IceStorm 98 Study

Neville Murphy (NM) is deputy chief of the Kingston-Central fire department. He has been with the fire department for about 15 years, initially as a fire-fighter (11 years) and later as the department’s Deputy of Training, Assistant to the Chief. He held that position for four years before being appointed Deputy Chief a little over a month ago.

Kingston-Central fire department covers the 11 square miles more commonly known as the former City of Kingston. The former Pittsburgh Township is now referred to as Kingston East, and the former Kingston Township is now known as Kingston West. NM figures that in a year or two the East and West titles will probably be dropped, and all three departments will be referred to as the Kingston Fire Department.

NM first became aware of the ice storm at about 5 a.m. when he looked through his window in the Calvin Park subdivision and saw ice everywhere. He didn’t begin to grasp how widespread the storm was until he went to drive his wife to work at Kingston General Hospital. “It wasn’t until I was actually in the vehicle and driving, and I didn’t have to go far, basically 60 feet, and I was almost trapped. I had to turn around and try another route.”

Trees were down, and there were only about three routes from his house out to one of the main arteries. Two of the three were blocked. “If the third had been blocked I would have been some time to work, that’s for sure.”

“I guess I was surprised and stunned that first of all I hadn’t known what was going on for however many hours it had started prior to 5 a.m. ... I know I would have been contacted if something more severe had taken place, such as a large fire in which there could have been victims.”

NM got to the hospital and dropped his wife off, and made his way over to the Kingston Central fire station on Brock St. When he reached the station, all the vehicles were inside and the power was out. Fire-fighters who had already been dealing with the storm for several hours were tending to hand-held lighting and trying to supplement lighting appliances with generators to the outlying stations. “We were basically trying to stay warm and dry and well-lit for the time being...”

A portable generator was being used to power up the dispatch centre and keep the apparatus floor lit up, so that fire-fighters could see their gear and vehicles. The generator was not powerful enough to heat the building. “We were trying to keep it as safe as possible.”

Power was restored to the building within about 24 hours.

One of the senior officers [Asst. Deputy Chief Les Meers] who had worked the overnight shift, briefed NM on events from the night before.

The fire department wound up putting several of its older (and smaller) backup vehicles into service in order to make it easier for fire-fighters to navigate blocked city streets. “Due to the magnitude of the ice and wires down and limbs and trees down and sagging and drooping, we had to resort to some of our backup vehicles. They’re for the most part smaller in size, not as bulky. They don’t have ladders on top of the vehicles ... They were able to travel down more roads than some of the newer and higher vehicles. In this station the three newest vehicles we had were acting in reserve capacity, and the older vehicles were being first-respond units.”

NM thought about calling in extra staff, but decided to keep the normal shift system intact in case he needed fresh replacements to deal with a major emergency. He did use an extra crew of four or five fire-fighters to help investigate the large number of calls that were coming in, but he refrained from calling in every available fire-fighter to deal with the storm.

The vast majority of calls dealt with glitches in the power system, alarms, wires down, wires arcing and telephone poles on fire. There were also reports of destroyed electrical stacks, and all of these were considered potential fire hazards. Some of the stacks were actually on fire, while others would produce intense heat wherever the stack was bent. [The stack is the initial point of contact between the city’s grid and the house.]

The fire service normally receives one call of a wire down every couple of weeks, NM says. During the ice storm, they were “receiving numerous calls in a very few minutes.”

The heavy volume of calls forced the fire department to be fairly ruthless at times in setting priorities. “Due to the fact that we were inundated with calls, we basically had to try to prioritize which calls were most threatening to the general public and which could intensify the whole emergency situation ... For the most part we would respond to them all, cordon the area off with tape, [and] notify the PUC if they hadn’t already been notified ... Basically what we would try to do is ... keep pedestrians away if it was a well-travelled area. And notify the PUC. There’s not a lot we can do when the wires are alive.”

Kingston Central had “more than a dozen or two” actual fires due to wires down. Many of the fires were immediately adjacent to the telephone poles, whether at the base or midway or the top of the telephone poles where the wires were adjoining. There were also quite a few transformer fires and “half a dozen or more” house fires. Most of the house fires were restricted to the outsides of buildings, and often broke out where electrical stacks were bent over and had ignited. “[There were also] many, many wires on the ground just arcing and sparking and zipping and zapping, that people could see with the common eye. As opposed to the hundreds of wires that were down, in some cases dead and in some cases alive, but doing nothing really.”

The fire department received 25 or 30 calls about immediate electrical concerns that were “visible to the common eye,” NM said.

