IceStorm 98 Study

Military Assistance

While the City was trying to arrange for assistance from the military, CFB Kingston was dealing with problems of its own. The base’s electrical system went down early Thursday morning, leaving 800 PMQs (personnel married quarters) in the dark and forcing base officials to improvise at headquarters. Not only did the base HQ building lack auxiliary power, but military officials quickly discovered that their emergency supplies consisted of three candles, a flashlight, and some dead batteries. Supplies were shipped in from Toronto and London fairly quickly, but military officials had to move into the Base hospital until they could get a generator to fire up the HQ. Power was restored to the McNaughton side of the base quickly, but the PMQ’s on Vimy side were without power for four days. Although the Base set up kitchens and shelters to feed the families, many spouses and children were left alone for days and weeks at a time while military personnel from CFB Kingston were sent to other parts of Eastern Ontario and Quebec to assist with ice storm damage there.

Base commander Col. Ronald Aitken received an ‘unofficial’ request for assistance from the City of Kingston on Thursday night, Jan. 8. City Hall had called CFB Kingston directly to ask for help. Col. Aitken said that although this is not exactly proper procedure, “it worked.” Theoretically, the City should have gone to Emergency Measures Ontario, which in turn would send the request to the Base for an assessment of action. Instead, Deputy Mayor Carl Holmberg used his personal connections to contact Col. Aitken at home, then handed the phone over to Gardner Church. Mr. Church suggested that the military assist by doing a door-to-door check on City residents. Col. Aitken reminded Mr. Church that the Base was without power and that the military needed to ensure that its own kitchens and other essential operations were up and running before it could help the municipality. Col. Aitken agreed to try and arrange for some assistance from the Signals Regiment, but explained that he did not have command over the Signals Regiment, and would only be relying on his personal connections with the unit. The Commanding Officer from the Signals Regiment was asked to supply approximately 90 personnel for the Friday morning to assist the City. He agreed, and the following morning, a bus arrived at the Base to pick up the personnel, who took part in the first series of door-to-door checks.

At noon on Jan. 9, Col. Aitken received a call from Land Force Central in Toronto and spoke to Major Gen. Stevenson, who explained that there were going to be two task forces set up: Task force North, involving 2 Brigade out of Petawawa under the command of 33 Brigade in Ottawa, and a Task Force South commanded out of Kingston. The Signals Regiment was placed under Col. Aitken’s command, which meant that from that point on he could assign tasks to them directly instead of asking them. The duties at that point were still confined to the immediate area of Kingston. It wasn’t until midnight when the Base received a visit from the Liaison Officer from Land Forces (Toronto), who informed Col. Aitken that his area of responsibility had been widened to include the areas from Trenton to Cornwall and north to Hwys. 43 and 7. Col. Aitken was also given command of the militia units in Kingston, Brockville and Cornwall -- a move which he described as “quite a change in the command structure.”

The 79th Signals Regiment, 79th Communications Regiment and the 1st Canadian Division had received warning orders that they were to be deployed in the South Shore of Montreal. Col. Aitken recalls that he was disappointed at losing these Regiments, since he had made plans for them to participate in door-to-door checks in Kingston and also hoped to use their generators. Col. Aitken was informed that not only was he going to lose the Regiments, but they were taking their generators with them. Some of the generators that were slated to be removed were already being used by the City, which had five generators on loan from the Base when the professional units received their orders to move out. Col. Aitken had planned to use the generators from the Communications Regiment if it turned out that the Signals Regiment needed to take its generators to Quebec. But when the Communications Regiment was also ordered to leave Kingston, things suddenly “got traumatic,” Col. Aitken recalls. He spent half an hour on the phone one night with Maj. Gen. Jeffrey discussing the position of one generator. It was being used as back-up power for a City shelter, and Col. Aitken expressed his concern that if the military took away the generator and the power went out, that would make for bad press. At another point, Col. Aitken told Commander Gen. Richard that he could not afford to lose a generator that the 79th Communications Regiment was planning to take with it to Quebec.

When the signals and communications units headed further East, Col. Aitken was left with his own Base resources of 350 personnel -- only about a fifth of whom were available for duty -- and what he described as the “excellent cooperation of the garrison units.” That included some 400 RMC cadets, who had already been working in the City doing a variety of jobs, including door-to-door checks coordinated by the police command centre. Although the cadets were limited in what they could do by the lack of winter kit, their presence on the City buses was very helpful because it freed up units such as the Canadian Forces School of Communications and Electronic (CFCSE) to carry out other jobs.

The RMC students would not have been able to continue their door-to-door checks if the weather turned too cold, but it got milder on the first weekend, and they were able to keep working.

