IceStorm 98 Study

Mark Fluhrer (MF) was Manager of Natural Environment for the City of Kingston when the ice storm hit. That included responsibility for parks, public open space, and outdoor facility maintenance. It also included environmental concerns relevant to the natural environment, and the other public works and transportation department’s responsibilities. Also included in that was solid waste disposal, which included a recycling facility, yard waste and a composting facility, as well as former landfills and one landfill that’s still operational in the east end of the city.

Six weeks before this interview, he became Manager of Parks. Brian Sheridan’s position was eliminated. The Public Works and Transportation Department has also been abolished. Everybody has separated and gone to other areas. MF’s new job includes parks, open space, public open space, outdoor facility maintenance, the urban forest, etc.

He has worked for the city for approximately two years.

When did you first realize the full magnitude of the ice storm?
It was around 8 or 9 p.m. on Jan. 7 (the Wed.). That was his first week that he was no longer on duty; he used to be a supervisor and was on duty, but he had a new supervisor in place. “He called me to let me know that freezing rain was becoming increasingly more critical, and that he had a couple of calls about tree limbs and trees down, and he felt confident that he could handle it, but he needed to know if I was available in case he had more difficulty. So it was about that time, 8 to 10 o’clock, in that neighbourhood, that I started cluing in.”

He got another call at about 10, and at that time he decided to go out for a bit and take a look around, to make sure everything was all right. “The joke amongst ourselves now is that I said to my wife ‘I’ll be out for a few minutes, I’ll be right back,’ and three days later I came home.”

At that point it started to break. The parks department was averaging about 20 to 30 phone calls every half-hour or so. They were coming in from all sides and on all communication devices, from cell phones to portable radios and truck radios. Finally they got so overwhelmed that MF told his staff to “forget it, the whole city is in a kafuffle, and therefore we might as well just record [the calls] and we’ll get them later.”

At that point they called in as many staff as they could get in. Priority was given to bringing in people with experience in arboreal culture and forestry. They had two crews going at that point just trying to keep the roads open, working with the worst conditions of the situation.

The magnitude of the event changed everyone’s perspective on what was ‘serious’ and what was not. “What used to be a critical situation now became a commonplace. We now had incredibly critical situations on our hands. Even then we were trying to prioritize those as best we could and were finding it very difficult. Very quickly it got to the point where we realized that most of the main roads, most of the power lines associated with those main roads, and all routes were being cut off by falling trees and other obstructions, etc.”

At that point, around midnight, they stopped trying to open the streets up with human beings (i.e., cutting them and rolling the branches out of the way) and started using snow plows and backhoes instead. MF called the works department to ask for the equipment to help keep the main routes open. He contacted police and fire to determine what were the most important routes to keep open; they selected two routes to the main hospitals (Hotel Dieu and KGH), and worked very hard to keep those two routes open until the following morning. “That was about all we could do.”

They had to work with the Utility to get a stay or a hold off and a guarantee that power would be off when parks crews went out to plow trees off the lines. At that time most of the grids were down anyway, so they didn’t have to worry. “But we were just plowing, literally plowing trees off the streets. It was incredible.”

He had never used snow plows to clear away trees before, and it’s not something that had ever entered his mind before, but it seemed to make sense. Something was needed to speed the whole thing up and get the roads clear.

Hard to say who came up with that idea. “It’s hard to take credit for anything. Everybody pitched in and came up with some good ideas. It was really a team result as well. Really you did have to depend on others. The volume and the immensity of the situation lent itself to you only being able to do so much. You had to depend on the others, not just in technical skill or ability but in sheer volume.” This changed people’s interactions with each other, which is probably something that happens in most emergencies, MF said.

MF had not had any emergency training. “Not really. Not in this sense.”

MF spent his time in the field, but he was also managing the natural environment group. “I was doing it all, in that sense. There was no way to be anywhere but [in the field].”