Asked about the specific causes of the fires and other damage, he said “For the most part it was the sheer weight of the ice on the wiring, on limbs and trees immediately above the wires, and ripping the wires out. For the most part it was the sheer weight of something, whether it be the wires or the trees that were bringing the wires down.”

[In a technical aside, NM explained that “arcing” occurs when power is trying to find a direction to travel in. It’s a power surge due to electricity becoming grounded or receiving a contact that it either likes or doesn’t like, and it’s a non-permanent type of contact, a temporary direction for electricity to go in until it finds a more permanent route. Arcing looks much like a camera flash. It can be bluish, orangish, and the colour will often change. Usually it’s just a tenth or a hundredth of a second flash, but it can be longer than that. The time change of the arcing can change the colour of the flash. A wire doesn’t have to be down to arc. You can have two different sources of electricity travelling, and if they touch together themselves, they will arc as well.]

NM “did a little bit of everything for a long period of time” during the storm. If the emergency had involved one major incident, his role would have been to go to that scene and serve as a safety officer for the incident commander. But because there was no single scene, he was never used in that capacity. Instead he did a little of everything. Initially he worked in the dispatch centre for a while, taking calls, talking to concerned citizens and taking reports of wires down, etc. He also helped dispatch vehicles to different calls and set priorities about where to send fire crews. Later the same day he went to City Hall as the fire department’s representative and took on the job of updating senior managers and Mayor Bennett, letting them know how the fire service was coping with the whole situation. Over the next four days, when Chief Glenn Gow was unable to attend senior management meetings, NM would often go in his place. In most cases he just gave updates about what the fire service was doing, how they were coping, what their concerns and problems were, and what would make their job easier.

Asked about his most vivid memory from the storm, he said “it would probably have to be 5 a.m., driving here [to the station]. It was disbelief, surprise, shock that it had been happening outside and I wasn’t aware of it.”

The nature of the work fire-fighters did during the storm wasn’t out of the ordinary, but the volume was much greater than usual, NM says. “We weren’t doing a whole heck of a lot that we haven’t already done. When wires are down, we’re accustomed [to that] and we’re trained and we have guidelines that we follow ... We just haven’t had to respond to 30 calls of wires down in as many minutes. So for the most part we were responding to calls of a very similar nature, just in a shorter period of time.”

He said he likes to think there was very little anxiety or excitement on the floor, among fire-fighters, at least about the type of the work they were doing. The pace may have caused some stress, however. “If there was anxiety or excitement, it would have been just because we had so many and it was [a matter of] prioritizing to respond to numerous locations at one time, which would have been tough. But they kind of came in surges as well. There was the odd lull.”

NM was convinced that the ice storm would generate a major, life-threatening emergency, and he worried that fire-fighters might not be able to reach victims in enough time to help them. “The major concern throughout that first few days of the ice storm was that if there had been a serious fire or rescue situation, in many parts of the city we would have had a real tough time responding within a reasonable response time. ... We like to think that we could be anywhere or have at least a first arriving vehicle anywhere in the city in approximately three minutes [on a normal day]. Well, in the storm, it was numerous areas that 13, 14 or 15 minutes probably would have been a respectable time, due to the fact that we would have been walking in a lot of cases, in some cases a number of blocks, to respond to someone’s front door. And how effective we would have been when we got there would have been a concern.”

Fire-fighters responded to many calls on foot, NM recalls, “but as far as major instances, no, we were very, very fortunate [that there were none leading to loss of life].”

Fire officials avoided calling in everyone at the same time because they needed to have fresh fire-fighters available in case ‘the big one’ arrived. “From a planning point of view there was no sense calling in all the Kingston fire department for the first day. We knew it was here for the long term, and we hadn’t had a major, major incident happen. And we always, at least I felt confident that we had the luxury of calling many individuals if they were needed. And basically I honestly thought it was just a matter of time before we had a Brown Bear incident or a Thrifty Drug Mart incident, and I’m referring to large fire calls which consumed large buildings and partial blocks of the city. So our backup plan was, we have a handful of fire-fighters and opposite crews that could come in at a moment’s notice. We were fortunate that way. That was probably the biggest reason we did not call them in initially to respond to wires down and what not.”

“We tried to function as normal as possible, and we were very successful in doing that.”

“I would like to think that the public would understand that in some cases our response time was longer, and yes, it could have been shorter, but really the method to our madness was ... I honestly thought and was encouraging senior managers to not call in backup personnel unless needed, because I honestly thought it was just a matter of time before we were definitely going to need them. And that’s when we would have utilized them.”

