IceStorm 98 Study

Emergency Plan

Kingston did have an emergency plan when the ice storm hit, but it was still in the draft stage and had only been distributed to 25 or 30 key City officials and employees in late December, one week before the emergency was declared. Retired engineer and consultant Bob Boyd, who wrote the plan in consultation with former emergency co-ordinator Sam Davis and a sub-committee of the City’s transition board, distributed copies of the document by hand when the forecast began calling for a heavy snow storm early in the New Year. The snow never materialized, but the ice storm did, and Mr. Boyd said he was relieved the plan was in the hands of the right people, even if most of them had little, if any, time to study it.

As it turned out, he almost needn’t have bothered. City officials say the emergency plan was valuable in some respects -- especially when it came to tracking down emergency officials using its contact lists -- but key parts of the document were overturned as the City went about designing its own, ad hoc response to the ice storm. As Kingston’s former Public Works and Environment manager Brian Sheridan pointed out, “Within about the first 24 to 36 hours, the framework, protocols and methodology of this plan, corporately and organizationally, had been cast aside.” As a result, Mr. Sheridan said, some people were left with the impression that the plan was somehow defective or not suited to the kind of emergency presented by an ice storm.

The most fundamental deviations from the plan had to do with the location of the Emergency Operations Centre (EOC) and the composition of the Municipal Control Group (MCG). The first thing City officials did after declaring an emergency was to bypass the plan’s primary, secondary and tertiary locations for the EOC. Rather than using the Correctional Staff College on Union Street, the Woodbine Road fire hall in Kingston West or the Municipal Building on Gore Road (in the former Pittsburgh Township), Mayor Bennett chose to locate the EOC at City Hall, where he knew the building, where access to the site was unimpeded, and where hydro officials could reasonably assure a steady supply of power.

As for the Municipal Control Group, City officials adopted the basic format, but allowed the group to become larger and more loosely structured than the one called for in the plan. Mr. Boyd’s document called for a tightly-controlled MCG made up of eight groups and individuals: the Mayor and Chief Administrative Officer or their designates; officers from the police and fire services; the manager of Public Works and Transportation or designate; the manager of Utilities or designate; the commissioner of Client Services & Community Development or designate; and the Medical Officer of Health or designate. They are constituted as a decision-making body that has a legal obligation (under the Ontario Emergency Plans Act, 1983) to manage the emergency. Control group meetings were supposed to remain small and focused on decision-making, but many people reported that they became large, unwieldy, and too filled with detailed operational talk. Others defended the format, saying that the meetings were well organized (using a “sheep rule” that kept participants focused on three main questions, dealt with in more detail below), and that there was no pressing need to restrict people from telling a certain number of “war stories” about their experiences in the field. Gardner Church tells of one meeting late in the emergency that got so large it was almost like a town meeting in Memorial Hall. As MCG meetings go, that one got a little out of control, Mr. Church acknowledges. But he said Mayor Bennett ran all of the meetings (including that one) with a firm hand, keeping discussion focused on what had already been done and what needed to be done before the next meeting. While opinions vary about the effectiveness of those control group gatherings, the fact remains that the composition and style of the MCG differed substantially from what was outlined for it in the emergency plan.

Departmental emergency plans were non-existent in most cases, and, as was mentioned, few City officials or employees had had time to study the draft emergency plan for the whole corporation, let alone practice playing their roles in tabletop exercises or mock disasters tailored to the plan. Key City employees had all been interviewed and consulted and agreed to the section of the plan dealing with their own duties and responsibilities in an emergency, but few if any of them knew how the different groups and individuals would work together. Others hadn’t read it at all. Mayor Bennett said he “flipped through it,” but Kingston’s interim chief administrative officer, Gardner Church, who is given full operational control over the EOC under Mr. Boyd’s plan, didn’t see the document at all until the ice storm hit. He had followed its progress through the transition board and so knew of its existence, but his first opportunity to read the plan came at 8 a.m. on Jan. 8, when Nancy Taylor, the Operations Manager at Utilities Kingston, produced her copy and gave it to Church. Even more remarkable is the fact that Mirka Januskiewicz never saw a copy of the document at any point during the emergency, despite being given the central task of moving the EOC out of City Hall mid-way through the response and establishing (and managing) a new operations centre in another location.

