IceStorm 98 Study

City Police/OPP/Police Command Centre

Kingston’s City police and the Kingston Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) were busier than usual during the ice storm, but in some ways, officials say, the job of policing the City was actually easier than it is under normal conditions. Crime fell dramatically during the emergency, as experts say it tends to during such events, and even the car accidents police expected to be dealing with in droves never materialized. The storm was severe enough to keep most people off the roads, at least for the first few days, and those who did drive were being cautious to treat non-functioning traffic lights (of which there were many, including six or eight major intersections) as four-way stop signs. Ironically, the first major accident took place at Princess Street and Midland Ave. about an hour after the lights came back up at that intersection. Other than that, OPP Staff Sgt. Glen Fowler pointed out, the ice storm was “[not so much] a police emergency as it was a utilities emergency, and a service delivery sort of emergency.”

Having said that, though, police were kept very busy with other matters. For example, OPP officers spent a great deal of time at the beginning of the ice storm trying to monitor intersections without power, until they realized that this was distracting them from more pressing tasks and began leaving residents to negotiate traffic on their own. Emergency 911 calls to both police forces also shot up dramatically in the first few days of the storm, then tapered off as residents began solving their own problems or turning to the City for help. Total calls to both police forces remained high for about a week. At a June debriefing, Staff Sgt. Bob Napier of the City police said the volume of calls in the old City core increased by about 70 per cent during the first six days of the emergency. OPP officials report a similar jump in the number of calls from residents in Kingston West, which remains under OPP jurisdiction until the municipality completes its move to a City-only police force. Many of the calls coming in to both departments were requests for generators, calls for help with flooded basements, and ‘check the welfare’ calls from residents wanting police to visit their friends and relatives who were stranded or temporarily out of contact.

Both police forces augmented their regular shifts to cope with the increased workload, and added a greater presence in neighbourhoods without power, where the fear of criminal activity was greatest. Police were also kept busy helping to establish emergency routes at the beginning of the storm and assisting the utilities, works and forestry crews with the restoration and clean-up. Near the end of the storm, police were also called on to secure the Utilities Kingston building and protect employees against a small number of residents who became increasingly hostile about the City’s inability to restore power quickly. City Police Chief Bill Closs said the department had to send an officer out “from time to time … so that the people who were here trying to help restore power and deal with the emergency felt safe, and [so that] cooler heads prevailed.”

As a crime-prevention measure during the storm, Chief Closs worked with local Crown Attorney Jack McKenna to encourage stiffer-than-usual sentences for anyone caught taking advantage of the situation to commit property crimes. “I was concerned that we would start having B&E’s [break-and-enters], especially with the power outage,” he said, “so Mr. McKenna and myself formed an agreement that we would go public with a message” warning criminals that they would be subject to special ‘ice storm’ sentencing. The Crown agreed to make the court aware of the special circumstances of ice-storm related crimes at the time of sentencing, and promised to seek higher penalties. Chief Closs made sure that got out to the media, and in fact one person who was apprehended early in the disaster did receive jail time for breaking into a house. Chief Closs said this well-publicized campaign did seem to work as a deterrent, but it also sent the message out to criminals that “if I’m going to do the crime, I’d better be really, really careful.”

Kingston Police Volunteers played an important role in the storm, performing hundreds of hours of free service during the storm and alleviating the stress on regular officers. City Police Chief Bill Closs estimated that without the volunteers, storm-related overtime costs in the department, which amounted to about $27,000, would have been closer to $35,000 or $40,000. “When I [say] our officers only had to work a few hours of overtime and were not that stressed out,” he said, “that would not have been true without the volunteers, because the volunteers were doing work that traditionally would have been done by the police.”

On one occasion, City police volunteers combed the City and returned a lost seeing-eye-dog to its owner. The dog was outside when the ice storm hit, and got scared and ran away. “So although she’s at home, that leaves her helpless,” Chief Closs recalled. “Our Kingston Police Community Volunteers responded, went to the streets, found her dog and returned it to her ... She was really pleased, and I’m sure there’s gotta be a hundred other stories like that from across the City.” On another occasion, volunteers were patrolling the streets and found a young man in his early 20s who had fallen down after a night of drinking and turned into what Chief Closs described as a ‘human icicle’:

He had been drinking in the local bars, and quite frankly had fallen down in the middle of this ice storm and just lay there for quite some time. Eventually our community volunteers came along and got him up. This guy was a living, human, breathing icicle. I mean, he was just absolutely covered in ice. He knew it was cold, and he knew he was hurting, and he was really looking for help. But he was well looked after. That’s just one small example of how close this [emergency] was to being life or death ... He was literally covered in ice, right from the top of his head to his shoes. Even his face was covered in ice. He was an icicle.

