re in the middle of a disaster. We can’t just drive to Ottawa and pick up cots, and how would we do that? We don’t have a transport truck.’ So that was really frustrating, and they said ‘Well, that’s what you have to do.’ So we hung up from there, very frustrated, and decided, at the suggestion of one of the members, to get a hold of Gerry Coady ... talked to Gerry, and Gerry said ‘Look, if you’re having any problems with anybody, let me know.’” They told Coady about the catch-22 with the cots and about EMO’s decision that Kingston would have to get its cots from Ottawa, “and Coady said ‘that’s crap, leave it with me.’” Within half an hour, CFB Kingston called back and offered the city a large supply of cots and bedding for use in shelters.

“Over a period of time we did make a connection with EMO, through Gerry Coady and through the base. I believe it was the base that actually muscled the EMO in to being a little more cooperative.”

Later on LT met the local EMO rep, who is Randy Reid, a councillor for the city. LT didn’t know that and had never met Reid until the storm. “There he was standing in City Hall, and I thought ‘Gee, where were you about six hours ago?’”

EMO finally told the group they had a transport truck loaded with cots, on its way from somewhere West to somewhere points East, and promised to divert it to Kingston to drop off some cots. Then the city wound up going through the base to get the bedding (blankets and pillows) for the cots. The city finally wound up with enough cots and enough bedding, after two days of wrangling. Dave Morgan was designated the job of dealing with the cots; he was known as ‘the cot man,’ and would have figures on the number of cots supplied.

LT and Cheryl Mastantuano acted as co-coordinators of the Client Service and Community Development part of the emergency response. Cheryl also assumed a lot of the coordination of the shelters from the emergency operations centre, and also helped greatly with food. After setting up the shelters, people suddenly began wondering how they would feed all of the many volunteers. Cheryl and a few others took over the job of setting up a food service. Initially they started calling around to local restaurants, saying ‘We need food for volunteers, send us your meals.’ They called places like KFC, Burger King, and Pizza Hut. They were feeding volunteers working both out of City Hall and the Utilities building.

The Utility group wound up needing much more food than could be provided by “calling a few restaurants and ordering a few happy meals,” since their people were out working on the lines and clearing brush. So they decided to take on the whole task of doing their own meal preparation and foraging for food. They managed to become almost self-sustaining.

LT’s group then focused on the volunteers at City Hall, and got to work on the next task outlined for them in the emergency plan: coordinating and setting up a supply distribution system for the emergency effort. This supply distribution system ultimately got shifted over to the Armories, and was eventually (about three days in) taken over by the Red Cross. But for the first three days, LT’s group had people assigned to turning over every stone they could to find supplies such as personal hygiene items, toilet paper, clothing, towels, “whatever they could get, from wherever they could get it.” Over time they started receiving calls from outside the area. Shoppers Drug Mart offered to send a truckload of supplies, and other companies did the same. It became clear that they couldn’t house all of the supplies at City Hall, so they decided to use the Armories as a drop-off and storage site for everything that was coming in.

Any of the supplies that were left over and that could be use (i.e., a lot of the personal hygiene items) were donated to local hostels. Pampers went to Dawn House, which is the shelter for women. It was felt that non-profit groups could “really benefit from all of this stuff.” Other supplies were distributed to other parts of the region, after Kingston was designated as a regional distribution centre. But for the first three days it was very much LT’s group that was trying to organize that distribution network, before the Red Cross took it over.

LT’s group also had to take on the transportation component for volunteers. When the number of volunteers pouring into City Hall became too much, they set up a volunteer coordination centre in the tourist information building. “We realized there was just way too many people hanging around and people coming in, so that got shifted, and off-loaded the pressure.” Ann Marie Harbec was in charge of receiving the volunteers and matching them with tasks. They also began making arrangements with John Giles to provide transportation for volunteers and members of the public who needed to get to shelters.

Screening volunteers was a delicate matter. LT had his social services people give some direction about how to screen volunteers, what to look for, questions to ask, and how to get a sense of the person coming in. All volunteers were put on a registry with their phone number and address. The people doing that were not trained social workers capable of doing a full personal assessment, but they received some advice. LT felt he learned a great deal about the “amazing skills” that social workers have for assessing people quickly. “It’s quite amazing.”

