IceStorm 98 Study

Public Works & Forestry

Although roads and forestry crews became dependent on line personnel to set the pace of the cleanup, the public works departments had its people working on the ice storm from the start, and had issues of its own to deal with throughout the emergency.

Forestry crews began responding to scattered reports of trees and limbs down in the first hours of the ice storm, at about 9 p.m. on Jan. 7. By 10:30 p.m., the pace had picked up and two full crews of forestry workers were being kept busy. By midnight, former Public Works and Environment manager Brian Sheridan recalls, the situation had escalated and workers were “reaching the point where it was beyond their capaCity to quickly respond.”

Mark Fluhrer, who heads up the forestry section, joined his crew in the field at about 10 p.m., and quickly realized that the situation was getting out of hand. The parks department was already averaging about 20 to 30 phone calls every half hour. Requests for help or information were coming in from all sides and on all communication devices, including cell phones, portable radios and truck radios. In what has been described as a role reversal, City police were calling the forestry group for input on which routes to keep open and to find out how the crews planned to set priorities. Finally the requests from all sides became so overwhelming that Mr. Fluhrer told his staff to “forget it, the whole City is in a kafuffle, and therefore we might as well just record [the calls] and we’ll get them later.”

At one point, Mr. Sheridan told the mayor that from a transportation perspective, his crews were in a “crisis situation” because a number of roads were blocked by debris:

It became just too hazardous in the early morning hours. It was like a lightning storm over the City, with lines sparking and transformers blowing. That is why we disengaged our forestry crew, because we didn’t want people to be caught in the circumstance in the dark where they couldn’t really see what they were doing. That was also part of the reason why we disengaged our road crew. At dawn our first response was to get out and survey the state of the emergency routes — exit/entrances to fire halls, access/egress from hospitals and emergency centres and entrance/exit from 401 to get on to these primary routes.

Over the next two weeks, the roads, public works and forestry sections of the City devoted all of their resources (and some borrowed ones) to the job of clearing Kingston streets, keeping emergency routes open, and supporting utility workers who were trying to restore the overhead electrical system. The road and tree portion of the response was a mammoth one, but according to Gardner Church, not everyone appreciates how much work was involved:

People look at a normal City and they say ‘What’s the big deal?’ Believe me, it was a big deal. They moved an awful lot of wood. Time and time again they would clear a street and it would be filled again. People began to throw wood out on the street behind them, to get it out of their own properties. So they cleared it [again].

Kingston’s urban forest was badly disfigured by the storm. In all, Mr. Fluhrer estimates that between 2,000 and 3,000 of the City’s trees were damaged to such an extent that they can’t be saved. Almost every tree in the City sustained some injury, but at least 60 percent of those received “treatable damage,” he said. A tree that loses 50 to 60 percent of its canopy will usually not be able to produce enough food to support itself, and will die.

Toronto Hydro officials who reviewed Kingston’s electrical system after the ice storm concluded, among other things, that some of the damage could have been offset by more aggressive tree trimming over the years. “Kingston’s residents pride themselves on the beauty of their many trees and are sensitive to the utility’s need to maintain adequate line clearances by trimming trees,” the report reads. “Tree trimming ... carried out during the past was clearly inadequate to minimize the extent of the damage caused by the ice storm.”

Mark Fluhrer disputes this, saying the majority of the ice storm damage was unavoidable. Kingston, he said, has been working for two years on an “aggressive life cycle management program” to bring the City’s trees into “a reasonable structural shape and size to meet the demands and stresses of the urban environment.” All of the City’s trees were gradually being thinned out, shortened somewhat, and rid of weakened branches and limbs, and this was being done on a “very thorough basis, through the whole City.” Short of cutting down all of Kingston’s trees, Mr. Fluhrer added, there is nothing that could have been done to prevent the overhead electrical system from coming down: “So in other words, you just have to live with it. It’s a once in a hundred year storm.”

Trees and branches were coming down so quickly in the early hours of Jan. 8 that forestry crews resorted to an unusual method of clearing them away: instead of pulling the branches down or manually lifting them off of the roads, they would use snow plows and back hoes to push the debris through the streets. This seemed to be working, and the crews began operating according to their normal snow control priorities. That meant clearing emergency routes first, then primary transportation corridors (when they could get to them), then secondary roads and collectors, and finally local and residential areas. After speaking with the police and developing an impromptu strategy, forestry crews focused their efforts on keeping clear routes to the hospitals, fire halls and other emergency buildings. Despite the snow plow idea, which sped things up over the next few days, workers still had to deal with the frustration of clearing roads only to have another layer of the urban forest fall in behind them.

Brian Sheridan pointed out that communication was a serious problem within his own working group, because the department had just brought four organizations together and hadn’t consolidated its radio systems yet:

I know cases of managers who would have to drive to the yard and find the right coloured vehicle to get a radio of the right frequency to get hold of the person they were trying to reach. The utility was on a different radio system as well. We knew that we needed to get a consolidated, single communication system in place before the storm but timing did not allow for that to be in place.

Mark Segsworth said his roads crews were able to rely on their own personnel to get the most of the cleanup done, although military personnel and private sector crews were brought in late in the response to help pick up some of the remaining debris. The forestry group had to go further afield for help from the start. Mark Fluhrer had about 40 full-time crews working for him during the storm, but he also brought in 56 tree specialists from other departments and cities, including several of the former municipalities in Metro Toronto, Peterborough, Guelph, and Brampton. Two people -- a tree specialist from Etobicoke and a former Kingston employee who came out of retirement to help with the response -- were put in charge of organizing the crews.

