IceStorm 98 Study

Mirka Januskiewicz (MJ) is commissioner of strategic and corporate planning for the City of Kingston. Her main responsibility is to provide a strategy plan outlining what kind of challenges and opportunites exist in the city, and present a road map to council of how these challenges and opportunities can be used to to make Kingston grow and become more prosperous. She’s also responsible for the city’s capital budget and makes recommendations to council on which proposed development projects should be approved. It’s a very broad mandate. She supervises a staff of 11.

When the ice storm started, MJ’s department was in the process of moving from City Hall to the Gore Road offices. The rain started to come, and they all decided to go home at around 4 p.m. Nobody thought this could be the beginning of a disaster or a problem of any magnitude. The next morning, MJ had an early meeting with other senior managers. She left her home in the former Kingston Township, hopped in her car, and couldn’t understand why every other road she tried to drive down had yellow tape blocking it off. She got to King St. and found the trees “all nice and glossy,” and noticed that there was no traffic. Somehow, she found a road she could pass, and she arrived at City Hall to no one there, and a little note saying ‘everything is cancelled.’ She found a colleague who told her that there are no phones in the downtown area, and the city is really looking at the situation. Neither of them had any appreciation of the magnitude of the problem, she said.

She went back home and discovered that she didn’t have hydro. So her first contacts with the ice storm were really on the personal level, she said. “I didn’t know what was happening in the city, and I didn’t really appreciate the magnitude [or] how many municipalities would really be affected by the ice storm.”

That night she received a call from Cynthia Beach, who asked MJ if she could help at the PUC site. She gave MJ a better idea of what was happening. MJ joined the crew at the Utilities building on Friday (Jan. 9) and worked there for two or three days, until she received a call from Gardner Church, who asked her to join him at a meeting with Lynne Jordon. That evening, Church asked MJ to take responsibility for the regional emergency centre. He gave her authority to act as manager of that centre, and all authority coming with the position and the position of acting CEO, as Church was going to Toronto for one or two days.

The next afternoon, Lynne Jordon and MJ had to present a report to Mayor Bennett and the entire city management team. At that meeting, MJ informed them that they had made the decision to move the entire operations centre to Gore Road. This was her own decision, after visiting the site suggested by the emergency plan (the Correctional Staff College on Union Street) and finding it unsuitable.

MJ had an emergency group with her from Toronto Police and Toronto Fire Services. They were a “great help,” and that evening they went with MJ and Lynne Jordon to assess the Staff College as a possible replacement EOC. There were several issues that prevented them from even considering the Union Street building. MJ took into consideration that the Gore Road building had hydro, and that it was ‘her’ building. She also had the entire GIS group in the Gore Road building. That meant she had access to all maps, not only of the city of Kingston, but Frontenac County as well. Their mandate was not only to look at the services and level of services in Kingston, but also in the region outside of Kingston. She was also working closely with the base on many issues, and it was helpful to be close to CFB Kingston. They were both on the same side of the Cataraqui River, and there were no reports that there would be problems with the LaSalle Bridge.

Part of the reason for the move to Gore Rd. had to do with the need to branch out and serve the rural areas of Kingston that were so hard hit by the storm. City officials recognized that Kingston had a responsibility not only to the people in the old city core and more populated areas of the former townships but also to residents living farther afield. They were getting distress calls from places like Wolfe Island and Seeley’s Bay and from other smaller municipalities outside Kingston. The city needed to establish a warehouse facility that could receive all donations and distribute them. Generators were also a big issue. It was important to have one location, one dispatch area that could coordinate the effort of all the parties involved, MJ said. For all of these reasons, Mayor Bennett made a decision to expand City Hall’s response to the regions, and that was about the same time that MJ came into the picture.

