IceStorm 98 Study

Scott Cowden (SC) is a planning officer with the Toronto Fire Service. It’s his job to “be ahead of game, to plan for emergencies before they happen, to do risk analysis for the city, and to make appropriate preparations for it ahead of schedule ... so that heaven forbid when something bad does happen, we’ve already had a look at the potential damage to the city and damage to the people that live here, and are ahead of the game, so we get the city restored to normal service as quickly as possible.” He works with Bob Crawford within emergency planning and research and development unit of the fire department. Before joining the emergency planning unit he spent about 20 years as fire-fighter, joining Toronto fire as a volunteer in the late 1970s and becoming a career fire fighter for the city in 1983.

He spent a few days in Kingston helping Cynthia Beach, Barclay Mayhew and others better organize the generators section of the emergency relief effort.

Toronto had offered to help Kingston with the relief effort, and beginning on the Saturday morning, some Toronto people began heading down to Kingston. SC drove down on the Sunday morning after the storm broke. He remembers it being “an amazing clear day, one of those winter blue sky days where the sky is that stunning azure blue, not a cloud to be seen, bright sunshine, and the highway was all but empty, I guess, because pretty much everybody at that point, four or five days in, had been told ‘stay away, stay away.’ It was sort of an amazing sight because the roads were absolutely dry.” When he got between Trenton and Kingston, “you come over a bit of a rise in the highway, and you could see a line, like somebody had literally cut it with a knife, where the ice literally started, and all of a sudden all the trees were broken, and it just got worse and worse on that line until I actually got to Kingston.”

When he arrived in Kingston, there was no hydro in a large part of the city, and the roads were filled with wood debris and branches that he had to navigate his way around as he made his way to City Hall.

He wasn’t exactly surprised by the devastation, but it was bad. “Having been through a couple of tornadoes, I guess I wasn’t overly surprised. I mean, I’ve seen that level of destruction before, and worse, I guess. But Kingston is a what I would call a mature tree city. It’s an older city, so it’s got lots of mature trees that you just don’t see in some newer neighbourhoods. It’s sort of sad to see all that come crashing down.”

SC was told to report to City Hall, so he drove straight there, where he met up with a couple of his counterparts, ie. Stephan Powell and Bob Crawford. Crawford asked him if he would work with the people in the generator section, who were providing emergency power to the various shelters and places like that. So he sat in on the first meeting of the emergency control group, with the heads of the various depts, and got a feel for what was going on, a general situation report. After that, he went down and met up with Cynthia Beech, and met the rest of her group, including Jamie Brash, Barclay Mayhew, Lindsay Reiach. “Great people. All great people. But they were just flying, trying to keep everything going. And they were tired, they’d been at it for three or four days.”

The first order of business -- and one which initially caused some controversy -- was to bring some order to the influx and deployment of generators, SC said. Equipment had come flying in from all over the place and just as quickly gone flying out; their biggest problem was that they didn’t know what they had and where the stuff they had sent out was. So the first thing SC did was try and sit down with them and get a handle on the whereabouts of all the generators and establish a system for keeping track of new ones. This was not a popular suggestion at first. “They really didn’t want to. I don’t blame them. They were tired and a bit cranky. They didn’t want to sit down and take a stop for half an hour and say ‘OK, what’s where?’ So I literally made them do that, and do a list of what [was] currently available for use and where everything went. It was all on scraps of paper, and some of it wasn’t documented. It took us three or four days to find some of the generators. They were out there working; we just didn’t know where they were. So we made a concerted effort to get that piece of the puzzle resolved.”

This was necessary because “If you don’t know what you have and you don’t know where it is, you can’t effectively deploy resources,” SC said. “Picture trying to do any job; try and bake a cake when you think you might have the ingredients but you don’t know where they are.”

Convincing the group of the importance of this step was difficult because they were a bit caught up in the emergency, he said. “Dealing with emergencies is not most people’s everyday line of work.” But in his line of work, SC said, you learn to save yourself time and aggravation by developing systems and taking good inventory as the emergency is unfolding. “A fellow taught me two rules a long time ago, and it downplays the thing, but it’s sort of a way of looking at it. Rule number one is ‘don’t sweat the small stuff,’ and rule number two is ‘it’s all small stuff.’ So you sit down and you literally take this thing apart and put it back together. While I’m sure it seemed like a waste of time to them in the beginning, the next day when somebody calls in for a generator, and you go down the list and say ‘OK, yeah, we have a 6,500-watt generator sitting right here, and you assign a crew to go get it, life is much easier. It’s a lot calmer then, because you’re not scrambling around looking for resources you’re not sure you have...”

