IceStorm 98 Study

Mark Segsworth (MS) is Manager of Works for the city of Kingston. He has responsibility for roads, garbage collection, and maintenance of municipal buildings.

He first became aware that Kingston might be getting an ice storm on Tuesday night (Jan. 6), when he heard weather reports about freezing rain. He had planned to play hockey on Wednesday night, but the game was cancelled due to the ice storm. One of his employees called him at home at about 4:30 or 5 a.m. on Thursday to say that they had had a "wild night," that power was out everywhere, and that the city was a mess.

Garbage and recycling collection was cancelled on the first day of the storm. All of the collection employees had shown up for work at 6 a.m. as usual, but the decision was made not to send them out because it was too icy. “It was pretty wild out there, they had power lines down and everything like that.”

Hearing that garbage and recycling collection had been cancelled, MS figured the situation must be pretty serious and went in early, at about 6:30 a.m. Power was out at the main city works yard at Division and Railway streets. “It was dark, and it was eerie all over,” he said. The phones were ringing off the hook, and nobody knew really the extent of what was going on. “At that point in time we weren't really sure what was happening, but everybody was reporting on how wild it looked down in the inner city, you know the trees were all over, the power lines [were down]...”

MS made a bunch of phone calls to try and get a better handle on the situation. He recalls that the transit buses were being sent out at 6:30 a.m., and some of the guys (transit employees) were coming in on the radio saying “this is crazy,” because they had power lines everywhere. MS’s own employees had been working all night moving trees off roads and cooperating with PUC linemen just to keep things functioning.

MS phoned John Giles at Kingston Transit and said there were problems; sometime after that, the buses were cancelled. All the managers were then summoned to a meeting at the Utilities building that Thursday morning, at around 10 a.m. Everybody gave verbal reports on what they were finding out in the field.

MS talked to Mark Fluhrer, who is in charge of open public spaces and trees, and who had been out all night. One of the first things Fluhrer's group (and MS's group) did was try to maintain clear routes to the two main hospitals, KGH and Hotel Dieu. Fluhrer was out on the road, and he decided which routes should be kept open.

After a night of using city works and environment staff to manually pull trees off the roads, someone came up with the idea of using snow plows to do the job. That proved “pretty effective,” and things seemed to be coming under some semblance of control, at least in terms of clearing the roads.

At the first control group meeting, everybody had their say on what they observed. No emergency had been called yet. MS can't recall whether there was talk about setting up shelters yet. He had trouble remembering what went on in that meeting, and he was too busy during the storm to keep a log of events.

“Once we got kind of settled into the fact that it was a state of emergency, you just kept going and going and going,” and didn't think about record-keeping, he said.

MS’s birthday fell on Jan. 8 (the first full day of the storm). He had been planning to go out to lunch that day, but that was cancelled in a hurry.

He tried to go home every night during the storm to eat, but he wasn’t eating some nights until after midnight. But he made an effort to at least get home for a couple of hours each night, in order to keep fresh and spend a bit of time with his wife.

The roads side of the response was up and running 24 hours a day, seven days a week, but MS didn't feel he needed to be there every step of the way, because he had some of his supervisors working midnights, and had that end of things covered fairly well.

“There's no way that you could keep going without sleep,” he said. “You'd come home, get a couple hours sleep, and go back again.”

Some days he didn't see his two sons at all. It was his oldest son's birthday on the Friday [Jan. 9]. MS got home for an hour or two so they could open their presents together. But visits home were usually interrupted by a steady stream of phone calls, so they weren’t very satisfying.

MS and his group didn’t fully realize what they were dealing with until Friday or so, because the situation somewhat deteriorated on Thursday, and got worse again on Friday. [That was the point at which the PUC said there was no hope of getting the electrical system back up and running for at least several more days, and possibly longer].

