IceStorm 98 Study

Nancy Taylor (NT) is the operations manager for Utilities Kingston. She looks after the engineering side of things, work planning and the field portion of customer service. Utilities Kingston doesn’t have accounting or human resources departments, so she handles those sorts of tasks as well. She’s been with the utility (formerly known as the PUC) for six years, beginning in safety and gradually moving into the operations and management side.

The storm hit Jan. 7, and the amalgamation happened Jan. 1. When the storm hit, the old PUC re-formed to deal with it. That’s because the PUC was programmed to respond to emergencies. Because they were going through restructuring, the new Utilities group didn’t have a good definition of roles, so they reverted back to the older, more familiar system that was in place before amalgamation. The way they’d normally deal with an emergency (and the biggest one she can remember is an outage of about four days on West St. in a very isolated area) ...

NT got up Thursday morning, and heard on the news that the system was down. She called in, and Jim Keech was there at the time, and she “gave him heck for not calling [her] in.” A lot of employees came in to help as soon as they realized there was a problem. NT came in at 6 a.m. and worked through until 6 a.m. the next morning -- a 24-hour shift -- then went home and got three hours of sleep. By the time she got there, some of the linemen had already worked a full shift, since 10 p.m. Wednesday night. Nobody really realized how serious the situation was when NT first came in, and she believes the full magnitude of it didn’t sink in until sometime that first evening.

Utilities Kingston is used to operating with eighteen either overhead or underground linemen. Until the ice storm, they had never encountered a situation they couldn’t handle, NT said, and utilities workers are “programmed to go out and fix it and get it back on fast.”

It took them quite a while to get a handle on how big the situation was, and then to admit that they needed help. In fact, they originally refused part of the help that was offered to them by Toronto Hydro in the wee hours on that first Friday. NT took the call at 2 a.m. Toronto Hydro reached her in the operations centre of the utilities building and said they had 20 crews that were ready to roll out at 8 a.m. if Utilities Kingston wanted them. “I talked to some of the operators, saying they have 20 crews and do we want them, and their first reaction was ‘Oh heavens no, we don’t need any help.’ Because we’re so programmed to do it ourselves. We’re very independent.” She talked to Toronto Hydro and agreed to take five crews, but said she would call further east to Cornwall and other places to see if those utilities could use the extra Toronto Hydro crews. (Cornwall had been hit by the storm two days before Kingston, and Kingston sent crews down to help them, but had to call them back when the storm hit home.) She called “everywhere, all the way down the St. Lawrence, and most of the people were still trying to deal with the fact that it was more than they can handle.” She talked to utilities in Brockville, Prescott, Iroquois, Kanata, Smiths Falls, trying to see if they wanted some of the crews that were being offered. She eventually found homes for 20 Toronto Hydro crews, and Kingston took five.

By Friday night, though, the ice was still on. Kingston actually made a lot of progress through the night, early Friday morning, and had restored some of the main feeds. The main feeds into the city are 44,000 volts. There’s about nine of those. They go to substations. The substations transform them down to 4,160 volts. And there are 16 substations. Each substation has an average of 10 circuits that come out of it. In the original storm, Kingston lost almost all of its 44,000 volt lines that come into the city -- or 80 percent of its electrical load -- and utilities workers managed to restore most of those in the first day or so, which meant that the substations were now operable. But out of each substation there were circuits, and if there were overhead circuits, what they had to do was go through circuit by circuit and make sure all of the trees were off it and make sure all of the lines that had been torn down were safe before they energized the circuit. If they energized before clearing the lines, they could burn the trees off and set fires.

Utilities Kingston only looks after the old city; Ontario Hydro delivers power to the former Kingston Township and had full responsibility for repairing lines and restoring power to that area, which is now Kingston West.

Utilities workers took about five days to put all the circuits back up. This was time-consuming because so much of the work had to be done on the ground, to make sure the trees and broken branches were cleared from the wires. Then they estimate they had somewhere between 2,000 and 2,500 individual services to homes that were down, that had to be restored. That service comes off the circuits, but they’re a different voltage again; they’re lower. That’s the line that actually runs into the house.

Under normal conditions, restoring individual service requires a pink work order to be filled out in triplicate. “After about five days we had pink slips everywhere. We realized we had to database it in order to manage it.”

