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Page 1 of 15 City of Kingston
by
Lee Parpart
No. of pages 80
October, 1998
City of Kingston
Background
This report offers a narrative of what happened in Kingston during the storm, based on 54 interviews with key participants in the City’s response [see Appendix A]. It touches on many of these close calls, problems and suggestions for change, but it also offers a wider account of how Kingston coped during the storm, how City officials and employees dealt with each other and with other agencies on a practical level and in terms of policy, how they mobilized internal and external resources, and in general how the corporation (and the community) responded to an unprecedented event.
Since this is a complex story involving many different players and phases, we felt the best way to organize it was according to categories of activity and issues arising out of the storm. Unlike a strict chronology of events, this approach lends itself to a certain amount of repetition, but it has the benefit of focusing attention on the key issues and agencies involved in the response and providing a picture of how they worked together.
Readers should bear in mind that the story told here is a partial and subjective one, based on interviews with participants in the City’s relief operation, who should be expected to have a stake in the way the emergency response is assessed. We do not pretend to have any special expertise in emergency planning that would allow us to judge the success of the emergency operation independently of these interviews with City and military officials. But as researchers and journalists, we have sifted through various claims about the response -- some of them competing -- and arrived at some version of the ‘truth’ about what happened.
It should be noted that a large part of the City’s response was setting up and running shelters for victims of the storm. The shelter story is dealt with in a separate report titled “Summary- City of Kingston Shelters”.
For a more complete review of the City’s response the reader is directed to the interview statements (available on CD-ROM) and supporting documentation housed at the Queen’s University Archives.
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