IceStorm 98 Study

Lynne Jordon (LJ) is CEO of the newly minted Kingston-Frontenac Library System, which takes in both the City of Kingston’s library system and the Frontenac County library system. The new, expanded structure came into being with Kingston’s amalgamation on Jan. 1, 1998. The system consists of 17 branches -- five of them urban and 12 rural -- and stretches the full length of Frontenac County. As CEO, LJ is responsible for day-to-day operations, budgets, administration, personnel issues, and she does a little work on the reference desk when she can find the time.

LJ first became aware of the storm at home on Wednesday night, just by looking out the windows of her home. After a tree branch crashed through her living room window, she was able to pick up the pieces and report to work. ‘Work’ at that point was City Hall, because the central library on Johnson Street was without power. When she went to City Hall on that first Friday, she could see that some of the staff had been there since Wednesday night, and they were tired. She was asked by Gardner Church if she would be willing to come in and help take on a senior management role in the crisis. She immediately went to work, first of all answering the telephones in the area where they had an emergency phone centre. She tried to direct people who were calling in with a myriad of problems. People called to tell city officials about someone else who they felt was unsafe in their home in a rural area, and asked city officials to send a car out to check on them. Others had flooded basements and needed generators or people to help pump the water out. Others wanted to know where the shelters were or whether they were full to capacity.

The storm was at its height when LJ came on board. The PUC had given up on its earlier estimates of a 24 - 48 hour quick repair. “We knew it wasn’t going to be an easy fix to get power restored to many areas of the city. So we knew that these people who were in their homes and by this point very cold needed to find places to go.”

LJ took calls from people who needed a tree branch removed, and who called to report sparks flying. The people in the phone centre would write the information down and put it in a designated spot where another group of people would then take the request and fill it or post it on a central board as general information. These calls came in many different forms. Some people were calling to get help, while others were calling to offer it. Everything went on the central board for all in the phone centre to see. This central information board was located in the Human Resources area and the Clerk’s area of City Hall, just to the left of the front entrance and down the hall.

The transportation link was essential there, LJ said, because people either needed to go to the shelters, or a person wanted city staff to check on someone in a rural area. She often had to take down complex rural addresses in order to get volunteers or city staff to the right place. Directions to rural addresses were often sketchy and vague, with people being told to go to a house ‘after this tree or after this sign,’ etc. The volunteer drivers were very helpful and convenient, she said.

The days were very long and seemed to blend into each other, LJ said. Her memory of the emergency has become a little hazy in the two-and-a-half months since it ended. Eventually -- probably on day two of her involvement (Sunday) -- she moved over to the food section, where several people were trying to organize all of the food for the volunteers and staff people at City Hall. There were probably upwards of 500 people coming and going in the building, she estimated. Before the armouries became fully up and functioning, she thinks, they were feeding military personnel at City Hall. So they had a large number of people who were not working in City Hall but who would come there to be fed.

[Eventually the Armouries became a site for warehousing. Also, the Princess of Wales Own Regiment may have, in conjunction with the RMC cadets and other military, started to eat their meals over there rather than coming into City Hall. It was more convenient that way, LJ said].

Initially LJ’s group was only doing food for City Hall workers and volunteers. Later they were asked to organize the food for the Princess of Wales Own Regiment volunteers. At the same time, there was another, separate food drive being carried out at the Utilities building on Counter Street, where different peopel were in charge of soliciting donations and feeding the hydro crews. LJ’s group was in contact with Joanne O’Maara at Utilities to see where they could get food and who would donate what. Initially both groups were asking various restaurants and grocery stores to donate food, but eventually the donations dried up a little bit and they did have to pay for some of the food, LJ said. All of the people providing it were very generous, so the city and Utilities were paying only nominal amounts for food, while restaurants often donated things like large trays of lasagna, other pastas, and salads. The city used a lot of local restaurants, such as the Brew Pub, which was a major supplier of wings and appetizer spreads.