On Friday, he recalls hearing some talk about barricading the city off. “A lot of these things came out, you know, different ideas of how the heck to ... because there was some concerns about the dangers to people. It was just unbelievable to see the people walking underneath the trees taking pictures ... It was wild. I don’t know how we got through that without a big limb falling on somebody.” [One woman did sustain minor injuries when a branch fell on her on Thursday morning].

“It just scared the hell out of me, just seeing that people were out walking around and driving and looking. It was just like ‘stay the hell home, everybody! I know it's pretty wild to see, but it wasn’t helping the situation.’”

It was a state of emergency, yet they were trying to keep everything going, MS said. His group was trying to look after roads, yet they couldn’t keep people from driving or walking around inside the emergency area. (Police did cordon off some areas while crews were working, but the city was never barricaded off).

MS didn’t go outside the old city until Friday, when he had his first look at the rest of the city. He toured the former townships to get a handle on where the priorities were. There were some major problems in areas like the Milton subdivision (along Hwy. 2, past the army base). Trees were down, power was out. MS did his best to make sure they weren’t concentrating all of their efforts on the old city, because there were problems all over.

Public works staff were already thinking in terms of the whole new city of Kingston because the department dealt with a major snow storm on Jan. 1, MS said. There might have been a tendency for some city employees to focus on the old city first, but MS thinks the earlier snow storm gave his department an edge and a greater awareness of problems in the former townships. “We had a semblance of an operation in all areas of the new city, so we were somewhat prepared to deal with the localized problems in [the former townships].” Hard-hit areas included the Reddendale section of Kingston Township, and areas along Hwy. 2 and some of the northern sections of Pittsburgh Township. There were also some downed hydro poles along some roads in the former townships.

“You had to get out and see what was going on, and keep getting updated,” MS said. He was trying to be everywhere, managing his own crews and also spending some time in the field. Works employees also worked closely with the forestry and hydro crews, he said.

As “the roads guy” and as someone who had never dealt with this kind of emergency before, MS found himself wanting to “barge in and clear off your roads.” But he couldn’t necessarily do that, because he had to follow the hydro crews. He says he found himself jumping into areas where he probably didn’t belong. For example, he jumped in on some of the tree clearing, but learned that he couldn’t just barge in and start hauling branches off trees. He learned a lot about arboreal culture, and found out that clearing away hangers and other tasks have to be done in a systematic way. “You can’t just go in and clear the streets and [have] everything fall in behind you. And that’s what was happening in a lot of areas. We were sort of cleaning off the streets from curb to curb, but then you’d have more branches falling in behind you. And that was a bit of a problem, because that’s where we felt some frustration setting in. You’d think that you had these areas cleared up, and yet it would all be falling in behind you.”

Workers were not always sure whether downed wires were live, because communications was not always effective or up to date. It took a few days to get it functioning fairly smoothly together, because it was a brand new city, and there wasn’t a whole lot of attention to detail before amalgamation, MS said. “A lot of people just kind of showed up for work on Jan. 2, [saying] ‘what do I do now.’ Then we were five days into this emergency. It was just a coincidence.”

People say the ice storm was a great bonding exercise, and MS agrees, but he said “in reality, it just pushed us back that much further, too.” People weren’t sure of what their new duties were going to be in the new city, and some of them just found things to do during the emergency that were unrelated to their jobs. “Maybe some of the things they were hired for, they should have been doing.” He wouldn’t name names, because it was a unique situation and doesn’t necessarily bear on dealing with emergencies in the future. But he said that was a problem.

“But it came together pretty good. I don’t want to take away any of the efforts at all of what we accomplished, because it was amazing, how we did work together. But under the surface, there was a lot of [confusion] about what we were supposed to be doing in the new city, and we were doing different things ... It was new to us all, the new city, so we weren’t really sure what our responsibilities were ... So yeah, sure, we bonded well and all that, but it’s too bad it didn’t happen a year from now.”