“It was quite heated there, the first hour I was in the room with them, but after that point things were motored along. And I think -- this is a bit of bragging on my part -- but I think it was generally accepted that we had one of the best-running groups in the entire command post.”

It didn’t quite get to the point where they were ready to kick SC out of the room, but “it was close to that,” he says. “You just have to have an appreciation [for the fact] that these guys had been pushed right to the limit, for 36 or 40 hours pretty much non-stop ... you’re eating on the run all the time, and you’re eating while you’re working ... it’s tough. They didn’t have any down time, and that’s very difficult for people to do.”

With a slow onset emergency like this, it’s difficult to know whether to set up shifts or not. “When you’re starting down the road with this sort of thing ... you say ‘we’ll start to deal with this,’ and then it’s getting worse and it’s getting worse ... and the next thing you know you’re up to your eyeballs in alligators.” SC saw all sorts of behaviour from Kingston and area residents, ranging from selfless to self-centred. Most people understood that they were not the only person being inconvenienced by the storm, but a few residents demanded personal attention. “Human nature is an interesting thing; when things really get ugly, most people really sort of buckle down and work. There was a few people who fully expected that they were going to be taken care of, and were quite indignant when they thought they might actually have to do something for themselves. But there were only a few of those people.”

SC recalls one individual who refused to leave his home, but demanded special consideration from the generator group and other city staff. “He was an older man, with his wife. This is six days into the incident, and he said ‘I can’t haul any more wood, I’m too tired.’ I said ‘Well, we’re going to put you in a shelter.’ He said ‘No, I can’t do that.’ So we made arrangements to get this guy a generator. So we get him a generator. And it was literally all we had left; we were down to the dregs at that point, and we had pretty much everything else out and working. Then he phones me back in three or four hours, mad as hell because he shut it off to go shopping and he comes back and he can’t get it started. So we sent somebody else to get it started for him. Then he phones me back in an hour and he wants a different generator, because this one he’s got to fill up with fuel every three or four hours, and he doesn’t want to do that. He wants one that’ll run all day. It gets to the point where you have to say ‘Come on, fella, you are not our only emergency here.’”

Some people tried “playing both ends” to make sure they got their share of the scarce resources. In a couple of cases, SC said, civic officials “misrepresented their situation to several organizations and ended up hogging help that could have gone to other people.” Individuals claimed to different command centres that they were being refused help by another command centre, and then we had generator trucks pulling up to find generator trucks from the other command centre sitting there, hooking in at the time. This happened three or four times, which SC said is “not much given the hundreds of generators we gave out.” They would talk to Belleville command and say we’re near the border area, but Kingston won’t help us. In that particular instance, they already had a generator in the place, but they ended up with four generators. In one case it was a seniors home that they were trying to light up, which is a bone fide need, but they had a generator in place, and misrepresented their system in order to get a backup generator. “And of course in an emergency like that, when you’re fully deployed, you don’t have the luxury of backing up every place with extra equipment like that.”

“In most cases it was because of a lack of planning on the part of the municipality, be it the township or whatever, that caused the problem,” SC said. Some municipalities didn’t have any sort of an emergency plan in place. Quite often the responsibility for drawing one up is laid on the fire department, but with a smaller fire department you’re dealing with a volunteer force. “These guys have their own concerns to deal with; if they’re farmers and they have no electricity, they’ve got to deal with their own stuff ... and you can’t always rely on the volunteer force to be there for weeks at a time.”

South Frontenac didn’t have an emergency plan, and they weren’t the only ones. Even though S. Frontenac was initially outside of their work area, SC said, they ended up sending them a lot of equipment and people. “We all appreciated that everyone was having a difficult time, but it’s sort of a shared deal. We sent generators south of Frontenac, then north of Frontenac ... to all the surrounding areas. It was one of those things where if you’ve got some generators and you don’t currently have any use for them, I don’t feel right just letting them sit. They’re there to be worked.”

