IceStorm 98 Study

CKLC [1380 AM] and FlyFM [98.3] are two Kingston-based radio stations which transmit throughout the immediate region. They have affiliate stations in Brockville, CFJR [830 AM] and ‘The River’ [103.7 FM, see also Bruce Wiley interview]. They are all owned by the CHUM radio group.

Tony Orr [TO] thought it was the day before the storm when, “...we talked with somebody who is a weather observer for Environment Canada and lives in Sandhurst, just West of Kingston (Andy Galt), and we use him to look at data from Environment Canada to give us an idea of what Kingston and the surrounding area is going to experience. Sometimes the forecasts can be a little daunting and maybe convoluted, especially for this area, because of particular aspects of being along the lake and in proximity to the Ottawa Valley. He indicated that the forecast was indeed correct. In his estimation we were due for heavy amounts of freezing rain with considerable build-up of ice, causing extensive damage."

Being sceptical, I sort of put that in the back of my mind. We did stories and warned people of the possibilities that this could take place, and I went home and made plans to go to bed early and get up early. I normally get up to go to work at about 3:45 a.m., so I set my alarm for 2:45, and figured an hour extra would be enough time. This was the day before the storm, so Wednesday night, to get up Thursday at 2:45 a.m.

I have had experience with this kind of thing - 25 years ago, in St. Thomas, Ontario, I lived through exactly the same situation, with a freezing rain storm - the freezing rain lasted for 3 days and blacked out pretty much the entire Elgin county area, although it was limited to a smaller area than we have, and a smaller population-base. So I realized that the impact would be severe if it did happen.

So I happened to wake up at 2:40 in the morning for some reason on Thursday - and it was likely because that is approximately the time the hydro went off at my home. I live right in the City of Kingston, in the central part of the new city. I got up and realized that the electricity was off and looked outside and saw that it was pouring rain and that there was indeed a fair amount of ice already. So I checked the water and jumped in the shower, because I knew that it might be the last one that I got for a while in warm water, and came into work. I took a different route than usual, to get coffee, and the Tim Horton's was one of the few places that had lights on, and I drove down Princess St.

As I got into the downtown all the power was off, and I realized that the power was off in our building. We don't have a standby generator, so I made my way through the parking garage into the building and left a note on the door saying that I was in the building and for other people to be able to get in - because we have electronic heat-pad entry into the building through our security system, so nobody else would have been able to get in.

As soon as I got in, I got a phone call from Rick Choma, who is the morning newsperson on FLY FM, and he said 'Tony, I don't know whether I'm going to be able to get out of the house'. He also lives in the city, fairly close to Princess St., and I said 'Rick, if you can get to Princess St. I'll come and pick you up.' As I left downtown, Brock St. was blocked off, and I realized there was big trouble right now, at about 3:30 in the morning, and started to pray that the electricity would come on at the radio station. So I scooted around up Princess St., found Rick, and we came back in. By that time, several other people were here, they were able to get into the building - and we decided that we had to collect as much information as we could as soon as possible, so that we would be able to handle the telephones when people woke up and started phoning.

The phones still operate even without electricity here, even though it's a computerized phone automation system, but very fortunately when it was installed they left it so that they would operate without electricity. So we were saved by that. We were able to call the police, the fire department, the utilities, and get a fairly strong picture of what the situation was.

The fire department gave us the best information. The police weren't that helpful - that was probably because the officer that was on duty, the duty sergeant or watch commander at the time, wasn't as aware of things as the person that was on at the fire department.

Then at about 5:10 a.m. the power came on. We do all our recording using computers, and so we need to have our file server and computers available so we can actually record interviews, and that's what drives radio news [it’s] the voices of the people who are making the news", so we went back and got several interviews and were able to get, again, a good picture of the situation in Kingston.

We weren't able to get through to Ontario Hydro. Apparently they were trying to reach us - they were faxing information to an incorrect phone number, and they had left a phone number that was the wrong one for us to call, it wasn't a private line. By the time we got the private lines and people's phone numbers, we were in a situation where we weren't able to make any calls because our phones were ringing off the hook.

We actually had people who had woken up early, realized the problems and came to work early and volunteered to help. I coordinated those people by asking them to answer the switchboard and to take whatever information they could, and to also forward any calls that might be of a news nature to us in the newsroom. And we carried on with our regular newscasts at that time.

We're affiliated with radio stations in Brockville, so I was in touch with them [TO is in charge of the newsroom there as well as here]. They had the same situation as we did, so we knew that it was a much more widespread situation than just Kingston; it wasn't completely localized. We talked to CJOH TV; I have colleagues that work there, and the situation was the same through Ottawa, so we knew that it was basically Eastern Ontario and in through Quebec - although Ottawa wasn't as hard-hit as we were.

So we basically scrambled to gather whatever information we could and to provide people with that. The biggest question was 'When's my power coming back on?', obviously. We realized that it wasn't that easy and that we just had to leave it with people, that 'We don't know, and the Utilities don't know, and they're doing everything they can to keep ahead of the problem but they can't.' I called in extra staff, 2 people who work part-time for me, and had them go out and see where the damage was, and to try and collect that information.