Both the City and provincial police forces kept their regular shift rotations in place but lengthened the hours somewhat and added resources. The OPP began receiving reinforcements from other detachments almost as soon as the storm began. After the first 24 hours the Kingston OPP had 10 extra people in the detachment to work and supplement their own shifts. In the first three or four nights, they had an extra 10 officers on two of the shifts and an extra five for the following three or four days. Staff Sgt. Glen Fowler said the help from head office allowed his detachment to calm the public’s concern about crime:

This allowed us to get out there and have a real presence in those areas without hydro or heat, to make sure that there wasn’t any criminal activity to flare up and victimize the people who couldn’t protect their own homes or didn’t have any communications by telephone.

In addition to these routine and less routine duties, City police also joined the emergency response in a more direct way by establishing a police command post at City Hall. The post, which was organized and led by Sgt. Bob Napier and Const. Al Melvin of the City police and included participation from various OPP officers (including sergeants Joe Marshall and Gary Collins of the Kingston West detachment), became the locus for door-to-door checks by the military and several other public safety initiatives.

Gardner Church launched the initiative by calling Staff Sgt. Napier and Const. Melvin in to City Hall late Thursday night – as Utilities Kingston was beginning to lose its battle against the freezing rain – and asking the two officers to come up with a plan for checking on the welfare of Kingston residents. It now looked as if the emergency might last more than a week, and City officials were becoming aware of the need to rescue isolated or needy residents from their homes and do whatever they could to prevent hypothermia casualties. Mr. Church had an idea that Kingston would use the military in some way to help with a door-to-door campaign, and Const. Melvin, who moonlights as a military police officer for CFB Kingston, was able to advise on the best way to make use of resources from the base. Both officers were relieved of their regular duties in order to devote themselves to running the command post, and they had a plan in place and a functioning office on the first floor of City Hall by Friday morning, within about 6 hours of receiving their orders from Mr. Church.

On Friday morning, Sgt. Napier and Const. Melvin contacted base operations at CFB Kingston to see if there was any possibility of getting a deployment of troops to help with the door-to-door checks. In order to get the ball rolling, they were told they would need to go through Emergency Measures Ontario (EMO). Sgt. Napier says Gardner Church made that first call to EMO, but from other interviews it appears the City began trying to reach Emergency Measures Ontario before Friday. City officials admit they bypassed normal channels – i.e., the requirement that they call the EMO before asking the military for any help – but this may have happened because earlier efforts to reach the EMO about other matters (such as getting cots and blankets into the shelters) had resulted in no action. (See interview with Lance Thurston). Whatever the exact sequence of events leading up to the military’s participation – and it does seem clear that at some point Kingston officials used their personal contacts with the military to extract speedier help than the EMO was willing or able to provide – the City received about 120 troops the first day from several different units at CFB Kingston. Transit Kingston donated six inactive City buses to the command post, and Sgt. Napier put 20 or 30 troops on each bus. They concentrated on the hardest-hit areas within the City core for the first day. At some point during that first Saturday (Jan. 10), Sgt. Napier got in touch with the OPP, and Sgt. Joe Marshall came down to discuss plans for extending the searches to Kingston West. Two buses were placed at Sgt. Marshall’s disposal, and he was charged with using them wherever they were needed most in Kingston West.

The first day the military was deployed in Kingston, Sgt. Napier said the soldiers located about 20 people who were in “difficult situations” and who took advantage of the opportunity to leave their homes and go to shelters. At least one person left in an ambulance after being rescued from a “hypothermia-type situation,” he said. Over the next week and a half, military personnel from several units attached to CFB Kingston and a large group of students from the Royal Military College took part in door-to-door checks that extended into virtually the whole new City of Kingston and eventually included parts of the wider region. (Door-to-door checks were confined to Frontenac County, with the exception of one period in Athens and another visit to Camden East). Depending on the day, Sgt. Napier had between 90 and 100 military personnel and between 300 and 400 RMC cadets at his disposal.