Asked about reports of conflicts over the move to Gore Road, MJ said that in any situation like that, there are always differing opinions about how things should be handled, but she didn’t have time to get caught up in the conflicts. “If there were frictions, if there were questions asked, to tell you the truth I didn’t have time to consider it and think about it or dwell on it. I was given the task, a very important task, and I had a job to do ... Yes, there were people questioning why we were moving to Gore Road, and for the reasons I outlined above, I weighed different options, and this was the best one. If it was the ideal one, I don’t know. This is life. You have to appreciate that the people who were working in City Hall were run down. They did tremendous work, tremendous work. But they were working 18-hour shifts. I know about people working in City Hall who basically lived there. The first rule in emergency [preparedness] is you establish very rigorous rules about how many hours people are working. It’s so easy to make one decision, it’s so easy to really create more stress and more tension. This is why when we moved to this location, I limited the amount of people working on every shift. That kept changing every 12 hours ... I would never have anybody working longer hours, for the reason of safety.”

MJ believes that if the person who is responsible for the entire operation is not fresh and capable of making decisions, it’s counter-productive for everyone. “If Mirka is coming in and she is having energy to run this, it gives a level of comfort to everybody,” she said.

Lynne Jordon was her replacement/deputy, taking over the Gore Road site from MJ when MJ needed sleep or couldn’t be there. Jordon was also asked to prepare a “very specific contingency plan” to deal with the the eventuality of another ice storm in the same year. The plan was supposed to describe what the city should do and how they would reactivate the Gore Road site in case another ice storm hit.

MJ had full authority to do anything she felt was necessary to reactivate the Gore Road site. Only the Mayor can declare an emergency, but MJ had full administrative authority over the operation of the Gore Road site during the emergency.

A typical day at the Gore Road site during the emergency started with a debriefing. These were held first thing in the morning, and consisted of reports from the military, the OPP, the city police, and MJ’s own senior staff. By 8 a.m., MJ knew what had happened during the nighttime (i.e., how many generators they dispatched, how many and what kind of distress calls they received, how they were doing with volunteers, etc.). All those things she knew from the city operation. Then at 9 a.m., she would get a debriefing from the military. They were looking out not only for the City of Kingston but the “entire picture,” she said. They were also giving her recommendations. They recommended when to go and check out a house, and kept her informed about things like the number of troops and RMC cadets taking part in door-to-door checks. At the same time, she had the OPP, Frontenac County and City of Kingston, giving their own updates on what happened during the night, where they stood, and what they needed. The same was true of the city police.

“It was wonderful. At 9 o’clock I had the entire picture: what is going on, where we are, what are the areas which need immediate attention.”

After that, she gave directives to the staff, and checked any areas of concern identified during the debriefings.

“All credit goes to the staff who were working there,” she said. “My main role was to keep them enthusiastic, and keep them motivated. But the people who worked with me, listen, they were wonderful. They put their hearts and souls to helping other people.”

There were also a number of volunteers working at the Gore Road site, and part of MJ’s job was to keep them motivated as well, make sure they knew who she was, and making sure they were fed and had coffee.

Another role was to coordinate efforts of the two temporary EOC centres that were established in the Woodbine Road fire hall and in Joyceville Institution. This is Col. Coady’s group. Their efforts were shifting from the centre to the rural areas of Kingston, and they were brought in with the Gore Road group. But Col. Coady’s sub-EOC’s were shut down after only a couple of days.

MJ also had to establish a warehousing operation. When the response in the city was winding down, a lot of rural issues were starting to dominate the relief effort. In the city, they didn’t have any issues with drinking water, for example, but that was a major issue outside of the city limits. There was no hydro to activate well pumps, and there was no heat to melt snow. [Some people did melt snow, she says]. Wolfe Island had a big problem with drinking water.

In the city, there had been community efforts to help each other. In the rural areas, it was different. People had wood stoves, many of them were prepared for disasters. They had jars in the basement and fire wood, and neighbours tended to take care of each other. “But they had different challenges. Their challenges were how to milk cows. If you don’t have a generator to milk the cows, these cows won’t produce milk for, I believe, nine months,” she said. The generators supplied within the city limits were for life support, elderly residents, etc. In the country, generators were used for totally different purposes. Their focus was on how to support animals.

At one point a Mennonite milking brigade was travelling around the area, milking cows by hand in places where generators weren’t available. It was a group of Mennonites from Waterloo. MJ met them in City Hall, but was not involved with them directly. George Sutherland [who never found time to be interviewed for this study] would be able to tell all about it, she said.