So by about 8 a.m. we were out starting to collect that information. We kept doing regular newscasts, which were 3 a.m., every half-hour, and after 9 a.m. every hour, and determined that we really weren't able to collect a lot more information for longer programming at that time. As we went through into the afternoon, I realized that we were going to be in it for the long haul.

"My experience in St. Thomas was that the radio station became the focal point for the community in trying to disseminate information and also in collecting it, and putting people in touch with other people." So when supplies got low, people would call to find out where to get them, other people would call that had them, and we had to find some way to co-ordinate that, get the information on the air but not flood them with so much that they weren't able to handle it - and to be able to co-ordinate it so people were able to collect the information that they needed on the air.

So at that time, I made a conscious decision to co-ordinate it. We didn't have anybody who was an experienced host of a talk show, we don't do talk shows, so we determined that we would do regular newscasts or with extended news packages. We did that through that afternoon until the next day - blocks of information from 20 minutes to 3 or 4 hours in length, starting usually with a newscast and going non-stop in between.

Our FM station, FLY FM, went off the air several times. Our AM station stayed on the air after we'd initially been off Friday morning. Our transmitter for CKLC is on Wolfe Island, which was devastated by the storm, but we also have a generator there. The Bell [telephone] line that we have to connect our studio with the transmitter was torn down, but it was intact lying on the ground, so it was saved, and we microwave our signal there normally, and at that time it was operating. Our tower was fine, our generator was fine, and we had, very luckily, made a conscious decision a couple of days before that to have diesel fuel delivered to the transmitter - a thousand gallon tank - because after that it was very difficult to get any supplies in or out from the island. So we were ok.

In Harrowsmith, the problem was a little bit different, with hydro off and on, and we had just installed a new generator and there were problems with that switching back and forth. The electricity went off permanently so we were on and we were fine, but then later on, by Saturday, when the ice started to melt, big pieces fell off the tower, and engineers - being the way they are - they locate the building close to where the transmitter is. So the ice fell off and came through the steel roof of the transmitter building like bombs, between 2 and 4 inches thick, big long pieces falling and destroyed the roof and a large portion of the transmitter. So that knocked us off the air on FLY FM for about 2 days until we could get a standby transmitter on low power, and that was located at the old Elron College (Princess Towers). We microwave our signal there anyway, we have a microwave link there and then out to Harrowsmith where the tower is. After that, when we were able to get back into the second transmitter - we actually have 2 transmitters there - as a standby to operate on again from that site near Harrowsmith.

At one point CKLC was the only station on the air in Kingston. Everybody came to the table to play in getting the information. Everybody realized that that was the most important thing to do at the time - myself and 4 other people who work here in the newsroom on a full-time basis, and 2 part-time people. There are only 3 terminals that you can operate in the newsroom where you can record telephone calls to do interviews, but we also have digital studios where we do production, so we were able to use those and put people in those to record things. In our news booths we also have the same system, so that we're able to actually write there, although we can't play back and edit and listen because of the on-air ability that we need.

Then we had to co-ordinate the information. With the station being on 3 floors - engineering above us with phone lines, studios on the 3rd floor with phone lines that only go directly into the studios, and the newsroom that has direct lines coming only into the newsroom, and the switchboard on the 2nd floor that has phone lines coming in and that don't go anywhere else unless you can transfer them to other phones - and people collecting information at all these places. How do you co-ordinate it, and how do you determine what should go on the air and what shouldn't?

We were able to set up a system where, instead of using little pieces of paper for messages and handing them around and photocopying them, we held back information for about 20 minutes until you could get of list of a page or 2 of text and then print that, save it in a file, and reopen that file and update it - and then making sure that people didn't overwrite files either, being on a network.

We were able to open files and task people to do specific things. That was the hardest part, because a newsperson's sense is that they never let a phone go unanswered, they never stop doing something that they start, but they always start other things if there's something else to start. So people were starting 2 or 3 tasks and weren't able to finish any of them, just because there was SO MUCH information coming in, and the phones never stopped. We had to at one point get somebody to come in and answer the phone in the newsroom, because the phone at each desk rings, as well as the phone at my desk, and there were other phone lines that rang, and we just weren't able to handle them and collect information to get out to people.

On the Thursday, we tasked the sales-staff of the station (the people who go and sell commercial time) to find some hotel rooms for staff that didn't have places to sleep. We knew that we were otherwise a safe haven here, being on the same circuit as city hall, which was the emergency centre.

The difficulty being that because there is a small group of people here, there is a limited amount of work space, we weren't able to go there to get information. They didn't welcome us into meetings that they had as emergency co-ordinators. So when the utilities people and others would go to meet, the media wasn't welcome to sit in on those meetings to collect the information. There were briefings held afterwards, which we were able to get people to.

However, once we got to Saturday, we realized that this was long-term. On the Friday, I had written letters that we hand-delivered to all of the emergency officials (mayor, police chief, fire chiefs, utilities manager, and municipal leaders that we could get to) to ask them to please contact us to set up a system where they could give out the information without us having to chase after them, because I just couldn't assign somebody to do that because we didn't have those people available. The only response I got was from the police chief (Bill Closs) and the utilities manager; they gave their personal phone numbers and pager numbers and said to call anytime - and that was a real blessing, because the utilities person had the information on where the lights were out and what they were doing to try and fix the problems.