On the food side of the operation LJ was working with Kelly Shaver (she works for finance, with Denis Leger) and Ann Pritchard (she works for KEDCO), along with many others. They staked out a corner of City Hall, stealing space when necessary: “We all had little areas that we operated out of, and believe me, this was makeshift. So we found a desk that was empty in the back quarters of City Hall, that looks out onto the side entrance. I can’t remember whose office it was, but the poor fellow came to work one day and there we were, ensconsed on his desk, and we’d taken over, and we had our lists -- because every time we asked someone for food we wrote down who it was we asked, what they were going to provide, whether it would free, and then the arrangements were made to pick it up, and deliver it.”

They were working to make sure people got fed, but there’s always somebody who was left out. At some point city residents started to bring in donations of food. A few people actually dropped off pies. “Not that they made them, but they had them. They’d drop off pies at City Hall. It was just an incredible process.”

Try asking Ann or Kelly how much food was moved during the whole event. Kelly was there at the very beginning, and she stayed there, whereas LJ took on a different job.

After working on food arrangements for a while, LJ moved on to the communications area, which had been set up at the back of City Hall. The Clerk’s office was being used for the emergency help line and the help centre. (Public health nurses had taken over that space and were working and answering public health calls). The Clerk had moved into the back of the building, and LJ was right next door at food services. At some point she was asked if she would spell off Sheila Birrell as the commissioner for client support and communications, so that Sheila could go home and get some rest. They were trying to do split shifts, and they also added [human resources director] Bill Bishop into that. Bill Bishop ended up doing all the night shifts. LJ would stay until 12:01, and he would come on at 12:01 and stay until 7 a.m., and Sheila would come back on at 7 a.m. and work through till the afternoon shift.

The whole purpose of this was to issue regular press releases, so that the press would be kept up to date on what was happening. There were also more informal methods of communication, ie., occasional interviews, but they wanted official press releases to be issued from City Hall. They had a volunteer named Dave [she can’t recall his last name] who was a communications consultant of some sort. He volunteered his time to help them get a format set up for their press releases. He suggested things like including information on weather conditions and forecasts. “At one point over that first weekend the temperatures dropped quite low and we were very concerned and we wanted to make sure that the public knew that it was going to get colder, not warmer.” Then there was the White Flag campaign. All those sorts of things had to be communicated officially.

They tried to issue press releases on a regular schedule, at 12 noon, 4 p.m., 8 p.m., and around midnight if there was anything eventful happening happening at that hour. They were writing the press releases and faxing them to all media. The group included Donna Pothaar, and Sheila Birrell, and Carolyn Downes, and Kathy Irwin and the volunteer Dave, and anybody they could find who could help them take down interview notes with Gardner Church or the Mayor, go to the computer, type them in and print them off.

Asked about complaints from the media about a lack of access to information, LJ said she did hear those objections. Regular press releases didn’t start going out until Saturday, a full three days into the emergency. LJ said the city really needs to get something up and running right away. She’s not sure why it took so long to start issuing press releases because she wasn’t there in the beginning.

By the time LJ started attending control group meetings on Friday, they were “jam-packed” with city staff. “There were representatives from just about everywhere sitting around the table, more than what you would see [designated] in the emergency plan. There were more members around the table, and I think it was because there was a feeling that we needed to get information from all these people. So there was no attempt to exclude; there was an attempt to include. People were just spilling out of the room. You couldn’t find a seat.”

Asked how well she thinks that worked, LJ said the meetings “tended to go on for a great length of time, with every single person around the table making a report, whether the information was relevant or had been said before.” There was some feeling that you had to be there, she said, and many people wanted to be there. But she said the committee probably could have been “a little more efficient” if it was restricted to those managers named in the emergency plan as members of the control group.

Somewhere around this time [the first Saturday], the Toronto Fire emergency response team came down to Kingston. That turned out to be a big help, LJ said. Bob Crawford (chief of emergency planning for the Toronto fire service) came down on Saturday, she believes, and he was making arrangements for the rest of the emergency response team from Toronto to come down. They arrived later that night, and included people, like Warren Leonard of the Toronto police, who were experts in emergency planning.

