IceStorm 98 Study

Tracy Newton (TN) is administrative assistant to the Commissioner of Client Service and Community Development for the City of Kingston. The commission’s mandate includes social services, Rideaucrest, culture and recreation, community development, development review, licensing and permits and building and bylaw. Of the city’s 11 commissions, client services has the largest number of areas in its jurisdiction, and is either first or second largest in terms of number of employees.

TN first became aware of the storm when she was getting ready to go in to work early Thursday morning. She had slept like a baby the night before, even though her husband was out all night working as a volunteer fire-fighter. He couldn’t believe she was planning to drive anywhere when radio broadcasts were talking about a state of emergency. But TN insisted. The trip in to work was surreal. “When we were driving here [to Midland Ave.] I was looking at all the trees, going ‘wow,’ and he’s like ‘Well, downtown is worse.’ And when I went downtown for the first time I was like ‘Oh my goodness, I can’t believe that this has happened.’”

TN arrived at the Midland Ave. offices at about 8 a.m. to find only one other employee there. The first thing she did was take out the emergency plan, because she hadn’t read it yet. They had just received it days before the storm. She pulled out the section dealing with the social services commission and began familiarizing herself with it.

Phone calls were coming in, and TN was troubleshooting those while waiting for the commissioner, Lance Thurston, to call. In the meantime, Thurston had called all the social service managers, telling them not to come to work. TN later learned he had tried to call her at home, but didn’t find her there and left a message. Thurston didn’t think to try TN at work until later, around 10 a.m. At that time there were about eight other people in the building. They were deciding what to do about keeping the building open, and concluded it was important to have somebody there to answer calls from the public. Three of them stayed and waited for the phone call from Lance, who called and said an emergency meeting was being held at the Utilities building.

At that time they were trying to get ahold of the associate commissioner, Sheila Hickey. TN tried to call her, but Hickey was at her mother’s house in Godfrey, which was very badly hit. About an hour later, Thurston called back and said the city was going to set up an emergency centre, and asked TN to go down to City Hall to start up the call centre. That was about noon on Jan. 8. Normally Sheila Hickey (who has a background in telecommunications) would have started the call centre, but since she wasn’t available, the job fell to TN. She went down to City Hall and established the call centre in the Clerk’s area, on the first floor of the building.

All they had were the phones that were already there. It was “very, very difficult” because the phone system was ancient, TN said. She also had a very limited knowledge of City Hall, having been there only twice. She had helped out with elections, so she knew where the Clerk’s office was, but she had no idea about other parts of the building. With the help of Clerk Sheila Birrell and a couple of her helpers, TN started answering the phones. At that point a lot of the calls were coming from city staff. Some people were out of power, so they didn’t hear the reports on the radio.

Ironically, City Hall was scheduled to have its phone system overhauled two weeks after the storm hit. So from a communications standpoint, TN said the timing of the emergency couldn’t have been much worse. All three of the major sites [Midland Ave., City Hall and the Utility building] have since had their telephone systems revamped or at least upgraded and maintained. City Hall was the first one to be overhauled, TN said, but it would have been more convenient if the work had been done before the ice storm.

TN and her group had eight phones they could use at first. They were regular Bell phones, with no hold buttons, which made it difficult to juggle large numbers of calls. Transferring calls required the person to click down on the receiver and punch in the extension, which was time-consuming. The other difficulty was not knowing the extension numbers throughout City Hall, TN said. Often the number written on the telephones didn’t correspond with the actual extension number. “People in that area are familiar with the system, but new people coming in weren’t familiar with it at all, so that was a big hurdle,” TN said.

TN recommended writing it into the emergency plan that all phone number extensions be updated regularly. Accurate extensions should be recorded on the telephones themselves and in a separate file.

Sheila Birrell backed away at this point and was off preparing press releases in the communications centre. So for that period, TN was in charge of the call centre. They had press releases and had a computer available, so they could do updates.