By that time as well, Hydro had pretty much come on line with their information. They have PR people who they scramble - Peter Webster out of Belleville was an incredible help to us in collecting that information. We quickly realized, as a lot of other people did, that power comes from different places, and even though you may live in one municipality, or a now united group of municipalities, there are different providers. As people in Kingston East realized, Granite Power provided power for them as well as Ontario Hydro.

In some areas, Ontario Hydro didn't have a system of reporting to the city on what was taking place, and so there was some lack of co-ordination there - and we may have had the most co-ordinated information of anybody because the operations manager at Granite Power (Howard Hanna) was incredibly good, and they became our lifeline. Again, they gave us their personal and emergency phone numbers and encouraged us to call.

The municipal leaders in Gananoque, the mayor in Loyalist Township, Paul Gilmour in South Frontenac, and in Central Frontenac also contacted us and were tremendous in helping us with getting the information.

One of the disappointments was that the city didn't understand, I don't think, the need to have the leader of the municipality speaking regularly to people, so it was quite a battle to get that person to come and talk to us. So by Saturday that was the frustration that we were having."

And I was on the air Friday and Saturday for considerable periods of time, hosting our extended programs and trying to co-ordinate things in the newsroom. We made a conscious decision not to go with 12 hours of talk, and tried to promote for people that these are the times that we would have specific information. The announcers in between played a little bit of music, went on and did their thing, fielded phone calls on the air, and did a lot of sharing of the information. For example, information collected on kerosene and where to get it, and then it would be broadcast -and be gone half an hour later if someone called for it.

One of the great things, on Saturday when everybody realized that it would be a long haul, was being able to connect people." A woman who called was desperate, because her son was very sensitive to different environmental things, he had a syndrome of some kind, and they couldn't go to the hospital because they would be exposed to certain things there; we put information on the air and got at least a dozen calls from people willing to help, including someone from Bancroft who had a generator and knew how to hook it up and drove to Kingston to help them.

The sense that we had was that people were there and willing to help, and needed to be connected somehow. We were able to do that, but we weren't in any way super-people in being able to handle this; we needed to set it up so that we knew that at a certain time we were going to tell people that we were going to stop broadcasting this information, so we could collect more and come back and tell them again.

Our manager (Rob Wood) and myself met 2 or 3 times on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. He acted as the secretary in the newsroom, answered the phone calls and kept all of the lists of material in the newsroom. His wife came in and answered the switchboard, and our sales manager came in also to do that; we had 3 in all on switchboard, instead of our usual one person. We then had to co-ordinate that with the newsroom, where the manager was collecting that information. He was very good at being able to do that.

Everybody did whatever needed to be done, without ever asking anyone. I had to ask the news staff what they were doing, how they were going to do it, and the plan that they had, and I had to make sure that people were going to be able to be fresh on certain days to be able to help us. The part-time people who get paid by the hour were more than willing to help as much as possible, because that also helped them, but in the newsroom where we're salaried, people had already worked 18 hours on Thursday and again Friday, so I switched some people's Saturday and Sunday shifts, so that everyone got some sleep. We also did a lot of stuff live then, and arranged for some guests to come in, and co-ordinated it that way; a medical officer of health came in after 3 or 4 days to talk about what to do with food and talk about carbon monoxide and various other safety issues.

I also knew that people would be out and about and more active and mobile on the weekend. Living through this before, even though it was 25 years ago, I had some understanding of what people were doing in their own lives, and I was able to be more mobile myself then -to go out and talk to people and work with them in that area.

So when I came back in on Sunday and worked from 5 a.m. through until 9 p.m., by then we realized that things were working pretty well this way. By the time we got to 5 p.m. the phone calls died almost completely, so people weren't needing that information, they weren't collecting it, they weren't going to drive anywhere because there were no lights in a lot of places and the roads were closed off or treacherous in many areas. So we were on the air Saturday and Sunday until about 8:30 p.m. with non-stop programming and regular newscasts.

Then on Monday we came in and had to deal with 'How do we handle regular newscasts? We only had the one station at that time, and also wondered 'How do we handle the fact that we have extra people here that usually staff another radio station, how do we talk to them, and recognize them on the air?'. We just set it all aside and said 'Here we are and this is what we do, you may normally listen to another station. It may be country, it may be oldies, it may be FM, it may be AM, it may be somebody else.'

And we told people that if they were listening from the Brockville area to listen to their station in Brockville. We knew that Belleville and Napanee were ok so we told people to tune into those local stations. We were worried about the northern areas because our signal doesn't go into Sharbot Lake very well. Our FM station is the station of choice for people listening up there for information, but they were listening to our AM station, huddled around it to try and get it, and we were able to get information for those people as well. And that's generally the area we covered.

