IceStorm 98 Study

Emergency Operations Centre

Shortly after the state of emergency was announced and an EOC was chosen, City officials and staff broke off into groups and began working on their areas of responsibility as outlined in the emergency plan or as delegated to them by Mayor Bennett and Mr. Church. Lance Thurston was given responsibility for setting up shelters and arranging for City officials and volunteers to be fed. Jim Keech was left on his own to organize hydro crews in whatever way was necessary to bring the City’s power grid back up. Brian Sheridan was asked to put together a framework for clearing key emergency routes and beginning to clean up the City. The police were charged with getting a better situation report. The fire service was also charged with looking at issues that were of particular concern to it. After some initial difficulty, Gardner Church finally got through to the Medical Officer of Health. Each of the people specified in the emergency plan, with one or two exceptions, had useful roles to play, Mr. Church said, and others were added as needed.

Many of the people involved in the response -- nearly everyone except the hydro crews, works and forestry group and officials in charge of keeping the Utilities building running -- wound up at City Hall. Without a pre-set plan for dividing up the building, groups took over whatever office space they could find, and gradually a patchwork organization took place. Tracy Newton, who was filling in for Sheila Hickey, set up a call centre in the human resources area. Later, another call centre was established by Bell Canada in the council chambers on the second floor of the building, with runners being used to relay messages between the two centres. Sheila Birrell established a communications centre in the clerk’s area on the first floor of City Hall. Sgt. Bob Napier and Const. Al Melvin set up a police command centre in a side office near the building’s Ontario Street entrance. Bob Baird, an engineer with the Technical Services department, turned his own office into a map-making area, where he turned out hundreds of maps of the City for use by police, military, hydro and public works crews. More large sectional maps were retrieved from the Staff College and displayed prominently in the Loyalist Room, where City officials used them to keep track of developments throughout the City. The Loyalist Room was also the main site for Municipal Control Group meetings, which were held at least twice a day throughout the emergency. (The largest MCG meeting was so crowded that it had to held in Memorial Hall). Barclay Mayhew, Cynthia Beach and others ran a generator operation in the rear of City Hall, and the same area was used to store donations and other supplies until a more permanent supply depot could be established at the Armouries. Bob Boyd and his ARES group of amateur radio operators were originally told to set up shop in the basement of City Hall, but wound up moving upstairs when they were unable to get a reliable signal. Transit officials also had an office within City Hall, where they coordinated radio communications with the military during the City’s door-to-door checks. Volunteers were originally being sent to City Hall, but that operation was later moved to the Tourist Information Centre, where Ann Marie Harbec and others were put in charge of welcoming new reinforcements and deploying them in areas where they were needed.

All in all, as this partial list shows, City Hall was transformed into a complex machine involving about a dozen separate but interlocking ‘cells’ and, eventually, hundreds of City staff and volunteers. Many City employees who volunteered to be part of the emergency response or who were named in the emergency plan got down to work Thursday at around noon and went 30, 40 or 50 hours straight before taking their first break from the EOC. Gardner Church recalls trying to order people home for a rest and being told it was impossible; no one else could do the job for them because they had been there from the start and knew the history.

No shift system was put in place until at least halfway through the emergency, largely because no one knew how long the ice storm and power failures would last. To give just one example of a person who refused to go home or rest: Tracy Newton, an administrative assistant to Lance Thurston who wound up in the key role of running the primary call centre, stayed at City Hall from noon on Thursday until Saturday night without taking a break. Her husband finally came in and demanded she go home and rest for a while. Other people slept on cots in City Hall, while Mayor Bennett and Gardner Church, who were the political and operational heads of the response, respectively, tried to get at least three or four hours of sleep a night, away from the EOC. As the emergency wore on, sleep deprivation became a serious and widespread problem, leading most of the people interviewed for this study to emphasize the need for a shift system to be put in place immediately during any emergency.

Some of the people we interviewed described the atmosphere in City Hall as chaotic, but others say this was only a surface impression; that the building and the response were actually functioning relatively well. Staff Sgt. Glen Fowler of the Kingston OPP, who attended MCG meetings and visited the police command centre, was one who saw more chaos than control:

City Hall became a bit of a circus, I found. It was too big and uncontrolled, there were people walking in off the streets, just coming in to get something to eat, and you could walk anywhere in that City Hall and there was no control ... no security at all. At the same time there were so many volunteers working there, maybe it was difficult to control it. To have a very businesslike and slow methodical examination of what was going on, I think it would have been better [to have] a little bit smaller [control] group, and in a better controlled area, a little more private area.