Col. Aitken was critical of Land Force’s decision to place so many units under his command within Task Force South. The scope of the operation was beyond CFB Kingston’s capabilities, he said:

This idea ... to create a Task Force South that was a mirror image of a Brigade based on a Base HQ, is dead flat wrong. I’m not telling tales out of school either. I have mentioned this to my Commander. I was required, in addition to dealing with the problems on the Base and assisting the local community, to organize a staff and command control and a logistics support that equates to a Brigade, and I don’t have it. All this was really ad hoc. In my own view of the world, it would have been preferable to give this to 2 Brigade which are better able to handle this.

With a total of approximately 15,000 military personnel, militia members and reserves responding throughout Eastern Ontario and Quebec, the ice storm has been called the largest single peacetime mobilization of troops in Canadian history. The primary units involved in the ice storm response from Task Force South included the Electronic School; Division HQ; Division Signals; the 79th Communications Regiment and the RMC cadets. Division Signals personnel were deployed to Montreal, while the 79th Command Regiment helped restore hydro lines from Gananoque to Montreal. Task Force South also made use of several militia units, including The Brockville Rifles and the Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry Highlanders, and relied on volunteers and part-time paid soldiers in the Princess of Wales Own Regiment (PWOR) to carry out tasks north of Kingston.

The PWOR’s 130 active members took turns staffing and running a supplies depot that was established in the Armoury and delivered many van-loads of supplies to rural areas outside the City, in an area Col. Aitken describes as a “no-man’s land” between the northern border of Task Force South and the southern border of Task Force North. Col. Aitken said he spent some time trying to get a handle on the situation in that area because he feared the Minister of Defence might be broadsided by complaints about it after the emergency. By the first Saturday afternoon (Jan. 10), the PWOR had been given the job of serving those areas, and had officers, SNCOs, NCOs and rank soldiers deployed up to Sharbot Lake, Arden, Perth and close to Smith Falls. Regiment members were put in charge of collecting intelligence and assessing public safety issues and supply needs in those communities, since there was little information about them at the time. As the unit’s commanding officer, Lt. Col. Mike Shultz, put it, PWOR members were “sent out to get a shopping list of what was going to be needed.”

One of the difficulties the regiment faced was a lack of vehicles for transporting personnel and equipment. The PWOR does not have a large vehicle depot, and the vehicles they could have used were in Meaford, Ontario when the ice storm hit. The regiment was forced to use vans and station wagons from CFB Kingston in order to transport supplies. Vehicles were outfitted with a driver, one officer or SNCO and a “rescue kit” that included water, fuel, candles, food, batteries and emergency commodities, and were “stack[ed] to the gunwales” with supplies destined for rural populations, Lt. Col. Shultz recalled. These efforts were viewed as a gesture rather than real relief because of the lack of adequate transportation. However the regiment’s relief efforts received a sudden boost with the arrival of two Griffin helicopters from 427 Squadron in Petawawa. The helicopters remained in Kingston for several days and were primarily used to scout out areas that had not been reached yet, but they were also pressed into service as roving soup kitchens when the PWOR flew about 300 hot meals to Battersea and another 80 meals to Parham.

Some of the units that were placed under Task Force South’s command and other individuals began helping area municipalities before the orders came in, and without being asked. Capt. Chris Grandy from the Cryptomaintenace Unit helped out in Mallorytown, for example, while Capt. Eric LaCasse was dubbed ‘the Governor of Seeley’s Bay’ for his extra efforts in that area. Once Kingston’s door-to-door checks got underway, the military dedicated approximately 90 to 100 soldiers and reservists from various units to the effort, while the Royal Military College supplied an estimated 300 to 400 students per day. As the previous section of this report indicated, military personnel and cadets carried out a wide range of tasks, including handing out information pamphlets, delivering supplies, checking on the welfare of residents, and encouraging those who were isolated or at-risk to leave their homes and go to any of the City’s shelters.

Without the military’s help, Mr. Church said he believes Kingston could easily have suffered casualties:

I think there almost certainly [could have been deaths]. If we didn’t have the military helping evacuate people, and we didn’t have the buses sitting in strategic areas, I think there would have to be a real chance of exposure deaths. And that’s what the military felt. Not a lot. I’m not necessarily saying there was a dramatic situation, but there certainly could have been some life risk.

One of a number of close calls involved a family living in the Joyceville area. Deputy Mayor Carl Holmberg recalled that they were on their last legs when he and a pair of soldiers found them about halfway through the emergency:

We had sent some soldiers to check on some houses in the rural areas, and I heard one report that a family was isolated on a side road ... so I went over there with a couple of soldiers, and there was a woman that was with her 16-year-old son and two young children, around seven or eight years old, in a little bit of a ramshackle home, huddled around a candle, and in a distraught, upset state of mind. In that particular instance it was a good thing that we had the soldiers out to find the stressed people and be able to move them. We moved that family to a shelter.