We were getting information from Gananoque, Lansdowne area, Rideau Lakes Township (covering Westport and Elgin), through South, Central and North Frontenac, Kingston, Loyalist Township - and then the Islands, which it was difficult to get information from because the phones were gone for a considerable period of time there. So we were getting information from people that had been there and come back. The mayor of the Islands couldn't be reached, but an emergency co-ordinator on Howe Island was very good for us, and other people on Wolfe Island were great to us. We relied heavily on people to help us and to call us, and to set it up at specific times.

The frustration then was with the city and how we collect information from the city. They had briefings, they sent out information, and were very good at doing that, but it was meeting the voice, that sort of warm voice to reassure people that this is what's being done and how... Jim Keech, the utilities manager, he stopped in here 2 or 3 times a day after he did his briefings, he'd bring the map in.

By Tuesday I pulled myself back a little bit from the on-air stuff and gave that to one of my other people. I realized that we had to task somebody else to do regular newscasts, collect information [and] simulcast. By that time our FM station was back on the air, and in the mornings we did our newscasts separate from both stations, because we knew there were two different audiences, but went as long as we had to go, and had the staff to be able to do that.

I had to physically remove somebody at one point on Tuesday because it was just too much, it was emotionally overwhelming for people because their homes were without power, their families were without electricity, and they were here and working 18 hours a day.

On Wednesday of that first week, 6 days into it, I knew that I was in a situation where I was starting to break down. I was luckily on the floor of my office here for half an hour trying to stop vibrating at one point, went to the general manager and said 'Can you chair a meeting for me?, and this is what we need to do'.

At that time, because everyone had this great sense of duty, we'd gone back to everyone trying to do everything so nothing was getting done - and the important thing for us was to get the information on the air that was most helpful to people - we had to say at specific times 'Stop! You're preparing this for our broadcast. Stop! You're going to do this.' The general manager's administrative assistant became the newsroom secretary. When she wasn't here we had someone else here, who was an announcer on FLY FM (Doug Thorne) and had a previous career in news, answer the news-line. They were both very aware of what was happening, were able to take notes instead of the computer, do up lists if they had to, and if it was a news-related call they could pass it on to us.

My wife and daughter and our dog were living in a hotel room with a single bed. I was trying to run home to check the house when I got a half-hour break, and to check on them, and it was the same with other people.

Doug Jefferies, who does the news in the afternoon on CKLC, I think Thursday their power went out, and his family lives in Gananoque and had been staying with him. He has a baby who's less than 6 months old and his wife, so there was a considerable amount of strain there already with the family resources. His father went out to do something and slipped on the ice and cracked his head open and had to go to the hospital. And here he is feeling sorry about whether or not he can work.

The thing that really impressed me was that no one ever asked, 'Can I leave now?' They asked, 'What else do you need?' and I had to tell people to leave so that they could get away and recover. One of my other people who has had triple bypass surgery and three heart attacks, I'm sitting there thinking 'how much strain, how much stress can this person deal with?' The one day, having them say 'I forgot my medication, I'm going to have to go now', I'm saying 'get out of here as soon as you can, NOW'! Even part-time people with family and kids; one child was in the emergency room in the hospital being treated. To get the child there and back was a challenge, relying on communications knowing that when you made a phone call you could get any number, like an automated answering system, because the phones were just overloaded. The cellular service was just jammed, so that didn't work.

It makes you look at technology and wonder about useful backups. We have a remote broadcast system that we use, called the Marque system, and it's really a low-powered FM transmitter that transmits to a receiver at the station, that you can then broadcast over a channel on the board on one of the consoles in the control rooms. But engineering staff was dealing with transmitters in Brockville and Belleville that were covered with ice towers, trying to keep radio stations on the air that were on the air and trying to fix ones that were off the air, and they couldn't go to set those up. So even if we were able to get somebody freed to go and sit behind that microphone, we need somebody to be able to maintain it, to operate it and use it usefully. So a remote studio is nice to have if somebody's there that can set it up.

Very fortunately I have a paging system that works with my cellular phone, so if people were calling me and needing information, I'd get paged and was able to call them back. That was a real saviour for me. The other people in the building were a real saviour as well. We set up a system where we asked certain people, who had said they would help, to help out, but we also knew that we needed to save those resources so that we could be in it for the long term if we needed to.

People were calling to ask us, and Canadian Tire were hesitant to tell us, about deliveries because they didn't want people lining up and storming and creating a panic for these kinds of things. Then some people called who hadn't bought batteries in years, like expensive D cells, and they wondered if they were being ripped off. We also had to worry about getting people out to get our supplies.

Yes, I did realize that, and I think a lot of it was my experience before, and knowing that If we had gone on the air non-stop I would have had to probably be the one to do that, and would have gladly done it but the person to co-ordinate everything else with the experience to do that- there wasn't anybody, so I thought that was my role. I operate on little sleep anyway, so I was ok that way, until I got to that Wednesday and I knew, but I was able to get away by 3 p.m. - although the meeting was at 10:15 a.m. and the manager said 'I want you to leave the building at 11'- just because I knew that I could plod away at certain things and if I was gone by 3 there was enough time for me to relax, and then I had to come back in that night to make sure everybody was co-ordinated and working through some of the things that we had to do.

