OFFICE OF EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT PHOTOGRAPHS: Brett Gundlock

Wed Feb 22, 2012
Places

What Goes On in There?: Office of Emergency Management

The Pickering Nuclear Generating Station is probably not going to melt down. A tornado is unlikely to tear a path of destruction down Yonge Street. But someone needs to prepare for the city’s worst-case disaster scenarios, however improbable, as well as more pedestrian emergencies like fires and floods. In Toronto, that job is left to the prosaically named Office of Emergency Management, perched high above the Don Valley on the sixth storey of a Don Mills Road office tower. “It’s best to be located away from the downtown core,” says OEM manager James Kilgour. “In New York, they used to have their emergency office near the World Trade Center. You can imagine the problem there.”

Although Toronto’s emergency warning levels aren’t colour-coded, they do follow a strict hierarchy. Events such as localized power failures or smaller city fires are considered Level 1 incidents, and usually don’t require the OEM’s involvement. During bigger, Level 2 events, the OEM remains on-call and notifies the mayor and affected councilors of the situation. Emergency incidents like the northeastern blackout and SARS (both in 2003—not a great summer) constitute Level 3 events, when the OEM is “activated.” Then, the warren of meeting rooms, offices and communications hubs that comprise the OEM are filled with police, politicians and decision-makers from all sectors of city government. During the G20 summit, an emergency operations centre was established, manned by a staff of 100 people around the clock for eight straight days.

The OEM is activated only a few times a year—most of the time, it’s a lot quieter. Under director Loretta Chandler, the OEM’s 14 employees train city staff on how to handle emergencies, study the aftermath of disasters elsewhere and conduct emergency simulations (they participate in close to 10 each year; the next one will simulate a terrorist attack on the TTC in March). Planning is crucial, since the big-impact events are usually unanticipated, like the Occupy movement. Although not a traditional emergency, it still required coordination and communication between police, EMS, media and other parties—a significant part of the office’s job during any activation.

However dire the conditions, the OEM can keep on trucking. They have emergency power supplies and even amateur radio capacity in place, in case telephones and the internet go down. “They’re basically ham radios,” says Chandler, “so we can communicate with anyone, anywhere. Of course, they’d have to have a ham radio, too.”