One problem they had on Friday was that the Kingston Township roads garage was out of power. It had been out of power since Thursday, and that was a problem that MS and his group needed to address. It was unfortunate that he didn’t get out there until the Friday, he said. They used a generator from the army base to power that station up. Before that, it was operating in darkness, which made it impossible to do things like run the equipment needed to repair the vehicles. MS said “I guess you can’t think of everything at once. It took till Friday. But we got that squared away.”

MS knew they were out of power, but didn’t recognize the full extent of the problem until he visited the roads garage. [In addition to the main works yard in the old city, there are sub-stations in the former KT, another one on Gardiners Road and one off Middle Road and Hwy. 15. His department also works out of the Middle Road MTO patrol yard when necessary.]

It was helpful to have several different yards in diverse locations during the crisis, MS said.

How did you set priorities?

“Basically you get reports from everybody, and you try to deal with them as best you can. I had one supervisor looking after Pittsburgh Twp., one looking after the inner city and one looking after Kingston Township. It worked pretty well that way, and we tried to keep a handle on things. And I think we did a fabulous job from the point of view of clearing the roads. I thought we kept the roads open. There were blocks where they had downed wires and things, and as soon as they got powered out, we got in there and pushed all the trees and everything else out of the way and cleared the roads curb to curb.”

His crews were able to settle in and get a bit of a rhythm going. But they realized they took a back seat to the forestry crews and the hydro crews. “We couldn’t go ahead of them; we sort of had to go behind them. So we were basically out there clearing what we could clear, but we were ready to be called where we were needed. We were kind of the trail.”

Forestry crews were needed to clear out the overhanging hazards, and they had to work closely with the hydro crews as the hydro crews restored power. By the time Saturday rolled around, all three groups (works, forestry and hydro) were working in designated areas, or quadrants, of the city.

MS went out to the Utilities building to meet with forestry and hydro crews. They would have meetings at night or first thing in the morning, to make sure everybody knew where they were going that day. Works crews put themselves at the beck and call of the hydro and forestry crews, who led the way. “It took a day or two to get that rolling, instead of everybody heading off in their own direction, we had to fall back in,” he said.

Did you think about your authority to act, and where did that authority come from?

“I don’t think we needed to be told what our roles were and all that ... We saw where some problems were, with communication, and with crews not being staggered or oriented in the proper sequence. That happened a few times. Roads crews, forestry crews, chipping crews and hydro crews. It took a day or so before we got proper orientation.”

He doesn’t think any one thing or person established the direction of the various crews. “I think it just sort of happened. I don’t think anybody stepped in and said ‘you’re doing this, you’re doing that.’”

Does this seem like a problem, or a lack of leadership?

“I don’t know. I don’t know exactly why it didn’t happen right off the bat. I think we all weren’t sure exactly what we were dealing with, and the full extent.”

On Sunday morning, MS and a group of other people went up in an army helicopter to survey the damage. There were three people from Utilities, three from Public Works, and a couple of guys from Ontario Hydro. They were looking for blocked roads and other problems. The fly over “basically confirmed what we had felt on the ground,” MS said. “It also demonstrated how much progress we had made as well, with opening up roads.”

By Sunday, almost all streets were passable. The helicopter tour was just meant to confirm that. The Hydro people also wanted to survey their main power lines, and look at priority areas.

Was money a concern?
“Money, money. I don’t really think it was. If it was something we needed, or something we needed to do, we just did it ... I don’t think we needed to be told to ... after things got set into this mode of this emergency, we knew what we had to do, and nobody was really worried about the nickels and dimes, and I certainly don’t think we spent anything foolishly, but I’ll tell you, a lot of money was spent.”

He has no idea how much was spent, but said it’s “in the millions.”

“It did get out of control. It got out of control with out of town crews, who had to be paid, and you couldn’t keep track of who was who or where people were from. That was rough. People were being sent here and sent there. Somebody would show up and say ‘this person sent me here, and I can do this.’ ... There were too many different people and too many different things. You didn’t know exactly who was doing what. But I think those of us that were delivering the hard services, I don’t think there was much of a problem there, but it was just a lot of other things on the periphery.”

