IceStorm 98 Study

( iii ) Emergency Plans – General

1. “The importance of having an emergency plan hit home to the municipalities who either didn’t have one or who hadn’t updated it for a while. EMO were handing out pamphlets and guidelines which now municipalities will take very seriously.”

   Terry Eccles, Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources

2. The Emergency Plan provided a structure and eliminated duplication of effort.
3. Emergency plans and planning processes need to be kept simple so that emergencies can be responded to quickly and easily.
4. Every emergency is so different that you can only do a limited amount of useful preplanning – don’t develop individual protocols but set out responsibilities for each group.

   “As the Ice Storm of 1998 proved, there is no way to fully identify and understand the nature and scope of emergency situations that have not been experienced before. Inclusion of many outside resources such as volunteers, community groups, provincial and federal agencies, etc. helps make the plan comprehensive in identifying who can help and how they can help. Therefore, the plan is focused primarily on the management of emergency situations rather than on providing detailed information on specific emergencies.”

   1998 Ice Storm Report on Emergency Operations, Chris Powers, City of Nepean Fire Chief, March, 1998

5. Emergency Plans should be functional and uncluttered – short, simple, and flexible.
6. Plans must emphasize getting the right people together – not step by step procedures.
7. Emergency Plans need to include planning for wide-scale emergencies like the Ice Storm, not just single point emergencies.
8. “The emergency plan cannot provide detailed instructions on handling all types of emergencies, but rather attempts to identify responsibilities of municipal departments and other agencies to match resources with needs of residents and to provide the structure to do so, that is efficient and effective.”

   1998 Ice Storm Report on Emergency Operations, Chris Powers, City of Nepean Fire Chief, March, 1998

9. Emergency Plans should clarify the roles of politicians, staff, and outside agencies including the Red Cross and Salvation Army; consider signing contracts with outside agencies.
10. Harold Tulk, Fire Chief for the City of Brockville, sums it up this way:

    “...the most interesting observation that I make as a person that’s been developing emergency plans for some 20 years... it’s been the hardest sell document in the municipal sector and you have to be diligent and tenacious in having people pay attention to the damn thing and the way I always sold it was it was a management tool as well as an emergency response tool because it gave everybody a snapshot overview of what each department does. But the beauty of this one, and this is a personal observation, nobody had to open the binder ... and I’ll be damned if they didn’t follow the process step by step...and that confirmed one thing; that all that training, all that practice, all the arguments I had with them to pay attention to it, paid off. The key players didn’t have to open the binder... we kept this thing simple .. we always believed that if we have a process to bring the right people together that they can evaluate the situation and make good quality decisions for the community.. that’s what that plan is premised on...not how to do it, but who was responsible, and that’s what we think is the right approach now... we’ve confirmed... the plan should never tell you how to manage anything it should make damn sure that the right person’s there to manage it”.

11. The overall municipal Emergency Plan should be supplemented by Emergency Plans for individual departments.
12. Do not over plan. This disaster showed that people had to be prepared for almost anything.
13. Concentrate on planning for the consequences, don’t spend time trying to measure risk.
14. Local and Regional Emergency Plans need to be compatible.
15. Emergency Plans should be harmonized with mutual aid arrangements for fire.
16. Smaller municipalities should consider joint emergency plans.
17. Formalize “twinning” – the pairing of a municipality outside the disaster area with a municipality inside.
18. Emergency Plans, especially in larger municipalities should include provisions for expanding emergency activities beyond municipal boundaries.

    “Smaller rural municipalities were less prepared for the organization and the finding of resources to get things like shelters up and running.”

    John Finlay, Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, Brighton

    “Contacting the surrounding municipalities should be part of the emergency plan. The plan didn't contemplate this type of disaster. One of the first steps should have been to immediately isolate the area affected and figure out who was responding for each area right away. Emergency Measures Ontario perhaps should have done that. Kingston eventually did it, in a fairly rough way. The EOC was never able to be certain that it wasn’t duplicating efforts because occasionally it would send crews off with a generator, only to find that some other relief centre had already sent one too.

    The City was eventually asked by the Province to send its emergency response effort into the region, but the city had already done so on its own and had talked to the Province about it. There was some nervousness about it on the part of the EMO, and even some denial, because, bureaucrats being what they are, there is some question about what happened. Most of what Kingston, as the western-most region affected, did that was regional was freight-forward materials that had been shipped from Toronto to make sure everyone got what they needed.”

    from the interview with Gardner Church, interim CAO, City of Kingston