- ...what am I going to do? I can go home, but there's no power there. I can go to my motel or hotel room, but there's nothing there, so I'm here but there's nothing here. I'm in the way if I'm trying to help, because we needed the space, we needed to be able to handle that, we needed fresh people there to be able to collect information, so we got the right information. And the one great thing was I can't think of any mistakes we made, like somebody calling you with a hoax or ...none of that, there was none of that sense that people wanted to cheat other people out of information or give people the wrong information, you know as some kind of a cruel joke.

But, all that said, I've never really experienced the bitter kind of attacks that we had to deal with as we got into 7 days after people started calling and saying ‘you didn't mention our area, you don't care’ and just attacking us, personally attacking us and our integrity and why... these kinds of things.. so, knowing some conflict-management techniques and conflict-resolution and problem-solving skills, I held, 3 times a day, a little session for staff in the newsroom, to talk about handling these kinds of calls - because it did no good for us to try and make up an excuse or give the real reason why we couldn't, because nobody knew, or because we weren't able to get the information, because that didn't help people.

What we had to do was to say we understood, we had to take down the information, where they are and say 'we'll try and get that information for you'. Even though we knew we couldn't, we had to try and deal with that. And then we did ask, but at one point, we had a discussion about that in the newsroom, and one of the announcers who was on the air, and was working with a group of 2 or 3 who were working on FLY FM, working virtually non-stop even in between the extended news programming, she overheard this and 'we should take down the information and we'll ask those questions of the utilities people'. And she took that as what we were going to tell people on the air, and she said that, 'We'll take your questions and ask people', and the phones just went like... it was unbelievable!

They just flooded everywhere with people saying 'I live at such and such an address' and so on, and we took all of that and we were actually able to ask some of those questions in trying to scope it down in the neighbourhoods and ask those, hopefully, and then... 'Never say that again', because how could we personally, for each address, tell people when they were going to be hooked up, and it didn't matter that you'd go on the air and say 'individual lines from poles to houses are torn off the side of the house', 'services that are wrecks have to be repaired by the home-owner' and, I mean, we went and did those things and repeated them over and over and over again as a service and a public service, "and I think the majority of people got that information and understood, but it didn't seem to matter to a lot of people".

And then one person, who it turned out I knew, I broke down slightly on the phone, because they were very bitter, and saying that we didn't care about them and their neighbourhood, and they lived out there and they had been mentioned several times before, but since such and such a time hadn't been mentioned, and so we were ignoring them and we're being unprofessional and everything else, and I took it kind of personally and I started to go against all of my own advice that I'd given out and I made the mistake of breaking down and saying 'What do you want us to do? What do you want us to do?' and they hung up on me. And I realized 'Oh no, I've done damage here, I've really offended this person', and I phoned back and apologized, and said 'Could I have somebody go out and visit you? We know people that will help by doing that', and they wouldn't accept the apology. It took about 2 months before they finally were able to accept the fact that I really was apologetic about that, and I didn't make any excuses of any kind in apologizing. I just said 'I apologize.'

And then I knew from then on that we couldn't say things to people that you might have been tempted to say, like 'well, I think it'll be by tomorrow night'. We wanted to, we wanted to help these people, and we actually did help many people individually by being in touch with some of the crews and the people, and saying 'there's a problem, there are 12 houses in this area and they were reconnected and there was a tree that was blowing back and forth brushing up against this and it's not the circuit again, it needs to be... they're saying these people in this neighbourhood are, they've assessed the situation and that tree needs to be trimmed and that breaker needs to be reset' or whatever it was, or 'the circuit needs to be reset' - and they got back on! And they did! And I thought that information was valuable for the crew as well as for those people, and they were able to do that.

Other people that called were really either paranoid or off the wall and threatened to do things, and because of our good relationship with police were able to call police and tell them and they were able to go and visit. People who were in homes that backed onto other areas that had power and they didn't, and didn't know when it would be back on.

And some of the women from the Canadian Forces Base and their husbands off on missions in other places; the base was off power for a considerable period of time as well - and they're being tasked to go to Quebec, and the people there are saying 'why aren't they staying here, to fix the problems here'- and then being able to get the information, to tell people that they aren't going to, there's a considerable number that are going to be here and the reason they're going there is because there's a huge need there as well and they couldn't use everybody here. That really gave us a real sense that we were doing a service for people, and we did get many people that called and said 'thank you'. And we knew that we were doing well.

People came and delivered food, realizing that we were stuck here and wouldn't be able to leave. People who normally came in to work at 5 came in at 3 and never left the building until 4 in the afternoon - just an incredible amount of dedication they had. I really think that that helped me get through.

Another thing, here we are but I'm in charge of the newsroom in Brockville but I can't do anything to help them there because we had so huge a task here with many more people and a larger area. In Brockville, right away the mayor phoned and asked if they could use the radio station to put information on the air. Their emergency services co-ordinators, all of the police and fire and municipal leaders, would meet in an open (public) meeting at the county office in Brockville or wherever the county council chamber is - I think they set it up elsewhere with power, - they discussed all of their problems and then they would go directly from there to the radio station and do it all over again and spend 2-3 hours there and then go away - very different than here. The radio station, CFJR, was the only one that was on the air consistently through the whole period of time. They do have a talk show, and Bruce Wiley who does the morning radio show and the talk show was on the air from 5 a.m. until 6 p.m. every day.

