IceStorm 98 Study

Warren Leonard (WL) is Director of Emergency Management for the Public Safety Unit of the Toronto Police Service. He has two people working for him: a planning sergeant and a civilian planner, and supervises any other people who come in to work on shorter-term emergency-related projects. His unit does emergency management for the City of Toronto, and emergency planning for the police service. They work on operational planning and write procedures for the police, and they review procedures written by others for use in departments across the municipality to make sure those procedures mesh with one another. WL’s unit is also responsible for writing the city of Toronto's emergency plan and its separate nuclear emergency plan. At the time of this interview, he was writing another draft of the emergency plan to reflect the new structure of the amalgamated city of Toronto.

WL has taken quite a few emergency courses, and holds a certification from the National Coordinating Council of Emergency Management. Only 14 people in Canada have that designation. It indicates that you've done a certain amount of training, teaching, writing, publishing, management course work, etc. It's a professional designation, and one of the highest ranks in emergency planning within Canada.

WL spent a week in Kingston, observing how the response was being handled and advising local officials on the best policies and procedures to bring to an emergency.

On the Friday after the storm hit Eastern Ontario, Toronto Mayor Mel Lastman asked some staff in the CAO's department to talk to the different agencies in the city to see what resources they might be able to send to hard-hit areas. The emergency management unit got involved in coordinating this effort because of its contacts with other agencies. The CAO's office was new, and they were making contact with all of the agencies, but the police services were able to cut through to some of the other agencies using their own networks.

WL’s group spent the first weekend of the storm in Toronto, amassing resources to be sent down. Toronto Hydro had already sent down large numbers of crews, but generators seemed to be the number one item that people were looking for. Toronto has some fairly large generators in its works department. The police service sent down a 30-kilowatt generator on the Friday, from the emergency task force. Three people were sent down with it. Toronto fire service also sent down ten staff members and a number of vehicles, including some mechanics.

Bob Crawford, the chief of emergency planning for the Toronto fire service, was already in Kingston by Saturday. It was through talking to Bob over the weekend and through his contact with the Mayor and CAO of Kingston that WL got called to come to Kingston in person. Crawford advised Mayor Bennett and Gardner Church to contact the emergency planning section of the Toronto police and ask some of its members (including WL) to come down. Gardner Church called WL on Monday and made the request. Toronto Police responded by sending a team of four: WL, Fred Ellerby, Rick Follert and Gary Symonds. Gary and WL are civilians in the public safety office, and Fred and Rick are police officers. (Ellerby is a Staff Sgt, and Follert is a constable). The fifth member of their team was Sgt. Jim McLean, who stayed back in Toronto to continue with the liaison and coordinate the flow of resources to Kingston.

Toronto was twinned with Kingston by Emergency Measures Ontario by Friday. It was an effort to match resources that worked very well, WL said. "It was great. Once we knew where to send these resources, great, we just sent them down the highway." Some things were destined for Whitby, but the police weren't sure exactly where to send their resources until they were twinned.

WL and his crew left for Kingston on Monday, soon after receiving Gardner Church's request. They started work Tuesday morning. They met with Gardner C. and Mayor Bennett and went to the daily meetings of the emergency control group. Church and Bennett asked them [the Toronto emergency planners] to assess what was going on from a policy and procedural point of view -- as the city was under a declared state of emergency --and comment on what could be changed or improved.

WL found the whole experience exciting, after so many years of studying emergencies on a theoretical level. "That's kind of an unusual place to be. A lot of our work is centred on reading reports afterwards. You don't often get the chance to be right immersed in the middle of [an emergency], and be given a fair bit of leeway to go talk to whoever you needed to talk to, find out what you thought was going right and what you thought was going wrong, and help them out with the move of their EOC.”

Kingston decided to move its emergency operations centre from City Hall to the former municipal offices of Pittsburgh Township on Gore Road. WL’s group helped them with that transition. The decision was made on Tuesday, and the move took place on Thursday.

The mandate given to WL’s group was fairly broad. "We were asked to look at the process they had in place. And the process they had in place was somewhat interesting because, being newly amalgamated, they in as much made it up during that response, and quite frankly, they did a remarkable job. They were putting in long hours. Everybody was very dedicated. This was a disaster that hit their community. Not only were the residents filled with community spirit, but so were the people in the city. As municipal workers, they were really doing a remarkable job, in my opinion ... What we were asked to do specifically was just see if there was any way in which this could be improved. ‘Can we make this go a little easier? Or is it working fine?’ So that's what we did."