One could argue that Ms. Januskiewicz didn’t need to see the plan at this point, because its key advice had long since been disregarded or overturned. The emergency response was taking a shape of its own, and there may have been little point in trying to resurrect Mr. Boyd’s plan so late in the emergency. Parts of the plan -- such as the contact names and numbers -- were, in fact, being used regularly by staff and volunteers working in the EOC call centres, and the basic distribution of duties and responsibilities had also been followed, with key City officials handling most of the areas assigned to them under the plan. However, two fundamentals of the plan -- the choice of EOCs and the composition of the control group -- had been altered almost beyond recognition.

Some feel this happened because City officials were unfamiliar with the plan, while others believe the City made a conscious decision to move away from the plan because it had nothing to say about a long-lasting, geographically widespread emergency of the kind brought on by the ice storm. This brings up the question of how appropriate the plan was for the kind of emergency Kingston faced. The interviewees were split almost 70%-30% on this question. Many argue that the plan was somehow lacking because it never envisioned anything like a 10-day power outage in the middle of winter, while a minority (generally those with more emergency training and experience) say the plan did as much as any emergency document could to address the specifics of an ice storm. Neither group blames Mr. Boyd for making an oversight, since all or most seem to agree that it would have been impossible to predict an emergency exactly like the ice storm. However, the difference lies between those who think a future plan should lay out specific contingencies for an ice storm or a similar event, and those who believe the plan should remain substantially the way it is.

Defenders of Mr. Boyd’s approach point out that an emergency plan has to be general enough to cover all types of emergencies, and that it should be viewed as a framework or a skeleton rather than the final word on how to respond to specific types of emergencies. Too much detail in a plan can be confusing when officials go to consult it, they say, whereas a good, general emergency plan invites people to treat it as a ‘living document’ that is constantly in need of practice, training, and ‘tweaking’. A plan is only as effective as the people who are responsible for putting it into effect, this group points out, and the best way to train City officials and employees to a plan is by holding regular tabletop exercises and occasional mock disasters.

While no one we interviewed questioned this basic principle of emergency planning, quite a few of the interviewees still believe the plan was of less value than it could have been if it had taken into account the specific problems associated with a slow-onset, geographically widespread and long-lasting emergency. As the City’s interim chief administrative officer, Gardner Church, put it:

The [emergency] plan, which was a wonderful plan, was not designed for a massive response like this. It was designed for an event, a crash, a spill, but not for the whole City shutting down. The plan assumed we would have communications. It assumed we would have all kinds of things. We didn’t have any of those things.

Mayor Bennett seemed to share this view when he said “it was a little discouraging to have the emergency plan and look at it and realize ‘Well, it just doesn’t fit. We’re going to have to write this as we go.’”

Mr. Sheridan offered a different point of view, saying:

... people have to recognize that an emergency plan is a shell of jurisdictions, primary responsibilities and predictable and likely contacts. Beyond that it lays out some methodology for how to react, behave and report as well as some protocol relative to authority and jurisdiction. All of those things change with each emergency. It’s a shell and you fill in the gaps as you go.

Others had no problem with the plan per se, but felt that it should have been written by a municipal employee rather than a consultant. Mirka Januskiewicz, for example, argues that responsibility for the emergency plan should always lie with the municipality, rather than a consultant, for two main reasons: 1.) Municipal employees know the City best; and 2.) If anything goes wrong during an emergency, the municipality -- not the consultant -- will be held legally responsible. Bob Crawford, who handles emergency co-ordination for the City of Toronto fire services and who spent time in Kingston as a policy consultant during the ice storm, agreed. Custody of the plan has to rest with the municipality, he said, which means that, “It can’t be a consultant that holds the plan.”

Mr. Boyd points out that the old City of Kingston did have an emergency co-ordinator whose responsibility was to oversee and help enforce the plan, but that person was laid off on Jan. 1 when the City underwent amalgamation. Consequently, the City had no emergency co-ordinator in place during the ice storm -- no one to represent the plan or provide the kind of municipal ‘ownership’ over the plan that some are calling for. At the time of this study, a new emergency co-ordinator had been chosen, but the question remains whether Kingston will continue to rely on a consultant for its emergency plan.