The station there was running on a generator, and it powers the studio's one outlet in the newsroom, which was able to power a computer terminal and a printer. The newsroom had to operate with flashlights and candles, collecting information that way, to get it on the air and to do all of that until they got the power back, which they got back sooner than in other places. The whole area was out and they had a feeder line from Smiths Falls to Brockville that was down - it was their biggest problem, but they were able to get that fixed more quickly than they had expected, but they did have huge problems. ...[That supply was gone, they had no choice, they couldn't just repair things and put it back on. That was really something.

But- I also realized that if I went down there I'd probably just screw things up - they were doing a good job, so I just pulled back and said 'do you need any help, and if so what is it, how can I deal with it?', so we were able to do that from here. Our general manager went down and took some reinforcements and supplies to them a couple of times.

T: Did you have any sort of emergency plan for emergency situations of any type?
The easy answer is no. The more complicated one is that we have a system of phone numbers and knowing who's on standby, who's on-call, and who's available - which is, from my experience, the best plan, make sure that we have updated phone numbers, contacts, and how to contact our own staff. And then to determine on an ongoing basis what we do and how we do it. So basically the station manager, who is the program director in charge of all programming on both stations, gave over the programming to me. And I determined what we would do, when we would do it, and how we would do it. Now I did that in consultation, but if I said that we needed to do 'this', he questioned it sometimes, but we did it, and so that was the way we dealt with our mini-plan, the next part being that we had to get people, even though we had planned and started out having people answer phones and having particular tasks of doing that... that kept falling down, so we needed to be able to co-ordinate that, and I needed to be able to do that.

Several times I've asked the emergency services co-ordinators, and when they've been doing emergency planning in Kingston...and when Frontenac County assisted, and Isabelle Turner was the warden of the county, I sent several letters to her to ask that we be involved in an exercise to set up a system of making sure that they knew how to get us information and what the proper phone numbers were. I know, for example, that I'm in the flood advisory from the region conservation authority, they have the wrong phone numbers...

We are in a far different world than we used to be when many organizations developed plans that they may update and may forget media. Right now I don't think there's any station that has staff on overnight. We operate on an automated system that's run by computers, and on Sundays we generally have somebody here until midnight.- every day a warm body. But the phone numbers have all changed. The direct lines to people have changed. I'm available 24 hours a day; the Kingston Police know that, and they have called me at times at 2 a.m. or 11 p.m., whatever, to inform me about something, but they're the only ones that have ever taken us up on that.

So in an emergency when the safety of the community is at stake, we need to be able to know that we can pull people in, know how to turn the automation off, and get messages on the air and we can do it and it's easy to do, it works very well. You can even leave the automation system going and play emergency bulletins or have it stop automatically to accept those. It's easy to program that into the system.

T: Have you made any changes, or are you planning to do any kind of adjustments in light of what you've gone through, thinking 'well, something like this may happen again'?

No.

...I think probably the biggest thing is that, when we had our post-mortem and went over how we did and how we did it, we looked back and we said 'well one of the worst things is that, because we had so much information, so many interviews, so much material that was recorded, and we're on computerized systems for recording all this, we didn't have enough hard-drive storage for all of it. So we lost some really good material, for our own archiving, and for the purpose of special programming or for being able to use this a week from the beginning, so we could go back and review and look at it. ...[W]e had hours and hours and hours of information.

The other thing was that we needed to make sure that we had someone that co-ordinated, all the time, what we were doing and how we were doing it, and we needed somehow to get the message to the city that they needed to be more forthcoming with the municipal leader. The problem at the beginning was that they felt the commander should be at the command post instead of going out to talk to the troops, and I think the troops were the people that pay the freight and they needed to know from that personnel. We were able to get them in the studio several times. And we were able to do that. But as things went on, we weren't and it became harder because it got more complex and his time became more at a premium and he got to a point where he was facing the stress of things as well. But there needed to be a better system of doing that, and that was a real difficulty that we had.

I also looked at, and we're now working on some staff development for individuals in areas of dealing with crisis management to a certain degree, so that they can deal with some of the emotional things that come out. And I think that part of that was that they were taking a lot of that heat and bitterness that came out, and then to get... I just happened to be going through some stuff that Kingston This Week had printed, I saw it three weeks after the storm had started, saying that 'the local stations should have done something where we pooled our resources and did something more on the air', and it happened to come from a person who has a partnership in a station that's in the United States, where they did that in Watertown, because they had that same problem, but it was perceived by people here as being a real attack on what we were doing and how we did it.

It really hurt their egos, because the general feeling they had was that they were doing a really good job, that they'd been putting all this time and effort into it and the feedback we were getting to that point had been quite positive from people, thanking us. People would phone after we'd be on for 3 hours and say 'That was so wonderful, you're our lifeline, thank you so much, and I just wanted to say that without that program I wouldn't have been able to make it.'...'and that information you gave on that and what you told us, I'm working with this little wee radio that I dug out of the basement and I don't think that the batteries are going to last. So the fact that you told me that you're not going to have more information tonight was great because I don't have to keep listening, and that I can tune in tomorrow at 6 a.m. or at 7 a.m. or whenever to get that information'.