TN and her group had no idea how long they would be there. TN says she initially believed the emergency would only last about a day. The first day wasn’t too bad. It got worse before it got better, and the hours flew by, because so much was going on, and they were having to learn quickly. People didn’t really have time to think about how much time they were spending in City Hall. New people were coming in, ie., the OPP and the city police. The community volunteers started coming in. TN said it was probably the second day before she realized the emergency wouldn’t be over any time soon.

TN worked from Thursday until Saturday night before going home. Her husband came in and demanded that she take a break. They didn’t have any power at home, so they were going to stay with friends. She allowed herself to be taken away from City Hall, but went reluctantly. “I wasn’t going to go home ... I guess the difficulty was that we were getting frantic people calling in, and we didn’t have time to train anyone. There was no time ... to just stop the phones for half an hour [so that we] could brief the new people coming in. There was a real shortage of staff, only because they couldn’t get in.”

Large numbers of city staff (many of them new and formerly with the townships) were never called in to work on the emergency response. A lot of the people who were called were from the old city of Kingston. This happened in part because the human resources records hadn’t been updated to take into account new people from the former townships. “It was one of those things where it was a real vicious circle,” TN said. “You didn’t have time to call anyone, but you didn’t have time not to call anyone, because things were pretty frantic.”

By Thursday evening, there were three key people working in the call centre: TN, Sheila Hickey and Marielle Laplante-Wheeler.

Sheila got strep throat on the third day of the emergency and stayed away for a couple of days, leaving TN and Laplante-Wheeler to staff the call centre themselves.

TN was able to go and go, but the first time she slept, she felt worse than at any other point, and became exhausted for the first time.

The hardest calls to handle were from elderly people who refused to leave their homes, TN said. Other people would at least consider going to a shelter, but the senior citizens wouldn’t leave, and in many cases they were calling with things like flooded basements. “Those were the calls where we were kind of between a rock and a hard place, because we didn’t have any manpower to go and pump out the basements,” TN said. “Really the only thing we could do was give them the names and phone numbers of the people who did that kind of business. And it sounded so awful, you know, telling someone ‘we’d like to help you, but how about calling...’ And it just sounded so awful. I hated that part of it, not being able to help every single person.”

It was very, very difficult to decide who was a priority and who was not, TN said. There were also liability issues. If volunteers went in and something happened, the city could and (would) be held liable. “I couldn’t say ‘OK, Joe Smith, yup, he’ll come to your house’ because we couldn’t be responsible for the liability part of it,” she said. What they did do was refer people to private pumping companies, some of which offered to pump people’s basements out for free. Robinson Maintenance and Pumping was “amazing” about volunteering its services, TN said. “They called and said ‘how can we help, if there’s anybody who needs their basement pumped out for free, we’ll do it.’” TN’s group kept a list of emergency cases and referred them to the right people. (One woman called to say her basement was flooding, and she was just upstairs in her house with a blanket over her. She said ‘it’s not that cold,’ but TN said “those were scary, scary [calls].” TN’s group sent Robinson’s out to deal with the situation because the woman wasn’t able to handle it at all. She was cold, they were out of power, and she just went to bed.)

“That’s the one that stands out in my mind, because as soon as she called, I could visualize her up there with her blanket, and no one able to help her,” TN said. The military did begin doing door-to-door checks later on, but that wasn’t until after the second day. TN and her group were getting calls before that, and started keeping lists of the people who needed their basements pumped out, and it just got to the point where they had to decide to respond only to emergency cases.

TN said they were also receiving calls from people from out of town saying “I can’t get a hold of my mother, or I can’t get a hold of my father or my daughter.” They couldn’t follow up every case, but if it was someone who was sick or elderly or disabled they would write it down and send the information to the police.

They kept a ‘missing persons’ list based on information from people who were looking for friends or relatives. They explained to callers that they were not going to be able to do anything immediately, but that they would check the shelters. “I found it very difficult, as did some of the other people, to tell someone ‘sorry, you’ll have to call us when this is over.’”