In the meantime they were getting calls from individual customers who wanted to be prioritized, based on age, illness, pets, wet basements, any number of factors.

This raised the issue of how Utilities Kingston set priorities. Early on, NT said, they decided that their best strategy was to restore the 44,000-volt lines before doing anything else, because without those you don’t have anything. And then to restore as much of the circuits as they could, because if most of a circuit was OK, they could bring on a lot of customers. Which is why sometimes you had your two neighbours on, but if your service came off, your power wasn’t back on. They were trying to get as many people as they could back with electricity, on the assumption that if a person’s neighbour had it, they could work together. (Some people strung extension wires across roads, others just invited people over to enjoy the heat and light in a house with power).

Then they started tackling the services. They knew they had piles and piles of those. They also knew that they couldn’t pile their ties, that many. So what they did was broke the city up into roughly equal areas and sent crews out to the various areas, so that they would work street by street. Part of this was a PR move; “every area in the city saw people working there, so there was no problem with which area was getting something.”

Although Utilities Kingston had no control over when power was going to be restored in the former Kingston Township, which is handled by Ontario Hydro, the local utility was affected by the outage in Kingston West. That’s because Utilities Kingston operates the water and sewer treatment plants in both former townships. Ravensview, which is the sewage treatment plant in the former Pittsburgh Township, had no hydro. Utilities Kingston was trying to get them restored, but NT says they couldn’t get preferential treatment from Ontario Hydro either. “And our water treatment plant in the former Kingston Township, they called with a report of a tree being on their service, and we didn’t send our own staff out to deal with it. I’m not sure if we maybe wouldn’t if it happened again, because we couldn’t get Ontario Hydro to deal with it. And both of those plants are critical. If you lose the power to those ... so we were trying to juggle that as well.”

Utilities Kingston called Ontario Hydro about the problem with the sewage treatment plant in Kingston West, she said, “but we were just like any other customer. And that’s fine. I know what they were dealing with also.”

She’s not critical of the way Ontario Hydro handled its part of the emergency, because she realizes they were overwhelmed. “I’m sure they were dealing with all the same stuff we were dealing with, so I can be somewhat sympathetic that they weren’t instantly set up. And I don’t believe they now have a local office, where they have people that live here. So their response time is [longer]. And they had a much bigger problem than we did.”

Shouldn’t there be a system, though, to get a senior manager of Ontario Hydro on site a little sooner than two days into the emergency? “Well, I will say that communications were difficult. We experienced it, as a utility department, and I know the city did. The coordinating group trying to get somebody [from Ontario Hydro] to coordinate with them. But I think that’s something they eventually recognized that they couldn’t afford to have happen.”

Getting back to the chronology of what NT did: as of about Friday morning, crews started arriving from out of town. They had crews from Napanee, Belleville, Picton, Port Hope, Clarington, Toronto, Oshawa, Whitby, Hamilton. They ended up with about 120 outside line staff. Only utility workers were brought in, because there were union issues and issues of safety. “Hundreds of contractors” descended on the Kingston utility and offered their services for a price, but Utilities made a decision not to use any contractors other than the two that were already working for them. One was a tree-trimming crew from Belleville (O’Brien’s Tree Trimming), and the other is Polar Power, which works in the former townships. They were already under contract with the utility, and Kingston engaged their services almost immediately to help deal with the storm. But their concern with other contractors was that if they engaged them “on the fly, without any discussion of how much it was going to cost, that we would just get killed,” NT said. “There was a lot of opportunism, not only at the level of individual residents, but at this level as well.”

It turned out that the response from other utilities across the province was so good that contractors weren’t needed. “Eventually we got better at defining what it was exactly that we needed, and we were able to get resources.” Most of the other utilities knew enough about it that they loaded their trucks up with materials, and brought them to Kingston without being asked.

At the time of this interview, Utilities Kingston wasn’t finished tallying its ice storm costs, but they’re estimating their own costs at somewhere between $2.5 and $3 million dollars. That includes labour, materials, accommodations and food.

