IceStorm 98 Study

ElectriCity (Utilities Kingston, Granite Power and Ontario Hydro)

The ice storm was, first and foremost, a hydro-electric emergency. Most of the public health and safety threats brought on by the storm can be traced to a lack of power. This meant that police and fire officials, who normally take a lead role in any emergency, wound up in a supporting role relative to Utilities Kingston and, when anyone could get ahold of them, Ontario Hydro. It also meant that works and forestry crews were dependent on the utilities to set the pace of the cleanup and recovery. No one could safely pull down a broken tree branch, pick up a fallen wire or plow trees off a road without first consulting utility officials about which areas were ‘live’ (i.e., charged with electriCity) and which ones were not. As a result, crews that started out working separately quickly found that it was absolutely crucial to work together. Public works, roads, and forestry crews wound up meeting regularly with hydro crews and officials at the Utilities Kingston building on Counter Street. Within two days of the emergency being declared, Utilities Kingston had divided its area of the City up into quadrants and was sending crews out to work on those areas. As the response became more systematic, forestry and public works crews began filling in behind the line personnel, clearing the roads and pulling down broken branches wherever it was safe to do so.

The fact that hydro issues were paramount during the emergency tended to give Utilities Kingston a great deal of autonomy. General Manager Jim Keech said it was helpful to have political leaders back away and let him do his job:

From the electrical restoration point of view and the utility point of view, one of the things that made it a success was right at the start it was established that basically it was our show. We didn’t have to ask Gardner Church or the Mayor every time we wanted to do something.

The job of restoring the City to full power was made more complex by the fact that Kingston is served by three different utilities: Utilities Kingston, Ontario Hydro, and Granite Power Corporation. Utilities Kingston, which was formerly a standalone organization known as the Public Utilities Commission (PUC), became a part of the City’s infrastructure when Kingston underwent its amalgamation on Jan. 1. Most of its 25,713 customers are in the old City core, although Utilities Kingston also maintains sewer and water treatment plants in the former townships (where power is supplied by the other utilities) and is responsible for a substation on the local military base that is supplied by Ontario Hydro. Granite Power services 450 customers in both former townships, with about 60 per cent of the total in the former Pittsburgh Township and 40 per cent in the former Kingston Township. Ontario Hydro provides electriCity to the remainder of Kingston West, as well as parts of Kingston East.

Utilities Kingston owns and operates a 44,000-volt (44 kV) subtransmission system and a 4,000-volt (4 kV) distribution system. Four 44kV feeders originate from the Frontenac T.S. on Division Street, and four more emanate from the Gardner T.S. In turn, these feeders supply sixteen 4 kV municipal substations, which are spaced about one kilometre apart throughout the City. (What other lines come into the former townships from Granite or Ontario Hydro?) According to a review of Kingston’s electrical system by officials at Toronto Hydro, the 44kV sub-transmission system, which is the backbone of the electric utility’s system, held up well during the emergency:

In spite of the so-called ‘ice storm of the century,’ the sub-transmission feeders suffered only minimum damage. All but one feeder were restored within one day; the last feeder within three days. The only serious damage was the failure of two poles due to the loss of guy wires.

The 4 kV distribution system was a different story. About 100 4 kV feeders distribute powers to the various streets within Kingston, and although the Toronto Hydro review notes that the system has been serving Kingston relatively well for many years, it points out that by current standards, the 4 kV system is “inefficient and has gradually become outmoded.” Parts of the system are over 50 years old, and in many cases, clearances on the overhead plant are not up to current standards. This increases the risk of power outages and poses safety concerns for line personnel. During the ice storm, the combination of a heavily treed environment, limited tree trimming and exceptional ice loads was too much for large portions of the 4 kV system to handle. At the peak of the storm, up to 80 per cent of the 4 kV feeders were affected, which meant that 80 per cent of residences served by Utilities Kingston had no power. Line-persons from utilities across Ontario took one full week to restore the 4 kV feeders to service. In their review, Toronto Hydro officials concluded that the distribution system needs a thorough overhaul, including a partial replacement or relocation of the 4 kV plant.