How did the organization function? Did you have a big board, were you using post-it notes? What was the physical set-up?
“Each day it changed, only because I think each day we got more and more organized and we knew what we needed.”
The night-time was slower -- they still took calls, but not as many -- and that became their time to clean up the boards, organize the tables and charts. Phone numbers were typed up on the computer and made available to everyone in the call centre. Urgent phone numbers were posted on a nearby filing cabinet (it was easier for them to just turn around and look) and the group used a window space for flip charts listing missing persons, shelters and available equipment.

They also had volunteers staffing the phones and provided them with the latest information and phone numbers. They were trying to avoid having them leave their desks to get or ask for the information.

One member of the team, Cheryl Mastantuano, was responsible for contacting the shelters, finding out how many were using them and keeping a running tab of what shelters were open and how many people were in each. That way, anyone who was able to go to one shelter or another was directed to the one with fewer people.

The hardest part of the whole operation, TN said, was that they didn’t have time to train the people answering the phones and they were the key people. Those were the people frantic residents were calling and they wanted to get a voice who knew what the answers were. “And that wasn’t always the case, only because the information changed so quickly.” Also, the two people operating the call centre were extremely busy. “I was trying to do 50 other things and so was Marielle,” TN said.

Although volunteers did a tremendous job, TN thinks that if they had to do it over again, they should rely wholly on city staff. “As a municipal employee, we have an understood protocol [as to] how you answer a phone. You never tell a person you don’t know the answer.” Instead, you tell the person you’ll find out the answer and get back to the caller.

“. . . To hear people say ‘well, I don’t know,’ that was very, very frustrating for me,” TN said. “We really needed to convey a message that ... yeah, it was an extremely awful situation but these were the things that we were doing and this was going to happen and people really needed to hear (that).” This was the only emergency contact number “and it was extremely important that they have trained people on the phones.”

Once they realized that there was a problem with the volunteers, TN tried to meet with them for five minutes before they began and gave them the basics. She told them to be pleasant, and gave them some quick advice on what kind of messages the city wanted to send out to residents. “After they heard that there was a real understanding.”

“We didn’t have all the answers and it was okay to tell the person that we didn’t have all the answers, but it’s one thing to say ‘I just don’t know, see ya,’ [and another to say] “we’ll find out, we’ll keep you posted, I can call you back’ ... just to let them know that we were trying to do our best.”

TN said psychology was part of the role the call centre played. Several days in, (on about Day 5 or 6) the community information centre and Vicars said they could have some volunteers to answer the phones and it was at a time when people were starting to wonder when it was all going to end. Their food was rotting, they hadn’t heard from relatives in days, even the smallest things were starting to get to people. At that point the decision was made to go with people who are trained rather than with untrained volunteers. “That made it a lot easier.”

The phone lines at City Hall weren’t adequate, TN said. The way the system was set up, the calls went straight to the receptionist, who fielded all the calls. People were having to wait or would get a busy signal. “And for an emergency call that wasn’t appropriate.”

The first day, Southeastern, the service provider, came in and hooked up emergency phones in case the power went out. That was a good thing, TN said, because the power did go out at City Hall for about 10 minutes on the second night. They didn’t have to use the emergency phones because the existing phone lines continued to work. It was, however, a reassurance to know the phone system would always be up and running, TN said.

In a bid to fix the problem of having calls go to the receptionist, they had Bell come in. Bell had a grand scheme to set up a centre in the council chambers with their own Bell operators. “We thought that was a fantastic idea, but it didn’t work out as well because I guess the two systems [Bell and Southeastern’s] didn’t mesh very well.”

They had wanted the Bell operators upstairs to handle the basic calls and transfer the more difficult questions down to the original call centre. But they were unable to do that. As a result runners were used to ferry messages back and forth between the two.
The arrangement almost made the problem worse, TN said, at least for the first day or so. “We had gone from not doing too badly to this new system that we had to have runners. Thank god we had volunteers who were willing to do that.”

TN said the downstairs location was a bad spot to have a call centre because “it was zoo central.” With so many people coming in, the transportation section was there, and also many people were showing up offering to be volunteers, “and they would stand there for two hours waiting for something to do.”