MF and his people tended to meet at the Utilities building. They would gather there at 5:30 or 6 a.m., and that became the operational centre, for the most part, “because most of the situations that were most critical were associated with power, and the prime objective was at that point to restore power. Given that, we had to work with the utility to do that, so therefore we all centred at that point.”

They then decided on communication systems and who would report to who, and how they would funnel information. They set up a couple of posts where the power was on, and had office staff come in and man the phones. Then they had others to support the posts. For example, when the regular phones and the cell phones went down, they relied on people to literally run information by hand from one person or place to the next.

They then organized very quickly a team from the technical services engineering group to go out and start analysing the damage, and assessing what the situations were, recording them, taking photographs, plotting damage on maps so they could identify the areas. [We get disconnected at this point, and I call back].

“That’s basically what we did from thereafter, was then prioritize, work with utilities, work with the emergency agencies, working with ourselves as the public works group, keeping transportation routes open, working with the bus service, working with police and fire, working with ambulances and other emergency services, trying go again work on a system, go keep all the main roads or routes open, then identify them and pass that information on.”

Keeping all of that information up to date was an “an incredibly huge effort. We had a very capable and competent technical staff that assisted us in that. And then we had other people who worked for the city who helped in that capacity.” They pulled in people from all over the municipality and Ontario to help with that effort.

“It was a monumental task,” he said, but Kingston got lucky by being twinned with Toronto and receiving help from such a large centre. “We were very lucky. Luckily it wasn’t a small borough someplace.” He counted about 55 or 56 people from other departments and cities who came down to Kingston to help with the response. “They had aerial trucks, over centre aerial trucks, chipper trucks, you name it, it was an incredible show of support. And that went on for quite a while, actually. The estimated value of that support is in around the quarter million mark.”

One group of tree workers charged Kingston $27,000 for sending its crews down. That covered everything from overtime to cellular phone costs and accommodation.

Asked about reports that some tree workers from Western Ontario threatened to leave Kingston as a result of conflicts with the works and environment department, MF said there are always rumours, but said any reports about conflicts are unfounded.

“Sure, there were rumours and things that have been started about different organizations, but when you really dug down there was nothing substantial to apply to it. That’s just human nature ... Rumours are people talking.”

“We weren’t able to find any substance [to the rumours]. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t any, it just means we couldn’t find any. We felt satisfied that everybody was somewhat satisfied, and of course there are going to be some people not completely happy with all ... Well, there’s just nothing here to even talk about. There were things like rumours this or rumours that, but like I say, we investigated it, looked into it, phoned both parties that were supposedly involved, and neither one understood what was being discussed. So nothing really that I know of. But maybe I’m just not in the loop.”

MF identified two main areas that could have been improved on: communications and co-ordination amongst the different departments. He said it “would have been nice” to have the emergency plan in place before the storm, but there was nothing that could have been done to avoid the fact that it was still interim. He doesn’t remember if he’d read the draft plan or not, but says it doesn’t matter because the plan’s core ideas weren’t implemented. (The EOC was changed, etc.)

MF doesn’t think City Hall worked well as an operation centre. The Utilities building was better for operations. “There are two main functions: one is the community needs, and the other is to run the operations, in other words go facilitate the utility, open the roads, maintain the sewers, get the water plant going, etc. And it’s hard to do that when you’re trying to operate in a room full of people who are looking for bed sheets and food and clothing ... it just doesn’t seem to fit. You’d have people spilling in, well-meaning, but it’s hard to organize at best when you have crews coming from all over Ontario go assist you, and different organizations and groups to suddenly deal with, and then of course you have many critical situations all at once that need to be dealt with. It’s impossible to try and do that and float at the same time the other needs.”

Communications were dicey during the emergency, primarily because the phone system was unreliable. Bell phones were operating, and then they stopped working for about a day or two, at which point they had nothing. His group did have radios, and some of those operated, some didn’t.