Deputy Mayor Carl Holmberg, who was one of three City politicians to regularly spell the mayor as the policy-making head of the EOC, agreed that the EOC looked like “mass confusion” at times, but he said there was a method to the madness:

The one thing that comes to mind right away, if somebody walked through the front door of City Hall, [it looked like] mass confusion. Bodies running all over the place, seemingly in every which direction, but not really sure of where they’re going. People would wonder, ‘What the heck’s going on here?’ Yet there were so many different groups all working within the same confined space, that were all organized, and knew what they were doing ... they were just all there at the same time. It was just crazy to look at from an arm’s-length stand-point, [but there were] logical pockets of people.

The decision to establish the EOC at City Hall, which was made very quickly in the first hours of the emergency, has since become a fairly major point of controversy. All but a few people involved in the City’s response pointed out serious flaws in the location, from bad acoustics and poor sight lines to a lack of security, awkward layout of the different emergency functions, a lack of provisions, poor radio communication facilities and an antiquated telephone system.

The most serious drawback had to do with the fact that City Hall is a public building. This had two main effects: it made it impossible to ‘lock down’ the EOC, and it interfered with a return to regular City business. Bob Boyd, who advocates a secure, off-limits EOC, points out that there were all sorts of people going in and out of City Hall who had nothing to do with the emergency response: “Some of the City’s winos were in there picking up the free food that was all over the place, volunteer car drivers were milling around, and the press were there, making a nuisance of themselves.” Some of the officials we interviewed saw this issue very differently, and suggested it was a positive thing for the public to be able to walk into the EOC, especially since the emergency affected virtually everyone in the City. However, everyone we spoke to acknowledged that having the EOC in City Hall eventually interfered with a return to normal municipal operations. Halfway through the emergency, when power in most of the downtown had been restored, City residents wanted to be able to discuss tax questions, pay bills and pick up such things as building permits and marriage licenses, but City Hall still wasn’t functioning yet. Eventually, the entire EOC had to be moved to another location, adding support to the argument that City Hall should never have been chosen in the first place.

At the time, however, City officials felt there were no other viable options. The Staff College, which has been under contract with the City for about five years to serve as its primary EOC, had no power, and a fallen tree was blocking off the building’s main entrance. This was especially unfortunate, since the Staff College was well stocked with emergency supplies (maps, flip charts, candles, flashlights, batteries and eight phone lines) and had a 50-foot radio-transmitting tower with antennas for police, fire, public works, public utilities and the amateur radio emergency service (ARES). Gardner Church said he and Mayor Bennett ruled the college out immediately -- “without giving it 20 seconds thought” -- when they discovered it had no electriCity. Mayor Bennett also argues that the Staff College may have been too small -- although no one knew at the time how long the emergency would last, or how much space would be needed -- and he says the eight dedicated phone lines in the college’s emergency centre may not have been enough. (Even eight lines, however, would have been an improvement over the single phone line and dispatch system in place when the EOC was first set up in City Hall, before more lines were added).

The final straw eliminating the Staff College as an EOC during this emergency came later, on or around Jan. 14, when Mirka Januskiewicz and Lynne Jordon were given the task of moving the operation to another building. Ms. Januskiewicz says she spoke to a building manager at the Staff College who told her that the federal training facility would need 24 hours notice before being used as an EOC. Furthermore, he said, City officials would have to keep out of the way of incoming students who would be taking part in Staff College training courses. It is unclear whether the requirement for 24 hours notice is an official policy that would have applied at the beginning of the emergency, or whether it was just something the Staff College chose to request later on, when the emergency was primarily rural-based and the Staff College had plans to start a series of new courses. However, if City officials had their reasons for rejecting the Staff College as an EOC in the first hours of the emergency, this condition, which Ms. Januskiewicz described as “comical,” has led City officials to question whether they should be listing the building as the primary EOC. At a June 24, 1998 debriefing, Gardner Church suggested that the Staff College could still be used as an operational centre, accessible only to key emergency officials, while the wider community response would be managed from another location.

The Woodbine Road fire hall would have been an acceptable site, but City officials decided it was too far away from downtown Kingston, where the damage was originally thought to be most severe. Despite this, City officials ordered the fire hall to be readied for use as an EOC, and it remained on standby until the emergency was over. The building did wind up being used as a ‘northern command post’ for two days, when retired Col. Gerry Coady’s group became involved in bringing the response to rural areas, but aside from that, the fire hall did not fulfill the function laid out for it under the emergency plan.

The Gore Road municipal building was also thought to be too remote from downtown and in an unstable area for electriCity. In spite of those problems, however, it was eventually used as an alternative to City Hall. Under orders from Mayor Bennett and Gardner Church, Ms. Januskiewicz and Lynne Jordon (Chief Administrative Officer of the Kingston and Frontenac Public Library System) moved the entire EOC into the former Pittsburgh Township offices on Thursday, Jan. 15, in order to let City Hall get back to normal and to begin focusing relief efforts on Kingston’s rural and agricultural areas.