By the time they arrived, LJ and Mirka had been assigned the task of planning for a future outage. One of the tasks LJ was given was to draft up some sort of a response document that would outline the city’s response if another ice storm hit later the same winter. She worked closely with Bob Crawford, Warren Leonard of the Toronto Police, Gary Symonds and Rick Follert.

“We [Mirka and LJ] really interviewed them to find out where ... we maybe hadn’t thought things through. We were thrown into the emergency, we didn’t have any training, we were just thrown into it. And these people had all the training in the world and wanted to be in the situation we were in, and they were so thrilled to get down here and to see a real, live disaster!”

The Toronto group helped LJ and Mirka realize that the emergency document was “a good skeleton, overarching document, but that there needed to be other layers below that,” LJ said. In particular, they stressed the importance of having departmental plans to supplement the main emergency plan. Each department would need to know what they should be doing on a departmental level, how to get their staffs mobilized, etc.

Another issue the Toronto contingent brought to their attention was the need to keep good records during an emergency. “Something we learned was that we were not good at record-keeping and recording,” LJ said. “I know the emergency response meetings were minuted, and all of that is available for reference. But, for example, when I was on the telephone, I didn’t write down in a log what kinds of questions I answered, how many questions I answered, what was the volume of calls, you know, from day one to day seven or eight. So those sorts of things we could have done better.”

There are some automated systems available that can track the number of calls, and LJ feels that would be a very good thing to invest in for future emergencies. “Obviously it’s an expense, but it certainly saves in the long run, because we were asked many times over ‘how many calls did you handle?’ We did know numbers of people who used shelters, because that’s a little easier to keep track of. But how many dispatches did you make in the transportation area? How many volunteers did you use? Lots of these things, I don’t think anybody has [statistics on]. It would be nice to be able to say, you know, ‘this is the official number of total volunteers.’”

Asked for rough estimates of the number of calls she received, she said she couldn’t even hazard a guess. “It was constant. We never had time [to count them].” And at that point, all calls were still being routed through the main switchboard at City Hall, because there were no separate phone systems or lines within the building. Often, people couldn’t get through on that main switchboard number of 546-4291, so the number of attempted calls will never be known. “The switchboard person’s fingers never stopped moving. It was unbelievable.” There were several switchboard operators.

By about Sunday or Monday, city officials were discussing moving the operations centre out of City Hall. That whole issue of how the operations centre got established in City Hall was an interesting one, LJ said. Her understanding is that City Hall was the only building with power or that could be guaranteed fairly constant power during the emergency. The Correctional Staff College was outfitted with everything from power chords to highlighter pens and everything else you need to start an emergency centre, but they were out of power. Eventually it was under generator power for many, many days. And the fire hall in the west end of Kingston (Woodbine) was the secondary site, and the third site was the Gore Road site.

They were being asked to resume regular city operations. Some people who had never lost power and a few who had lost power only briefly were clamoring for normal city services, LJ said, “and they couldn’t get any response, because the person who was doing bylaws, or whatever, was out pulling tree branches down ... or they’d have a tax bill question, and they couldn’t find anybody in the tax department, because the departments weren’t functioning.”

Since the central library was still without power at that point, LJ was still free to contribute. She and Mirka worked with the Toronto emergency specialists to look at the various emergency sites, and eventually chose Gore Road. They didn’t go out to Woodbine because at that point, she believes, Gardner had spoken to Gerry Coady and they were operating a Kingston West emergency response centre out there. LJ said her understanding was that it was to be a communications setup only, at the Woodbine site, more as a funnel back into the central EOC, but she’s not sure what it ended up being.

Really, according to the emergency plan, there should be one place where all the information gets funneled to, LJ said. “And I think we found that with that one set up in Kingston West and another one set up in Kingston East, at Joyceville, that we weren’t always getting all the information. But that was an attempt to make sure that the people in Kingston West felt that their needs were being attended to. Certainly, in the Pittsburgh area, that was a big concern, because the farmers in the rural areas really did feel that they did have some urgent, urgent needs that were maybe not being met as quickly ... They needed generators to get their cows milked.”