MJ was concerned with getting water to rural residents, getting help to anyone who was stranded or in dire straits, and getting generators to anyone who needed them to maintain farms, etc. Bottled water was distributed to some areas of rural Kingston. Local retailers donated the water in most cases. “The amount of donations received was incredible,” she said. She didn’t want to name any particular retailer, because it would leave out dozens others.

“They were all so helpful. We needed something, and bing, it was on the doorstep,” she said. Kingston also received a lot of donations from outside the city limits. Some of the donations, which include everything from diapers to canned food, were still in storage at the time of this interview, and the plan was to give them to charities and non-profit social service agencies.

There were 65 or 68 municipalities that declared a state of emergency in Eastern Ontario, from Kingston to the Quebec border, MJ said. Eastern Ontario also went through various amalgamations recently. Kingston had enough time to put its resources together and find out who was doing what. MJ had some people working for her who she’d never met in her life. She gathered them all together and said ‘OK, tell me who you are, what did you do in your previous life, and what are your talents?’ “It was wonderful, because at least from my perspective, I met people from other organizations that I would never have any other opportunity to meet. And I tell you, in the city of Kingston, talents are everywhere, and people’s sense of civic duty is incredible.”

Many of the smaller municipalities outside of Kingston didn’t have staff, or emergency plans, or mechanisms for obtaining supplies as quickly as they did in the city. Kingston had organizations like the Salvation Army and the Red Cross, and they knew where to get supplies. The city also had military support, and the base was only a few miles away. When people in the city started to go back to everyday life, the Gore Road building was still in full emergency state, because they were getting distress calls.

There were many different types of calls. Some people called on behalf of their neighbours, for example to let the city know that a woman nearby was stuck in her house with three children, with only two candles and no food. Calls like that were the most distressing calls, MJ said. She herself received a call from an old woman who was crying on the phone and who was begging for heat. MJ offered to send someone and take her to a shelter. But the woman refused, saying she and her husband weren’t moving. “Those are the most distressing calls. There is a means of helping, but people, for different reasons [won’t leave their homes]. We didn’t have time to get into detail, why a woman with three small children prefers to stay in a house without heat or electricity, and no food for these children, and how desperate the situation had to be that the neighbours called.”

The most distressing calls she had were about old people. They were often reluctant to move into the shelters, even in the last phase, when they had a shelter (at Penrose) with private rooms. City officials recognized that people felt very intimidated being in a huge room filled with cots and other people. They also knew that older people often need to visit the washrooms more often, or have other special needs. These are some of the reasons why people wouldn’t leave their homes.

MJ also remembers receiving a lot of calls about generators and food. Volunteers would drive bags of food to different locations, or drive people to the Salvation Army, or to stores. The stores were open, so people could buy food, but there was no transit. People who lived downtown were OK, but for those living far away, it was very difficult to get to the stores.

Records were kept about every phone call. [MJ donated copies of all of her ice storm records to the study].

One of MJ’s roles was to have everything documented from the perspective of corporate liability. There could, conceivably, be lawsuits resulting from the way the city handled things during the ice storm. Lawsuits have already cropped up in Montreal. “You never know what kind of information will be needed, for any purpose, after everything is done.”

Her staff did a “fabulous” job of making sure records were kept even at the height of the response, MJ said. Tracy Newton and Erica [she didn’t know Erica’s last name] set up a system in the first hour. They had a book given to every volunteer, everybody who was on the phone. Everything was recorded, and they wound up with a lot of information.

The base commander came to Gore Road several times, and the comments MJ heard from him and other members of the military were “so positive,” she said. MJ said they learned a lot from the military as well. The military set up its own emergency centre, and invited MJ to visit. MJ spent several hours with them, and they showed her how their centre worked.

MJ also had high praise for the group from Toronto fire and police. Bob Crawford (chief of emergency planning for the Toronto fire service) and his crew helped her group to develop an organizational chart, showing who was doing what and who was responsible for what. [The incident management system].

Asked how the OPP and city police worked together, she said “they were great. They were the most professional group. And if they had any difficulties in staying in one room, I have never noticed it.”

MJ wouldn’t put up with conflicts in her EOC. “If they had difficulty, it would be outside this building, and it wouldn’t be my problem. Everybody who was coming worked wonderfully together, and I cannot have enough words of praise for all of them. They were great.”