Bob Boyd maintains that the City should have used the Staff College, and says it was eliminated too quickly. The penitentiary service has told him that if they had been contacted, they would have had the tree out of the way and hooked up their emergency generator within an hour or two, Mr. Boyd said. The tree was removed and the Staff College did hook up its generator the next day, but by then the site had been ruled out and the response was being managed from City Hall.

Despite City Hall’s flaws as a location, many of the people we interviewed said the building functioned reasonably well, at least until it had to get back to regular business. The primary advantage from the start was that City Hall had power, and was likely to keep it because it happened to be on a grid that was still intact. Mayor Bennett said this fact sold him on the location right away. One reason he didn’t pursue the Staff College option, he said, was because the decision had to be made very quickly:

When you’re sitting around a table and saying ‘We have a state of emergency on our hands, we need an emergency operations centre, now,’ we didn’t have time to drive out and take a look and just see what the situation was. So I just looked at each one of the established EOC centres and I said ‘Why don’t we just make it City Hall? We just came from there, there’s lots of room, there’s light, there’s heat, there’s hydro.’ Jim Keech assured me that it was on the primary substation number one, and he was convinced he could maintain that substation operating under just about any circumstances. Even though we failed to really understand, I think, the magnitude or the severity of the emergency at the time. So I said ‘If you can guarantee me power at that particular site, I’ll take it, that’s where I’m going’.”

Lance Thurston still supports the decision to locate the EOC there, saying City Hall had many advantages:

It was an area that the Mayor was familiar with, it was a large building that could accommodate people, it was central, and in hindsight I think it was a good location ... People say ‘Well, it was chaotic, communications weren’t good, or different groups didn’t know what was going on...’ Yeah, that’s a fair comment. But I think it worked pretty darn good, considering we were making up the plan by the seat of our pants.

Gardner Church also points out that the EOC needed to be centrally located, because the main priority was to keep the institutional core of the City functioning. When it became clear that it would take the City a long time to get back up and running, Mr. Church said attention was focused on restoring electriCity to and/or keeping the roads clear to the prisons, Kingston Psychiatric Hospital, Hotel Dieu Hospital, and Kingston General Hospital, and to a lesser extent the Royal Military College and Queen’s University. It made sense, he said, to be as close as possible to the scene where they needed to achieve those results. In retrospect, he believes the EOC probably should have been very close to City Hall but not in it.

Several people pointed out that a key problem with City Hall had to do with the lack of a floor plan for all of the different functions that went into the emergency response. Lance Thurston noted that too little time was taken to assess the best physical location within the building to locate all of the different areas of responsibility. As a result, some problems continued as long as the EOC remained in City Hall. For example, the call centre wound up in the human resources area, where sight lines are poor and where the public had easy access. This brought on unwanted interruptions, and made for difficult communications between the call centre volunteers. The communication problem was then compounded when Bell Canada set up a second call centre upstairs, in the City council chambers. Bell tried to link the two call centres with new lines, but the connection never worked, and runners had to be used to relay messages between the two rooms. Location and public access also became a bit of a problem for the police command centre, which set up shop in an office near the front door of City Hall. Residents who came into the building would (understandably) often approach the police first, sometimes making it difficult for those in the command centre to stay focused on the job of coordinating door-to-door checks by the military, running transit bus shelters and arranging such things as the white flag campaign.

Despite these imperfect arrangements, however, City staff and volunteers did what experts say people usually do in an emergency centre: they became entrenched in their roles. The sense of ‘ownership’ people developed over their jobs is a large part of what drove the response and made it a success, but it also created tensions when it came time to move out of City Hall. Mirka Januskiewicz and Lynne Jordon say they met fairly widespread and in some cases vocal resistance when they first announced their plan to move the entire EOC into the municipal building at Gore Rd. Gardner Church had given them full authority to make this decision and carry out the move, but some City staff felt the move was a mistake. It had taken an enormous effort to get established in City Hall, and the prospect of having to do it all over again in a new location left some people feeling exhausted.

Others apparently had trouble believing that Ms. Januskiewicz and Ms. Jordon had been given the task of selecting and running the new EOC. Ms. Januskiewicz remembers having her authority openly questioned during a municipal control group meeting, when Mr. Boyd asked what she was doing, and why she was overlooking the Staff College. Staff Sgt. Bob Napier of the City police explained that part of the resistance to the new EOC had to do with the fact that people who had been working in City Hall throughout the emergency had more of the history of the response than either Ms. Januskiewicz or Ms. Jordon:

[Ms. Januskiewicz and Ms. Jordon] did a hell of a job, but they weren’t intimately involved with what went on in City Hall ... But I think that with what they had, and the information they had, they did a good job, because they actually came around and asked what we had done, in order to bring themselves up to speed ... I think it would have been nice to have more people over at Gore Rd. that were intimately involved with what went on at City Hall, because there were issues that came up ... none of it was a killer issue, but certainly [there were] issues that may have caused some friction, where people were now responsible that didn’t have the history.