On the Thursday and the Friday they were trying to feed people by bringing in food from area restaurants, but the appeal quickly wore off. “After about three meals of cold pizza, I went to Joanne O’Maara [the fleet administrative assistant], and I said ‘Joanne, we can’t keep eating cold pizza. These guys can’t work in this weather [and keep eating this stuff] ... I mean, they’re going to kill me.’ She was really upset; she said ‘There isn’t anything open; I can’t get food.’” They thought about the fact that there is a kitchen at the PUC building, and decided to set up a makeshift cafeteria. There were a lot of people who wanted to volunteer, but the utility couldn’t use their volunteer services in the field because it was too dangerous. So they put some of those people to work preparing food. “And she organized an amazing effort downstairs in our kitchen, basically converted it to a full-service ... we had people coming from all over, we don’t even know where. Donations of food, volunteer cooks, donations of appliances... we had 14 or 15 refrigerators and stoves. So I think by Saturday morning, they started actually cooking breakfast. And we were able to feed everybody that was working with us -- hot food -- they started off about 5:30 for breakfast, then went out as soon as it was light, then came in around noon to eat and get warmed up. Some of them worked until midnight every night or later. Then we had a crew on every night for emergency stuff.”

At about 8 o’clock on the first Friday night of the emergency, with the was still on the wires and the poles starting to fall faster than they could get them back up, the utility decided to shut down the work and develop a plan for the next few days. They’d had a lot of people coming in, but no real system for organizing the help, and it was “just too dangerous to keep the people out there” without a better plan in place. From that Friday night until the next morning, a lineman and one of their dispatchers organized all of the crews. They decided to pair each of their 14 linemen with four or five or six outside people, from other utilities. So you had someone who knew the system and the city acting as the foreman for that crew. “It’s very important that we knew where everybody was, all the time, because we were switching, we were energizing equipment, and if you do that with someone still working on the lines, you can have big problems, which we didn’t want.”

Nobody got electrocuted during the storm.

How did that communication work?
“We have radios. What we did is, most of us have portable radios, so we took everybody’s radio that didn’t absolutely need it, and sent it out with crews, so that they always had contact with our operation centre. We were also coordinating with the tree people that were working with Mark Fluhrer’s group, because the same thing applied there. If they were working in an area and we energized it, they could [get zapped].”

Up until Jan. 1, the PUC was a standalone organization, not a part of the city. Now the Utilities is a department of the city, and Roads and Parks is another department of the city. So it was a crash course in working with their new colleagues.

On Saturday morning, crews went out again. They didn’t have as many managers as they used to, and their electric department manager, who is Murray Binch was out in the field. They only have three other managers, and one [Stewart Thompson] is in charge of the treatment plants, so he had his hands full because there was no power at any of the treatment plants, NT said. [There are two sewage and two water treatment plants].
Kevin Reilly looks after gas and electric and now sewer people, who had just joined Utilities that week. They used all of those people to add to their resources. Although they’re not linemen, they were used to haul poles and to use back hoes to put poles in the ground, etc. All of those people kind of filled in behind the linemen and did all of the work that wasn’t strictly linemen, in order to keep the linemen just doing their job.

Along with everything else, City Gate Station was without power. That’s what they call the place in Glenburnie where the gas from the Trans Canada comes into the city. They have to keep the boilers going on the gas, so people were stationed there 24 hours a day to keep the generators running, so they didn’t end up with a gas problem on top of everything else. If the boilers shut down, they wouldn’t have been able to put the odour in the gas at City Gate, and the gas coming in from the Trans Canada would have been odourless. Any leaks in homes or businesses would have been much more difficult or impossible to detect.

Nothing disastrous happened there. “We covered all our bases.”

The unique thing about Utilities Kingston is that they deal with so many different utilities. That gave them more problems to deal with, but it also gave them more resources to put where they needed, NT said.

Utilities always had water, gas and electricity, but they’ve since added the sewage treatment plants onto their mandate.

“It turned out that was a bigger addition than we thought, because when you start losing power to the pumping stations, and the treatment plants and you’re backing up sewer stations, it tends to be a concern to the community.”

The water treatment plant for the city has generators, and they can operate for about 24 hours or more, but as the water goes through the filters, they plug up, and they have to do something called backwash to get the plugging removed. The backwash takes more energy than the generators will provide, and if you can’t backwash, it will shut down the system. “Stewart [Thompson] called us and said it was critical, and we had to target getting the treatment plant back on so they could do the backwash, so we didn’t lose the water.”

It’s difficult to know whether to buy a bigger generator for the water treatment plant. This kind of outage is not a typical situation, so it’s hard to know whether that would be a wise capital expense.