They began screening volunteers after getting a call from Tanie Steacy (TS) at Loyalist High School, saying she had a concern about one individual that was sent to her. TS advised them to start doing some basic screening of the people coming in, and gave them some tips for assessing the volunteers.

Volunteers were also under the watchful eye of various professionals out at the shelters. All of the shelters were manned by social workers and by some parks and rec people and by some members of the Red Cross, so there were enough trained people at all the shelters to weed out any problematic or potentially dangerous volunteers, LT said. “If somebody didn’t really look like maybe they should be there, they were very subtly and gently taken aside and talked to, and either reassigned or encouraged to go home.”

LT doesn’t think there were “too many’ hurt feelings over such incidents. He didn’t witness any personally, but he heard a few stories of people who wanted to help and weren’t being given that opportunity. But he said there was such an outpouring of volunteers that at one point there was too many. “You just couldn’t [use them all], and there was not enough control to ensure that they were used efficiently.”

LT is not sure how the system could have been designed to make even better use of volunteers, but he thinks they were wise to separate the volunteer reception centre from the emergency operation centre, and would do that again in future. “That plus a communication plan to get the message out to the public would certainly benefit it.” You don’t want to turn people away. Early going, they didn’t have enough volunteers, and over time there were too many, LT said. One of the ways to make it better would be to pre-identify tasks that had to be done. But the problem is that every emergency is so different that you can only do a limited amount of useful pre-planning; anything else must be invented to suit the situation. You might at least be able to divide people into skill sets, ie., people who can drive, people who can lift, move meals, move animals, etc.

One of the big issues that arose had to do with the care of people’s pets while their owners were in shelters. Groups of people were assigned to looking after people’s animals. Members of the public could call a phone number and ask for a volunteer to drop in on their pet at a certain address. There were groups of people looking after that. Volunteer drivers would also go around to the shelters and take people home for short periods of time to visit their pets and check on the house. Drivers were assigned to shelters, and whatever people at the shelter needed or wanted would be taken care of. Other people refused to go to the shelters because they didn’t want to leave their pets alone in the cold.

Liability was not an issue. “We didn’t worry about it at the time,” LT said, but there could have been serious consequences. “Our main goal from our point of view in terms of the shelters and the people was ensuring safety, ensuring people were warm, dry and fed, and whatever means it took to do that, that was our focus. If that meant using volunteers, whatever, that’s what they did. So we didn’t worry too much. We got lucky [that nothing happened].”

Backing up to that first meeting in the makeshift ‘war room’ at the Utilities building, LT said the one person he was unable to get a hold of was Sheila Hickey, who is the associate commissioner of client service and development. Her area of responsibility is customer service. She comes from a Bell Canada background, and knows telephones. She would have been the logical person to have set up the call centre, but she was unavailable. She was ill, and had taken her son to her mother’s house north of the city, and was trying to get back. She was out of the range of the cellular phones. She did wind up getting involved, but at first LT’s group had to get things started without her. They knew they had to set up the call centre downtown, and they knew they had a lot of technical limitations at City Hall, where phone lines were limited and all calls went through a central switchboard. That was where Sheila would have been very helpful. LT called Tracy Newton, got her to close down the Midland Rd. office, and asked her to set up the call centre in City Hall with help from Marielle LaPlante-Wheeler, who is the manager of customer service. They headed down to City Hall to get that set up, around noon on the first day. They swooped in and took over a section of the building for the call centre.