Ms. Januskiewicz ruled out the Staff College and chose the Gore Rd. site for a number of reasons. First of all, the Staff College had asked for 24 hours notice and told her that if she did set up the EOC there, City staff would have to stay out of the way of incoming Staff College students. These conditions, which struck her as “comical,” also put her off using the site. By contrast, Gore Road was ‘her’ building, since she was in the process of moving her corporate and strategic planning department into the building when the storm hit. Ms. Januskiewicz also had a GIS group close at hand, which meant she had access to maps for the City of Kingston and all of Frontenac County. This was important because the mandate of the new EOC was not only to look at the level of services in Kingston, but also in the region outside the City. Another reason for choosing Gore Road had to do with the military. Ms. Januskiewicz would be working closely with CFB Kingston on many issues, and it was helpful to be close to the army base.

After choosing the site, Ms. Januskiewicz and Ms. Jordon worked with other City staff to move all of the key response cells out to Gore Rd., including the call centre (which was set up in the former Pittsburgh Township council chambers), the police command centre, the generators group and the communications centre. The Gore Road site became a fully-functioning EOC on Jan. 15.

Along with consulting City staff who had been at City Hall, Ms. Januskiewicz and Ms. Jordon worked closely with a group of visiting emergency experts from Toronto to set up a secure and organized new EOC. Warren Leonard, a civilian member of the Toronto police force who writes emergency policy for the force and the municipality, introduced Ms. Januskiewicz and Ms. Jordon to the Incident Command System (ICS), which sets out an organizational path and a chain of command to be followed in emergencies. Mr. Leonard said the EOC was already organized according to ICS principles, for the most part, but that it helped Kingston officials to see that there was a logic to what they were already doing. In that sense, it was more of a confidence builder than a source of direct change in the EOC. On a more tangible level, Toronto officials made sure the new EOC was secure -- with a guard at the front door to greet and screen all visitors -- and helped institute a shift system to make sure everyone was getting enough sleep and enough time away from the response.

One of the key reasons for moving the EOC to Gore Rd. was to begin focusing on rural problems, which had received too little attention during the first part of the response, Ms. Januskiewicz said. City officials recognized that Kingston had a responsibility not only to the people in the old City core and more populated areas of the former townships but also to residents living farther afield. Power was still out in some areas of the former Pittsburgh Township, and the EOC was getting distress calls from places like Wolfe Island and Seeley’s Bay (both which lie beyond the City of Kingston’s boundaries). Kingston needed to establish a warehouse facility that could receive all donations and distribute them to those areas. Generators were also a major issue, with virtually every farm in the area and many non-farming rural residents requesting back-up power. Given all of these needs, Ms. Januskiewicz said, it was important to have one location, one dispatch area that could coordinate the effort of all the parties involved.

Some of the people we interviewed said this rural/northern and regional focus came too late, and that a more systematic response should have been put into effect immediately. While that may be the case, the Gore Rd. EOC did manage to distribute a large number of generators and other supplies to northern areas of the City and beyond. City councillor George Sutherland, who could not be interviewed for this study, made an extraordinary effort to distribute generators to any Kingston farm that needed one, and personally went a long way towards this goal before the City’s generator group, with help from Scott Cowden of the Toronto fire service, stepped in to coordinate.

The focus shifted to a different set of problems once the EOC moved to Gore Road. Drinking water shortages and the problems of not being able to milk cows dominated the new agenda. Without hydro to active well pumps, and without heat to melt the snow, rural residents (especially in places like Wolfe Island) were dependent on a steady supply of bottled water that was distributed by volunteers and military personnel. Farmers were also desperate for backup power to milk cows, which will stop producing milk altogether for many months if they go long enough without being milked. Of the many groups of volunteers who helped with this problem, one of the most memorable was a Mennonite ‘milking brigade’ from Waterloo, whose members travelled around the area milking cows by hand wherever generators weren’t available.

While all this and more was being coordinated out of the new EOC, Ms. Jordon was put in charge of writing an interim emergency plan to deal specifically with the possibility of another ice storm hitting the area over the next four months. City officials knew from talking to the Utilities group that it would take a much lighter storm to take the whole electrical system down the next time, and the City was hoping to be prepared. As part of this plan, the Gore Road site was kept on standby for another emergency until the Spring of 1998. Although the emergency was stood down on Jan. 17 and the Gore Road building gradually went back to normal after that, the building remained ‘EOC-ready’ throughout the winter and could have been brought back up to full emergency operations mode within hours. Despite some rather frightening forecasts in the Farmer’s Almanac that called for more freezing rain and the possibility of an even heavier storm than the first one in 1998, Kingston got through the winter without having to reactivate the EOC.