In addition to the problems posed by an outdated distribution system, Kingston faced jurisdictional conflicts during the ice storm that affected its ability to keep residents informed. While Utilities Kingston was in constant contact with the City during the emergency, Kingston officials say they had difficulty getting cooperation -- or even a response -- from Granite Power Corporation and Ontario Hydro. Mayor Bennett said he never heard from Granite Power at any point during the emergency, and still hadn’t spoken to anyone from the company about the ice storm as of mid-March. Ontario Hydro had linemen working to bring power back on in its service areas almost as soon as the emergency was declared, but it took the provincial utility almost three days to return phone calls from Kingston and send a representative who could attend municipal control group meetings. This meant that at the height of the emergency, Kingston officials had no reliable figures on the number of customers in the former townships who were out of power, and were unable to answer questions about when power in those areas might be restored. [Does this apply mainly to Kingston West or also to Kingston East?] This looked bad from a political and public relations point of view, and eventually led to charges that the City was taking care of the downtown core while ignoring the townships. It also meant that City crews trying to clean up affected parts of the townships were working blind at first, with no indication of which areas were live and which were not.

Gardner Church described the lack of communication from Ontario Hydro as “the sole gaping hole” in Kingston’s emergency response. In an attempt to make up for the utility’s absence, he asked Kingston OPP officials to do an analysis of how much of the rural areas were out of power. Mr. Church said it was a difficult job for the OPP to do, and would have been unnecessary if Ontario Hydro had been up to the challenge. In fairness, though, the interim CAO pointed out that some of this had to do with timing, and a simple lack of resources. Ontario Hydro had devoted its entire head office response to the disaster that occurred farther east the previous night. Kingston happened to feel the effects of the ice storm one day later than some other areas, and Mr. Church said he believes Ontario Hydro’s resources were already completely dedicated. Some of those resources had been sent to Quebec, while others were dedicated farther east in Ontario, in hard hit places like Cornwall. The situation in Kingston “was simply either not of sufficient concern,” said Mr. Church, “or they didn’t have sufficient capaCity to respond to our situation.” Whatever the reasons, he says, the fact is that Ontario Hydro’s absence from the table made life very difficult for local crews:

It was a very serious and dangerous situation for some time, working in a system in which we had no idea what was hot, what was not hot, what was going to become hot, what wouldn’t ...That Ontario Hydro could not, as a system, find a senior manager for several, several, days (Jim West finally arrived) is, to my mind, inexcusable. And [it was] the only really serious glitch in our process.

Once Kingston officials made contact with a line person from Ontario Hydro who was working in Kingston Township, it was reassuring to find out that there was no significant reconstruction going on, that Ontario Hydro crews were working on a line-by-line basis, and that none of the major systems were out. As of this point, City crews were able to do their job in the former townships without as much fear of electrocution.

An Ontario Hydro representative, Peter Webster, addressed Kingston officials during an ice storm debriefing on June 24, 1998, and talked about the astonishing number of demands placed on the provincial utility during the storm. More than 100 high voltage transmission lines came down during the emergency, he noted, and a full 30 per cent of the electrical distribution system in Eastern Ontario was damaged. He talked about the frustration of repairing lines only to have them come down again the same day or the same hour. Over all, 232,000 electriCity customers in Eastern Ontario were without power at some stage of the emergency. That is at least 700,000 persons, on the assumption that one customer means at least three persons.

A few of those interviewed for this study came to Ontario Hydro’s defence, saying it was understandably not a priority for the utility to be sending supervisors to control group meetings in every municipality. Staff Sgt. Glen Fowler of the Kingston OPP said it’s clear Ontario Hydro had other issues occupying it at the time:

The devastation for Ontario Hydro was all of Eastern Ontario, it wasn’t just the City of Kingston. So they had to prioritize where they would put their resources initially. People attending meetings wasn’t at the top of their priority list. So they tried to meet the needs right across the Eastern end of the province.

Even Utilities Kingston had a hard time getting Ontario Hydro’s attention, and this added to the problems already being faced. For example, Utilities Kingston was trying to get power restored at the water and sewage treatment plants in both former townships, but couldn’t persuade Ontario Hydro to put those sites at the top of its priority list. Ontario Hydro, which supplies power to the sewer and water treatment plants in Kingston West, treated Utilities Kingston like “any other customer,” said Nancy Taylor. At one point the City’s water treatment plant in Kingston West called to a report a tree laying on its service. Utilities Kingston made a decision not to sent its own staff out to deal with the situation because the area was supplied by Ontario Hydro. Ms. Taylor said if they had it to do over again, they would probably ignore jurisdictional lines and send their local crews in to do the job. As a result of the delay getting power restored, it looked for a while as if Kingston might face a serious threat to its water supply. This danger was exacerbated by a lack of adequate back-up power at one of the water treatment plants, which nearly shut down when the generator proved too weak to operate the backwash system. Kingston officials requested a much larger generator from Toronto to deal with this problem, but the crisis was averted when power was restored to the plant.