She said it’s important to remember that city police had to rely for some of their information on a constable from Frontenac County, who didn’t know what was going on in the city. But, she said, “We were one well organized machine.”

She joked that she thought it would be a challenge for a short woman like herself to gain the respect of a group of “big guys” from the police and military, but says “they were wonderful.” She never heard of any tensions between the city police and the OPP until this interview.

Turning to the issue of where her authority came from, MJ said it came from Mayor Bennett. “When he appointed me manager of the regional emergency centre, I got all authority which comes with the title. It was not Gardner Church giving authority, it was Mayor Bennett.”

Every day MJ briefed Mayor Bennett on what was happening in the regional EOC, and discussed things as needed with her fellow managers. She kept her updates to Mayor Bennett very general. She didn’t ask him to make any organizational decisions, she said, and nor would that have been proper. She was given a task, and the mayor had entrusted her to carry out certain responsibilities, which she carried out.

Asked whether money was a concern, she said ‘not particularly.’ It’s a rule that finances are kept separate from the emergency operations centre, because one body (the EOC) has to save lives, while another body has to account for expenditures.

Nevertheless, her group kept records of supplies bought, and staff time. These expenditures were later charged to a separate ice storm account.

She doesn’t know how much she spent. She supplied receipts and gave it all to the city’s accountants. Denis Leger would know.

Asked to comment on how she made decisions, MJ said she delegated and consulted constantly. “I had senior staff who were responsible for different areas, and I had resources, including the city police, OPP and the military. Any decision, I was asking all my staff or the proper party what would be their recommendation ... As a manager, if you have the entire picture .. this really makes the entire decision-making process much easier.”

People who were responsible for certain areas of the emergency response (for example, generators) were making decisions autonomously all the time. They would only come to MJ if for some reason they couldn’t make a decision alone. Her role was to provide support to them, and support their decisions.

Asked whether she had any problems with communications, she said her first hurdle was to learn how to use the cell phone. “They gave me this little gizmo, and I didn’t know how to use it,” she said. “It had too many options!”

Bell and Southeastern were very helpful. They set the city up with eight additional, dedicated phone lines virtually overnight. (They installed these new lines in Gore Rd.)

There is a lot to say about the need to upgrade technology in the city, and about dispatching, and about how the phone system in Gore Road building was set up, and how this had to be changed by bringing in eight additional lines, MJ said. Whoever is responsible for future emergency planning will have to research these issues in “great depth,” she said.

There were difficulties in the beginning because one system is owned by Bell and one system is owned by Southeastern. But MJ said “if there are any issues to be resolved between these two companies, we didn’t suffer in any way. They were more than helpful on every occasion.”

Some of the cables are owned by Bell, and some are owned by Southeastern. Sheila Hickey would know more about this.

Other forms of communication, such as communication with the media, worked well, she said. Certain people at the Gore Road facility were assigned the task of sending out regular press releases (as they had been in City Hall), and the group was giving interviews to media from all over, including papers from Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, and of course Kingston.

She never discouraged anyone in her EOC from talking to the media or sharing their own experience, but few people had the time to grant interviews. In general, when the media came and asked for interviews, they got MJ or Lynne Jordon. They split the interviews roughly 50-50.

Interpersonal communications became less formal. There was less time to have formal meetings, but those 9 a.m. meetings with senior staff were relatively formal. But MJ’s interaction with staff during the day was catch-as-catch-can. Everybody was given authority to make deckisions and was capable of doing so. Staff may have been looking for moral support from MJ, but they didn’t need to consult her on every little detail, so communication was kept to the essentials.

Asked what worked well and what didn’t work well, MJ said it would have helped to have a detailed emergency plan (not just a “shelf document”) that everybody was familiar with and in which everybody was properly trained. And of course it would have been much easier if the city had not been newly amalgamated. It would have been nice to know what kind of human resources were available, rather than having to learn as they went.