“We’re reviewing all the generation for all of our facilities, because we ourselves didn’t really need to be trying to address those problems on top of everything else,” she said.

NT spent a lot of her time in the control room, taking calls and organizing the crews and dealing with customers, which she said is “probably the most difficult part.” Their customer service people got most of the calls and handled most of them extremely well, she said, but “there were some extremely irate customers,” and those are the calls she got.

It wasn’t always easy to keep up decorum. After about eight days, on the second Wednesday, Jim Keech asked NT to come up and see him about something. She was walking out of the lunch room, and she said “I have to do something,” and he said “What?” and she went “completely blank.” And she broke down a bit. “I don’t know!! I know it was something important!” It was just a matter of overload, she said . “Everybody ... it was constantly coming at you, ‘have you got a second, have you got a second, have you got a second’ ... I actually calculated that there are 86,400 seconds in a 24 hour period, so I could answer questions at that rate.”

Her job was to work with the operators, decide how to prioritize, where the crews needed to be, that sort of thing. Jim Keech’s role was more working with the city groups, coordinating with them, and communicating with the media. He lived at the Utilities building most of the time, and took the night shift, while NT went home. She mostly went home between midnight and 6 a.m. She has young kids, age seven and nine, but they weren’t affected. She lives in the former Kingston Township, and her power never went off. “So they had no understanding of why their mother wasn’t there ... I had some relationship repairing to do after the ten days.”

Her husband worked in Brockville, and he was able to be around. He was a “really good support.” Her parents are also in Kingston, and they were able to help out while the schools were closed. “Lots of parental support, and I don’t know what you’d do without that.”

In their debriefing, one of the things that came up was this issue of family support. A lot of the linemen didn’t have power at home, live in rural areas, and couldn’t address those problems. In future, the utility would like to use some of their resources to help the families of the people working on the relief effort. “The families were amazing. I talked to wives that came in with the kids to eat and so on. So patient, and so understanding. Basically their spouses just walked out and said ‘I have a job to do.’”

The spouses really have to be recognized, NT said, because “there wasn’t anyone here who felt they had an option of not coming in and working. I’m sure it was stressful, but I don’t know of any spouses that attempted to interfere with that. And they were very supportive. And these were people with small children and no pumps, no heat, no nothing. I don’t know how they did it. And they didn’t have the support, because the people that were in here working had a mission. We were very focused on what we had to do. We developed a community. Even with the additional 100 and some people from outside, it was a sense of community and working together. We had that. And actually that was hard to stop. That was hard to pull out of. But the families didn’t have any of that. So I don’t know how they did it.”

Why do you think it was hard to pull out of the emergency and the relief effort?
“It’s an adrenaline rush to be focused on an emergency. Now, I don’t think we could have sustained it for any longer than the 10 days. People were starting to break down. We shut down early the first Friday, and by the Wednesday, which was a week into it, we made a decision again to call everybody in and to call off operations at 7 o’clock, after dinner. There were people concerned about whether or not they could continue to work, because they were exhausted. We couldn’t single out individuals, so we made a decision to close it down.”

She had a lineman sitting across the table from her, saying in a dead tired voice things like “I can’t go home. There are people that still don’t have any ... power.” [To illustrate how exhausted this person was, she slides her elbows across the desk]. “There was no way he could go back out and work.”

It seemed especially ironic to her that later that night, after watching this lineman practically fall asleep in front of her, she took a call from a customer who was critical of the utility’s decision to give the workers an early night off. “He was criticizing the fact that he had done that.”

What did you say to that person?
“They’re not robots, they’re people. And the conditions they were working under were just ... it snowed, it rained, it did everything. And they were working in the dark a lot of the times. The ten days, most of them worked somewhere between 16 and 18 hours a day, for ten days. That’s one thing if you’re in the office, and I found it difficult, and I was in the control room. But it’s a totally different thing if you’re out in the field and you’re cold and you’re wet.”

NT doesn’t think she ever got a full sense of the magnitude of the emergency, mainly because she spent all of her time indoors. She didn’t realize the scope of how big it was until the Saturday, when they finished, and the utilities held a sort of victory parade down Princess Street. It was a suggestion of one of the linemen. When she went out to the yard to get a truck to go in the parade, she said ‘Oh my God, I had no idea I was sending this many trucks out every day. If I had known, I couldn’t have done this!’

