IceStorm 98 Study

When the storm hit, Ron Wadden (RW) was two days away from leaving his job as interim editorial page editor of The Whig-Standard and starting a new job at the Toronto Star. He reverted back to his role as news editor during the emergency and played a key role in getting out the first two ‘storm editions’ of the paper.

[NB: Ron is also my husband, and we have worked together at the Whig on various occasions].

As news editor, he designed the front page and several other pages, edited stories and wrote headlines, and basically made sure that the paper got out.

Power was out at the newsroom (in the Woolen Mill), so they moved several pagination terminals out to the plant on Grant Timmins Drive and produced the paper there.

The composition of the storm edition team had a lot to do with who was available. Some people lived in outlying regions and couldn’t easily get in to help. There was also a shortage of space out at the printing plant, so only core staff were used. There were about four or five people reporting and three or four people paginating and designing pages on the first edition, and a few more of each on the second day.

RW was awake most of Wednesday night listening to the storm and getting up to look out the windows. He remembers thinking that the huge tree in front of our house was going to fall through the roof. Lynn Haddrall, the Whig’s managing editor, called him at home at about 6:30 a.m. and explained that the power was out in the newsroom and that they were going to have to figure out what to do. A meeting was scheduled for 9 a.m. in the newsroom. RW walked down to the Woolen Mill, and says it was “a walk [he] won’t forget soon.”

Just walking out the front door and trying not to fall down on the ice was a challenge, he says. There were branches down all over the place, hydro wires were crackling in some place, and he was unable to take a direct route down to the Woolen Mill because some roads were impassable.

Eventually he got down there, and found a handful of people from other departments in the lobby. Someone had managed to get in the front door despite there being an electric entry system. There were no lights on, and a cell phone was being passed around.

Eventually everybody gathered. It took people a while to get in. There were some doubts expressed as to whether they would be able to get a paper out or not, because the power was out at the downtown building and they didn’t know if power would last at the printing plant. “Of course if we didn’t have power at the printing plant then we were cooked.”

RW is not aware of whether the Whig had backup power, but he remembers a technical advisor saying it was not a good idea to use generators because the power supply can be unstable and might damage the computers. RW didn’t know if there were enough generators to run the printing plant anyway. “I don’t know that we had any, and I don’t know that it was really considered much of an option, for long anyway.”

A decision was made to move out to the printing plant, and a few people picked up CPUs and monitors to bring out to Grant Timmins Drive. It took Lynn Haddrall a while to get there from her home in Odessa. “Basically when she got there we talked about it and there was really no doubt in our minds that we had to get a paper out somehow, and we would do everything we possibly could to get one out. I said there were some doubts expressed, but they were temporary. We were just trying to figure out how to do it, but I don’t think anybody really was convinced for long that we wouldn’t get a paper out.”

Whig staff were motivated by two things, as he recalls it: professional pride in always getting the paper out, and a realization that they had to get emergency information to the public. RW said he was also motivated by the fact that he had only two days left at the Whig, and wanted to rise to the challenge.

“My immediate gut reaction, because it was my last two days at the paper ... I, to be perfectly honest, didn’t want it in my background to have been at the paper when we didn’t get the paper out. That’s a big sort of personal motivation when you don’t want to have that on your head, even if it wouldn’t have been any responsibility of ours if all the power was out all over the place. I wanted to get the paper out, and it was somewhat of a badge of honour that we got it out. I think mixed in with that is the feeling that, ‘Yeah, we have to get the paper out, it’s our job to get the paper out, and part of that job is to serve the public, and to get information out to readers.’ That’s what we do. So I do think the two motivations were mixed together. On the surface, it’s the ‘We’re not going to let this beat us’ kind of mentality, may have been the more obvious. But I think the other [motivation] is there, buried a little bit.”

The fact that the Whig was one of the only news outlets up and running locally (three out of four local radio stations and CKWS-TV were down) didn’t come up. “Everybody has their role to play ... we were just so concerned with getting our own thing done that we didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to what other people, other media, were doing.”

“I remember feeling -- I think I said it at one stage -- but that there was no way we were not going to let the paper out. I think there was a real rush, you get a bit of a rush on deadline when things are piling up and you’ve got to get things finished, and there was an even bigger rush then because we didn’t know if we’d be able to get it done. We had to rush against time because we didn’t know if power was going to go out at any moment.”

Normal tasks -- like getting stories off the wire to supplement the storm coverage -- became a major challenge. Tim Gordanier, who is the paper’s sports and new media editor, went home and downloaded stories off of various Web sites, such as Canadian Press and Southam News, copied the stories onto disc, brought the discs in to the plant and downloaded the stories onto the system from there.