Despite the close working relationship that developed as the military took on a key role within the City’s response, CFB Kingston had problems with the way that partnership first came about. Several military officials drew attention to the fact that Kingston by-passed protocol when it called the Base directly to ask for help, and a number of them blamed this procedural mistake on a lack of knowledge by City officials. Major Jim Frazer, Chief Engineering Services Officer for CFB Kingston, said the City simply didn’t know how to make the request: “They didn’t know what government agency they were supposed to go to and for every situation, they called the Base directly to ask for help.” Furthermore, he said, local officials didn’t know where their local EMO or their local store house were located, or what equipment they had. All of this led to confusion and meant that the military was being asked to bypass its own procedures for offering help to municipalities.

Col. Aitken acknowledged this difficulty but pointed out that part of the problem lay with Emergency Measures Ontario. EMO officials were slow to respond to the ice storm, he pointed out, and in some cases municipal officials only tried to deal with the military directly after getting nowhere with the EMO:

Once the EMO got up and running ... by the time they got deployed and set up their teams, and [got] a handle on who to contact and how to get their hands on resources, it was fairly late in the game. There’s been a lot of criticism of the organization including from Brig. Gen. Rick Hillier of 2 Brigade. That could have worked better, and there would have been less spinning of wheels about provision of some of these things, whether it was food, generators, tents or other equipment ... The ‘chain of command’ should have been, the civil authorities to the EMO and the EMO to the military, who are the only resource they could have used, [but it] didn’t crank up as quickly as it should have.

Col. Aitken said he found it ironic that EMO was slow to respond, since with the exception of Kingston City councillor Randy Reid, everyone he dealt with at the organization was a retired Armoured Corps. Lt. Col. With that kind of military background, he said, they should have been able to leap into action. Col. Aitken’s criticism of the EMO reinforces a similar complaint from Lance Thurston, Kingston’s Commissioner of Client Service and Community Development. Mr. Thurston told the study that when he tried to call Emergency Measures Ontario on the morning of Jan. 8 to arrange for cots from CFB Kingston to be used in local shelters, he had trouble reaching anyone at first, and was later told that Kingston would have to travel to Ottawa to pick up the cots. When Mr. Thurston told the EMO that this was impossible, as Kingston was in the middle of a crisis situation and had no transport truck, he said he was told it was his only option. Later, with the help of former Base Commander Col. Gerry Coady, the problem was resolved and Kingston was finally told it could use cots from CFB Kingston. Mr. Thurston recalled hearing that CFB Kingston had to pressure the EMO to cooperate more fully with municipal officials.

Some of the complaints about Kingston officials not knowing enough about the EMO’s role at first may be accurate, however. Before his frustrating encounter with the EMO, Mr. Thurston had in fact called CFB Kingston directly to ask about the cots, and only learned about Emergency Measures’s role while discussing his problem with someone at the Base. Deputy Mayor Carl Holmberg also called the Base directly to ask for help, and told the study that he was not sure of the EMO’s responsibilities relative to either the municipality or the military. He also suggested that the EMO was so late in sending a representative to Kingston that by the time the person arrived, all he could do was duplicate efforts that were already being handled at the local level. He recalled what happened when the EMO’s local representative arrived in Kingston and tried to carry out a job that was already being done:

I had already coordinated a lot of the military help, and Randy Reid came in -- and I’m not trying to downplay his role -- but Randy came into coordinate the military help. Well, it was already coordinated. I was already doing it. I’m already well-connected on the base anyway.

Col. Aitken said it is important for local officials to remember the protocol for requesting military help, and to bear in mind that the military is not simply there to serve municipal governments during an emergency. “Our orders were theoretically to assist in the aid to civil powers,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean that every military resource within a hundred miles is at their beck and call. If the structure had been set up earlier, it would have prevented a lot of confusion.” Col. Aitken also reminded municipal governments that military assistance may not always be available. The federal government could decide to withhold military help for any number of reasons, he said, or military personnel may already have been deployed somewhere else when municipal governments need them. For those times when military assistance is both appropriate and available, he said, municipal emergency plans need to clearly outline the proper procedures for mobilizing that help. In Kingston’s case, Col. Aitken said the draft emergency plan he reviewed back in October of 1998 was underdeveloped when it came to military involvement. The section he was asked to read was only one page long, and stated that City officials would contact the military for assistance. Col. Aitken said it wasn’t clear what the City would be asking for, or how they would make their request known. Future drafts of the plan should settle these questions, he said, so that both military and civilian officials know in advance how to proceed.