IceStorm 98 Study

Northern Response Centres

Along with enlisting the help of regular military personnel, Kingston officials contracted with a local company, Co-Tal-Co, to try and bring the response closer to some of the rural, northern areas of the City that had received too little attention during the first few days of the emergency. Co-Tal-Co (short for “Coady’s Talent Company”) is a local employee placement and talent business owned and operated by Col. Gerry Coady, the former retired Base Commander of CFB Kingston. He maintains a hand-picked roster of retired military personnel (and retirees from a few other fields, such as health and law enforcement) who are available to carry out short-term jobs and assignments for a wide range of employers. Co-Tal-Co referrals have worked for various departments at Queen’s University and were in the process of assisting several City departments with the organizational side of their move into new office space when the ice storm hit.

When Col. Coady went into City Hall the morning of Jan. 12 to check on the status of that contract, he was told to put the move on hold and was asked to help out with the emergency response instead. Mayor Bennett and Gardner Church wanted Col. Coady to assign some of his people to the job of establishing and running two or three northern response centres, or depots, that would extend the City’s emergency response into remote areas of the former Kingston and Pittsburgh townships. Mr. Bennett and Mr. Church made the request at about 10 that Monday morning, and by 5:50 p.m. the same day, Col. Coady had recruited several of his retired military personnel and overseen the establishment of two new response centres. One was in the Woodbine Road fire hall, which used to be the emergency centre for Kingston Township and which was still designated as the secondary Emergency Operations Centre for the new amalgamated City. The other was located in a section of the warden’s building at Pittsburgh Institution, in Kingston East. Ron Aquino, a retired military captain, ran the north-east control centre, and Larry Wilson, a retired major, ran the north-west centre. The two of them worked through Col. Coady’s chief of staff, Bill Stevenson, a former PUC worker and former member of Toronto’s emergency planning and response team. Kingston police Staff Sgt. Bob Napier also joined the north-east centre to advise and assist with police matters, and both depots made use of a number of other personnel borrowed from City Hall.

Both sites had backup power and telecommunications facilities, and had the added benefit of being near the centres of the communities they were intended to serve. In spite of these advantages, however, the northern response depots were only partially successful. The north-west centre was shut down on Jan. 14, after only two days of operation, and the north-east centre was closed down on Jan. 16. Some critics say the northern response was ‘too little, too late’ -- a token effort to make up for lost time at the beginning of the emergency in the rural parts of the City. Others argue that Col. Coady’s group fragmented the City’s overall response, and say the remaining north-east centre became redundant as soon as Kingston established its own regional EOC (to replace City Hall) in the former Pittsburgh Township on Jan. 15. Col. Coady himself was disappointed with the way the northern response system was utilized by the City, and he expressed his dissatisfaction by pulling his staff members out of the regional EOC, where they worked briefly as advisors after the northern depots were shut down. Both ‘sides’ of the issue (retired military and civilian authorities within the new EOC) agree that there were personality conflicts and other issues that made it difficult for the northern response centres to function effectively alongside the regional operations centre on Gore Road.

Kingston officials had political, as well as practical, reasons for establishing the northern response depots in the first place. Gardner Church recalls that the two centres were put there largely in response to discontent by rural residents, who objected that they weren’t getting the same level of attention as the urban residents. And he said it was true that for the first few days, the emergency response was focused on the old City core and more populated areas of the former townships. Not only did it take longer to restore power to most rural areas within the amalgamated City, but it also took nearly a week for the City to begin systematically responding to the needs of northern residents. Cows needed to be milked, other livestock needed to be kept warm, isolated rural families needed help with supplies and groceries, and some residents who were on their last legs needed to be moved into shelters. Despite door-to-door checks by the military that extended beyond the City core and despite a one-man rural generator supply network run by Kingston City councillor George Sutherland, none of this was happening in an organized way at the height of the emergency. Interviewees agree that the decision to establish the northern centres on Jan. 12th was an effort to close that gap.