RW made decisions as he normally would as news editor, so things were not all that different than usual. Lynn Haddrall was there during the whole emergency, and they did a lot of consulting back and forth about what to run and how to fill and design the papers. There weren’t many people in the plant, so communication became more informal than usual. They would banter back and forth, and if there was debate about anything, Lynn would make a final decision. Basically, RW said, things proceeded as they always do at newspapers: “You have to make some decisions on your own along the way, and then others you defer to the senior person around.”

Ron’s most vivid memory from the whole event was a small standing ovation he received from his colleagues on the second night. Lynn announced that it was Ron’s last night at the Whig -- after seven years with the paper -- and his co-workers burst into an impromptu round of applause. “It was very touching.”

He recalls feeling elated after the first night and deflated when it was all over. “It was strange because after the first night, I felt a real rush. We’d gotten it out, I was proud of it, I thought it was as good as we could have done under the circumstances. I was very happy about that, and I also knew that I would probably have a chance to do it again one more time, because I knew that circumstances probably weren’t going to change much for the next day. At the end of the second day, as I finished up ... I was not as happy as I had been the day before because I knew that was it, there wasn’t going to be another one. So I was almost surprised by that. I didn’t realize that I would feel that way ... Those kinds of deadline rushes when you’re on the news desk are part of what keep you going ... they give you an adrenaline rush, and that adrenaline rush is an enjoyable one, as long as it doesn’t happen every single day all the time. So when I realized that was it, that was the last one, it was a bit of a letdown.”

The atmosphere in the printing plant in those first two days was “a bit tense,” and people were engaging in quite a bit of gallows humour, RW recalls.

People were tense because they didn’t know if power would last at the plant. “There were a number of brownouts, moments where the power seemed to fail, and you could hear the press sort of hiccup for a minute. We would all stop and look around, and wonder if that was it. Because that was the lifeline. As soon as that went, we were out of luck.”

News values shifted somewhat as a result of the crisis. “In emergency circumstances, your first priority becomes informing people about where to go for shelter, what places to avoid, what’s dangerous, what’s not.” The Whig shifted into that mode automatically, without sitting down to discuss how news priorities would be set, he recalls.

“We didn’t sit down and say ‘OK, we’re now going to do such and such.’ I think it was a natural thing for us to decide ‘OK, what’s the most important thing we have to do right now,’ and the most important thing we had to do was just inform people about shelters, etc.”

RW didn’t hear reporters’ complaints about a lack of access to city officials, but by the time he got in for his night shift most reporters were done for the day.

[At this point we circle back to the prepared ice storm questions, and I get RW to talk about when and how he first realized the city was facing a major event or emergency].

RW knew the storm was coming because he had heard about problems in Montreal and Ottawa from the night before. He heard the storm all night on Wednesday and looked out the window to see large chunks of trees falling. He knew it wasn’t just our street but that it was “all over the place.” As soon as he walked through the city, that’s when it really hit him just how widespread the damage appeared to be. But he was aware of the storm all night.

The content of the storm editions was limited by the fact that the Whig couldn’t gain access to information on some of its servers. That’s why there was no editorial page in the first paper, because there was no way of getting at the information (letters and columns, etc.) that are normally used on the editorial page.

Advertisements also proved to be a big problem. Many finished ads were locked inside computer terminals back at the main office, unable to be accessed. In many cases the artwork had already been scanned in, but they couldn’t get at it. “So they had to do some major fudging to get any ads in.” RW expects there was a loss of revenue, but doesn’t know the figures.

Whig employees showed a great deal of resourcefulness during the storm, RW recalls. “Everybody was working towards the same goal, whether it was gathering information, writing stories or making personal sacrifices to get the paper out. A lot of people had to stay in hotels or friends houses or whatever, and everybody just did what they had to do to get the paper out.”

Asked what didn’t work well, he cited the basic problem that newspapers are “so reliant on power and servers [that] without it it’s very difficult to get a newspaper out.”

Asked what he would change as a result of the ice storm, he said he’ll keep more bottled water in the house and make sure he always has a carbon monoxide detector. Eventually he wants to have a wood stove. But as far as the job, he can’t think of any changes he would make.

The Whig didn’t have an emergency plan that was written down, but the impromptu plan was to find whatever power source they could, go there and set up a makeshift newsroom.

RW has never had any emergency training. He had no contact with provincial or federal emergency measures during the storm.

He doesn’t recall it being much more stressful than usual during the storm. “I can feel stressed every day in that job, so it’s not unusual ... The stress was heightened a bit, but that was just the circumstances. It was balanced by the adrenaline rush.” It reminded him of the feeling you get working for a newspaper on election night.

RW finished his job at the Whig at around midnight on Friday, Jan. 9 and started his new job at the Toronto Star at 9 a.m. on Monday, Jan. 12.