George Sutherland was trying to be a one-man operation, supplying generators to every farmer who needed one. Gardner Church eventually got Gerry Coady involved in setting up a centre out East to help out with those tasks.

LJ said it may have been politically important to have more than one EOC and to locate the sub-EOC’s in different parts of the new city, but from an operational standpoint she’s not so sure it was a good idea to set up the additional centres.

Putting the EOC at City Hall had some advantages, because the politicians reside there, LJ said. Even if it hadn’t been in City Hall, the politicians would still be more than likely coming in to City Hall. But it did mean that as things started to calm down, city staff couldn’t get back to normal operations. Once the decision was made to move the EOC to Gore Road, LJ said it became “a fairly large issue” to meet with the staff and volunteers and ask them to move locations. The state of emergency hadn’t been lifted yet, and Mirka and LJ were asking people to move their operations out of City Hall and into a new building. This was complicated because people had gotten used to doing things a certain way and in certain places over the previous four or five days.

There was also the difficulty of getting a whole new phone centre set up in the new EOC. Bell Canada had come in and put in a phone centre in the council chambers, so that area was functioning as the place where the phone calls were being answered. Eventually a volunteer agency was asked to staff the phones. [She thinks it may be VICARS]. They did a very good job of staffing the phone lines. But LJ and Mirka had to do this all over again over at the Gore Road site, installing new lines and setting up another phone centre.

LJ and Mirka worked with the emergency experts from Toronto to evaluate different sites for the new EOC. They looked at the Correctional Staff College, and felt that really it wasn’t a large enough space. It was sort of on a cooperative basis that it had been given to the city, but when they actually went to visit it, they didn’t think there was enough space to accommodate everyone and everything. They knew there was something happening in the Woodbine Road site, so the third site was Gore Road. Mirka was going to be the manager out there anyway, so it seemed like a logical choice. “Basically it was a space that we could go in and make work for us.”

They then worked with the Toronto emergency people to get an organizational structure in place so they would have a clear chain of command at the Gore Road site. LJ and Mirka noticed how easily and smoothly the military’s part in the emergency seemed to go, and attributed this to the fact that they knew exactly who was in charge, LJ said. “They knew who to go to for what, whereas what we were doing was chaos! Nobody knew who to go to for answers,” LJ said.

Part of the problem is that “No one had the answers,” she said. “That’s also the difficulty. When you have so many bits and pieces coming together that, who was the central person to coordinate and disseminate ... It was very interesting, and I’m not sure in an emergency you can do it any better unless you bring the military in and have them direct it.”

LJ feels the emergency response could have been given more thought. “There is some thought in here [the emergency plan] about that core group that should be making decisions, and [about] keeping it to the core group. I don’t think any of the decisions that were made were really bad, but I think we might have just been a little more organized if we’d had sort of a clearer chain of command.”

Asked where she was getting her authority to act, she said “It was really Gardner Church.” Once he asked her to fulfill a senior management role in the ice storm response, she was fairly autonomous and rarely went back to him for advice about how to act. “We didn’t have time to do that, and I think it was expected that at the senior management level you run with it, and if you make a mistake, you have at least made a decision, and making decisions was more important than always getting it right.”

Asked how she kept track of decisions, LJ said there was a paper trail of basic information about almost everything they did, whether it was ordering food or buying a white board. It was always the same form that was used. At some point very early on, someone in finance came up with a form. You wrote down who you were, if you created an account number, what the item was for, and who you purchased it from and how much it cost. So it’s all documented. Linda Lamb at finance may have come up with that form.

LJ and Mirka held an initial meeting at City Hall to get all the staff members and volunteer players around the table and ask them: ‘what do you need at the new site, what worked well at City Hall that you want to take with you, what didn’t work well that you want to replace?’ Then they went over to Gore Road one morning with the Toronto crew and divided up the building into different functions. Space was allocated for communications, transportation, the police command centre and the phone centre (which was in the former Pittsburgh Township council chambers).