Kingston Central fire department runs a four platoon system. When one crew is working there’s always a shift that’s completely opposite, which means they’re not coming in that night or they haven’t left that morning. Each platoon has about 21 fire-fighters.

Twenty-one would have been a full complement, but during the ice storm the platoons tended to include only about 16 or 17 fire-fighters.

Morale was very high during the storm, NM recalls. “The fire-fighters knew they were being well-utilized, they were super-busy, they were providing assistance to the citizens of Kingston, they knew what they were doing was well-appreciated ... Morale was far from low. It would have been on the higher end of the scale. In a lot of cases being busier is better.”

Morale may have tapered off somewhat on days three, four and five of the storm due to fatigue, NM admits. Part of this had to do with fire-fighters needing to perform the double duty of keeping their own families warm and fed. “You were trying to do double duty basically at home and work. The novelty went out of it, at least for me, on about day three, trying to keep my house warm and lit.”

NM’s home lost power for six days. His gas furnace wasn’t functioning because its electrical blower was out. But he hot wired it into the generator, and he had a furnace a couple of days into the storm. His family had hot water throughout the emergency.

On day three he bought a generator and was able to fire up his furnace and supply some lighting to his wife and three kids (aged four, six and eight). Getting the house back up and running was a big relief: “As soon as I knew the house was more comfortable than [it was with just] a fireplace, and cooking was a little more convenient, other than a barbecue ...”

“The first two days weren’t too terribly bad, but it was nice when I knew that the house was intact and the heat was on and what not.”

His wife stayed home [from her job at KGH] during most of the storm. After day one, she was pretty much at home.

Calls were coming into the Kingston Central fire station at a rate of about 100 an hour at the start of the storm, and the total number of calls was about 1,000 times the normal figure. Many of them were reports of wires down or wires arcing, alarms activated and power glitches.

The fire station had two people in the dispatch centre, just answering phone calls. Another person would be trying to redirect vehicles from one call to another. “That was time-consuming, because a lot of times a vehicle, one of our fire apparatus, would try to go up street A and it would be blocked, so they’d have to resort to street B to get to the same call, which was in a lot of cases a much longer route to get to the call ... It would be frustrating knowing that it was time-consuming going to one call when you knew you had a whole backlog of other calls to go to.”

Fire-fighters also kept on edge by the possibility that one or more of the calls on their back list might be serious, NM said. “Not knowing what calls are waiting or what the intensity of the calls were ... yes, would have been frustrating. And I guess maybe possibly anticipating the worst, anticipating that one of these calls over here that’s on the back list to respond to could have been of a serious nature.”

Asked about his authority to act, NM said he reported to senior administrators and kept them informed, but did their own thing when it came to the front-line response. “We basically were reporting to Gardner Church, keeping the mayor updated, communicating with the Brian Sheridans, the Mark Segsworths, the senior managers downtown suggesting that ‘Hey, if at all possible, these areas of the city are very congested, could we open up the main routes.’ We had really good communication with the senior managers, and they were very obliging in trying to establish main arteries in the city for emergency services, which was at that time a high priority.”

“We basically prioritized and worked with the tree people [and] the hydro people. [Utilities director] Jim Keech was very successful in meeting some of our wishes that powered up some of our stations as soon as possible, keeping us informed when different parts of the city were being shut down.”

“We were fortunate. We have a job to do and we understand it and understood it and did it as best as possible. And once that was known downtown, I don’t think we were under as much of a watchful eye as a Jim Keech with PUC ... we were conducting business as usual, just a whole lot more of it.”

Asked whether money was a concern, NM said no. “Any time I had to make decisions regarding money, it was something [where] I said ‘I won’t worry about now ... Let’s just get our job done and we’ll worry about where it’s going to come from following this incident.’ It wasn’t a big concern. Yes, we called in overtime people. It never really entered my mind as far as ‘Hey, I could be slapped on the wrist for this.’”

Compared to other departments, NM estimates the fire service spent little more than it would have under normal circumstances. But some costs were unavoidable, such as those for vehicle maintenance. “There weren’t very many fire vehicles over that four-day span that did not sustain some damage. In most cases it was minor damage, [such as] scratches, broken light lenses ... just from debris on the streets. So I would guess it was just a few thousand dollars that we would have incurred between overtime costs [and] damage to vehicles. No, we weren’t in the tens of thousands of dollars or hundreds of thousands of dollars like many other departments. We certainly could have [spent that much]. If we had known there wasn’t going to be a big incident, then we probably could have supplied a slightly better service for that shorter period of time. But our mandate is to think about the worst-case scenario and try to act in that capacity.”