In another instance, military officials report, a lack of communication between Ontario Hydro and Utilities Kingston caused CFB Kingston to go without power longer than it needed to. The Base has a substation that receives its power from Ontario Hydro but that is maintained by Utilities Kingston. Due to a lack of reporting between the two utilities, Maj. Jim Frazer, chief engineering services officer at the Base, says power was restored to the substation for about 16 hours before Utilities Kingston knew it had been restored. “Because of poor co-ordination [between Ontario Hydro and Utilities Kingston],” he said, “we were hampered.”

Coordination between the two utilities seemed to improve after Joanne O’Marra, who ran the supply and distribution system for Utilities Kingston during the emergency, took it upon herself to arrange a joint helicopter ride for officials from both utilities. O’Marra, who is normally the administrative assistant to Cynthia Beach but who took on a vastly expanded role during the emergency, arranged for the fly over in a military helicopter several days into the crisis. Eight City and utility officials took part in the flight, which allowed Ontario Hydro and Utilities Kingston to get a better look at the damage to their respective service areas and discuss areas of mutual concern.

While pockets of both former townships (such as the Reddendale and Bayridge areas) were hard hit by the ice storm, the heaviest damage was sustained in the old City core. The downtown was more vulnerable because it had a greater number of mature trees and overhead lines, many of which came down together during the first three days

Utilities workers managed to restore most of the main feeds in the first day, which meant that the substations were then operable. But to fix the circuits, they had to go through each one individually to make sure all of the trees were off of them and check that all of the lines that had been torn down were safe before they energized the circuit. If they energized before clearing the lines, they could burn the trees off and set fires, possibly injuring workers or causing property damage. With all the precautions that were needed to avoid this, it took 120 line personnel about five days to put all the circuits back up.

Along with the overwhelming task of restoring circuits and bringing individual services back up, Utilities Kingston had even more pressing concerns affecting the whole community. One of the utility’s managers, Stuart Thompson, had his hands full trying to restore power to the water and sewage treatment plants, which remained on back-up power for several days and brought the City dangerously close to a complete water shutdown. On top of that, City Gate Station -- the Glenburnie site where the gas from the Trans Canada pipeline comes into the City -- was without power. Workers had to be stationed there 24 hours a day in order to keep the generators running so that the boilers would keep going on the gas. If the boilers had shut down, City Gate wouldn’t have been able to put odour in the gas, and any leaks in homes or businesses would have been impossible to detect by smell.

Utilities Kingston general manager Jim Keech, who had only been in his job for a week when the storm hit, said he knew as early as Thursday that this was an extraordinary event that was going to require substantial help from other utilities across the province. But even he couldn’t have predicted how long it would take, or just how much help would be needed. For the first 24 hours of the emergency, Mr. Keech was still predicting power would be back up in another day or two. It took everyone a while, he said, to grasp the enormity of the situation:

At that point [on Thursday] people seemed quite relaxed. I don’t think people knew what we were getting into. We had no feel for the actual magnitude of the damage. It was Friday night before we realized the full extent of the disaster, because the ice didn’t stop coming down until then.

Line personnel had a hard time admitting they would even need outside help, Ms. Taylor said. This is because hydro crews everywhere are “programmed to go out and fix it and get it back on fast.” Kingston crews were still trying to repair the City’s battered electrical system by themselves as of late Thursday night. They were so confident, in fact, that when Toronto Hydro called at 2 a.m. Friday morning to offer 20 crews, Kingston linemen told Nancy Taylor to refuse the help. As it turned out, she accepted five of the Toronto crews and found homes for the rest in neighbouring municipalities. As the storm worsened, Utilities Kingston wound up accepting (and actively seeking) much more help from outside utilities. Napanee was the first to send reinforcements, and Belleville crews arrived later. Kingston also called some of its own line personnel back from Cornwall, where they had been sent to help with an earlier bout of ice storm damage. By Friday morning, more crews started arriving from all over Western Ontario. Eventually the City wound up with 120 outside utility workers, from municipalities as near and as far away as Picton, Port Hope, Clarington, Toronto, Oshawa, Whitby and Hamilton Lindsay, and Belleville.