Some of the out-of-town workers may have stopped in Kingston to get free gas before heading off to Ottawa or wherever. “It kind of got a little hairy sometimes. Just so many different people.”

He tried to record who filled up for gas and where they were from, but they didn’t have a person monitoring the gas pumps at all times. “It was amazing, the amount of resources and power. Wow.”

Denis Leger asked for a final figure on what the works department spent, and MS assembled that at the end of January, early February.

From the roads end of thing, they didn’t need to bring in outside crews. They were basically able to handle their responsibilities without outside help, because they weren’t looking after the trees or the power lines. So they were fortunate in that respect, MS said. However, public works did spend quite a bit on over time and things like road salt. “We used just a pile of salt. Those salt trucks were just a steady stream coming in.”

“One thing about this whole [emergency] was that the public seemed to appreciate municipal employees for a while,” MS said.

Despite this, road crews have felt a bit left out in the rush to give credit to hydro employees. “One thing that kind of rubs the guys [in public works] the wrong way is that all the accolades have gone to the utilities people for the marvellous job that they did during the ice storm, and there’s no mention made of roads or the forestry crews,” MS said.

People were out of power, and they got it restored, so they focused on the hydro side, MS said. “It just seems that that’s where the focus was. And [it’s true that] power was out. That was the biggest thing about the ice storm. People were out for seven days. And through the works of the hydro crews and the lineman, power was restored sooner than most people imagined it would be. But there really has been no mention made of the contribution of the many other people involved.”

People made “pretty good money” during the ice storm, MS said, but that doesn’t take away from the effort by city employees. “Quite frankly, the effort by the employees was fabulous.” The city cancelled garbage and recycling collection on Thursday and Friday, but public works employees picked up what they could on the Saturday and Sunday. Regular service was restored on Monday. “We tried as best we could to maintain the services that we’re responsible for, while dealing with a 100-year event ... And our guys did a great job. Just a great job. You didn’t hear anybody complaining, and nobody was bitching about this or that. They just kind of came in and did whatever they were assigned to do that day. It was great. It really was.”

Segsworth said it was “kind of nice for [him] too” because it got him away from desk work for a while. “It was nice to get out and see the people, see the employees, see exactly what we were doing ... it was nice to get out and about. You had that kind of talking back and forth [about] where we needed to shift some resources, and so forth.”

Some people probably didn’t want the emergency to end, MS said. “It was quite a machine we had going there.”

As long as people were out of power, the emergency had to carry on, MS said, but to a certain extent, the real emergency period was the first three or four days.

How did you make decisions?
“You had to make them on the fly. You had to be totally connected to what was going on. Everybody had their cell phones, and that was quite a [?] sometimes, the cell phones didn’t work. Communications were a big problem, there was no question about that.”

For one thing, everybody was on different frequencies and had different types of radios because they still had the old equipment left over from before amalgamation. “So that was a big problem. You couldn’t really have too much radio contact ... So we had to communicate by cell phone, and then those got overloaded.”

“The damn cell phones ... I guess I heard at one point that it was jammed up, the cell phones weren’t operable,” he said. At that point they were stuck with two-way radios, but you couldn’t always get the person you wanted to get because they were on a different frequency.

Two main issues need to be addressed for any future emergencies, MS said: communications and back-up power to some of the city’s facilities. None of the public works buildings have back-up power. The problem is that the city may not be able to afford to equip all its buildings with generators, MS said.

Another area that needs to be addressed is the choice of emergency operations centres. The Staff College, which was fully equipped as an EOC, was never used. In hindsight, MS thinks it was probably a bad idea to use City Hall as the EOC. “It didn’t seem like a bad idea at the time, but it was quite a media circus.”