The fire service bought a few extra supplies, such as batteries and flashlights, but once again the extra costs were not too far out of the ordinary, NM said.

Fire-fighters needed more portable radios than they had, and spent all their time briefly re-charging those that were around. “Due to the fact that there were few batteries for portable radio and walkie talkie radios, they were well fatigued ... they take a special sort of battery that requires a charging system, and in order to charge them properly, normally we would drain the batteries and have them re-charged over night. We didn’t have that luxury to keep them up and running, so in many cases they were only getting a quick charge or a rapid charge, which only gives them a few hours. The shorter the charge, the shorter the longevity of the unit. So that was a concern, but once again it was something we worked with and lived with.”

Batteries were being replaced or re-charged much more often than usual in the first few days of the storm -- about six times a day, rather than once every few days.

Fire trucks were equipped with radios that run on the vehicles’ electrical system, and those were never a problem.

Kingston-Central fire station’s dispatch centre also functioned well, unlike the dispatch centre in Kingston West, which was “well-taxed.” Some other departments piggy backed on the Kingston West dispatch system to dispatch calls for various reasons [ask Glenn Gow about this] ... “so communications, yes, it was a concern. Basically when radios would malfunction or die out or transmitting became impossible it meant anything from hand signals to people relaying messages by foot.”

NM was holed up in the station during the first part of the storm, and used a cell phone to do a lot of his work. “For the most part, for the first three days of the incident I basically saw nothing of the city aside from the route from my house to this building here, and from this building to City Hall. So yes, I had a cell phone and a portable phone so I could dial out of City Hall and talk to this station, talk to Glenn Gow, update Chief Gow, and receive information from Chief Gow.”

He had no telephone at home for several days, and his wife had no cell phone. So there were times when he couldn’t check on his family.

All in all, NM says, the emergency was probably good for morale. “Under these circumstances, a fire department really tends to gel together. Everybody is extremely co-operative when need be. The sense of helping and belonging tends to be that much greater amongst fire-fighters ... morale tends to [get a] boost when people are receiving assistance and when people are able to give assistance.”

The paper trail sometimes suffered due to a lack of time, NM recalls, and less attention was paid to calls that normally would have received full attention. “There were times in the dispatch centre that short form was being conducted by people like myself that can’t perform short form. So many times I would be jotting down a lot less information from callers than [we would] normally. There [were] calls that I ... re-routed to other agencies, [such as] ambulance service or the PUC, that would have been undocumented. I’m not saying that was good, but in that case there were other lines flashing and I was still concerned for the worst ... Many calls received very little attention that under the normal situation would have received lots of attention. For the most part, for the first few hours, if it wasn’t a rescue situation or a medical concern or a first-responding emergency sort of situation, I don’t want to say calls were sloughed off, but they were re-directed as much as possible.”

Internal communication [between fire-fighters and fire officials] was “great, verbally,” NM recalls, and when it came to documentation, “we did the best we could with what we had and the people we had.”

“Hundreds” of calls would have gone missing from the fire service’s statistical summary of its activities during the storm, but those were calls that were redirected to other agencies.

NM says he may never have met a lot of employees in the new city if not for the ice storm. “The idea of assisting each other and working as close as we did, I think was extremely beneficial to the senior management group and the people who are trying to drive this city as smoothly as possible under these transition conditions ... So I really think there was a whole lot more positive that came out of this [than negative]. When we were at City hall we were working together for a common goal, and that was to ... get the city up and functioning and to supply safety, and let the citizens of Kingston know, hey, we’re as concerned as they are, and we’re doing our damndest and best to alleviate things such as response times and potential hazards that could very well have been incurred.”

Fire-fighter attendance was excellent throughout the storm, NM recalls. “We never had a staffing concern here, we never had people late. I don’t know if we had any sickness at all, which proves that people were here for emergency work and were doing their damndest to provide it. Does it sound like I’m a proud fire-fighter? I guess I’m just proud of the way things were handled and functioned.”

Only minor problems arose. “Looking back, if we could have had double the amount of portable radio equipment, or triple the amount of radio equipment, that would have alleviated a concern. A big concern, which was a short-term one, was the inaccessible routes to different parts of the city. However it was something we knew we couldn’t be overly concerned with because we knew the people that were out there were doing the best they could do to clear those routes. It was just a matter of time, and we were keeping our fingers crossed. Time was our big concern. I for one was anticipating that it was a matter of time before we got an area or a concern that was going to be major or fatal.”