The problem with City Hall was that everything at that time was coming through a manual switchboard. In time, they made some improvements to that, when Sheila got on board, but for the first little while it was “a bit dicey.” But LT said he thinks they did “amazingly well, given that the expertise for a call centre worth of telephones just was very non-existent in the corporation, except for Sheila. What we did, given that it was City Hall, given it was such a rush, I think was the right thing to do. I don’t think you could have done much better.” Looking back on it, though, they probably should have commandeered the north side of the building instead of the south side. The north side would have been far better in terms of people at telephones being able to see each other, having a counter there separating you and the telephones from the crowd of people coming in, so that there was a real definition of the work space and the public space. There was quite a lot more phones and desks that could have been used in a much more manageable set-up on the north side. LT made that comment within about half a day: ‘Gee, we should have gone to the other end,’ but by that time other people had commandeered the space they wanted. But the north end of the building was pretty much under-utilized throughout the emergency, he said. It wouldn’t have been efficient to move once the call centre got underway, because there was too much activity throughout the building and the call centre was basically established. They were in the clerk’s area, where the hallways are very narrow, and where the space is all cut up. Visibility from one desk to another within the clerk’s section is poor, so the people working the call centre couldn’t speed things up with visual cues. The call centre eventually moved out into the human resources area, and that was a little better, but again there were walls separating people, and the phone system was “kinda wonky,” LT said.

Tracy Newton assumed the role of the overall coordinator of that call centre. She wasn’t assigned that role, but took it over and made herself indispensable. They set up their systems as to who was to do what: food, supplies, transportation, volunteers and what have you, and she was then coordinating that. Calls would come in, and she would make sure the calls went to the right people. “Because of her skills and her tremendous personality, she has natural leadership abilities, and people gravitate to her. So she was a natural choice there. So she took on that pivotal role of running that control centre ... She went down and made it her own. Absolutely fabulous. She did a great job. An amazing ability to juggle 15 different things at once and get them going.”

That allowed LT to focus on some of “the other logistical nightmares” they were having. Communications with the various shelters was “terrible,” power was going down at various shelters. They had to relocate, so they had to contact transportation, generators, all those logistical things; they were trying to negotiate with KPH to get them on board, etc.

Kingston Psychiatric Hospital was doing its own thing early on, but LT and his group didn’t know it at first. “If there was anything that could be improved or learned from all of this, it was that the city’s emergency operations centre, I think by law, becomes the pivotal point of the whole emergency response. And all of those other players have got to know that they have to work through that centre. And some of them weren’t doing it, for whatever reason. It’s not blaming anybody ... they’re used to functioning [on their own], and phone lines to the city, you try to get a hold of the city, we’re going to do this, we want to do that, we can’t get a hold of you, ‘well, we’ll just do it.’ And then you forget to call, and it’s three days later. ‘Gee, you mean you had a shelter there?’”

KPH was actually running three shelters on its property, and LT’s group knew of one of them fairly early on, but not the other two. “Our communication wasn’t the greatest, but again, that’s not blame, that’s just circumstance.” But they found other parties and groups were doing things, and again, it should have come through the emergency operations centre to coordinate it, LT said.

KPH was running shelters both for the general public and for their own patients. They had a shelter for some of the senior citizen homes in the area that were closing. They also ran a shelter for the Ongwanada population. They then opened up a shelter for the general public, and that ultimately became the Penrose Shelter, which was widely advertised for the public. KPH was also dealing with two or three nursing homes, and did so without consulting the city. “The health care system has its own networks, and KPH had space, it had a generator backing up its electrical system, people know that, and there’s connections made so extendicare ... can make a call to Wayne Barnett at the hospital and say ‘Gee, what can you do for us,’ and he’d say ‘Bring ‘em on down.’ So it just happened. And that wasn’t a bad thing, given the speed with which this was all happening. The first and foremost thing would be the safety [of the public], and if protocol got in the way, well, screw the protocol. Get the people safe. We can always catch up later ... So I wouldn’t get too hung up on the fact that they were off doing their own thing. They were doing the right thing. And the protocol can catch up later.”

Another communication problem arose with the Ongwanada residence next to the YMCA. It houses a number of people, and there was “quite a confusion” as to whether that building had actually been evacuated or not, and there was “quite a back and forth,” LT said. “Ultimately what happened was that Wayne Barnett of KPH drove there to assess the situation, because the staff there was saying ‘Oh, we’re fine, we’re fine,’ but they had no heat and no power. And they had this population of people who could really be at risk. So I think Wayne Barnett finally went in himself to assess the situation.”

The only other irritation they had was with the school board, LT said. The schools were loaning out their schools to them, and they were concerned about the integrity of their structures, and ensuring that their offices weren’t ransacked by anybody and everybody. They didn’t want just anybody using their phones and faxes, or going through records. So LT’s group did have some difficulty getting proper coordination. “But once we worked out the lines of communication, the schools got right on board with their own people there, and we were fine. That took a little bit of diplomacy.” School board concerns about security were “reasonable,” LT said, and were satisfied when proper internal security was arranged at the shelters.