It’s hard to say if anything would have made the emergency shorter in duration, MS said. The city is still dealing with the mess out there, and will be dealing with it for “quite some time to come.” He didn’t want to have his staff do a massive clean-up right away, while the snow was still on the ground, and find out in the Spring that people’s back yards were still full of branches from the storm. That would have required another full sweep through the city to get the remaining yard waste. “It’s amazing how much is still in people’s yards, that they haven’t cleaned up.”

What was your biggest problem during the storm?
“Communication. There’s no question. The communication is something that really needs to be thought through ... I think we will get on a uniform system, eventually, all our vehicles, so we can communicate with one another directly through two-way radio. But if the communications tower gets knocked down, who knows.”

What would you do differently?

“I don’t know. I guess there’s a natural tendency to jump right in, and possibly we would have been better off to sit down for a bit and think some of these things through a little bit. But there again, it was one of those things where we didn’t fully appreciated what we were dealing with. We take a position that we deal with emergencies all the time; a major snowstorm, flooding, whatever, that’s part of our job. But I don’t know if anybody really fully appreciated exactly what we were dealing with.”

After a day or two, they got into a rhythm. Once the city was divided into quadrants, life was easier.

What have you changed or will you change as a result of the ice storm?

“I think we all have a little better appreciation of what everybody else has to deal with, and as a result of the ice storm we have a better appreciation of what other people are doing, and what they’re up against. But as well, it’s almost like ‘well that was then, and we’re carrying on.’ It’s sort of like ‘we dealt with that, let’s move on.’”

Did you have an emergency plan, and was it useful?

“Yes, we did, and it was useful. But I think collectively we all weren’t as familiar with the plan as we would have been under normal circumstances ... I looked at it, but you kind of flew by the seat of your pants a lot, too. We changed our direction when we needed to. To describe how the whole thing went, it changed hourly, I guess.”

That made sticking to the city’s interim emergency plan tough. And the plan itself is more general in nature, generally defining the roles and responsibilities of the various players. “The detail is something that comes on the spot.”

Municipal control group meetings grew to a point where they were a bit unwieldy, MS said. He would recommend that they be kept smaller, as outlined in the emergency plan. But he said it’s hard to know who or what kind of information to cut. “Everything that everybody had to offer was of value. There’s no question about it. So how do you leave people out?”

MS has been involved in a few emergency planning committees for the city, but hasn’t had a whole lot of emergency training. “We were all just basically doing the best we could in the circumstances. We weren’t necessarily following an orchestrated plan. It was just dealing with whatever came your way. Somebody would run up to you and say ‘what about this,’ and you’d be trying to solve that problem, and you’d be all over the place. There was a lot of [multitasking] going on, and a lot of connecting with the right people.”

Duplication was also a problem. “There were so many different things going on, and everybody definitely had the noblest of intentions, but they’d often be sent out on a task, not realizing that somebody over here might be doing the same thing. It definitely got a little confusing at times,” MS said.

One day, somebody showed up with a 500 gallon tank, and they were going to use the city yard to refuel generators. MS forgets who supplied the tank, but he knows it was never used. “It just sat there, and we ended up paying for the cost of fuelling it up and then draining the tank and hauling it away.” Nobody really knew who sent it there. You couldn’t trace it back to a single person making the request. MS happened to be at the city yard when the truck and tank showed up, and although his first instinct was to send the person away, he had no idea what the plan was for the tank, so he ended up storing it at the yard and filling it up with fuel. “It was in the way, and they came to fill it up, and that’s the last place we wanted it.”

Volunteers also kept showing up at the city yard, saying they were told to come there and that they would be assigned a job. “People were just showing up, and you don’t want to tell them ‘We don’t want your help,’ but that was the last thing we really wanted to do was just take volunteers out and put them in trucks, or what were we supposed to do? And they were being sent there. Nobody told them that we needed help. There were all kinds of assumptions made.”

