IceStorm 98 Study

Marg Verbeek arrived in Brockville after dark (8:00pm) on Tuesday, January 13, by which time the power had been restored to most of the city and the streets were in good shape. Marg Verbeek noticed a lot of down trees and ice banks (first impression).

Marg Verbeek was tasked by Emergency Measures Ontario to assist Randy Reid. The emergency had been declared and an interim Warden appointed, and Marg Verbeek was to run the Emergency Operations Centre (EOC) as someone with emergency management skills. Marg Verbeek reported to the EOC at City Hall. She spent the next two weeks there, and never left the building for the first week. The second week she went for a ride along with the OPP and a fly over with the coast guard.

Marg Verbeek says that each of the local jurisdictions (Brockville, Prescott & Gananoque) had already declared so that the county's role was to coordinate resources needed by each of the townships. Marg Verbeek thought things were "well at hand" though there were problems outstanding. The local system as established was running. The county would meet twice a day, once in the morning and once in the evening and these were information sharing sessions. MV's job was to locate, collect and coordinate the distribution of resources. Marg Verbeek says that by the time she arrived many of the local townships had been given the resources they needed -- for five days in the response phase, getting cots and blankets, setting up the shelters -- the county had come together by the time Marg Verbeek arrived on site. They did not have all the resources they needed, nor was coordination up to speed -- that came later.

The night that Marg Verbeek arrived she studied the emergency plan and that gave her a good sense of how the community was structured and she concludes that the plan did not reflect the emergency plan at all "not in the truest sense" -- the plan was out of date and so forth. Roles and functions were performed during the emergency that need to be revisited. The county needs a public relations officer -- someone to get out the message on what the county is set up to do -- Marg Verbeek consulted with the Warden about getting a public relations officer from Brockville who acted on behalf of the county and Marg Verbeek had brought with her someone new to the emergency planning field so they were able to fill those resources for them. They also did not have in-house staff in the county system to run an emergency centre.

Marg Verbeek says that in general terms a plan is defined not to cover the four phases of management (mitigation, recovery, preparedness) -- they are really just a response plan in which key organizations and people are identified -- the plan allows responders to plan what kind of response they are going to mount, whatever kind of response is contemplated. The plan really serves as an initial guideline during the first hit of the emergency -- it does not go into day three, four or five. It outlines the roles and responsibilities of the individual members of the Emergency Control Group (and their group responsibilities) and can go as far as to indicate how to set up evacuation routes or procedures or how to set up an ECG. The legislation allows that if responders feel there is a need to implement the plan they are allowed to do so.

The plan is not a "to do" book -- it is a guideline, a checklist, an overview of roles and responsibilities -- not to be consulted during the emergency itself. The plan is a small component of an emergency planning program that a community could undertake. During an emergency it could be used as a checklist, but it does not tell you how to make decisions or what decision is the correct one. It simply delegates certain decisions to certain people on the basis of their function in the structure.

In the ice storm, some of the roles and functions -- it just didn't fit the role. There was no role, for example, for Marg Verbeek -- but because they have the background they understood what needed to be done during the response phase and how to go about doing it. Marg Verbeek says that she cannot comment on what parts of the plan were useful and which were not.

In Brockville they did implement their plan -- not necessarily the plan approved by council, but much more -- authority was never questioned because the (ECG) was responsible for making decisions on behalf of the county and that's what happened. Marg Verbeek looked at the Warden who was ultimately in charge on a county-wide basis and he used his ECG to make administrative decisions about how to do things. They may have questioned the ECG but Marg Verbeek does not know of such an occurrence. There will always be people who ask for resources and they will not get them and MV's group made decisions concerning whether they got that resource.

Marg Verbeek says that she was not aware of every aspect of every problem, certain problems were taken over by specific agencies.

Fire mutual aid was a system that worked extremely well. The organizational structure between the county and the townships worked well. The county set up a county-wide EOC under Randy Reid and that worked well -- Marg Verbeek worked under Reid. The organization consisted of a handful of people collecting resources and distributing them and communicating that to everyone -- like a nerve centre. In the city, where the EOC was located, they had power and phones. The reporting structure between the county and townships also worked well -- they met nightly and they worked through all of the updates and it was a good mechanism for information sharing. The county was to have had the election of a warden (term of office ended on December 31st) and so they had a couple of weeks without a warden -- and they had to appoint an interim, but they rose to that problem and did it (on January 11th or 12th). The warden was a local Reeve in one of the townships -- but no one elected official had the responsibility to do anything as an individual, but they did as a collective.

Marg Verbeek does not know how some of it came together in detail.