They had about 120 crews, so they probably had 50 to 60 extra vehicles out there. “Unless you actually saw it ... I mean, we’re a small utility. It was incredible.”

People often found themselves doing jobs that were totally unrelated to their normal positions with the city. Joanne O’Maara, who is assistant to Cynthia Beach, took on a vast array of jobs and even wound up ordering a helicopter through the military at one point, so that Ontario Hydro and Utilities Kingston could do a fly-over and look at the devastation together.

NT told a funny story about O’Maara: “She arranged [the helicopter] with the military. And we needed what are called RBD’s [radial boom derricks] to dig holes so that we could put poles in. Somebody told me that the [military] base had RBDs sitting around, and no one was using them. So I called Joanne and said ‘use your contacts and get some RBDs,’ and she said ‘what’s an RBD?’ And I said ‘It’s a really big digger. And I said no, no, not really, it’s a radial boom derrick.’ So she gets on the phone and calls over to the major and says ‘I want your RBDs, and he says ‘what’s an RBD?’ And she said ‘it’s a really big digger.’ And he says ‘how big?’ So she gets on the PA system and says ‘Anyone who knows what an RBD is, call Joanne O’Maara at 203 immediately!’ She did a really good job of faking that she knew what it was. She eventually was able to tell him that it was to dig holes for poles.”

The emergency was stood down on Saturday night. They had every service that they knew of put back up by Jan. 17th. “We wouldn’t have had the parade if we hadn’t.”

It was nip and tuck. They were trying to make plans and were hopeful that they would finish, but not really sure they would finish. They couldn’t actually have the celebration if they weren’t finished.

The parade was partially to recognize the efforts of the outside volunteers.

Did you think about your authority to act, and where did that authority come from?
“I don’t think anybody here thought about their authority to act, other than the issue with the contractors and so on. The situation was such that you didn’t have to have it. People were doing things that they wouldn’t normally have done. You didn’t have to order people to do anything ... We were all just doing what had to get done. And I have to say that the politicians really assisted us by not being here trying to direct the work. We knew what we had to do, we had a plan, we communicated it to them, and they didn’t try to prioritize individuals and make it more complicated. We really appreciate that that happened.”

City officials actually came and cooked the utilities workers breakfast at one point. Councillor Stoparczyk was in, and Councillor Matthews was in, and Controller Hawkins. There were probably more.

Was money a concern?
“It was a concern, and we were trying to do what we could to make sure we were conscientious about things. But at the same time we knew that the community was going to accept that we incurred costs to get the power back on. Our attitude was more or less that we would deal with the costs later. But we were tracking the expenses, and we weren’t making ridiculous judgment calls or anything like that.”

“I think, as a new organization, we had some problems. Our former treasurer that used to be with the PUC, he and his wife came in here and assisted Joanne with the food and that sort of thing. We had some concerns with other groups ... I remember getting a call, and I have to be careful about this, that Denis Leger wanted a line-by-line tracking of the costs. Well, this just simply wasn’t a practical approach for us at that time, because we didn’t have the people to do that. I remember saying to the person who gave me the message, that I agree we need to track the costs; I don’t have the people to do it, tell Denis to send them up here. Please. You’re welcome. Help us.”

“We’re still struggling with new ways of working together [with the city]. Our focus, honestly, wasn’t the cost. Our focus was to get the power back on. We knew that there was a concern about the cost, and we had some tracking and we were trying to do our best, but we just simply didn’t have the resources to do what was being looked for.”

Utilities knew their own accounting system, and had a code they used to track everything to a work order. So they knew it would all come out eventually, that they were tracking it. But it would be some time before they would get all of the costs through the system. “We established that on the first day, and any charges that were incurred had the work order number on it. We weren’t just free reign spending money. We’re programmed to keep track of our costs.”

Most of the outside utilities charged their rates under their own collective agreements. They billed Kingston for their labour costs. If Kingston used materials off their trucks, they tracked the use, and they had the option of billing Kingston for it, or Kingston could replace it from its own warehouse if they had the materials available, before they went back.