MS did wind up sending away some of the volunteers, and this didn’t make people happy. “People were kind of getting put out, too. You know, they felt ‘how can anyone turn down me helping them?’ But it was confusing enough trying to get our people doing what was the most effective thing at that point in time, without throwing in a bunch of volunteers. We didn’t really want to take on that responsibility.”

In some areas, you can throw too many people at the situation, MS said. “It gets in the way, and we really didn’t need them at that point in time.”

In the end, the city wound up using volunteers and the army in a coordinated effort to pull brush off the lawns and out onto the road, where works crews would then clean it up. Those efforts were coordinated by somebody else, and public works would work in conjunction with them.

Some of the people who showed up and presented themselves as helpers turned out to be contractors who were looking for work. Public works did use some contractors, hiring trucks to help with the clean-up, but they [public works] initiated it, so it was better controlled.

Did you have any contact with provincial or federal emergency measures?
MS had a brief conversation with someone from Emergency Measures Ontario on the first Thursday night (Jan. 8) to try and get generators from the army base. But apart from that he had no contact with either agency, and couldn’t comment on their role in the response. He also had limited contact with the media. He made one or two comments to journalists on Thursday, Jan. 8, but that was the extent of his contact with TV or newspaper reporters. He saw very little media coverage during the storm because he was working such long hours, and because CKWS wasn’t on the air for most of the emergency.

MS’s own house, which is right in the Village of Sydenham, was in a small pocket that only lost power for brief periods of time. “We’d have power out for a few hours here and there, and you weren’t ever sure how long it would last. A lot of our friends would come over and have showers at our house, because in the country, when you don’t have power, you don’t have running water.”

Some of his friends were saying the ice storm was “kind of a neat thing” because everybody was home and all together, but MS’s wife couldn’t share that sentiment. He wasn’t there. “And you know the kids were a little bit upset because everybody else’s father was there, but not theirs ... They were sort of stuck in Sydenham, and everybody wanted to stay where they were.” His youngest son drew a picture at school that showed three people sleeping in the living room. MS wasn’t in the picture.

“So that was the hard part, just not being sure what was happening at home, and you couldn’t always call because the phones were out sometimes. That’s why I made it home every night, even if it was only for a couple of hours, at least I was able to spend an hour or so with my wife. Missed the kids quite a bit, but it helped.”

One of his most vivid memories from the storm was the helicopter ride. It was bitterly cold, and he remembers standing out on the runway at Norman Rogers Airport, getting briefed on crash landing procedures. Once on the helicopter, they realized it was overloaded and had to sit on the runway and burn off some fuel for a while. After touring the old city, they came back to the airport and dropped a few people off, while the rest of them (including MS) went back up and flew over to Wolfe Island to see the damage there. They saw the CKWS transmission tower, which was crumpled to the ground, and a number of other things before realizing they had about a minute and a half of fuel left to get back to the airport. MS and a guy from Hydro were giving directions to the pilot to go here and there to look at different things, and all of a sudden they got word from the pilot (over a headset) that there was about a minute and a half left of fuel. MS said his heart was beating pretty fast, but he felt they were in good hands. They got back to the airport safely.

MS believes there are “far too many positives in the whole [emergency response] to focus on the negatives ... It was a tremendous effort. No one group of employees or one department or one agency could have pulled it off on their own. It took a collective effort, and that’s how it was dealt with. So sure, all the way through there was, oh, Christ, you get little bitching at each other and lack of sleep and edginess and all sorts of different things. And I think for the future there are some fairly well-recognized areas that need to be addressed [like communications, the choice of command centres, and the size of the emergency control group]. But there are just far too many positives to focus on the negatives.”

One of his only regrets is that he didn’t keep records during the storm. “It’s wrong, I know it’s wrong. But it’s like the last thing [you think about] ... I knew it at the time that I should have documented it.”

He does have slides from the storm, but he wishes he had better ‘before’ shots to show the contrast.