“So we were able to fairly readily transport the City Hall operation out,” LJ said. “Most of the people [from City Hall] came [to the new EOC]. By that time the crisis here [in the downtown core] had really been alleviated, and it was really focusing on the cleanup. Only marginal areas of the city were still without power. But we were finding that the calls that were coming in [to the new EOC] were from places like Sharbot Lake, or Snow Road Station, or Perth, or other places outside even Frontenac County but just sort of within the boundaries. Those were places that all along we helped if they had a need.”

Barclay Mayhew and Cynthia Beach were heavily involved in getting generators to some of those places that really needed it, LJ said.

By the time they got to the Gore Road offices, they had established themselves at a new phone number as a regional operational centre. So they were trying to take the calls from the areas in Frontenac County. They weren’t really going as far as Brockville, because Brockville had its own group, but they would help Brockville if Brockville had a problem it couldn’t handle.

One day, LJ heard from the over night staff at Gore Road that there was a real problem up in North Frontenac. Because of her role as Chief Librarian, LJ knew Stan Johnson, who is the mayor of North Frontenac, so she called him and inquired about the state of things up there. She knew some of her branches up in Kline and other areas were operational for some of the time, and LJ and her group were communicating with them. There was some debate about whether the military should go in and do a ‘fly over’ and begin to do a major effort in that area. When LJ got through to Stan Johnson, he told her the hardest-hit area was Snow Road Station. A general store was operating as the food shelter, and the people running it and using it were pretty burned out. It was at that point that Kingston asked the Red Cross what they could do, to see if they could send some relief volunteers into that area. The military did go into the area and did some door-to-door canvassing and helped get the generator situation squared away. There was a generator that someone needed back, and it had been powering the Snow Road shelter. [Snow Road Station is at the very end of Hwy. 509].

Col. Aitken and Col. Douglas came and spoke to the regional EOC and said ‘here’s our plan,’ etc. LJ recalls it being “a very nice working relationship” with the military. “We’re civilians, and so we don’t have the ... mindset or whatever of a military operation. But they were very helpful at providing us with information, and telling us what was working well from their perspective and what was maybe not working so well.”

While Mirka and she were in charge of the regional operation centre, LJ said “there wasn’t any sense that we would lord it over them [the military] and tell them they couldn’t do something, because obviously we valued their expertise. These people are experts in emergencies. But they told us what they were going to do, and asked us if we had any concerns or whatever.”

At one point the military told LJ and Mirka that a fly over was absolutely necessary, but then it was called off. The colonel came into the Gore Road station. The military had established its own operations centre at the base, in cooperation with Emergency Measures Ontario. Mirka visited it, but LJ wasn’t able to. The military’s area was wider initially than the city of Kingston, and they were also able to mobilize different things. There’s a hierarchy outlining who gets to call the military in the event of an emergency, and a local mayor is not really supposed to call the military directly and ask them to respond. It has to go through provincial channels, and then the province has to ask the feds if they can respond to the emergency.

But local officials in Kingston did wind up calling the military directly, and LJ said this was a natural response. She said “it seemed to take Emergency Measures a long time to come to Kingston” particularly after Kingston Councillor Randy Reid, who works for the EMO, was sent to another part of Eastern Ontario. LJ said she doesn’t think Col. Aitken would have said no [to a local request for military help], but the appropriate channels were eventually put in gear.

Asked what role Emergency Measures Ontario played in Kingston during the ice storm, LJ said that was “one of the head-scratching parts of the process. We wondered what they did.” By the time the EMO came on scene, Kingston officials had already set up the shelters, obtained the blankets and the cots and the food, LJ said, “so it was a mystery to us at that point what Emergency Measures Ontario could do.” The Deputy Minister in charge of EMO did come and tour the area, but it was late in the emergency, maybe Monday or Tuesday.