During the brief time that they were up and running, Col. Coady’s group worked with the military, the Red Cross and the police to check on people and buildings, and distributed many vehicle-loads of essential supplies routed through the PWOR Armoury. Co-Tal-Co personnel also designed a questionnaire and checklist to help residents determine whether they were in good condition or not, and whether they had all of the supplies they were likely to need. Military visitors and volunteers (whose movements were now being coordinated from the northern depots) also looked in on houses and tried to determine which of the contraptions being jury-rigged to produce heat were dangerous. Staff at the northern response centres had a mandate to ensure the safety of those who decided to stay at home, Col. Coady said, and they did what they could to keep back-up power as safe as possible. During slow periods, he added, soldiers and firefighters and a few of the communications workers would get together and pump out people’s basements and do other chores.

Despite the important work that was being coordinated out of both centres, conflicts arose almost immediately with other parts of the City’s response. Scott Cowden, an emergency planner with the Toronto fire service who came to Kingston to help with generator distribution during the emergency, said the northern depots created problems for his group almost as soon as they were established. Once the northern depots came on board, the generator group wound up serving both the neighbourhoods and the response centres, he said, “and that’s not good.” Instead of receiving single requests for generators from the person or group in need of back-up power, the generators section began to get duplicate requests from the source and the northern depots. Residents, who were perhaps confused by the sudden proliferation of different emergency phone numbers and response centres, started calling both the generator group and the northern depots, and there was no system in place for keeping track of duplicate calls. In a situation where resources were scarce -- the group had only about 130 generators for use throughout the City and wider region -- this was a waste of time and energy. What ended up happening,” Scott Cowden explained, “is [that] you’re dividing up the pie but you’re not dividing up the workload. It just added more links in the chain than probably needed to be there.” As a result of these overlapping requests, the generator group had to begin carefully double-checking all requests for back-up power, and this meant there was less time to distribute, install or carry out safety checks on generators in the field. Although he had mostly positive things to say about the City’s overall response to the ice storm, Mr. Cowden said the decision to establish northern depots was symptomatic of a general tendency by top officials to second-guess the structure of the response and break it up into too many parts:

Some of the higher up people, I don’t know ... they were trying to organize things, and they kept breaking things up and finding it didn’t work and putting it back together, and there was some energy wasted there. Rather than just designating a command post and running things appropriately, they kept trying to analyse it to death.

Col. Coady believes there may have been some resentment directed at his group because they arrived late in the game. “Once you’ve done all the ground work and set things up, you don’t feel very good about ‘Johnny-come-latelys’ coming in and apparently over-ruling what you’ve been doing,” he said. “Everybody gets a little territorial.” His group responded to the situation by trying to make it clear to everyone involved in the emergency response that the northern field depots were operating strictly in a support capaCity to City Hall -- not as a replacement EOC. Once the emergency operations centre was moved out of City Hall and into the municipal building on Gore Road, however, the conflicts with civilian staff only seemed to intensify. Col. Coady described several cases where his advice was sought and then ignored during the setting up of the new EOC, and he finally pulled his donated operational staff out of the Gore Road site when they were excluded from an important meeting. Mirka Januskiewicz, who was put in charge of the new EOC, alluded to fundamental differences between retired military and civilian members of the response. She wouldn’t go into detail about those differences, but said they were the result of “different structures ... responsibilities and expectations” separating civilian and military operational styles. Police Staff Sgt. Bob Napier confirmed this observation, saying Col. Coady’s group did its job in an organized and professional way, but had difficulty adapting to municipal structures:

[There were] some issues, some struggles over who was in charge and who was not in charge ... Col. Coady’s group, basically the group he put together are people that are used to running operation centres in a military sense, and they were trying to deal with a civilian system.

Steps should be taken to avoid future clashes between municipal and retired military groups by making it perfectly clear to all outside groups and agencies that municipal officials ‘own’ the emergency response, said Ms. Januskiewicz:

It has to be recognized in the future, this issue should be evaluated in more detail, and clear rules of conduct should be established. My recommendation is that military staff which were at one time associated with military operations should be made very aware that civilian staff in desktop operation ... have full authority --not [only] from the municipality but as well from the province -- to act as the only sources of authority. Civilians assume all responsibility, and they have all power to make decisions.

Ms. Januskiewicz said she decided to shut down both northern depots because they wound up without “much of a role to play” after the first week of the emergency. The new regional EOC was able to handle any remaining problems in the north-east, and because Ms. Januskiewicz was working closely with the regular military, she says she no longer needed Col. Coady’s group to coordinate the final door-to-door checks. Ms. Januskiewicz said she also realized she needed to centralize the whole relief operation in order to prevent problems like the one that affected the generator group.