IceStorm 98 Study

Introduction

Kingston first began feeling the effects of Ice Storm ‘98 shortly after 9 p.m. on Wednesday, January 7, when an unusually intense weather system swept into the area from points further east, bringing Gulf of Mexico air into contact with zero-degree temperatures and causing prolonged bouts of freezing rain. Large portions of Quebec’s electrical system had already been devastated by the storm, and parts of Eastern Ontario, including Cornwall and most of the Ottawa-Carleton region, had been dealing with varying degrees of the same weather system for two days.

The ice storm began to pick up momentum in Kingston sometime after midnight, and did its worst damage while many of the City’s 112,605 residents would have been asleep. As the freezing rain accumulated, large parts of the mature urban forest began to come down all at once, leaving much of the old City core littered with branches and fallen trees. The ice pulled telephone and electrical wires out of their stacks, split utility poles in half, crumpled communication towers, set transformer boxes and electrical stacks on fire, and lit up the sky with blue and orange explosions as live wires arced their way to the ground.

Mayor Gary Bennett, who had spent part of Wednesday night watching the national news and thinking about how Kingston might be able to help Quebec residents get through their emergency, suddenly had more personal concerns to deal with at 2 a.m. when a tree crashed through the roof of his home. Others watched as their decks, vehicles and front porches were flattened under branches. Those Kingston residents who were able to sleep through the storm woke up on Jan. 8 to find the world covered in ice. Every traffic sign, fence, car and bush in the area glistened with it, and most streets, lawns and parks in the old City core were awash in broken tree limbs, downed wires and telephone poles. Much of the City’s overhead electrical system was either laying on the ground or in danger of coming down, leaving 80 per cent of homes supplied by Utilities Kingston without power on Thursday morning. Local officials gradually realized it would take much longer than their initial estimates of 24 to 48 hours to bring the system back up.

At noon on Thursday, Jan. 8, two hours after meeting with key City staff to assess the situation, Mayor Bennett declared a state of emergency -- joining 64 other municipalities in Eastern Ontario to do the same. Over the next two weeks, Kingston carried out a massive relief operation to get the City running again, and to address the many safety and public health issues brought on by the storm. Local utility, roads, and forestry crews had been clearing debris and trying to bring the electrical system back up since late Wednesday night, but the freezing rain kept coming, the wires, poles and trees kept falling, and Kingston officials soon realized they would need substantial outside help. Before the emergency was stood down on Jan. 17, Kingston managed a flood of assistance from its own back yard and all across Western Ontario, hosting and mobilizing an estimated 400 RMC cadets, several hundred soldiers from various parts of CFB Kingston, more than 100 linemen from utilities in other parts of Ontario, a special unit of emergency planners from Toronto police and fire, and hundreds of local volunteers. Meanwhile, City employees threw themselves into running the City’s Emergency Operations Centre (EOC), which became the hub of the local relief effort and, for a time, also served as an ad hoc regional distress centre for parts of Frontenac, Lanark, and Leeds and Grenville counties.

Before it was all over, Kingston would see its water purification plant and local Bell telephone system come dangerously close to failing; scramble to coordinate resources and employees in a newly amalgamated City that was only seven days old when disaster struck; and be forced to invent an emergency response in the absence of any approved, final plan for coping with a widespread, slow-onset emergency.

Most City officials we spoke to for this study felt that the emergency response was, on balance, a success. The clearest evidence of this is the fact that no one died in Kingston as a direct result of the storm, despite a long list of threats to public safety, including falling branches, fire, electrocution, hunger, carbon monoxide poisoning and hypothermia. Kingston officials and EOC staff went to extraordinary lengths to keep the public safe under highly dangerous and unusual circumstances. As in any emergency, however, there were some close calls, including some that may have been preventable, and a number of things that could have been done differently.