Pre-planned communication was also problematic, and again that goes back to the fact that the emergency plan was in draft form. Bob Boyd’s new plan seems to address most of these problems. It’s clear-cut whose in charge, who does what, and that should make it possible to limit the number and variety of different organizations and people placing calls on emergency lines in the future. Communication technology and pre-planned communication are also interrelated, he said, because “if you’ve only got one phone line and one link, then you want to keep the calls to the absolute minimum, and avoid difficulty on everybody’s part.”

“Everybody and their dog called us [during the storm].” That included everybody from private citizens to other agencies within Kingston and local officials. “And of course we had ongoing calls coming from internal, just to try to operate the system. And so we had all those mixing together.”

There was no real system for fielding calls; “it was just using people who are already trained and know what is the best way to handle a certain situation under certain circumstances.”

Works and environment people are used to dealing with crises because it’s an integral part of their job, MF said, and this may have made it easier for them to deal with the storm. “Everybody’s running around in a flap; and we basically said this is what we do every day, once things got under control. Trees falling across roads, on top of cars, lines down, houses damaged, people upset. This is basically what we do. But it was on a grand scale, times one hundred thousand or something of that nature.”

MF estimates that his crews did about one or two years’ worth of work in one week. “Everything changed. Everything went up about 10 notches on the scale. What you used to think was important became unimportant or at least not as important, and you would then work your way from there up. Once you adjusted to that, it was difficult to adjust your way back ... People would say ‘there’s a limb on my house,’ and you’d just say ‘so what, is anybody dead?’ That’s a joke, but anything less than a disaster seems like it’s commonplace.”

MF held debriefings every morning with his crew at about 5:30 a.m., and only the most critical cases received immediate attention. Normally if someone called to report a tree on a roof, works and environment crews would be out there at 3 a.m. dealing with it, MF said, but this way you’d just say “‘oh well, we’ll get there when we get there’ ... We couldn’t have dealt with them all at once, so that was the way we had to do it.”

MF had about 40 full-time crews that were used during the storm. That includes environment and waste disposal employees as well. There were also about 54 people from out of town who were specialists in trees.

Some of the things that he was concerned with included: “The stress factors on the trees themselves, one laying against another; their proximity to buildings, people, public safety was the biggest concern, obviously, and then property is after that. After that you then have to look at potential for the potential for subsequent damage, or late onset damage, which we’re still dealing with and will be for quite a while.”

Six months after the ice storm, his people are finding limbs that are falling off now that are fully leaved. They were fractured and stressed during the storm, and now they’ve got weight on them and they’re falling. Now they’re cracked within themselves and they can’t hold the weight and they fall. “This is ongoing. So this is our big concern; the immediate danger, and the late onset danger.”

Trees will usually die if they’ve sustained about 50 percent damage, plus or minus. “They equate it to the early Norman days when a soldier would lose their arm and they’d be dead. In other words, eventually they would lose enough blood and go into shock and they couldn’t recover. Anything over 50 or 60 percent of the canopy loss, you might as well say the tree will not be able to produce enough food and therefore won’t be able to support itself.”

Between 2,000 and 3,000 of the city’s trees were damaged to such an extent that they can’t be brought back. Almost 100 percent of the city’s trees received some injury, however minor, and at least 60 percent sustained “treatable damage”.

Kingston had been working for about two years on an “aggressive life cycle management program” for the city’s trees, to bring them into a reasonable structural shape and size to meet the demands and stresses of the urban environment. They were being thinned out, shortened a little bit, rid of weakened branches and limbs, and this was being done on a “very thorough basis, through the whole city,” MF said. But, he said, short of removing the trees, you can’t prevent this from happening again. And removing the trees is, of course, not acceptable. “So in other words you just have to live with it. It’s a once in a hundred year storm.”

What was your biggest problem during the storm?
“I would suggest organization. That was probably the most important [thing]. Just understanding who does what. If we had an understanding prior to the storm, [that would have helped].”