Some of the highly trained ‘elite’ troops that were tentatively promised to Kingston early in the storm (from units such as the 79th Signals Regiment) were diverted to Ottawa and Montreal and were replaced by militia units and the students. Gardner Church recalled his own disappointment at seeing these highly trained units leave, and said this feeling was compounded later when reports suggested that Ottawa suffered less ice storm damage than Kingston. But he said the militia and students turned out to be thoroughly professional and did a “wonderful” job for Kingston, dispelling any earlier doubts he had about their ability to help. The only limitations on their activities were practical: unlike the soldiers, for example, the RMC cadets had no winter kit (clothing), and couldn’t do jobs that required a lot of standing around in cold weather. That meant that they tended to do more of the door-to-door checks, while the professional soldiers eventually took on a greater variety of jobs in the field, including picking up brush toward the end of the response.

Soldiers and RMC cadets went from door to door in the City for four days in a row, handing out pamphlets and checking on the safety of residents who wouldn’t leave their homes. The pamphlets gave the emergency number at City Hall and provided basic information about mobile and permanent shelters, emergency supplies, safety issues and the White Flag campaign. Volunteer (auxiliary) police officers from both forces also took part in check-the-welfare visits, and occasionally had to use forceful persuasion to remove at-risk residents from their homes. Police and the military couldn’t force people to go into the shelters, but in a few extreme cases they threatened to invoke the mental health act unless a person agreed to be evacuated. (The mental health act allows civil authorities to detain and arrange for institutionalization whenever a person appears to be a danger to themselves or others). Sgt. Napier recalls one elderly woman whose apartment was filled with animals, animal feces and lit candles. She had very poor eyesight, and police were worried she would start a fire. She refused to leave her apartment until police threatened to invoke the mental health act, at which point she allowed herself to be taken to a shelter.

Exact figures on the number of people who took advantage of the military and police help or who left their homes during these door-to-door checks will probably never be available, Sgt. Napier said, because no one kept a central log of all the responses. One reason for this had to do with radio communications. Police in the command centre were having trouble with their own radio signal at City Hall (at one point they couldn’t even establish contact with the police station two blocks away on Queen Street) and Transit Kingston’s dispatch system was the only means they had of keeping in touch with the troops during the door-to-door checks. This meant that Sgt. Napier and the others had to physically walk over to the Transit Kingston post to pick up any incident reports sent in by the military. In the beginning, the military troops were reporting virtually every situation they encountered and would sometimes call in for orders on how to proceed. When this became too time-consuming, Sgt. Napier told the troops to loosen their reporting structure and do what they felt was necessary in the field: “The way that we left it was ‘If you find somebody who needs help, get them an ambulance and move on. Don’t call us and say we’ve got somebody that needs help. You’re just wasting time.’” As a result, there are no figures for how many residents accepted help during the door-to-door checks.

Competition between the City police and the OPP (who are due to lose their responsibility over Kingston West with the move to an all-City police service in 2000) seems to have spilled over into the command post at times, causing strained relations and contributing to a number of miscommunications. Each participant tells a different story, and the only thing that seems clear is that the two groups had some trouble getting along. Sgt. Gary Collins, for example, reports that he and other OPP officers felt as if they were being excluded from the command post, and attributed this problem to a “turf war” between the two forces. By way of example, he said certain City police officers were less than grateful when an OPP officer prevented a crime within the old City boundaries, feeling the officer should not have been on their territory. And Sgt. Collins said he was constantly being told to go home when he tried to put in his night shifts at the command post in City Hall. He remembers being told repeatedly that he wasn’t needed, but feels this was part of an attempt to maximize the City police force’s involvement and minimize that by the OPP.

Sgt. Napier insisted that he and Const. Melvin did everything possible to welcome and accommodate the OPP, but admitted it was frustrating at times, and says that may have shown itself occasionally. One source of tension had to do with the way participation in the command post was handled by the two forces. City police designated two full-time people to the job and relieved them of their regular duties until the emergency was over, while the OPP sent various representatives and reportedly had those people doing their regular jobs for the provincial police while they were assigned to be at City Hall, Sgt. Napier said. It would have been preferable, he said, to have both forces designate full-time representatives to the command post. But Sgt. Napier said this didn’t happen on the OPP side, and as a result provincial police representatives sometimes had to be brought up to speed on things before they could act.