The one really useful thing she remembers getting from EMO was a plan of how many cots and how many blankets, flashlights and things like that they should keep on hand. That was helpful to have when LJ was writing her report on how to handle another ice storm. “It became part of our report that said ‘this is how we can keep this city and the region in a state of readiness in case the Farmer’s Almanac proved to be correct and there was another ice storm on the way in February.’” [Whig-Standard columnist Jack Chiang wrote a brief story after the ice storm saying that the Farmer’s Almanac was predicting another, worse ice storm later in February. It didn’t happen.]

Asked about any personal issues that came up for her during the storm, LJ said it took her a long time to feel comfortable in her own home again, because of the large branch that came through her window. “It wasn’t so much that the large branch hit the window and broke it, it was the little, little twigs at the end. They had so much ice caked on them that it just smashed into the window and broke it.”

For “many, many days” she was worried about the larger maple tree in her back yard and felt convinced it would come crashing down as well. She actually moved everything out of her kitchen in preparation for the tree to fall. “And I didn’t like being in the kitchen, and the night that the branch fell through I had decided to sleep by the fireplace, so I was right in the living room when the branch came crashing through the window. You know, [it was] a terrifying experience.”

She was alone when the branch broke the window, and all her neighbours had by that point moved out because it had been a day and a half or so, and they didn’t want to stick around. She had nobody she could call. She got cardboard and put it up. “You felt so violated ... and immediately your mind races, and [you think] ‘Oh my God, I hope the prisons have back-up power system, so the prisoners aren’t escaping, and could walk right into my house, because I had no protection.”

LJ managed to find a glass company open around the corner from where she lives and he fixed the one section of the window that was easy to do in a couple of hours. After that she was able to at least lock the window. That was a relief, but she was worried that her pipes might freeze. And the backyard tree was a real concern because she had already watched another large tree fall down in a neighbour’s back yard.

She had to put all of this out of her mind while she was doing her job at City Hall. “You just had to, because there was so much happening that you couldn’t focus on what was happening at home,” she said. Some people did have to take time off and drain their pipes or move to a shelter, or whatever. LJ was fortunate that she had a gas-fired water heater, so she just kept the pipes running. One day she decided to fill all the sinks and bathtubs up with hot water, in a sad little attempt to heat the house. “I thought that the hot water in the bathtub would heat the house! [Big laughter]. At that point my house was just above freezing, so I was a little concerned, and I was leaving again for another whole long day of work.”

Her father, who lives in Trenton, asked LJ if she wanted a generator, and offered to drive it up, but she had to refuse it because she wouldn’t be home to watch it. She had heard reports of generators being stolen and causing carbon monoxide problems. She didn’t have a garage to hide it in. So she didn’t end up getting this generator because she thought it would be too much trouble.

Lindsey Reiach and Jim Miller were instrumental in getting the supplementary emergency report written. Lindsey R. works with Mirka, and Jim Miller is a planner. They wrote this report that tried to give some of the advice that LJ and Mirka had observed or that others had told them and that could be added to the emergency plan.

If Bob Boyd and his committee feel that there’s something in this interim emergency document, they can incorporate it into their plan, LJ said. But it could also stand alone. It was designed for a very specific purpose, to lay out the procedures for dealing with another ice storm in the same winter.

Asked what other changes she would recommend for future emergencies, LJ mentioned the need for better record keeping and better security at the EOC. At one point during the emergency response, police working out of the Gore Road site noticed that one of the volunteer drivers was ‘known to them’ (i.e., possibly as a criminal). They started to ask LJ and Mirka questions about how the city was screening (or not screening) the volunteers, she said, “and of course we realized that no, the volunteers weren’t screened at all, and that in future, we should set up some kind of a system where we at least can put the person’s name through a [computerized background check]. Because we could have had an incident ... with money being stolen, or an assault.”

In that one case, they thanked the person very much for their help but told him he was no longer needed. The EOC was winding down operations anyway, and was only planning to have one person staffing the centre that night. LJ recalls hearing that the person got angry. “Because also when you think about it, all these volunteers were given free meals, every meal of the day for seven days. They’d been well-fed.”

At that point they really didn’t have any other volunteers working as volunteer drivers. They had some names they would call if they were needed. John Giles would have more information about this.