The school boards decided after a certain number of days that they needed to open up their schools, LT said. At first the reaction from a number of people in the city was ‘well, sorry, but this is an emergency situation, we will call you when you can have your schools back.’ The school board didn’t quite accept that authority being taken away from them. “They were very resistant, [saying] ‘Look, we want to open our schools, we will open our schools. We want you out.’ From their side, a very logical position was ‘we want to keep the kids occupied; they’re at home, they’re in shelters. If we can get them into school, at least they’re warm, they’re safe, they’re productive.’ It was a good thing from a human point of view to get the kids in school. They really needed that at that point, which was four or five days in. So that was good, from their point of view, to get the kids in school. But it was just that attitude: ‘they’re our schools, we’re opening them, not get out, but make an arrangements please.’ And when we told them ‘excuse us, it’s an emergency situation, the mayor’s declared it, the legislation gives us the authority to tell you.’ It was that natural, long-standing turfy thing that municipalities and school boards have had for years. It’s a natural thing. It’s understandable. And people were tired, emotions were raw, and a few feathers were ruffled along the way ... In the end, cooler heads prevailed and it worked out fine.”

The city did wind up getting out of the schools and consolidating the shelters in Penrose, but they delayed that move for some time. The schools wanted the shelters out sooner than the city could make the arrangements to get out. The city started planning to go elsewhere as soon as the school boards started asking for their schools back, and that’s when the KPH option became the obvious choice. LT’s group had the Red Cross and one of their own staff go out and scope the entire urban community for locations, and give an inventory of buildings and facilities and attributes within those facilities. Penrose emerged as the perfect site, and KPH was quite happy to open it up. It had been mothballed by KPH for two years. The building was professionally sealed. Everything, including the toilets and sinks, had been physically sealed off and taped up shut. No heat had been on other than minimal heat for some time. “So they did amazing, amazing work to open up Penrose, get it clean, they got it all cleaned up to accommodate us, they had their nursing staff available for medical help, they had their kitchen there to support the Salvation Army in terms of food preparation... that was just a wonderful partnership. And of course the Red Cross came in and assumed the coordination of it. There was a partnership, really, between the Red Cross and KPH. KPH was really running the physical infrastructure, and the Red Cross was looking after the people side. And then there was a natural cooperation of the medical support. So that became a really neat partnership.”

Penrose is the old asylum, located to the east of KPH proper. The population they had in there two years ago were moved out into the community, so they no longer had the need for the building, so they put it on mothballs.

As time went on, systems within the emergency response as a whole got refined, people got quite good at what they were doing, and quite passionate about what they were doing, LT said. The supplies people were taking great pride in all the connections they could make and all the supplies they were bringing in. And the people that were feeding the volunteers developed an amazing network to supply the food. LT’s group was providing meals not only to the people working at City Hall, but they were also feeding the militia, the Princess of Wales’ Own Regiment was fed there, the police forces were fed there, some of the army people and RMC students. “And they were good meals. Not just shlocky fast food. They had really good meals donated by people like Clark of Clark’s By the Bay. He prepared an entire, magnificent meal. It was great. It was absolutely wonderful.” He prepared a great big vat of chile, plus salad and rolls and dessert.

The Hershey’s Factory in Smiths Falls donated “scads” of Peanut Butter Cups and all that stuff.

A lot of the food was donated, but there were some charges made to the city afterwards. At the time, no money (or very little) was being exchanged. It wasn’t really a concern. But he’s not exactly sure about the financial side. Clark donated his meals, and Hershey’s donated their products. But some restaurants did require payment, and the city paid.

One interesting story on the food: LT’s group called Kentucky Fried Chicken early in the process to place a big order, and the person working there refused to fill the order without payment on the spot. It was the second time KFC had been called to provide food for wherever. “They refused us. They said ‘you have to pay cash.’ We said ‘We’re the city of Kingston. We’re in a disaster, here. You will get paid.’ So we got one of our staff, who is extremely diplomatic, and I believe it was Lynne Jordon, the librarian, to call them. Shortly thereafter, we had our meal.” He thinks the person they were dealing with initially was a junior staff person at KFC who didn’t feel he or she had the authority to give away food. “But it’s striking that we had a restaurant refusing ... It’s like ‘Hello, I think we’re good for it!’”