One thing that worked "remarkably well" was the call centre, WL said. City staff had set up a call centre, initially in the council chambers, that was staffed with people, and they kept current on the developments. When residents or anyone would call the centre, they got current information, “and that was key.”

Mayor Bennett’s visibility in the media was “excellent,” WL said. He was also impressed that Gardner Church and the Mayor greeted hard-working city staff every morning when they returned to continue the emergency response. “There they were every morning in the front foyer of City Hall, welcoming the employees back for another day of dealing with the emergency. [People] said that really bolstered their enthusiasm and their spirits, to have these people there leading the way for them, and making that personal contact."

The city’s use of volunteers also seemed to be efficient and effective, WL said, although he admits to having less personal experience with that area. Volunteers would come in and had a place to report to, and there were jobs for them. Volunteers weren’t turned away, and the city had a formal way of using people who just walked in off the street. He saw volunteers walk in off the street and ask to help, and someone would tell them ‘Great, go here [to the tourist information centre].’

WL hasn’t heard reports of volunteers and municipal staff coming in from points west of Kingston and being left waiting for long hours. His own group was put to work immediately, assisting and advising Mirka Januskiewicz and Lynne Jordon, who took over control of the emergency operations centre once it moved to Gore Rd. "They had stuff for us to do right away."

With the move to the new EOC, WL and his crew suggested a management model which is based on the Incident Command System (ICS). “We said ‘Look, you're doing all of these things, have you thought about organizing them under this model?’ We explained it to them, it took about half an hour, and they thought it was great, and they could see that the things they were already doing ... that's an important point... they were already doing a lot of this. They suddenly had some means and understanding of how it all hung together.”

Operationally, very few changes were made as a result of introducing the ICS model. “It just gave them some focus and structure. It gave them a means of seeing how reporting lines worked, and how one side can support the other instead of it being perhaps, in their mind at that time, more disjointed than it actually was. It was more organized than perhaps it appeared even to them, because they didn't have time to sit back and analyse this, but we did. They were immersed in doing work. The phones were always ringing, they were always doing something.”

Another thing they did at Gore Road was suggest the adoption of a shift system to make sure nobody was working too long at one stretch. Shifts gave city staff a chance to get away and get some rest, with the knowledge that somebody competent was running the place while they were away. When people came back, they were much more effective.

Early on in the emergency, WL heard stories of people working too long at one stretch. “People were working some pretty long hours ... I think they kept thinking this was going to be over shortly, but it kept raining. And, you know, [you say to yourself] ‘just a little more work and we’ll fix this, and a little more work,’ but it stretched on into the next week.”

By the time WL’s group suggested a shift schedule, power was back on in a large chunk of the old city. There were still portions of it without power, but they were starting to get rest at that time.

Outside workers tended to push themselves and stay on the job from 6 a.m. to sundown, WL said. He saw a lot of them at the Ambassador, where he and his crew stayed during the emergency.

Kingston looked after outside workers really well, he said. It impressed him that whole crews of people were assigned to the job of feeding the workers.

The entire City Hall was devoted to the disaster, and although that was appropriate once the decision was made to put the EOC in City Hall, WL said “it wouldn’t have been [his] first recommendation to use that building.” The EOC should have gone in a separate, dedicated site, he said, and been identified long before the emergency. “If it’s a location where normal operations have to be suspended,” he said, “then so be it. But City Hall is a difficult place to suspend operations, because people want to pay their water bills, and people want to get back to normal, and City Hall is one of the first places that they turn to.”

He saw the Staff College (the first site identified in the emergency plan), but never saw Woodbine Road, which was the second choice. He said he’s “not so sure” this emergency could have been handled from the Staff College. “It's a federal training [site], and while people will often say in this business, you can always suspend training in an emergency, so that’s a good site to pick, that makes reasonable sense if you have some control over the training. This is a federal site. They weren't suspending their training. They had a full class coming in the next day we were there, it was going to be full of people.”

The other problem was that the Staff College had only five phone lines. They could have dropped more in, as they did at City Hall and Gore Rd., but initially they had a concept of an operations centre that was not sufficiently large for the City of Kingston. The Staff College may have been big enough if it had been a single point emergency like a plane crash or a chemical spill, but there was no real site; the whole city was affected.