One problem that’s rarely mentioned is the difficulty people had withdrawing from the emergency and closing down the emergency. If you talk with people who study emergencies all the time, MJ said, they could have predicted Kingston staff would have difficulty shutting down the operation. Toronto officials told MJ that a part of the public would start to rely on the emergency centre. Then, she found it difficult that at one point, her departmental staff were reporting to work, and she couldn’t work with them in her regular capacity. She was still on the EOC, and this created tension. She said her staff was “extremely unhappy” with her because she couldn’t perform her regular duties. “I would describe this as a mother and children syndrome. Crying for attention. And you can imagine that with the new department, having the new role to play in the corporation, this was a very difficult issue to deal with.” People who were not involved in the emergency wanted to get on with things, but she couldn’t immediately disengage, and in some cases their offices were still being taken up by the emergency response team. Her staff got pushed into the basement. Future emergency planning should take this into account, and outline a clear system for disengaging from the emergency.

Some volunteers also had difficulty going back to their regular lives. “They were used to making decisions, and they were used to being the centre of attention. All of a sudden, this disappears,” she said. “And this is also true of some staff who were involved in the centre. All of a sudden they have to return to their normal work.”

Asked to comment about Col. Gerry Coady’s part in the response, she went off record, spoke for a while, then came back on record to discuss general issues around the interaction between the military and city/civilian parties in the response. “It has to be recognized in the future, this issue should be evaluated in more detail, and clear rules of conduct should be established. My recommendation is that military staff which were at one time associated with military operations should be made very aware that civilian staff in desktop operations, they have full authority not from the municipality but as well from the province, to act as the only sources of authority. Civilians assume all responsibility, and they have all power to make decisions. The issues of differences, how do civilians work and operate in situations, and how military does, is a result of different structures, and different responsibilities and expectations.”

The week before this interview, she met with the EMO, and this issue was discussed with them as well. Municipalities are responsible for emergency operations, she said, and they have full authority. “I don’t want to diminish the role of the military. I cannot stress enough how ... valuable they were. However, I want only to highlight this as an issue that should be factored in in the new emergency planning for any municipality.”

MJ can only say very little, because she made the decision on the first day to close both of Col. Coady’s operation centres down and transfer everything to Gore Road. Col. Coady’s group was up and running before she took over, but she shut them down. The reason for that was they didn’t have much of a role to play, especially since the regular military (CFB Kingston and the RMC) were taking over a lot of their functions. Everybody was focusing on supplying firewood and generators. Because they had some problems with generator distribution, they made the decision that they had to centralize the operation. This was consistent with a recommendation from both Gerry Coady and the base commander.

Asked what her biggest problem was during the ice storm, MJ said it was the exhaustion level of staff. “Staff was tired and exhausted. The second biggest problem was the City Hall was going to function in the regular capacity, and it was difficult for me to have staff from other departments, as their managers couldn’t understand why I was still working on the emergency and taking their people.”

Asked what she would do differently, she said she would be better prepared. “We have to have the emergency centre established on a permanent basis, and it has to be managed by city staff. I have great difficulty with emergency plans being developed by consultants, and I have great difficulty that a consultant was given full authority to manage the EOC centre in the emergency plan. Also, the emergency plan has to have a very specific outline of what are the roles of different departments. Saying that, we as a newly formed municipality didn’t have time to look at these issues. However, I’m not sure if we would be forced to look at these issues if we did not have an emergency.”

MJ didn’t know Bob Boyd [the consultant who wrote Kingston’s emergency plan] until she was appointed as emergency coordinator. She learned about Bob Boyd and his emergency plan at the first meeting with the Mayor. MJ said Bob Boyd challenged her in this open meeting and asked her what she was doing. “This cannot happen. It’s counter-productive,” she said, “and this really only makes a necessity to appoint a permanent person to deal with that. It has to be city staff, it cannot be a consultant.”

One reason for this has to do with corporate liability. If something goes wrong during an emergency response, only the municipality, and not the consultant, will be liable, she said. The second issue is that city staff know better than anyone else how different departments interact and how the municipality works, and what kind of resources it has. “What I’m saying to you is very consistent with recommendations from the province. The province does not recommend to any organization or municipality that a consultant write the emergency plan. They can write a draft, but the ownership belongs to the corporation, and so the corporation should have somebody designated to carry on emergency functions.”

MJ recommended this to Mayor Bennett and Gardner Church.