Marg Verbeek says the twinning concept worked very well in Leeds Grenville, and this allowed them to get physical resources such as the mobile command post. Marg Verbeek also brought generators from Western Ontario, for both groups because the stuff was not going into some large warehouse never to be seen again.

The fire mutual aid system worked well, their mutual aid system allowed them to work together on a county wide basis, such as getting CO detectors and distributing them across the county. That meant that individual chiefs did not have to go out and get resources, that all efforts of that kind were shared and pooled. It worked well that the county was able to have someone from EMO there who knew the community and could undertake a leadership role. It also worked well that the area officer in Eastern Ontario could be called in to do emergency management with them. Marg Verbeek says that one should try to mirror the day to day functions that people are already doing so that they are comfortable doing what they already know how to do.

Marg Verbeek says that it makes more sense to get people to do what they already know how to do rather than trying to get them to do something they don't do all the time.

Marg Verbeek says that when they recognized what they needed to do -- what type of resources they needed to bring in -- then they could share resources and offer up the public information officer. Those kinds of things worked really well.

Marg Verbeek says that decision-making was hard for her to assess objectively because she was part of the team. Marg Verbeek says that the control group was set up to support the local EOC and the evacuation centres. When they asked for things it was MV's job to get it for them. Some things were decided on consensus and others on the basis of their own organization -- the members of the control group had the communication flow and formal opportunities to make decisions through their scheduled meetings and they met on an ongoing basis through the emergency. These various sub-components did not wait for the meetings to cooperate with each other on an ongoing basis.

Marg Verbeek says that the plan should "image" how the county functions under normal conditions -- "we would want them doing exactly what they do." Never get anyone to do something unless they've been trained -- but in an emergency there is more pressure, more demands and so forth.

Marg Verbeek says that she cannot think of anything that did not work really well. She says that it was "tough to determine where response is over and recovery begins" -- but one cannot really draw a line between them. One begins recovery during response. What did not work well was communicating between groups, organizations and the public (for example on the role of the Army). The public understood that the army was there to do door to door, but the public thought they should also be doing recovery work. It's important, Marg Verbeek says, that the public understand what they are there to do -- but these were challenges not really problems.

Marg Verbeek says that "nothing else really comes to mind" as to what else did not work well. Marg Verbeek thinks that clear and consistent communication between the ECG and the public is crucial.

The biggest task was to keep the public up to date and informed -- that's the number one communication issue. That's why Marg Verbeek says she worked with the warden and why it was so important to have public information people. Keep feeding the public on the mechanism of the ECG and what they are doing and what progress is being made.

Marg Verbeek was able to take one step back and ensure that communication with the public was ensured.

Marg Verbeek was not on site in the first few days, so many things got underway before she arrived. She noted that liaison had been established with the utilities companies and she advocated that Hydro begin reporting on what they were expecting to have done in the next few days rather than reporting at the end of every day on what they had done. Marg Verbeek took calls all day from the public on the progress of hydro restoration.

Marg Verbeek says that there were problems with the notification system, with getting the EOC together, that the region was immediately overwhelmed by the storm. Some resources had been sent east and when the storm moved west those resources were not available. When Marg Verbeek arrived in Brockville she was brought up to date on this situation -- but she was not there to work through those problems.

Marg Verbeek says that it was to her advantage to be an outsider and not to have interests within the community -- outside help can be a help and a hindrance. She had a chance to get around and survey the community and talk with people and get a feel for a status of the emergency -- "getting your mind into that mode" -- before jumping into the work itself.

Marg Verbeek says "given the resources that they had they did extraordinarily well."

Marg Verbeek says that there are a lot of lessons learned: Public information, that a plan should be updated every two years, and parts of the plan should be exercised once a year. The trick is to get the plan up to date and then maintained. The plan can be exercised in parts, at different levels, training, all these things could be done annually in stages. Lessons learned should include information relative to backup power, an up to date inventory of generators, ongoing liaison with the public, development of a pamphlet on how to deal with an ice storm. Don't assume that because there's a plan that it's up to date and useful. Elected officials need to come to grips with the costs of preparedness and of mitigation. Someone should be tasked with updating the plan and bringing in the expertise to do it properly -- the rest is just common sense. It's one thing to have a plan, another thing to put the resources into keeping it current.

Marg Verbeek says her final impressions are that in a few short months they have not lost sight of the lessons learned. Marg Verbeek thinks they (Brockville and county) did the right thing, she would like to see some of the lessons learned put into action. The plans, however, need to be tabled and taken somewhere -- that's the last element to close the loop. They could never plan an exercise above and beyond what they had to do in the storm itself.