The most serious lapses, Sgt. Napier said, had to do with incomplete door-to-door checks and an early misallocation of resources. On the first day the OPP was involved, for example, they ignored or misunderstood their instructions and made plans to send one bus to Sharbot Lake and another to Wolfe Island. This would have been fine later on, but in the first days of the response the door-to-door checks were only mandated to happen within the City of Kingston. Later, it was learned that the OPP-led buses somehow went three days without checking residents in Reddendale, one of the hardest-hit areas within Kingston West. Sgt. Napier has no idea why Reddendale wasn’t checked, and says he publicly took the blame for this oversight at a municipal control group meeting, despite the fact that it was an OPP error. Such oversights might have been avoided, Sgt. Napier added, if the OPP had been clearly told that City police were running the command post and that all orders were to come from them. But he noted a fundamental problem with the lines of authority that affected the command post: City police were, in fact, running the show, but because the OPP still has full responsibility for policing in Kingston West, there were limits to what City police could do in terms of holding the OPP accountable for their own area.

While some areas like Reddendale went unchecked for days, other neighbourhoods that sustained only minor damage and suffered no loss of power were canvassed thoroughly. Staff Sgt. Gary Collins was critical of the decision to patrol the Bayridge subdivision in Kingston West, for example, saying it was a flagrant case of a waste of manpower. Bayridge was not subject to any lasting power failures during the storm, Sgt. Collins said, but it was decided that the area had to be canvassed for political reasons:

I sat at the table with the police and said ‘that is a waste of time, I tell you we have cruisers in that area, the people have power, they’re not in any need.’ But they took literally hundreds of RMC soldiers [sic] and made them canvas that area, so the Mayor would look good. And I think that that was a waste of manpower that could have been used somewhere else in a more important or a more devastated area. But it was done. This is not being done because people need help; this is being done because it was a political move. And in my opinion, that makes me nauseous.

Another source of tension between the two forces arose with an offer to use 10 unlicensed vans as part of the emergency response. The donated vehicles had no plates, but City police chief Bill Closs was willing to write a letter promising that his officers would look the other way during the emergency, and refrain from ticketing the vehicles. The OPP’s Staff Sgt. Glen Fowler disagreed, and came up with a solution to have the vans licenced quickly and inexpensively through the Ministry of Transportation. City police had only to visit the MTO and pick up the plates, which would be ready when they got there. Staff Sgt. Fowler was concerned about liability issues that might arise if any of the vehicles got into an accident, and refused to write the letter. Chief Closs appeared to offer this anecdote as evidence of an inflexible attitude within the OPP, while Staff Sgt. Fowler pointed out that the disagreement was resolved in his favour, and said the story illustrates that City police were too quick to suspend normal rules and precautions during the emergency. In the end, the vans were licensed by the MTO and used in the response without incident. In a separate incident, City police allowed a volunteer to use one of their marked police vehicles, and the volunteer got into an accident.

Reflecting on the ice storm months after it was over, Chief Closs said he came to the conclusion that, among other things, Kingston needs a better plan for dealing with elderly residents in an emergency. “The elderly, or the vulnerable, the people at risk -- sometimes don’t recognize when they’re in danger, or refuse to be helped,” he said. “We were a little slow, but eventually someone came in with the White Flag campaign idea, on about day four or five.” (The White Flag campaign was a public information campaign that encouraged residents to fly a white cloth from their home if they needed help). For the next emergency, Chief Closs said the City plans to designate a single, easy-to-recognize symbol that indicates when someone needs help. “[It will be] something you hang in your window or put out a door, etc., so that anyone walking by will know, ‘Gee, there’s something happening in that house.’ We need to come up with a symbol that young and old will recognize.”

Chief Closs said the City was also slow, initially, in providing information to the media. “People were phoning my house and saying ‘we need more information here,’” he recalls. “Unfortunately [media relations] gets left behind, but it wasn’t very long before the mayor had a media person designated.” The chief had high praise for Tony Orr of CFLY radio, who he said contacted him early on in the emergency and urged him to help the station get more emergency-related information out to the public. “So between Tony, the mayor and I, we got something going ... after that, there was almost a regular parade over to the radio station, with people trying to get information across to the public. Tony Orr deserves credit for organizing that. I know it’s his business to be in the media and to get something out to his clients, [who are] the listening community, but the fact of the matter is that when he wasn’t getting what he felt was a good enough response, he was smart enough, and assertive enough, to come to the police chief and say ‘hey, you gotta help us here.’”