WL attended that meeting with Mirka Janusckiewicz at the Staff College to talk about possibly relocating the EOC there. He doesn’t remember hearing anything about the Staff College requesting 24 hours notice, but says they may have done so.

The city did have an emergency plan, and the plan itself was “fine,” WL said. “But people have to understand what a large municipal plan is. And Kingston is a major urban place. You have to take the plan, you have to train people to it. Having it isn’t good enough. People who have responsibilities outlined in the plan have to be aware of them. They have to have undertaken some activities to create procedure within their own departments to meet those responsibilities. Having that big picture plan isn't any good unless it trickles down. It’s a good starting point. I mean, I looked at the plan and I thought it was fine. But again, it’s the big picture, it's the starting point, it's the building block, it’s the foundation. You just can’t leave it there.”

The timing of the storm was probably the single biggest factor working against city staff, WL said, because they were just in their jobs six or eight days. There had been quite a shuffle of personnel. A number of people said to him ‘Gee, if this had happened six months ago, I would know who to call to get that done. But I’m not sure anymore.’

Asked what lessons can be learned from the whole experience, WL said “don’t put your EOC in City Hall.” There were two problems: it disrupted normal city functions, and when the inevitable move to a less public spot came, those who had been working on the emergency from City Hall didn’t want to go anywhere. “The people there had a little bit of resistance to moving. I think they felt ... personally attached to what they had created at City Hall, and [felt] it was working. It wasn’t according to a plan, but they came up with this operational mode, and it was working, and they didn’t want to leave that. They didn’t want to go to a new building, didn’t want to start over. [They said] ‘we got it to this point with a lot of hard work, let’s not move it.’”

Once the EOC was transferred to Gore Road, however, it worked fine, WL said. Operations had been scaled back. There was a fair bit of power left to be connected, but in most areas of the old city, the hydro was back on. Effort could be concentrated on the rural areas, where some people were still lacking power. Bus and garbage routes were starting to come back on in the city. They were into the recovery mode, and they were able to manage effectively from the new centre, WL said.

Unlike City Hall, the new site was kept secure and was restricted to the public. This was one of WL’s suggestions, that they keep the site secure. A bylaw officer camped out at the front door of the Gore Road site and ask any visitors why they were there, who they wanted to see, and give them an ID. The idea was to give remaining emergency workers a sense of security, “So that as you’re walking around the operations centre, you have an idea that the people in there are supposed to be there.”

Kingston’s City Hall “appears to have a very open door policy, and that carried over when it became an EOC,” WL said. “I guess that’s what they embrace, and the place is small enough that that was fine. I don’t know that they had any problems. I didn’t hear of any. But I think that when you’re working under those kind of stressful situations, you don’t want to look up and be surprised by having a camera pointed at you. The media is one, but also other people. It’s just better to have some control over ... an operational facility.”

WL’s group gave “conceptual direction, structural direction, organizational direction.” Most of them were not working in the field. On the final Thursday night, short of them actually sitting down in the new EOC at Gore Road and taking a position (a job in the EOC), there wasn’t that much more they could do for them, WL said. “We didn’t take on jobs; we suggested how they could continue to do their jobs. [That was the most effective use of our time] and our expertise, and there’s still the City of Toronto back here; we had to get back to our jobs.” They were only gone a week. They came back on Friday.

There was no pressure to come back to their own jobs, WL said, but they were aware that if they took jobs in the EOC, they could be there for a long time. “This wasn’t our emergency; we were willing to help them out with what we know. For the people in this office, our best expertise was spent giving them a model to work under. But once you give them the model, they can run with it themselves. They didn’t necessarily need our expertise to fill those positions.”

What WL’s group gave Kingston staff was a “concept of operations.” Nothing fundamental had to be changed, but the incident management model gave them a concept of how things were working.

WL’s group did suggest that they look into critical incident stress debriefings for the people who were working these long hours. They acted on that very quickly. At the very next municipal control group meeting they had someone there to look into setting that kind of thing in place.

“It was great. It was fabulous. It’s the only way to go. You generally don’t get the opportunity to be sitting in a working machine. You read about it after, or you visit it after,
or you read the reports after. But there’s nothing like being part of it. And I would say to the credit of Mayor Bennett and Gardner Church, the freedom that they gave us to look at this -- they said ‘go out there and check it all out, look at how we’re preparing....’ They thought another storm was coming, so they wanted to make sure that when the next storm hit, and they were all fairly convinced that this would happen, for the next windstorm that this delicate hydro system that they’d put back in place was going to fall down again. And this time even worse, or at the very least put them back to square one like they were on Saturday when they lost power to a lot in Kingston ... to be in that, you can’t buy that kind of experience. You can’t go to enough courses to learn that.”

