IceStorm 98 Study

Timing

The timing of the emergency was both fortunate and unfortunate. Kingston had just amalgamated with its two neighbouring townships on Jan. 1, and the City in its current form was only one week old when the storm hit. Most departments had been reorganized, and a number of departments were either in the process of moving into new office space or had moved in the week before the storm. A large number of staff changes had been put into effect on Jan. 1, and as a result, the informal networks people have with each other after years of working in the same group or office simply didn’t exist in many cases. Some managers were still unclear of their employees’ names, let alone what they could do or how they might best be used in the emergency. This was the source of some frustration and wasted time at the start of the emergency, but City officials say the whole experience of banding together during an emergency did wonders to cement relationships, probably putting the corporation years ahead of where it would be now in terms of employee relations.

Mayor Bennett also argues that it would have been much more difficult to stage a coherent emergency response under the old, un-amalgamated system, with three political leaders vying for resources to serve their own communities and possibly three separate EOCs:

I don’t think we’d be speaking about the successes of how we coped with the situation [if Kingston were not amalgamated]; I think we’d be talking about the deficiencies and what went wrong. I think what went wrong would have been a much longer list ... there’s no question that the ability to try and co-ordinate services across the whole area would have been extremely difficult, because you would have had to get the concurrence of myself and the reeves of the other two townships. There was an inability to communicate with people in your own community, let alone trying to communicate with the surrounding townships. And then if you had to co-ordinate meetings and co-ordinate what they were doing with what we were doing, clearly it would have just been a logistical nightmare.

But Mayor Bennett acknowledged that the newness of amalgamation created problems of its own: “We didn’t have a staff directory or anything like that. People were going by me and introducing themselves and I hadn’t even met them. And I felt bad about that, but we’d only been running for a little better than a week ... There wasn’t even enough time for people to adjust to [questions like] ‘Is this my desk? Is that your desk?’ So we had to pull a diverse group of people together very quickly.”

Mirka Januskiewicz, who is Kingston’s Commissioner of Corporate and Strategic Planning and who was given the task of setting up an alternate EOC after City Hall became unwieldy, said she had some people working for her whom she had never met in her life. Before doing anything, she gathered her emergency staff together and said ‘OK, tell me who you are, what did you do in your previous life, and what are your talents?’ While this took time away from the emergency response, Januskiewicz also said “It was wonderful, because ... I met people from other organizations that I would never have any other opportunity to meet.”

One problem left over from before amalgamation had to do with communications. City employees often had trouble reaching each other by two-way radio because they were using old equipment left over from before Kingston and Pittsburgh townships became a part of the City of Kingston. For example, different groups within the public works section were using different types of radios and trying to speak to each other on different frequencies, and they in turn had different equipment from the Utilities Kingston crews, who were on a new system all their own. This was a serious impediment at a time when hydro, works and forestry crews needed to work closely together to clear the roads and keep each other informed about such things as which wires were live and which ones were safe to approach. This problem was alleviated to some extent when Utilities Kingston divided the City into quadrants and sent combined crews of hydro, works and forestry people out into designated areas, where they worked with the same people and could speak to each other directly. Until that point, however, outdoor workers had so much trouble staying in touch with each other that some gave up on the radios and began going out on foot looking for vehicles of a certain colour (indicating which department or former municipality they were from) in order to relay messages verbally. Cell phones were the other option for people in the field, but they were often unreliable because the system was being overloaded with excess calls.