Generally, the outside utilities have billed Kingston for the actual time that they spent here. That was calculated according to their own collective agreements. Some of the utilities have not billed the city at all yet, and there’s some possibility they won’t. They may have made a decision not to bill the city. Kingston heard a rumour that Oshawa’s commission decided not to bill Kingston but to absorb the cost themselves. NT hadn’t confirmed that.
The thinking may be that Kingston will reciprocate at some point in the future.

The union staff at Utilities Kingston really stepped up to the plate during the storm, NT said. Each of the linemen was assigned to foreman duties, and that’s not normally a job they would do.

Everyone worked as a group, NT stressed. Each morning, she would talk with the operators about what the plan was for that day, and she would talk with the linemen who were looking after crews. She would usually talk to them while they were eating breakfast. “They got sick of me because they never got to eat a whole meal.” Then she would check with them again at lunch to monitor their progress and find out if they needed any extra equipment or crews.

The kitchen became really important because it gave everyone a chance to connect and figure out what had been done. “You can do that on the radio, but it’s not quite the same as in person.”

It was almost impossible to hold regular, formal meetings. “As you can imagine, it’s a bit hard to hold a regular, formal meeting with about a hundred and fifty people that are going in sixty different directions, all trying to do their own thing.”

The crews tended to take ownership of the areas to which they were assigned. “That worked really well because, I’m not saying there was competition, but they owned it, they wanted to finish it, get it all cleaned up, and then when that crew was finished ... we could assign them to another area that was maybe not as far advanced or as tough.”

Some of the downtown areas were especially tough. “We had a pretty big one downtown that we assigned to one poor guy. If we hadn’t eventually put more crews in there, he’d still be there.” He was assigned the area from Sir John A. Blvd. all the way to Victoria Park and all of those side streets. “It was absolutely devastated. Every service was on the ground. So we got him some help.”

Workers got to know the residents in their areas, and talked to them about how the job was going. Some areas, like Sherwood Drive, had to be reconstructed completely from the back yards to the front yards. Hillcroft is another one that had to be rebuilt completely. In both cases, all the poles were in the back yards, and they were so mangled that they had to be replaced. You can’t get equipment or people in the back yards, so the lines had to be rebuilt and the poles reinstalled in front. Some people were not very pleased about that, but that was their most efficient way to get the power back up.

“The guy we had assigned to Sherwood Drive we called him Robin Hood and his band of merry men, because they were out there for days.”

NT had to call two guys in from the field because their wives were in labour. One of them was a tree-trimming person from O’Brien’s crew in Belleville, and another person who was here from Whitby. They were rushed away. “I think it was tough for them, ‘go, stay, go ... my wife’s going to kill me.’”

On about the seventh day, customers started to come into the utilities building and some of them were “really upset.” NT and her group actually asked the police for assistance with security, because they weren’t sure if it was going to get out of hand or not. Some of the customer service people were upstairs, and most other people were downstairs, “and it just felt kind of vulnerable, and people were getting really upset and frustrated and somewhat threatening.”

It never became a serious problem, NT said, “but if it had gone on longer, like the situation in Montreal, I would be concerned about that.”

Police also assisted the crews in the field, who were being swarmed by residents wanting their service hooked up. “Not in a bad way, but just ... you can’t get on with the job.”

Police helped a lot with road closures and such, which helped speed up the work. They closed down sections of Brock Street and so on, so that hydro crews could work there and not deal with the traffic.

Getting back to the issue of how resources were mobilized, NT said the first day they asked for help from outside they had some success. Napanee responded right away, and although they’re not a large utility, they sent everything they could. They were the first ones closest to Kingston that were not affected. Most of Belleville utility was also there. They called Kingston to offer their help and resources.

The same went with Kingston’s own staff. “None of the people were called in, to speak of, and none of them questioned whether or not to come in. I think [in] other organizations, people just [had] a day off. We had people coming in during the night just because they wanted to be here and do something to help.”

One lineman who had retired last October came back to work. “He was a lineman during Hurricane Hazel, and he always gave the guys a hard time about how ‘they never knew any big problem, because they hadn’t lived through Hurricane Hazel, and it could get a lot worse’ ... Well, he admitted that it was topped.”

Technically, the people in Customer Service don’t work for Kingston Utilities anymore. They’re in a different department. But they were still in that kind of mode, saying ‘we need to be here, we need to answer the calls, etc.’ The utility kind of commandeered them, NT said. “Technically they weren’t in our department, and we didn’t go through the right channels to get them; they [just came]. And it was great. We had to have them. And they organized their own schedules, and things like that.”