The generator group set priorities by deciding who needed generators most, in order to serve the greatest number of people or the most needy category of people. “We started with the top of the list. Hospitals’ emergency services need to be kept running, the shelters need to be powered, and then we worked down the list. Our priority is to protect people, but we can’t always protect people in place. It’s not appropriate for us to try and find generators for every house in Kingston.” They powered up a few homes where the occupants were older people who couldn’t easily get to a shelter. They would have gone to a hospital instead, but you don’t want to start filling up your hospitals with invalided people if you can help it, SC said. There were maybe six or seven homes like that in Kingston, where the people were in their 80s or 90s and it was easier to put a generator on their home rather than find them a hospital bed.

On his second day there, SC said ‘OK, these things have all been running for a few days, what are you doing about looking after them?’ We got these sort of blank stares.” SC used to own his own engine repair dealership, and understood the need to do maintenance on the generators. They got a crew from Cynthia’s division, three or four mechanics and a couple of trucks together, and they started going around and changing the oil in these generators and making sure the air filters are clean and that sort of thing, to keep them going. These smaller engines don’t have the same built-in systems that a car would have. They don’t have oil filters, for example, so they need to have the oil changed on a regular basis, or the dirt and the wear just wears the engines out in short order. Also if they run out of oil they’re blown. Some of these engines only run on a litre of oil, so you don’t have a whole lot of buffer zone.

The group only had one seized engine, “and considering we had a hundred and change generators out, I thought that wasn’t too bad.” There were about 130 or 140 generators in total.

Of all the generators that were sent down from the Toronto area, only one (a medium sized generator) went missing during the storm and failed to return. Kingston replaced it.

There were some break-ins, and a few generators were stolen. A Kingston fire fighter was physically assaulted when he interrupted two guys trying to steal a generator away from one of the fire halls. But there weren’t many generator thefts in Kingston area; but rumour has it that East of Kingston, towards Morrisburg way, the other side of Brockville, quite a number of generators were stolen.

SC spent most of his time working in the command post, and hardly got out into the field at all. He had a team that included about a dozen guys from various hydro utilities (Toronto and Scarborough), another better part of a dozen fire-fighters, and three metro police officers the ETF with the generator van. They broke them into teams, because each generator installation needed at least one person who could wire into the house, and a couple of strong backs to move equipment around. So they broke the skills up into teams, and sent them around with generators and lists of installations to do. They would report back as they got them done.

In hooking up generators, you need to separate out the power supply from the house, because houses aren’t built to accommodate generators. You have to turn off the power supply to the hydro grid so that it doesn’t feed back, ie., so that when the lineman goes to hook it up he doesn’t get nailed from the generator’s power. Then you wire it in. And conversely, once the hydro’s back on, you have to go in and reverse the procedure. “So it’s not quite as easy as saying ‘yes, hook it up’ and we’re done.’”

One electrician got a bit of a jolt while hooking up a generator. In order to reduce the potential for this happening again, SC went out and bought a case of padlocks and had his crews use them to lock the electrical boxes in the off position every time they went out to install a generator. That way the person couldn’t come along and turn it back on; nobody could turn the electricity back on and endanger themselves or someone else while the generator was hooked up to the house. When they went back out, they cut the locks off with bolt cutters.

“I just didn’t want to have any of our people responsible for electrocuting any of our linemen out doing the hard end of the job.”

The emergency response generally seemed to go well, SC said: “Everybody worked hard; once they got into the swing of things after a few days, things went really well.” But he noticed that senior administrators had a tendency to “waste energy” by dividing up the emergency response effort: “Some of the higher up people, I don’t know ... they were trying to organize things, and they kept breaking things up and finding it didn’t work and putting it back together, and there was some energy wasted there. Rather than just designating a command post and running things appropriately, they kept trying to analyse it to death.”

For example, they had a central command post, and at one point they were putting together another sub-command post at Joyceville Penitentiary. It was supposed to run an area, except the people in it kept phoning the generator group. And then the command post would phone them for materials as well. So the generator group was supplying the neighbourhood and the command post at the same time, SC said, “and that’s not good.”

“What ended up happening is you’re dividing up the pie but you’re not dividing up the workload,” he said. “It just added more links in the chain than probably needed to be there. And I think they eventually ended up closing it down after a day or so, because it simply wasn’t working. If you centralize the thing and get it so that people have two or three phone numbers, and everybody phones there, and you deal with it appropriately at that level, then things go smoother than breaking up the pie into 50 pieces when everybody ends up going to the same place anyway.”