Asked for more details about Bob Boyd’s challenge to her in the open meeting, MJ said it happened directly after MJ informed Mayor Bennett that she was moving the emergency operation centre to Gore Road. “And Mr. Boyd, probably he was as surprised as many of my colleagues that I am responsible for the emergency and that I was emergency manager ... but he challenged me [as to] why I [was] not considering the Staff College. And he challenged me of my knowledge of the emergency plan. What made it very interesting is that I didn’t know who he was, and I didn’t know what is his interest in emergency planning. I didn’t know why he was at the senior manager meeting anyway. I was stunned. Who is this individual, and who gave him authority to speak, and who gave him authority to question me in the open meeting? However, things like that happen to me all the time. I explained to Mayor Bennett that I made an evaluation of the Union Street [site], and it’s not going to work.”

The Staff College had power by this time, but there was one more reason, which she said she finds “comical.” In the evening, when Lynne Jordon, MJ and Bob Crawford from Toronto all went together to the Staff College, the first observation was that the road leading to the building was very narrow, and the trees were very large and close, so that with any additional storm, the road could easily be blocked again. Then they couldn’t locate all the emergency rooms in the college. When they located them, they got in touch with the building manager, who informed that in order for the city to move its EOC into the Staff College, it would have to give the Staff College 24 hours notice. She said she reacted very calmly to this, and reminded the manager that the city had a contract with the college. But when the manager asked her to make sure that the city’s emergency activities would not interfere with the students’ activities in the building, “that was the last straw.” At that moment, she made the decision to move operations to a building that she had full control over, and that was Gore Road.

MJ said one of the reasons the Staff College may have asked for 24 hours notice is that “things were getting back to normal,” and the Staff College was getting ready to start a new series of training courses. “So they told me OK, you need to give us 24 hours notice, and then whatever you do, you cannot interfere with the students going to the cafeteria, the students having classes, students doing whatever they are doing there.”

MJ had full authority under the emergency plan to kick everyone out of the Staff College if she had wanted to, but she didn’t have the time to deal with the situation. She was given her orders late at night, and had to establish a new EOC centre the following day. MJ also decided it would be better to set up shop at Gore Road, where she had full operational control and access to a team of map-makers with the GIS. The Gore Road building was also better-situated to deal with rural emergencies in the former township.

MJ was also basing her decision on advice from the Toronto group (Bob Crawford, Warren Leonard, etc.), who said the emergency operation centre should always be located in a building where municipal officials have full operational control. The province eventually told her the same thing. Since the municipality has full responsibility for emergency prevention, the municipality should have full control of the emergency centre, and they should designate a building which can perform this function during an emergency.

MJ could have used the Woodbine Road fire station, which is a municipal building, but she never knew it was designated in the emergency plan. In fact, she never saw a copy of the emergency plan until after it was all over. She only heard about the Staff College from Gardner Church. Woodbine Road wasn’t mentioned.

MJ believes City Hall should never be designated as an EOC centre again. The problems with the phones, and all of the other problems that Tracy Newton describes in her interview had to do with the physical configuration of City Hall. “Security. Lack of separation of the phone centre from the rest of the building. Bad lighting. Bad acoustics. Everything that you could say [was wrong]. The second building was designated the Staff College, and tertiary was Woodbine Road Fire Hall.” [This is not the case. City Hall was not designated at all in the emergency plan. The Staff College was the primary EOC, and the Woodbine Road fire hall was the secondary EOC.]

In hindsight, Woodbine Road may have been the best location. “But I didn’t know that, and I didn’t have full control of the building, and this made it difficult too.” It’s also very risky to let a fire hall be used for any purposes other than fire prevention, she said, agreeing with a comment by Fire Chief Glenn Gow. “Emergency providers, fire, police, in any emergency have such a specific role to play, that their autonomy to make decisions should never be diminished by EOC centre function, which is more general and more broad. I would agree with the fire chief one hundred percent [that fire halls should not be used as EOC’s].”

MJ had had emergency training, and believes this is one of the reasons she was designated as the emergency manager. Her background is not only municipal. She has a few years of heavy industrial experience, and through her previous placement work she has been trained in emergency response, specifically to environmental incidents. She worked for two chemicals, Domtar and Bakerlite. She has been involved in “many, many emergency situations” throughout her career. She knows how to evacuate places, how to get agencies involved, and what to do and what not to do.