They had a team that set up in one wing of City Hall that was simply dealing with the food. They had a staff rotation plan that worked wonderfully, LT said.

Any volunteer that came to city hall also got fed. LT’s wife and kids came down to see him one time, and the kids became pretty fixated on the food. “They were standing there looking at these trays of donuts and these boxes of peanut butter cups, and they were just ‘Can we have one, dad?’ ‘Well, they’re really for the volunteers, you know. Are you a volunteer?’ ‘Well, we’d like to be!’”

One of LT’s biggest concerns is to make sure that the families of city staff and other emergency workers are looked after in any future emergency. “I’m extremely family oriented. I have four kids, four young girls, and my wife. And we were without power for about four and a half, five days at home [just north of the city]. And that was a real concern ... If anything needs to be worked into the new plan, it’s this whole notion of family support during the crisis, so that you know your family is taken care of, you know they’re warm, you know they’re dry, safe and fed, and you can get on and do what you have to do without constantly worrying and wondering.” He remembers stopping “many, many times,” setting everything down and calling home. “I’d say ‘screw the world, I’m finding out if my family’s OK.” This was difficult at times because their phones went out for a couple of days during the crisis. There were times when he couldn’t get through, and had no time to go home in person and check on his family. “You’d try to make contact, and if you couldn’t, there’d be this gnawing ‘Gee, what’s going on.’” At the time, he didn’t think this was taking away from the focus too much, but when he looks back on it, that was an “enormous drain.” Virtually everyone there was having the same difficulties. Cheryl Mastantuano didn’t see her kids for three or four days. “They were with her mother. She knew they were with her, but then the worry is ‘do they have power, is mother OK?’” LT’s family had a wood stove, so they were warm, and they had municipal water, so they had water, so that was OK. The kids “loved it,” he said. “They thought it was just a hoot. They were camping. It was just the greatest thing. And all these candles, you get to play with fire, they just had a great time.” His wife just “rolled with it, at the time, just wonderfully able to cope,” he said.

For the first time in his life, he says, he pulled strings. He exerted some pressure to try and get a hotel room. He managed to arrange for a room at the Ambassador, and they refused. “She said ‘no, we don’t want it. We’re fine. The schools are opening [tomorrow], we have heat, we have water, what’s the point?’” LT somewhat jokingly says he was “just devastated ... here, finally I can do something for my family, and they’ve refused me!”

One time he came home after working about 28 hours straight. He came home at about 9 a.m. and tried to sleep but couldn’t. “Just laying there, all this noise going on. And getting up and just feeling totally depressed that the house was without heat, it was cold, it was yucky outside, and I thought ‘I can’t stand it here. This is awful.’ And I said ‘You’ve got to leave.’ And she said ‘Why? The kids are happy. We’re warm. We’re getting out to see friends,’ friends were inviting them out to dinner ... they were having a hoot.”

One of his children had strep throat throughout the whole ice storm. LT would come home, and the child was sick. Normally his wife takes over the running of the house and arranging things like doctors appointments, and she was debating whether to call the doctor, and LT was “right on it, saying ‘We’re calling.’” He called the doctor’s office, was told he couldn’t get in to see the doctor, and LT got a bit aggressive on the phone. “Totally out of character for me. But here I was, taking charge and doing, and I brought that home for one of the first times in my life.” His wife still laughs about it.

LT remembers going through two low periods. The worst was after his 29-hour shift. He came home and tried to go to sleep, telling his wife he needed to be woken up at a certain time, but he couldn’t sleep because he was afraid she would forget to wake him up. “So I get up at 10:30, come downstairs, and of course she’s all mad because I didn’t sleep, and I wasn’t getting rest, and didn’t trust her and all that stuff. And at that point I just physically hit the wall. I was physically ill, almost delusional. Just could not have a rational thought in my head. Couldn’t make a decision at that point. And just sort of melted in the couch, and said ‘What am I going to do? I have to go to work. People are depending on me. I can’t even think.’” His wife advised him to call Gardner Church, which he did, and GC said ‘That’s fine, get some sleep.’ That’s all he needed, was somebody to say ‘It’s OK, take the time.’