Hundreds of contractors also descended on Utilities Kingston and offered their services for a price, but the utility made a decision to use only two private companies. One was a tree-trimming crew from Belleville (O’Brien’s Tree Trimming), and the other was Polar Power, which works in the former townships. They were already under contract to do work for the utility, and Kingston engaged their services almost immediately to help deal with the storm. Nancy Taylor said her concern with other contractors was that if they engaged them “on the fly, without any discussion of how much it was going to cost, that we would just get killed.” As it turned out, the response from outside utilities was so extensive that extra contractors weren’t needed.

Despite some logistical problems handling the influx of outside crews, local line personnel and the first visiting workers made progress on Thursday night. But by about suppertime on Friday, Mr. Keech said, “everything seemed to start to fall apart.” The freezing rain hadn’t let up, the weight of the ice brought down more trees, poles were snapping off, and anchors were being pulled out of the ground. Linemen were bringing services back up only to watch them come crashing down again as they drove off to the next call. At about 8 p.m., Mr. Keech made a decision that few could comprehend at the time, but that has since been judged one of the smartest moves anyone took during the emergency: he gave up and told his crews to go home for the night. Gardner Church remembers it as an extreme low point:

They had worked 48 hours non-stop with everything they had to win, and they lost. The system went down, and we had to start all over again, and we had to have hundreds of people help us get the system up ...So these people reached a point of depression that was quite understandable. Jim had the wit to call them off.

The decision to send line personnel home (or back to their hotels) caused “a lot of excitement in Toronto,” Mr. Church said. He fielded numerous phone calls that night from people asking him why Kingston Utilities quit trying to keep the system going. The answer, he told them at the time, was that everyone badly needed a rest.

In the bigger, broader assault of the job, having a few guys drive themselves completely bonkers wasn’t the answer. And Jim [Keech] had the management capaCity to say ‘No, this isn’t going to work,’ [and to call] everybody off work. But of course in hindsight ... that was a brilliant decision. That was the toughest decision made during the process. It was made by Jim Keech, operationally, at the site. He just phoned into one of our control meetings and said ‘I can’t do it. I’m calling it off.’ The mayor instantly supported him, and that was done. That was the only really emotional moment in the whole process, when we realized that the City was not going to be out of power for a couple of days -- the City was going to be out of power for a very long time. And that was a shock. It was difficult.

As a result of that decision, Mr. Church said, Kingston went from being in “a kind of a holding pattern” to recognizing that life and security issues were going to be paramount, that the City was going to have to set up double and triple back-up systems at the hospitals and the shelters, and start dealing with the social consequences of people being out of their homes for long periods of time. All of these issues that hadn’t previously been part of the emergency response -- flooded basements, senior citizen needs, agricultural needs, threats to people staying in unheated homes for long periods of time, the threat of water and food shortages, the need for door-to-door checks -- became part of the response on the Friday.

Part of the reason for shutting down the utility operation on Jan. 9 was to come up with a better plan for mobilizing local and visiting crews. From that Friday night until the next morning, on Mr. Keech’s orders, a lineman and one of the dispatchers from the utility organized all of the crews. They decided to pair each of their 14 local linemen with four or five or six outside people from other utilities. This meant that each crew was being led by someone who knew the system and the City. The main point of this, said Ms. Taylor, was to prevent local and visiting workers from getting hurt in the field: “It’s very important that we knew where everybody was, all the time, because we were switching, we were energizing equipment, and if you do that with someone still working on the lines, you can have big problems.”

As part of this plan, the City was also divided up into quadrants, and each crew was given responsibility over one area at a time. Police would cordon each area off, utility crews would go in to work on whatever part of the overhead system needed repairs, and public works and forestry crews (later aided by construction volunteers and military personnel) would follow behind to clear the roads and remove debris. This grid-based approach seemed to bring the response under better control, Ms. Taylor said. The response was systematic, City departments were finally working in tandem, she said, and crews tended to take ‘ownership’ over the quadrants because they knew they were responsible for everything (from line repairs to debris removal) within a bounded area:

[It] worked really well because ... I’m not saying there was competition, but they owned it, they wanted to finish it, to get it all cleaned up, and then when that crew was finished ... we could assign them to another area that was maybe not as far advanced or as tough.