How were priorities set?
“Generally speaking, on the individual services, I resisted quite strongly setting priorities, because I didn’t feel we were in a position to judge one person’s need as being greater than somebody else’s. And if I had to track something all over the city, that wouldn’t be the most efficient way to get everybody back on. So I tried to really resist prioritizing ... I mean, houses on fire got priority. We did have a couple of those. We had a crew that was roving to deal with real emergency situations. Other than that, we systematically went street by street by street ... and I think that was probably the right decision to make, because it was the most efficient use of the resources we had.”

The crews set priorities within their own areas.

Ontario Hydro inspection works out of the Kingston Utilities building, and the two groups were able to work closely together on things like permits. Ontario Hydro crews went ahead of the local crews and made sure the permits were there. Hydro would make sure all the services had their permits in order, so that local crews would just follow that up. These were permits to make sure that the service was safe to hook up again.

What worked well, and what didn’t?
“We actually went through this, and what worked well for us was the teamwork and the cooperation, and just the commitment to get the job done. That was excellent.” Communications were a problem, however. The telephone systems were overloaded, and hydro had trouble receiving calls. They also had a problem getting outside lines. The new call centre that’s being planned will probably address that, she said.

It was a very lucky thing that power never went out at the Utilities building, NT said. There is a generator, but it wouldn’t have powered the entire building. Power was also maintained at the radio site, which was another blessing. “If we had lost radio communications, that would have been extremely difficult as well. So we had a couple of really lucky breaks, as far as not losing power. So that meant we were able to keep the call centre functional, basically. Otherwise I’m not sure we would have been able to have as many people in here answering calls.”

The phones that were in use during the storm were “a real pain in the butt” and have already been replaced, NT said. It was just an old system. There were not enough lines coming into the building, and when you have that many calls flooding through, it makes it difficult to get an outside line whenever they needed to call outside.

Kingston Utilities also has a lot of remote monitoring at some of its stations, but it’s not fully implemented at all of them yet. It’s called a SCADA system, which stands for Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition. You can get load readings and so on from the stations, to see if you need to make any adjustments, and you can actually adjust it remotely. Utilities just doesn’t have the system installed in all the stations yet. But it’s going to be a “great benefit” when they do. It’s remote monitoring software; it sends the signals over the phone lines or radio, back to the control centre. It’s partially up and running. It would have been nice to have it at every station. Without it, they had to send people out to each of the stations to take the load readings, and radio them in.

Utilities officials want to make sure they do more planning and developing of strategies if anything like this ever happens again. “We would like to in the future take the time to evaluate what we’re dealing with, because we instantly jumped into fixing it. That’s what we’d always done in the past, and it worked because it’s been small enough that you could do that. But in this case we really needed an evaluation of: ‘what are we dealing with, how bad is it, what’s our approach?’ In the future, we’ll make sure that that stuff happens.”

The problem is that people view such planning as a waste of time, but if you do it up front, you can actually save yourself a lot of time, she said.

One key component of any strategy would be the creation of a database for all incoming calls and work orders, NT said. With the paper system, they would sometimes receive 15 calls from the same address and not know it. With a database, they could say ‘thanks, we already have that call.’ (This actually happened; they had 15 calls from one address).

Sheila Hickey of the Client Services group is developing a plan for a new, more efficient call centre to be used in any future emergency.

The utility also needs to dedicate one person to handling information and communications, NT said. “Jim Keech did a great job of keeping in contact with the media, but we could do a better job of making sure the people taking the phone calls were better informed. We did our best, but we have some ideas on how to make that better.” One person should be continuously communicating to the people on the phones what the situation is, what the current information is. “Because the customers really want as much information as you can give them, and if we don’t give that to the people on the phones, they have a lot of trouble giving that to the customers.”

Accounting support would also be “most useful,” because it was too hard for Utilities workers to do their own job and keep on top of the accounting function at the same time.

Things they did well: “We eventually learned how to organize. I think the approach, the strategy, we took as far as the restoration goes was the right one, and I don’t think I’d change that. And the kitchen was amazing.”