Can you give an example of how any lack of organization affected your ability to do your job during the storm?
“I would suggest the very beginning, when we were having the occurrences; the police were phoning us, and it became a role reversal, and really nobody knew where that was. Clearly who do we call about keeping routes open. Who’s the one we call in to start setting up the emergency situation. And who calls in an emergency. All of those things were sort of in the air. If I was clearer on that I would probably have pulled the plug half way through the night instead of waiting until the morning. I would have said ‘hey, we’ve got an emergency situation here, Mr. Mayor or Mr. Whoever. We need some decisions made.’ And hopefully I could have been able to start that.”

He called his immediate superior [Brian Sheridan] to discuss the storm, but didn’t talk to the Mayor.

“If somebody like myself had the mechanisms in place, knew what the connections were, and knew who was to be called, etc., and who made those decisions, I may have foregone the initial courtesy call and made it straight at that time and said ‘we’ve got a situation here.’ But I don’t think that would have made it any easier. I don’t think it would have improved the situation. I don’t think it would have made what happened go away. It would have simply just made it easier on me as one of the many thousands of people who were working on the situation, and made me be a little more effective, that’s all.”

What have you changed as a result of the ice storm?
“My job, I guess. I don’t know. It’s too early to tell; if I had time I would have probably had a post-mortem and discussed all the issues, but we’re ongoing. We are more aware. And we’re still dealing with the ice storm. That’s ongoing. Everybody thinks it’s over. It’s not. For us it’s going to be for the next two years.”

Was money an issue?
“It was discussed that we would have an ice storm account; so we just isolated the costs related to it. We discussed them, we made decisions as a group, including the commissioner or general manager, and any major expenditures or any major initiatives we discussed it with senior staff. But for the most part kept it separate as ice storm. It was a necessity, a need, so therefore we did it. If it fit into the criteria of ‘must have,’ then we basically did it, making the decisions as best we could, having our backgrounds in what we do.”

Not taking into account the disposal or environment sections of the commission, his department spent about $1 million on the ice storm.

In general, he feels the storm was a positive experience. “I would take all positives out of that storm. I would think 99.9 percent of this was positive. The very few minor incidents or occurrences that were negative were that, very minor, and I took them to be that way. Now sure there were rumours, there were people saying things, there were misunderstandings, but that’s life. That’s human beings. You have to facilitate that and make it into the positive, turn people into the positive. And I guess we were able to do that, because we had a mandate, that was to get things on the road, to put things back in order and make it a safe and reliable place to live in. It was really a good thing as well because it kept you fairly clearly focused on what your jobs were and what you had to do. It was one of the few times in a municipal government situation that you know exactly what your job is and what you have to do. There’s no muddling here. It’s very black and white.”

It was actually rejuvenating, he said. “When we usually come over everyone is mad at us, it’s our tree that fell on their house. This one was clearly out of our control, so all of our guys were being touted as heroes. [People] were bringing out muffins and coffee to the crews, and thanking them very much and coming out and hugging them. They don’t usually experience this. They usually get told where to go. So this was a very positive experience for a lot of people, actually.”

The storm also cemented relationships within the new city. “I learned the names and personal lives of about 80 people that I wouldn’t have otherwise, at least. I thought it was the best thing that could have happened to us in a lot of ways. [The best and the worst.] Absolutely. And when they say that I know what they mean now, exactly. Everybody was inconvenienced, in many cases I would call it the mother of all inconveniences, but at the same time there were a lot of positives that came out of it. The compassion of the individual or the group would come out. People just bent over backwards. You just asked someone to do something and they did it. This was a very rare case.”

Six months after the storm, however, the honeymoon seems to be over, MF said. In a recent meeting with staff, he heard some of the first routine complaints about the job that he’s heard in months. “That had gone by the wayside; now we’re back to normal, obviously.”