Gardner Church once put LT in charge of City Hall in order to go away and get a few hours of rest. Within ten minutes of Church leaving, the power failed at City Hall. “So he’s gone, and Cynthia Beach and I are at the Loyalist Room, the north end of the building, trying to sort out the generator issue for City Hall. We wanted to get a generator hooked up at City Hall for fear that the power will go down. We’re standing in a hallway, and power goes down, and we looked at each other ... we had these dinky little flashlights and a cell phone that shows it has very little battery power left. The power goes down and it’s dark and all there was an emergency exit light above our heads. We’re just looking at each other, ‘Damnit! Gardner’s done this! He went to the hotel and flicked the switch!’”

Power came back on within 10 minutes. In the meantime, though, a call came in on this cell phone that had no power, and some military guy from way up north wanted to come down and take our generator and take it somewhere north. “So I just handed it to Cynthia, who was handling generators, saying ‘it’s a generator question, deal with it.’ So she talks to this guy for ages, on the phone with no battery. We’re going to need that battery, it’s the only phone we have, and she finally sorted it out. But what a low point. It was just awful, that feeling of responsibility and hopelessness.”

“That building was so still, you could almost hear this collective sucking in of air.”

That was about 12:10 a.m. on Day Two.

“Later that evening, Gardner’s still off sleeping, the power’s back on, Cynthia and I are feeling quite in control now, and we’re both getting very giddy from lack of sleep, cause we’d both been up around the clock. And in fact Cynthia drove herself almost to extinction by staying up so long. But anyway, around 3:30 a.m., we’re up in the main reception area of City Hall, and Janice [switchboard operator] is there working the phones, she’s a very lovely, funny lady. And I asked her if I could have the key to the big board that has all the names and locations of people ... She said ‘Well why?’ And I said ‘I just want to look.’ So I take it, and Cynthia and I then rearranged all the names. And we made up names, and did all sorts of funny things, and then closed it up and gave the key back. And it was like that for days. The one funny thing ... was we had changed Gary Bennett’s name to Jim Bennett. [They were in the mayoral race together]. It was just a bit of fun. But every time I went in there I’d think ‘Boy, we’ve really got to change that. Someone’s going to notice.’ Nobody noticed, that I know of.”

There was no possibility of danger arising from this bit of comic relief because the board was out of date to begin with; it hadn’t been changed since before amalgamation.

“We thought we were just so clever. We were just about peeing our pants we were laughing so hard.”

Moving onto the prepared questions, LT said that like most people involved in the emergency response, he didn’t worry about money at the time, but he did respond to Denis Leger’s attempts to keep track of expenditures. Leger quickly instituted a system of keeping track of where something came from, were a particular item came from, so that they could go back later and pay or question a bill. At the time, LT admits, this was “an enormous annoyance,” but he realizes it was essential. “Because they were checking with us almost on a half-hour basis. ‘Are you filling out your log form? Are you filling out your log form?’” [He makes the sound ‘Whack’ as if to indicate smacking the financial folks on the head]. “But we did, and everybody was very cooperative. By and large I don’t think too much was missed, in terms of filling out those logs. So it was a good thing, but it was an annoyance at the time.”

Decision-making tended to be a meeting of minds, he said, but that depended on the issue. “Some issues I would just make a very quick decision, and that would be it. But on other issues, for example, about linking with other groups or agencies or what’s the best approach ... we would draw on people. ‘Here’s what we need to do, here’s what we think we should do, what do you think?’”

Internal communication with other city staff and volunteers was virtually all verbal. That held even if the person was at the other end of the building. “If I needed to talk to Gardner Church, I went looking for Gardner, and found Gardner.” They were all assigned cell phones, but because the whole network was jammed most of the time and didn’t work in City Hall worth a hoot, you couldn’t rely on it. Or the phone on the other end was turned off, or whatever. So in most cases you’d just go out looking for people.