“They were talking and whatnot, and we were trying to answer these calls and it got really hard to hear.”

TN said they tried to avoid that problem by having the phone system upstairs so they could answer the phones quietly. They didn’t want to have to ‘shush’ the volunteers. That would have been rude. And even though the volunteers did hang around for long stretches of time, something always came up that they could do, TN said.

They kept the Bell centre for several days, even though it didn’t work as planned and also because it may have caused even more disruption to have them unhook their set-up. Bell’s presence solved some problems (such as having the volunteers answering all the calls) but introduced new ones.

Another problem was the number of phone lines. When runners brought messages down and calls had to be returned to citizens, each call out of City Hall tied up a line that could have been used by a resident to call in to the emergency number. So the call centre workers ended up using cell phones and the phone on the fax machines, which were on a separate line. For the kind of call centre they needed to have, there were definitely not enough phone lines, TN said. Doubling the number of lines they had may have been enough, “but the problem with that is you had to have someone there at all times.”

How were the Bell operators in comparison with the volunteers when it came to getting the City Hall ethic across?

“Although they were really good as far as their manner over the phone ... we had the information in front of them but they didn’t read the information. So I was still getting all the little messages (such as) ‘someone wants to know where you drop off the firewood,’” while that information was in the information packages. “So that was very frustrating,” TN said.

The Bell operators were volunteering their time.

The call centre remained at City Hall for about eight days before TN was asked to move the centre over to Gore Rd. so that City Hall could return to its normal functions.

TN said the operation got better every day even though it began without enough basic supplies such as pads of paper and tape. Also, she and the others didn’t know City Hall and so they had to hunt for supplies. Because of the amalgamation, the supplies at all the municipalities were allowed to dwindle and they were going to do re-order in the next month, with new letterhead etc.

As a result of the City Hall experience, when TN was told she was going to handle the Gore Rd. call centre, she went out and bought supplies and had the room at Gore Rd. set up even before the lines were switched over. Grand and Toy and Empire Life donated some office supplies.

By the time they reached Gore Rd., TN said everybody was just about “fed up”. Most of the same people who had been handling the emergency all along came out to the new building, because they were the ones with the expertise. “It wasn’t that we all wanted to be there ... you just didn’t have time to train anyone.” Some training beforehand would be helpful, such as a mock disaster. “I think that's extremely important,” TN said.

It had been decided that TN would get a new call centre set up the Gore Rd. site, but once that was accomplished she really wanted to get back to her regular job. Everyone was new to their jobs and if anything good came out of the ice storm it is that they all got to know each other very quickly. TN only stayed at the Gore Rd. site for two days and then went back to work. One person, Erica, stayed on. “It was really just tidying up things.”

Asked about her authority to act, TN said “When we got down to City Hall, it didn’t matter if you were a commissioner, manager, admin assistant, secretary, it didn’t matter at all. You were an able body. And I think that when we first started out people just used their leadership skills and went from there, and I don’t think a lot of people really overstepped their authority.”

Overlapping duties was one key problem, TN said. “That was the most frustrating thing for me.” To combat this problem, TN’s group came up with a general ‘who’s doing what’ list and tried to keep it updated. She feels it did help limit some of the overlap.

TN’s boss, Lance Thurston, was doing other things during the relief effort so she wasn’t taking her direction from him. Instead, she was pretty much left in charge of the call centre.

Was money a concern?
Initially the feeling was “forget what it costs, we’ll worry about it later.” Denis Leger was excellent about that, TN said. After Day 1 he had someone inputting costs as they went along. (TN said there hadn’t been very many purchases the first day, except for pizza.) “We were all using our common sense.” They would ask if they could get items donated or invoiced later so they didn’t have to pay for it right away. They were always thinking about the costs, although it was not an issue where safety was involved, she said. “If something was a matter of life and death it didn’t matter [how much it cost]. It got done.”