The clearest lesson he learned had to do with “the magnitude of what’s required for those large geographic, for those natural events.” It’s not a site; it’s not a bomb that’s gone off. “It’s not a plane that’s crashed ... It’s not a tanker car on a railway that’s spilled over. Geographically, there is no site. And the amount of resources that are available and that can be amassed by a city the size of Toronto is very significant, and it needs some very large facilities to handle and organize the management of those resources. This isn’t going to work out of a building the size of this.”

Toronto has an emergency operations centre, but it’s geared to a single site. For a widespread geographic impact like the one that hit Kingston, they would need to find another site; something like a works yard, with a large space for vehicles, large office space, several meeting rooms, large board rooms, and lots of different pockets and wings for people to work in.

WL kept a log during the storm but didn’t want to deposit it in the archives.

The group in Toronto that was tasked with this has de-briefed with the fire department and the police department. They’ve discussed what happened in Kingston, but WL was not asked to write a report about his group’s experience there.

Asked to comment on the military’s participation in the response, WL said that from what he saw, they were “outstanding. They were really good. Some of the work that the police did in sending the leaflets around, someone said they had used 400 RMC Cadets. Because they’re right there, along with CFB Kingston. They were great. They operate in this kind of environment very comfortably. They’re conduct is obviously experienced in stressful situations, and that really showed. I think that brought an element of calm to a lot of the things there.”

One military officer attended the municipal control group meetings every day. Kingston police and the military operated in a common office. “They got along great. I’m not sure they could have done it all without the military. I was just impressed that the comfort that they operated under in stressful situations. And I think that probably says something about their training ... They were remarkable, and they seemed to take this task on without blinking, just went about doing what was needed.”

WL is not sure what kind of mandate was given to Col. Gerry Coady’s group; that was all in place by the time his group got to Kingston. The northern response centres closed down after two days, but he’s not sure why. He did say, however, that it raises the issue of making sure you know who you’re bringing in ahead of time. “Make all these contacts ahead of time, so you know who to bring in and who not to bring in if something happens, so that you can put a name to a face. Because someone who shows up, and this could have been somebody from anywhere, and I don’t know that this didn’t even happen, could show up and say ‘look, I’m the answer to all of your problems.’ If you don’t know that person, don’t have some prior experience with them, you might be hesitant to take advantage of them, and they might be the right person.”

Asked about conflicts that are said to have flared up between Mirka Januskiewicz and Gerry Coady at the Gore Road site, WL said he didn’t know about that, but remembers Gardner Church very clearly handing authority for the new EOC over to Mirka. “It was almost a passing of the torch ceremony, and he gave it clearly to her. That was on the municipal side of things. If everyone didn’t understand that, it may have caused some problems. But there was no doubt, from what I witnessed at the municipal control group, that the control and authority remained within the city of Kingston by giving it to Mirka, who’s the commissioner. That was clear to me. I don’t recall everybody who was at that meeting. It was one of their big municipal control group meetings. But if people choose not to pay any attention to that or try to usurp that authority, then I guess that’s just one of the problems you’ve got to overcome during an emergency.”

In general, WL gave a very positive ‘review’ of the emergency response, and said Kingston should feel good about what they accomplished. “I was glad to be able to go down and take some people and help out in the way that we could, because it validated for us a model that we’ve adopted. There was a bit of a testing ground for us. We had adopted it before we went down there, but it validated the direction and our thinking, because we saw it [the incident management model] work.”

The key attributes of the model are that “it’s flexible, it’s easily understood, it brings order to what appears not to be order, although it may be more than you think. It sets out lines of authority. It keeps things clear. And the earlier you can implement something like this the better. It keeps terminology common .... we’re just sold on it.”

The incident management system (or incident command system) was developed in the U.S. in the early 1970s for use in fire departments. It tends to be used more widely in the States, but fire departments in Canada tend to use it because it comes from a fire environment. But the police services in Toronto have seen its value as well. It’s for site operations, primarily. He’s not sure of other police forces in Canada that have gone this route, but as a result of the ice storm, Kingston is aware of it.