IceStorm 98 Study

Randy Reid (RR) is one of four area officers employed by Emergency Measures Ontario (EMO) to promote emergency planning, training and exercising and to respond to an emergency by providing guidance and advice to municipalities that have declared emergencies.

RR got his first call Wednesday (January 7th) morning - Akwesasne Reserve near Cornwall had declared an Emergency and RR arrived mid-afternoon.

The further east he went the worse it got. Before RR left Kingston he called Mark Derroch (MD) [Social Services administrator for Leeds and Grenville] to get him to ship the Provincial/Federal store of mattresses and sleeping bags from L&G to Akwesasne.

The mattresses and sleeping bags and MD arrived one or two hours after RR. While MD and RR were discussing distribution, MD’s pager went off and the second emergency was born- the Township of North Grenville had declared and they wanted the mattresses and sleeping bags. MD turned to Health and Welfare Canada for supplies then.

A total of sixty-four Emergencies were declared, but the Province did not declare a State of Emergency.

RR was in Akwesasne until Friday (January, 9th) because the roads were closed until then. It was a harrowing drive getting off the reserve. Only one gas station in Cornwall was open and RR waited in line for gas. The line for coffee was even longer and he didn’t bother with the coffee.

RR returned to Kingston on Friday, was re-deployed to Brockville, then went back to Kingston, was re-deployed back to Brockville and on his way to Brockville got called back to work at CFB Kingston, where he was the liaison officer for the Province for “Sector South”.

Under the legislation the Solicitor-General requested help from the military so the Canadian Forces were then operating under the direction of the Ontario Government.

EMO identifies taskings to the military and then the military decides how to carry them out.

RR tried to do the whole thing for Sector South for a few days, splitting his time between the City [of Kingston] and the Base. They didn’t have all the information up-front (about the scale of the emergency), and it takes time to mobilize resources.

About five eighths of RR’s territory was under a state of emergency - this was unprecedented.

RR was re-deployed to Leeds and Grenville on January 13th. L&G didn’t have a warden elected and hadn’t mobilized their emergency plan.

L&G elected an interim warden (Howard French) who is now the warden.

RR was in Brockville from about the 13th to the 26th.

EMO sent two people and some support staff to work out of CFB Kingston when RR was re-deployed.

RR was the lone EMO contact in Brockville.

The area officer from Thunder Bay was in SD&G (Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry) and the area officer from Sudbury was in Ottawa. The London Officer was in Kingston.

The provincial operation was run out of EMO’s offices in downtown Toronto.

The Province went into twinning, (i.e. pairing municipalities one in the emergency, one outside the emergency), an idea Greg Taylor came up with. It worked because it cut out the middle man. The Province at first was trying to identify everyone’s needs but this was difficult to do from a central organization - twinning put the supplier directly in contact with the customer.

RR came up with an idea about dealing with offers of help - in an emergency you have convergence of resources and people, everyone wants to help and you can be overwhelmed with resources, but you don’t want to discourage anyone - so RR said to ask what people can provide and to get a contact name and phone number, and then match this list with the needs - this cut out some of the storage needs later on by not getting too much of what you don’t need.

Lumber came from Timmins, hydro crews from Wawa, and hydro poles from California.

The Province had seven or nine EMO people and brought in emergency planners from other places like Marg Verbeek from Kitchener-Waterloo.

RR was so busy in L&G doing operations he couldn’t do planning, so Marg Verbeek did the planning (RR got the OK from the Warden to operate this way).

A person from Hamilton became the L&G information officer.

In the mornings they had a control group technical meeting and at six p.m. also had politicians come in to give updates on their communities and to get their requests.

The County Engineer (Gord Dougall) looked after generators greater than 5000, and Harold Tulk (County Fire Co-ordinator) generators less than 5000.

RR realized very quickly that EMO needed to come up with guidelines for returning equipment; EMO also came up with other guidelines and hints.

RR had to make sure everybody’s needs got met, couldn’t have the “back-door” system, but all they had was the back-door system at first.

RR says there is a need to abandon the back-door system once a formal structure is in place.

RR said - “you tell us what you need and we’ll make it happen”.

“Resources were not a problem - we had resources coming out our (ears) - resources were not a problem”.

Organizations that had done the best had taken time to do some emergency training and planning - where there was nothing, that’s where there were problems.

L&G has a CAER committee that meets regularly and exercises regularly and they have a County plan - once the County plan was in place, it provided a focus for all the communities to be treated equally.