LJ and Mirka have recommended that Human Resources be put in charge of making sure that there’s some way of screening volunteers in any future emergency. The police can set up their computer and be doing background checks on anyone who volunteers.

Kingston police have a little office set up in the basement of the Gore Road offices, and they might even have a computer set up there. If that were to be used as an emergency site again, the police would be right there.

Turning to the prepared questions, LJ said she knew the nature and scale of the emergency fairly early on. The central library was down, and wasn’t going to come up for “many, many days,” and she knew that on Thursday. The branches couldn’t operate without the central library being up and running. “That was magnified many times over in every area of the city.”

Asked whether money was a concern, LJ said there were limitations on what could be spent. For example, she and the others in the call centre at City Hall would loved to have equipped the building with a brand new phone centre, complete with a system to record the number of calls that came in, but they knew that wasn’t possible. “I think we’re all used to [limiting spending] ... having worked in the municipal sector for so long, we’re automatically geared up to ‘what’s the minimal we can do, how can we do it for less.’”

Everyone was generous and did as much as they could, she said. She remembers talking to Tony Deodato, who had just made a huge donation to the Utilities building. She caught him on a Saturday night, at home, he’d just come in, and he said he didn’t know if he could do anything because all his workers were gone. The next morning, there was fresh fruit at City Hall. “He had managed it somehow.” People routinely gave, and gave again.

LJ said it was a great experience for her to work closely with colleagues at City Hall who she would otherwise rarely, if ever, see. It was also a very good experience for staff members who didn’t work in the same municipality to come together, she said.

Her biggest problem may have been that move from City Hall over to Gore Road, LJ said. There were some tensions around that whole move. People asked why this had to be done, what it meant, etc. Some people even questioned why LJ and Mirka were put in charge. “There was a little of that, not much, but it was a confusing time,” she said. “And when you’re on your own turf, City Hall, it’s different when you’re moving outside of your turf, and when you’re asking other city managers if their staff members can come with you to the new location.”

Mirka and LJ’s authority was challenged at the first meeting that was held to discuss the move, but they explained that they’d been asked to carry out this task. “There was a variety of grumbles [from other managers, etc.], partially at the task and partially at the assigning of it. But quite frankly ... it wasn’t as if [Gardner Church] picked Mirka and I out. I think he had asked other people around the table who wanted to do this, and some of them just said no because they were burned out, they needed a break, they needed to get back to their regular operations.” LJ was not as burned out because she didn’t come in to the Utilities building and City Hall until Friday.

Gender bias may have played a role in the way other managers and staff received the news about Mirka and LJ’s authority over the new EOC, LJ said. “There was certainly some of that, I would think.”

This gender split was reflected in other parts of the emergency response as well, LJ agreed. “Yes, definitely. The men were out there dealing with the branches and clearing the roads,” while the women were often put in charge of things like securing donations or making and delivering food, she said.

Each department had its own (defunct) emergency plan when the ice storm hit, but virtually no one had seen them, LJ said. The plans within the departments hadn’t been changed since amalgamation. Social Services had an extensive departmental plan, but it wasn’t updated to reflect the new organization of the city, because the new city was only seven days old. It’s really up to the commissioner of each area to create a departmental emergency plan, and there was not enough time to do that, LJ said.

Asked about her experience with the media, she said it was “very good.” Because LJ had been working on communications at City Hall, Mirka put her in charge of that area in the new centre as well. “We got calls from Ottawa, Toronto, French CBC, and all the local media. It was very good. We had no trouble at all. They were appreciative of our faxes, I know, although yes, indeed, some of them felt they were slow in getting out and maybe we could have made them shorter.”

Each fax was usually about four pages long, and dealt with everything from the weather projections to what the police were doing and what the hydro, roads and tree crews were doing. These were nice and detailed, but each one took a long time to assemble and send, so they could have been issuing shorter, more frequent communiqués.

The fax list was also so long that it tended to take a couple of hours to fax out each release. “We were faxing Ottawa, Toronto, everywhere.”