IceStorm 98 Study

Dr. Peter Glynn feels that it took about two days for people to figure out that this was a disaster. He remembers that it started on Wednesday night and the hospital noticed it most when people didn't show up for work on Thursday, although some patients "came in through hell or high water to meet their appointments". It took a while for people to figure that this wasn't going to go away fast and that the power was going to be off longer than usual. There were substantial portions of the City and the rural areas that were without power. The issue was also that just because the power came on didn't mean it was staying on.

Kingston General Hospital was without power for about 8 hours. They have generators that power most things. They discovered that only some plugs are on emergency power so they spent Thursday fixing most of that and adding more emergency power plugs. They don't have enough generating capacity to replace everything so they were "scurrying around to make sure the 'fridges and those sorts of things" had power.

Some of the Queen's University buildings that they are connected to had freezers with 20 years’ full of research samples in them so they were running extension cords to power those up or they would have lost their life-time of research. In the University setting, electricity is also necessary for freezers and temperature control of all types for storing research samples. He recalls that some samples may have been moved over to K.G.H. from Botterall Hall.

The main thing they did at K.G.H. was to make sure that they were able to deal with any influx of patients with whatever problems, whether caused by fire or accident or carbon monoxide poisoning, etc. All of their energy went into making sure they had beds available and keeping staff around.

Thursday night they slept approximately 75 people (particularly nursing and lab staff) over. "In all cases they were happy because they were warm. They probably wouldn't have been, at home." They were also quite willing to be there for the next day.

There was also some confusion, even though the Mayor was doing the right things, created by some of the announcements. An example is the announcement telling people to stay home, don't go to work. "Well, excuse me. That's the wrong thing to say to hospital staff." There was some controversy caused by this over paying some people who had stayed home. K.G.H. went further than they would normally have gone but they didn't just pay people who had made no contact with the hospital.

The other problem was paying people because banks had all shut down and locked their doors. Even though people had access to bank machines, K.G.H. couldn't get the payroll into the banks. Fortunately, one of their Board members works for the Bank of Montreal and "she gathered up a couple of people and got a door open and they went in and typed it in themselves." Dr. Glynn found that annoying, "that the banks abandoned their customers" and didn't put any thought into the fact that staff get paid every two weeks. "One of the things that happened here is that a lot of people got so immersed in their own situation, they forgot what their job was." Although it's understandable, they didn't make any alternate arrangements. "What I really found fascinating is that a lot of people basically said to the world 'we're optional'. And many of them weren't optional."

The interesting thing with the Hotel Dieu Hospital is that they converted themselves from being a hospital to a hostel. "That was good in many ways, but it would have been nice if there was more consultation about some of these things. And the impact." He comments that, as Frank Norman said in an earlier conversation, "People started working independently."

Dr. Glynn says that there was enough communication that everybody in the health care field knew what the other person was doing, "but there wasn't a lot of discussion about 'should we be doing that?' Everybody was looking after their own particular situation."

Dr. Glynn feels that it all worked "because of lots of personal contacts. The instant creation of a hostel at Hotel Dieu was a good idea, but they didn't realize how good an idea it was, and then had to turn around and say...'Can the rest of you take some patients 'cause we can't cope with 350' they had that Thursday night. But it all worked out amazingly well, actually."

The shelter at K.G.H. was opened for Friday night. They took about 40 people from the community who had been at Hotel Dieu. Some were walk-ins or some had gone into the Dieu and were redirected to K.G.H. They were "medically compromised people. They were on oxygen or ventilators or dialysis.... They needed a wall plug, they needed some nursing staff around, as well as food and sleep." They kept that open until approximately Monday.

Then, on Monday, they created a 10-bed home care unit. K.G.H. was concerned about keeping the regular acute care beds in the hospital as free as possible because of difficulties staffing and because of concerns about dealing with whatever came along. They were quite worried about pneumonia, hypothermia, carbon monoxide.... They needed to discharge people but they couldn't be discharged to their home. Home Care went in to staff the new unit for about 3 days "and it worked terrifically".

Dr. Glynn says, "We lost a few friends in that the physiotherapists feel like they were evicted in that they were going to be transferred to St. Mary's eventually anyway" in about a month or so. "Well, they got transferred within a few hours." They were St. Mary's employees but they had been using the space at K.G.H. for therapy.

He comments that a disturbing part of the hostel experience is that for many of the people staying with them during the ice storm, their standard of living went up. "They had better food. They had better sleep. ... And all of them were pleased that we had done this."

Dr. Glynn remembers "three old guys sitting in chairs outside the gym, like they were on a park bench, and they were having a little chat with themselves." "'We just want to stay out of the way. We don't want to be any trouble. We just like being warm.'" He says that that was kind of neat and there's no doubt that they were better fed than they normally would have been.

"The volunteers through the Auxiliary and the volunteers' service at the hospital were terrific."

A claim for approximately $150,000 was submitted for storm-related expenses. A lot of it was overtime, some supplies shipped out to others (diapers, Extends for seniors).

In response to a question of whether things were stressful, Dr. Glynn replies, "I think they had fun, actually. It broke the routine. We brought in pizzas and food. And people had pajama parties.... And [people] thought that they were doing something worthwhile."

"The City had no sense of what resources it had. It had to discover that on the fly. And one thing I was trying to do was take some of the issues off their agenda.... So I was just trying to get as many things off their table as possible because they had enough other problems."

A concern, of course, was the water and power supply but the City engineers assured him that the water supply was not a problem.

Dr. Glynn had meetings about twice a day at K.G.H. with senior staff to find out "what are you doing, what are your problems, how are you making out".

The biggest problem was getting staff in. They used Guy-Tash Security to fetch some staff who were having trouble getting in. The other problem was getting physicians in and they discovered that they didn't know some of their phone numbers.

(He mentions that Dr. David Walker couldn't get out of his house for two days. He lives out in the country. They couldn't even contact him by phone because his phone line went down.)