SC described Col. Gerry Coady’s group as “some well-intentioned people who thought they could break [the job] up and make it easier,” but he said the way they were deployed did more harm than good. Part of what happened is only half of the job was split, SC says. Col. Coady’s group was out there trying to do the regional response, but a lot of the calls were still coming into the regional centre, which was trying to respond. “It was not an appropriate deployment at that point; it just didn’t work right.”

When told that some people have praised Col. Coady’s group as a highly efficient operation who knew how to run an operation centre, SC laughed and said “Well ... maybe they did.” But he said more time was time spent on “establishing command levels” than on delivering services at some points. “They were so busy with the administrative end of it that they weren’t actually delivering the service appropriately, in my view, for what that’s worth.”

Adding the northern response centre just magnified the duplication that was already making life difficult for the generator group. “People were phoning the northern command centre looking for generators, and then when they didn’t get an answer right away they were phoning us looking for generators. We’d supply a generator, then the northern command centre would phone us looking for a generator ... there was so much duplication that we really had to look closely [to find out where generators were needed or had already been deployed].” In some cases two generators were sent to the same place, because there were two requests. “When resources are limited, you can’t afford to be duplicating.”

The problems with the northern response reinforced his belief that “If you make a decision to do something a certain way, unless there’s a glaring reason to change it, you know, [because] you’ve made an obvious mistake, you’re better off I think to work in that direction.” There were too many different numbers to call, and things kept changing. “Not that change is a bad thing, but there should probably be a reason to change.”

The general co-operation of the people was great, both within the civic organization and the people of Kingston, SC said. People pulled a lot of things off.

One of the more touching things he came across was a note from a woman who was going around leaving thank you cards on all the windshields of all the emergency vehicles she could find. “On the Thursday morning I’m coming out at 4 o’clock, going to work, and there was a woman going around with a card and she has little thank you notes that she’s written to everybody, and all the emergency services vehicles she was putting them under the windshields. All the people in her neighbourhood had signed the piece of paper and she’d made photocopies of it. In a lot of ways there was people who couldn’t do enough for us. We’re not there for that, obviously. But it’s kind of nice to know that ... somebody appreciates what you’re doing.”

SC reflected on what a challenge it was for the newly amalgamated city to respond to a crisis like this. But he said Kingston was fortunate that it had taken the time to write an interim emergency plan, and had its managers in place. “And what a heck of a way to find out who all the players are; they’re probably years ahead in terms of building working networks that get jobs done in Kingston, where they would have been if the event had not happened.”

He remembers working “20-hour days followed by 20-hour days,” and says it was stressful at first, but it was “just long after that.” Once they got organized to the point where they knew what they had and where it was, things got better.

But there were little frustrations, like not having any maps of Kingston for the first little while. When SC got to town Sunday, they didn’t have any maps of the area. He had stopped on Hwy. 401 on his way to Kingston and bought a map of the area, just so he wouldn’t get lost while driving in to City Hall, and when he met up with the generator group he discovered that this was the only map they had. They stuck it on the wall and used it throughout the emergency. He started using tacks on the map to keep track of where generators were.

That was fine, but the group really needed more maps for all of the people who had come in from Toronto and other areas and who didn’t know Kingston at all. Finally SC got his hand on a box full of town maps from the real estate board. They were the maps that are handed out to people who come in to buy a house. He handed them out to all his people.

He doesn’t know where the maps came from. “It was one of those situations where I found myself a couple of people who knew where things were in Kingston, and I latched onto them and basically said ‘you’re mine.’ ... I don’t need a whole lot of high-level commanders. What I need is couple of Radar O’Reillys. They don’t have to be in charge of anything. But you need the people who know where the resources are. They’re the ones who really come in handy.” Cynthia Beech said her assistant Joanne O’Marra was one of those, and she really made herself enormously useful during the emergency. “She’s one of those network people who knows everybody and where stuff is.”

SC returned to Toronto on Thursday afternoon, in the middle of a blazing snow storm. They were in the restoration phase. By the time he left, the City of Kingston had hydro back on pretty much everywhere, with the exception of about half a dozen houses. The fire chief said ‘it’s time to start pulling back.’ “Obviously it was costing Toronto a lot of money to have us down there. It’s good training, but...” [get home].

The storm was a great laboratory for anyone who has done a lot of theoretical work on emergency management but rarely had a chance to put it into practice, SC said. “They can send you on all the courses in the world, but when you’re actually in there doing the job for real, that’s when you learn what’s going on.”