And then we went through and we realized that a lot of people were getting power back on, so I went and I surveyed the municipal leaders in the rural communities and asked them when we should put information on. We knew that there were still going to be a lot of people that didn't have power. They said 'well, 1 o'clock', but I thought noon would be the logical time to do it. - And indeed the first week that we were off after the storm, both stations on FLY FM (we were on a national newscast from CHUM Radio from a satellite feed that we pick up from them), we simulcast on both stations and had a major package that went from noon until 2 o'clock. - Then we realized that probably wasn't serving the use that it started out at, so we asked about this with these people and they said 'well that's the time the farm report used to be on'. That's the time farmers are able to stop, they have enough time, with milking duties and everything else, so 1 p.m. is the time they stop, and that's when they could hear it. We got people phoning and thanking us for the decision to do it at that time, and that was great.

So there was that feedback. The mayor of South Frontenac and others became personalities on the air with these people. They don't normally have to speak publicly a lot, but they became very articulate, and handled all sorts of things (worse than we were getting, I'm sure, the power was off for so long), and dealt with the emotion, "and then having some of them come in and sit in the studio and cry", and to see that.

The one Friday night after the storm, I was able to go for an hour and have dinner with my family, and we were able to get down Johnson St. at that time I think - we looked down the side streets and "we all started crying because of the devastation that you saw and being pitch black, and then seeing in the midst of all this with the front porches of houses and cars crushed, and then see a bucket up with some guy with a spotlight working - just like, unbelievable", to know that.

And then to deal with the other people here, which was just such great pleasure, knowing that they needed a huge amount of support, and how to do that. Normally we operate on a pretty tight budget, and knowing that we're going to blow all of that - how carefully we had to deal with it. How do you weigh that, whether or not you're going to say to people "we'll pay for your room if you don't have a place to live" - 'if someone else needs it, would you be willing to share it?', and them saying 'yes we would', and not having to do that though.

And the manager of the bank here (who I've only met a couple of times) came in and said "Well, I have electricity at my home, and it's a big place, and your family is welcome there". Getting that kind of feeling from people was just incredible.

T: So how was money a concern?

Money never became a concern, it was always there in the back of my mind. What Rob Wood said to me was 'Well, make sure that it's set aside in a special area; if you can identify all the things that were spent, some of it we may be able to recover, some of it we might not. But at least it's there and it's removed from the overall budget, so that you'll be able to make it to the end of the year.'- and not have to do without for another 6 months.

Do what you need to do, whatever way you have to do it. I just said to people very quietly, 'If you're having a hard time and you need food, charge it, make sure it's a reasonable cost, and then keep your receipts and get me to approve them.' So we were able to do that, that felt pretty good to be able to supply people with a warm place to stay.

My home was, I think, a total of 6 days without power. After that Saturday thaw it got pretty darn cold, and "one of the sad things was I lost all my tropical fish". When the house was finally up and running, there was the fridge to clean out and all the things you hadn't had a chance to do before - which I did one night, and I shut off all the water, and drained all the pipes, and having to drain out the aquarium and take these little bodies out, fish that had been there for 4 or 5 years... As an aquarist, you become attached to those things, so it was kind of tough - at the end of it all, even though it seemed very small. One of the great things was that weekend when they had the bucket brigade down Princess St. - having a relationship with the utilities people, they called me at home, I'd been at work until 5 p.m., I went home, I got a chance to lie down, at 5:30 I got a phone call, and 'We're doing this; the city, for all intents and purposes, is back on, and I was able to go and be in the parade. I was able to do some special reports for the station that they got on the air, do interviews, get those done for the news on Sunday morning, come in and work through.

And then through the next weekend we did a documentary-style special that was about an hour in length, as a review of everything - because everything was back by then, the state of emergency had just been lifted on Wolfe Island. We sent somebody over with the Hydro crews that were working over there; we had interviewed the utilities crews here, when they had been working, and when it was all over we put it all together. I took about 14 hours to do that show, simply because there was so much editing that went into it.

T: Would that be something that would be available to us?

Yes it will.

T: It sounds like it would be a good overall summary to have.

Most definitely. You certainly can have that. It's locked away in a valt (ha ha!), because we lost so much! Our systems are so reliant on power, as everybody else.

When I was in St. Thomas, 25 years ago, the studios didn't have power but there were apartments above and they had power, and we ran big cables from the outlets in the hall down through into the building. But I was able to do my first broadcast using a tape-recorder with a battery on 'record' that had enough power to go through the phone line to the transmitter. So we knew that through the dial-up to the transmitter link, the Bell line was on, the transmitter was on because the generator was on, and I was able to use the microphone and go and talk. I had set it up because I realized this - there was a jack through the patch-field in the studio for that, where you could plug things into the transmitter so you could bypass certain things on the studio board if something had blown up. I had made some recordings of music and other things that we could use - having a sense that sometime it might come in handy. And it did. We were able to do that and use it.