TN used a log list provided by Denis Leger to record costs. Only staff were authorized to spend any money. If it was a large amount then they were to go to Denis Leger, but that wasn’t a big issue with TN’s group.

TN remembers one discretionary decision to buy water to send out to a family in Glenburnie. The family had no water at all, and although a lot of people were in the same situation, this particular family had four young kids and nothing in the house for them to drink. “I thought it was extremely important.”

How did communications work?
Communication with volunteers was quite informal, TN said. She held five-minute debriefings every day, with periodic advisories on new information.

The largest problem TN’s group had was that the importance of the call centre was not recognized. “I think this is typical in the whole scheme of things, where you have the senior managers and the commissioners and mayor, senior advisor and other top officials, meeting in a room to discuss how things were going. In retrospect, my boss, Lance, has said ‘You know you really should have been there,’ because the call centre wasn’t getting the information. So I wasn’t able to give the people who called the most up-to-date information. That was including any press releases that went out. We had asked that anything that went out, that we saw it first so the volunteers and the people answering the phones were able to look at the information and be able to give that to people.” Instead, a press release would go out, the call centre wouldn’t get the information for quite a while and then people would call in asking for more details and the phone staff wouldn’t know what they were talking about. That was embarrassing and caused some internal problems, TN said.

She feels that communication link was just overlooked or someone assumed that someone else was keeping them updated. It did improve later on, she said.

TN worked with Sheila Hickey, Marielle and Erica Becker (she helped on the transportation side of things at City Hall and also at the switchboard, but not so much at the call centre).

TN described the assistance of a radio station, she couldn’t recall the name of it, that travelled to Kingston picking up supplies along the way and arrived with three trailer loads of stuff. They had called, saying: “Tell us what you need.” They wound up delivering generators, batteries, jackets, blankets and other supplies.

One problem was the location of the volunteer co-ordination centre right near the call centre. It was eventually moved across to the tourist information area, but for a while it caused confusion and noise.

What worked well?
Teamwork. “People were really good with each other.” They also worked hard to keep each other’s spirits up. “It was the only way we were surviving.”

“The hard thing for all of us is that all of the people that were there were in similar circumstances at home. ... I didn’t have power (at home in Glenburnie). My husband is a volunteer fire-fighter so he was at the fire hall the whole time and so we had to find a place for the dog.... And other people were in worse situations ... where they had to find a place for their kids.”

Recognizing that they were all in the same boat helped, TN said, especially when one of them was having a bad day, because they could all understand.

What didn’t work so well?
The area. Neither City Hall nor Gore Rd. were appropriate sites, TN said. They needed a large, up-to-date building with lots of parking and lots of space. One example of the lack of space: TN didn’t take her first nap for 60 1/2 hours at one stretch and when she did, there was no place to go. “It's a municipal building, it’s not a hotel.” She ended up sleeping on a mattress in the first-aid room. Having a space large enough to set up cots very important in an emergency situation, TN said.

TN wonders if City Hall was chosen as the response centre because they didn’t realize the state of emergency would last so long. They thought it would be an emergency for that day only, TN said. Gore Road is too small, she said, especially with its narrow corridor.

There should also be some place to eat, she said, such as a cafeteria. There is no cafeteria at City Hall.

How were priorities set?
Judgment, common sense and experience had to be used, TN said. There was really no other way other than physically going out to different places to determine the ranking of priorities, which would be a waste of time, she said.

What should be done differently next time?
The key thing she would recommend in future similar situations is that trained staff, working on rotating shifts, be answering the phones. The volunteers were on shifts, but the three staff, which dropped to two when Sheila got sick, were not able to rotate shifts. Two staff people were needed because there was too much work for just one person. Also, she would not want to work such long hours again. “Although you think you’re fine ... after that many hours you get more upset about things you wouldn’t normally get upset about and your tolerance is just way down.”

Personally, TN says she will now have an emergency plan for home. Even though she was counselling callers to let their family members know they were okay, she didn’t do it herself and her parents and siblings were frantically trying to get in touch with her.