Some of the downtown areas were especially challenging. One crew leader was assigned the area from Sir John A. MacDonald Boulevard all the way to Victoria Park, including all of the side streets, and found it too much to handle. “It was absolutely devastated. Every service was on the ground. So we got him some help,” Ms. Taylor said. “If we hadn’t eventually put more crews in there, he’d still be there.”

Some areas, like Sherwood Drive and Hillcroft Drive (both in the old City of Kingston), had to be reconstructed completely from the back yards to the front yards. In both cases, all the poles were in the back yards, and were so mangled that they had to be replaced. But because you can’t get equipment into the back yards, the lines had to be rebuilt and the poles reinstalled in front. Some people were not very pleased about that, but that was their most efficient way to get the power back up. Inevitably, these were the type of jobs that took the longest to complete, Ms. Taylor said, and after a while you just had to develop a sense of humour about the whole ordeal: “The guy we had assigned to Sherwood Drive, we called him Robin Hood and his band of merry men, because they were out there for days.”

In addition to line personnel from outside utilities, local crews had help from Kingston’s gas, electric, water and sewer workers. Although they’re not linemen, they were used to haul poles and to use back hoes to put poles in the ground. All of those people filled in behind the linemen and did the work that wasn’t strictly related to restoring power, so that the linemen could concentrate on doing their job. One lineman who had retired in October also came back to help with the response, and had to admit to his colleagues that the ice storm was worse than his generation’s legendary battle with Hurricane Hazel. “He always gave the guys a hard time about how ‘they never knew any big problem, because they hadn’t lived through Hurricane Hazel, and it could get a lot worse’,” Ms. Taylor recalled. “Well, he admitted that it was topped.”

From the point utility crews adopted the quadrant system, it took them one week and a day to get power restored to all areas of the City supplied by Utilities Kingston. Line personnel worked 16 and 18 hours at a stretch. Some of them slept at the Utilities building. Most of them ate there, in a makeshift cafeteria that was organized on the fly (by Joanne O’Marra, in another of her many roles) with donations of appliances, food and cooking staff from local businesses and the military. Sear’s loaned 10 refrigerators, and CFB Kingston donated two large heating units to keep the food warm. Food and drink were coming in constantly from places like Gord and Kim’s No Frills in Kingston West, National Grocers and Molson’s Breweries, to name only a few regular donors. Chez Piggy provided food for breakfast on the first day, and with the help of a volunteer cook and RMC cadets, the Utilities cafeteria was able to provide regular meals throughout the emergency. Dozens of volunteers, including several City councillors, came in to help cook and serve meals. At the high point of the emergency, the cafeteria served lunch to more than 800 people. That included not only the local and visiting hydro workers, but call centre staff, volunteers, customer service employees, military personnel called in to help remove brush, and public works and forestry crews.

While line personnel and their support staff taxed themselves to the limit out in the field, another corps of utility workers and volunteers kept things going on the inside, maintaining a dispatch/call centre and radio communications room and dealing with a huge array of provisioning needs, securing everything from mattresses for exhausted employees to a piece of machinery called a radial boom derrick, which is used to install poles. Customer service employees, who worked for Utilities Kingston until amalgamation reshuffled them into a different department on Jan. 1, came back to work on the response, spending many long days and nights talking to customers who ranged from grateful and understanding to irate. (Nancy Taylor recalls that the public began to get more hostile after about Day 7, prompting utility staff to ask for police protection in case anyone became violent).

One of the most successful aspects of the utility response was the communication system. Unlike other City employees, who had trouble with their outdated or mismatched radios, utility workers benefited from a relatively new system that had been installed in 1994. The system is programmable and has multiple channels, which meant that groups of utility workers could devote specific frequencies to different aspects of the emergency. It also meant that employees back at the Counter Street building could monitor radio conversations more easily, tuning in for a discussion about the City Gate Station on one frequency, for example, and listening for water treatment plant news on another.

Though utility workers were able to get most of the City back up to full power within a week, it took another seven days to restore electriCity to remaining customers in pockets of the former townships. Utilities workers pushed hard to finish the job on Jan. 17, the last official day of the emergency, and managed to enliven the last few homes on that Saturday afternoon. They celebrated with an impromptu and well-attended parade down Princess Street, with flotillas of thoroughly worn out hydro workers waving from atop their trucks. It was a gesture of thanks to all of the line workers and others who gave up a sane schedule at their home utilities to help Kingston at a time of need.