But here, everything is automated now, with those kinds of things, it's all Solid State, although larger transmitters - they still have to use tubes because of the power that's required for them - but still, we don't have those links here anymore. I suppose we would have been able to go to the transmitter site if we'd had to. But even that would have been a massive undertaking, to try and rig something to be able to do that.

So you need power, and in this building there isn't a generator. But in the 21 years that I've been here, the power's been off for a total length of about 2 hours including that period of about an hour and a half during the ice storm, so it's been pretty amazing. And I guess that's because the lines are underground cable, and it is in an area that's deemed as priority area, with the hospital and city hall. What else can I tell you?

T: Just if there's anything that you would like to add. I think we've covered all the relevant points, and I've certainly taken up enough of your time.

I would just go back to the plan, being a very loose plan that we have for those kinds of things - more or less being that each thing we try to assess individually, but "have the proper contacts, and knowing that I'm not the only one that has the understanding of what needs to be done, that there are at least 2 other people all the time and that have the same sense of responsibility and duty as I do in the newsroom". So if I'm away, one of those people is here, and usually both of those people are. And making sure that when I'm not available, that there are designated hitters in place to do that. That's the ongoing plan, but each individual thing would be different in how to deal with it.

For example, if there was a plane crash at the airport, we know that we'd have to contact a list of people, it's there, it's in the book that we have set up. But we'd also have to be there, get there, and be here; these are the kinds of things that we don't have written out in particular detail - it's what we do. And then to assess whether or not we need to do more. That's where you have to be able to have that ability to not have such rigid structures that say, 'Well, as a programmer I'm not going to allow you to be on the air more than the length of a newscast', which is 5 minutes, so if we had that - and I've dealt with some people like that before in this business - we would have been screwed, really.

T: It's an interesting part of it, across the board, that the collective bargaining sort of went out the window, the job descriptions and things never really came up as an issue, the management generally worked out pretty well - an interesting phenomenon. It would be interesting to see, of course on a longer term...

I think so; that's what I really want to work on continuing. It was part of, a year ago, my personal goal: to make sure that the people that I work with are the most important thing that we deal with in this building. Yes, there are all kinds of other things that we have to do on a daily basis, but those are the people, they need my resources, they need things to develop themselves personally, and I think part of that was paid off in a way.

But what we didn't think of, going through that 2-week period, where most people were working virtually non-stop, very, very long hours for at least 2 weeks following it - doing that special program afterwards at 1 o'clock which was hugely labour-intensive, we would start at 8:30 a.m. for a show at 1 p.m., because we would get reports in from people about what's new, what do we need to know, and some of it was done live on the air as well. By the time we got to 2 p.m., we were just...ugh. And then we realized 'how are people going to recover from this, to carry on?'.

So "I made plans to get people away right away". One of the people had already booked a week of vacation; I told them to just take the time, "If we need you we'll call, but we'll only call if it's an emergency situation." So we were able to do that. And then the week after that, we got other people for 3 or 4 days each, and vacation is never easy at the best of times here because of being on short staff, but I was able to fill in for those people and do that. And then I think it took until about 2 weeks ago for me to recover and just to feel good about a lot of those kinds of things.

T: Ya, I think a lot of people had to kind of go through a kind of closure in some way.

Ya, and I think a lot of that was to stop thinking about some of those negative things we had been hit with, some of those really almost personal attacks, and thinking 'Couldn't we have done more?', or questioning yourself about it - and to just realize that you probably did what you could do and more, and what you got was a natural phenomenon of being frustrated. Some people phoned back and apologized, said that they had realized what they had said and done.

T: That must have felt good.

Ya, which was great. We've always had a thing where we joke sometimes when people call and we'll just say, 'Well, I guess we just don't care.' (ha ha). Overall our group had a really great performance. After the first 10 days, I spent time writing some individual notes and getting flowers delivered to people's families, and writing individual notes to other people in the building that helped us. People are still close to this day because of that I think, and understand that we did care about it. You know, it was only 3 or 4 sentences; I made sure that I wrote and focused on what they had done. "Some people hadn't done as much as others, but that didn't matter, it helped and they'd offered to help." So that was great and it made me feel good about that.

There are people I still want to say thank you to, including the mayor of Gananoque, who I've never personally met, and Phil Leonard from South Frontenac, who I've never met. I'd just love to be able to just go and say 'Thank you for that just unbelievable help that you gave us.'

Some of the people who called who had taken trips around - they happened to be ok themselves, they either had power or a safe place to live - "we had a couple of people who volunteered to do this on their own and were our reporters and went out in the rural areas, drove on the safe roads, the main county roads that weren't covered with debris, and called in saying 'Would you like us to tell you what we saw?'" We said 'Yes, that would be fabulous!', because we weren't able to do that. You know, people that have journalistic background and were able to do those kinds of things and then talked to us about the great stories that people had, where some supplies where, and how people had opened up their stores. That was really good. - "Seeing people that worked together and pulled together and overcome such huge adversity - just incredible."