Most municipalities charged Kingston for labour and other basic expenses. Salaries were calculated according to the visiting municipalities’ own collective agreements. Mr. Fluhrer estimated the total value of the support from outside departments and municipalities at $250,000. One group of tree workers, for example, charged Kingston $27,000 for sending its crews down. That covered everything from overtime to cellular phone costs and accommodation. Crews tended to absorb the cost of bringing and maintaining their own equipment and vehicles, which included chainsaws, aerial trucks, over centre aerial trucks, and chipper trucks.

David Cornwall, president of the CUPE (Canadian Union of Public Employees) local for the City of Kingston, pointed out that the job of clearing roads during the storm was made more difficult by the fact that Kingston had fewer than the required number of outdoor employees on staff. The City had been ordered by a Ministry of Labour arbitrator to have at least 115 outside workers on its payroll, Mr. Cornwall said, but during the ice storm the number dropped to 92. As a result, he says, the City wound up seeking more help than it should have needed from outside municipalities and private contractors.

Like the police, fire and other groups who are used to dealing with emergencies on a regular basis, forestry and public works managers said the only thing that was unusual about the ice storm was the vastly increased workload. Mr. Fluhrer estimated his crews did “about one or two years worth of work in one week,” but he said the problems themselves were the same as usual. This made it possible for forestry and works crews to cope with the emergency calmly, Mr. Fluhrer said:

Everybody’s running around in a flap, and we basically said ‘this is what we do every day,’ once things got under control. Trees falling across roads, on top of cars, lines down, houses damaged, people upset. This is basically what we do. But it was on a grand scale, times one hundred thousand or something of that nature.

With so many incidents occurring all at once, Mr. Fluhrer added, works and forestry crews automatically adjusted their priorities:

Everything changed. Everything went up about 10 notches on the scale. What you used to think was important became unimportant, or at least not as important, and you would then work your way from there up. Once you adjusted to that, it was difficult to adjust your way back ... People would say ‘there’s a limb on my house,’ and you’d just say ‘so what, is anybody dead?’ That’s a joke, but anything less than a disaster seems like it’s commonplace.

Despite this change in attitude, the ice storm was largely a positive experience for tree workers because they felt (for once) appreciated by the public, Mr. Fluhrer said:

When we usually come over everyone is mad at us, it’s our tree that fell on their house. This one was clearly out of our control, so all of our guys were being touted as heroes. [People] were bringing out muffins and coffee to the crews, and thanking them very much and coming out and hugging them. They don’t usually experience this. They usually get told where to go. So this was a very positive experience for a lot of people, actually.

Normal City services had to be put on hold during the emergency. Garbage and recycling collection was cancelled on Jan. 8 and 9 (Thursday and Friday), for example, but public works employees picked up what they could on Saturday and Sunday, tailoring their routes to accommodate areas where the roads had been cleared. Regular garbage pick-up was restored on Monday.

On the transit side, mobility manager John Giles made the decision to cancel all City bus routes early Thursday morning, after his drivers began sending in a steady stream of warnings about hazardous road conditions. All of the buses, with the exception of the Kingston Access Bus, were put to other uses during the emergency. Some were used to transport military personnel and RMC cadets who conducted door-to-door searches, while others were designated as transient shelters for use by residents who wanted to stay in their homes but who needed a break from the cold.

Mark Segsworth recalled what a challenge it was to try and clear City streets while residents were still allowed to drive and walk almost anywhere they wanted. This was the unique thing about the emergency: it was so widespread that there was no easy way of isolating the affected area. The affected area was the whole City of Kingston and beyond. Mr. Segsworth recalls a municipal control group discussion on the first Friday (Jan. 9) where officials entertained the idea of barricading the City off, but the idea was finally rejected. Mr. Segsworth still finds it amazing that no one was seriously hurt during the emergency, given how many residents insisted on walking and driving through the wreckage:

It was just unbelievable to see the people walking underneath the trees taking pictures ... It just scared the hell out of me, seeing that people were out walking around and driving and looking. It was just like ‘stay the hell home, everybody! I know it's pretty wild to see, but it wasn’t helping the situation.’

Mr. Segsworth also found himself struggling against the constraints of an arrangement that had him working behind hydro crews and his own forestry colleagues. As “the roads guy” and as someone who had never dealt with this kind of emergency before, he said he found himself wanting to “barge in and clear off [the] roads.” But he couldn’t necessarily do that, because he had to follow the utility crews, and leave the tree work to the arboreal experts.

Until his group settled into a rhythm with the other crews, Mr. Segsworth says, he sometimes found himself jumping into areas where he “probably didn’t belong.” For example, he moved in on some of the tree clearing, but learned that he couldn’t just “barge in” and start hauling broken branches out of the trees. Because of the particular demands of the ice storm, and the way it forced diverse City groups to work together, he ended up learning more than he ever thought he would need to know about arboreal culture. He found out, for example, that clearing away hangers (broken branches) needs to be done systematically in order to be safe and effective:

You can’t just go in and clear the streets and [have] everything fall in behind you. And that’s what was happening in a lot of areas. We were sort of cleaning off the streets from curb to curb, but then you’d have more branches falling in behind you. And that was a bit of a problem, because that’s where we felt some frustration setting in. You’d think that you had these areas cleared up, and yet it would all be falling in behind you.