Both Jim Keech and NT had taken emergency training, and when they got a handle on how big the job was, “it [the training] started to kick in,” she recalls. They had taken courses through Emergency Measures Ontario. NT took a two or three day emergency preparedness course. “I think it’s a pretty good indicator that the more of that you can get out to the community, the better, and that staying on it ... it’s one of those skills you have to practice.”

One practical benefit of the EMO course was that it had talked about how to avoid “convergence” by private contractors. NT remembered being warned against using unfamiliar contractors, and this made it easier to turn them away when they came offering help for high fees. “I knew it was going to happen, so it wasn’t unexpected. More training for everybody would be a good idea.”

She also remembers learning about how to use volunteers, and hearing about the idea of setting up an EOC kitchen.

The radio system worked “great,” she said. Their supplier (Ericsson) sent in extra radios for use during the storm. In the past Utilities had a system where everybody had to talk on the same frequency. They replaced it in 1994, and this one is programmable, so you can program different talk groups. So Utilities had different crews on different talk groups, so they could be talking at the same time, but they would think they were on their own frequency. In the operations centre, they had four or five different base stations with people monitoring the different talk groups. For example, they had one person who monitored only gas leak calls and paid no attention to the electrical calls, “Because if you had everybody on the same system, you’d never be able to pick out the critical stuff.”

What was your biggest problem or challenge?
“Probably accepting the fact that it was more than we could handle ourselves. And asking for help. We tend to be a proud organization ... But it worked out really well, and I don’t think we’ll have that problem in the future. And the utilities that came to work with us have basically demanded that if they ever have a problem, we’ll be there for them. They also very much want to move to Kingston, and they would love to have a boat cruise in the summer sometime. They didn’t see Kingston at it’s very best, but most of them had a great time as it was.”

Did you have an emergency plan, and was it useful?
NT and Jim Keech had been on the city’s emergency planning committee, so they were very familiar with the draft plan. They also have internal plans, that are not as well communicated as they should be, and that’s something that they want to change. Having a plan is one thing, but “you need to have the habits there to kick into place.” The training element is really important. Then it becomes a habit, and you just react.

The city’s emergency plan is “a good starting point,” she said, but it’s probably more important to have the tabletop exercises, the mock disasters, etc.

Some people wound up doing things that were not covered or dealt with in the plan. “I don’t think anybody said ‘that’s not my job!’”

What contact did you have with federal or provincial Emergency Measures?
“Actually, I was being bombarded with calls in the operations centre. Emergency Measures contacted us several times for updates, and the press. Continuously. It would be nice to have a better system in place for providing them with the information. I think I would use the information officer to fax them regular updates, because I didn’t really need those calls. The press, for instance, after the first four days, all I was saying to them was ‘we’re working on services, we’ve got four more on since the last time you called’ ... I wasn’t saying that, but basically it was unchanged, and I didn’t really need the calls. Some way to update them more efficiently would be a good idea.”

Emergency Measures Ontario occasionally seemed to be more of a nuisance than a help. NT received one message -- which may or may not have been delivered correctly -- telling her to ‘call this person at EMO in the next five minutes.’ She called him back immediately, and the person who answered the phone said ‘I’m sorry, he’s not available at the moment.’ “So I said ‘I was told I had five minutes to call this person, and if he wants to talk to me, he’d better talk to me right now.’ I was probably not at my best right then.”

The atmosphere around the Utilities building was “really frenetic,” she said.

Was stress a concern?
“Yes. Generally speaking, people held together during the time that we had to. We have found from past experience that it’s important to do critical incident debriefings, and we have an arrangement with an EAP provider [employee assistance program; Kingston Community Counselling] in the city, and we actually had them come and just hand out some information, talk to people, get a feel for whether everything was OK. Then on the Monday or Tuesday after we’d finished cleaning up, we all went for a debriefing to talk about how you pull out, how you might expect to feel, and that sort of thing. I think it’s important to do, and we’ve learned from bad experience that if you don’t do it, you can really mess people up.”

You could talk to: Murray, Stewart, Chris Durant, some of the operator/dispatchers. There are four of them: Harold Dalmas, Ian Tracey, Dan Moore, and Glen Roy. There’s also a volunteer firefighter, and he was going home and being on call for them too. And some of the linemen, such as Bill Anderson, Jim Thompson, Jim Woodcock.