Was the city’s emergency plan useful?
It was useful in the sense that you knew the scope of what you were responsible for, but “it was almost too vague,” TN said. Also, while it’s great to have a plan, it is of little use if staff haven’t read it, she said. “It doesn’t do any good the day of the emergency to go through (and say) ‘Oh, I was supposed to do this.’”

Because of amalgamation, people didn’t know who all the players were in the emergency plan because they still hadn’t learned who their colleagues were yet. Having departmental emergency plans to go along with the more vague city plan would have made a difference.

One of the problems, TN said, is that everything bad that could happen did. They lost power, the roads weren’t great, wires were coming down, most radio stations were off the air. “How do we get the message out to those people that you can’t get a message to via the telephone or the radio?”

TN did not have any emergency training and did not have interaction with the people from emergency measures Ontario. All media calls were directed to the communications specialist.

Was stress a concern for you or your volunteers?
Not until Day 5 when there were a couple of volunteers who stayed day and night and wouldn’t leave. They finally had to ask one volunteer to leave after he, acting quite out of character, was heard being unpleasant to a caller.

TN was not stressed about how things were going at home. She would get periodic calls from her husband updating her on how things were going there. On Day 4 or 5 she started to get the feeling that even if she wanted to leave she couldn’t. Only two of them were there and Marielle has two kids at home.

On the Saturday night her husband came down to get her to take a break. He was worried about the fact she had been going non-stop since the emergency began. Even a change of clothes and meals that aren’t from a fast-food joint offer a break, TN said. If you are not used to eating that kind of food it can make you feel sick, she said. “I got to the point where I didn’t care if I saw another pizza. ... We were almost creating little emergencies by having all of us there for so long.”

She went home the Saturday night and the Monday night, which was the first night her power was back on at home. After that they had a staffing rotation so she didn’t have to stay overnight, although she was still there for very long hours.

Things would have been worse at home if her husband had been there on his own, rather than spending so much time at the fire hall. Both could understand the long hours the other was spending at work.

Interesting, intriguing, funny anecdotes?
It was more fun at night, because things would quiet down and they would stay up and talk. “It was kind of like camp,” she said. “It was kind of good because it was people you wouldn’t normally have talked to. Everyone was down at the same level.”

People had difficulty pronouncing the name of Cheryl Mastantuono, the receptionist. The resulting mispronunciations were quite funny. There was Dave ‘the cot man’ Morgan who boasted that he slept in the same room with Sir John A. because he set up his cot in a room with his portrait.

Who else should the ice storm research team talk to?
Linda Breen -- involved in getting donations of supplies
Judith Pierce -- in the human resources side. TN said they would go to her often to tell they needed help. “She was in charge of doing the first schedule.”

What documents would be useful?
There is a binder TN kept that includes media releases, hardware stores and what they have available, Ontario Hydro information, portable shelters, employee assistance program, volunteers, on-call doctors, brush and tree drop-offs, supply lists, emergency procedures pamphlet, other shelter numbers and phone numbers.
By Day 5 they kept a log, particularly overnight.
She was willing to donate a copy of the binder’s contents.

TN said the documentation was not as good as it should have been. “If we had ever had anything, liability-wise, that came back we wouldn’t be able to track it as well as we should have.” Documentation improved at Gore Rd., where they used double-sided message pads so that when messages came in they would have a record.

But TN said she has kept all the pieces of paper from the call centre. All the messages were put into a box and kept. TN said she could get the papers. Boxes of messages, and the most up-to-date binder, from City Hall were bundled up and taken to Gore Rd. Other messages, “the stuff that I was involved in,” TN had at home.

Denis Leger has all the information on costs incurred by the call centre.

“All in all, I think the city did a very good job just coming together, but there’s definitely improvements (to be made) and I think the storm really caught us off guard, a lot of people in a lot of different ways. I think that once we get this next emergency plan the very first thing we should do is everyone should have a look at it and understand it and everyone should really be a part of the process, including all the front-line people as well, because some of the more serious problems were sometimes at that level and never reached the senior management level.”