The freezing rain began to fall on Jan. 5, 1998. When it subsided some 80 hours later, ice accumulations of between five centimetres and 10 centimetres had built up on virtually every surface across eastern Ontario, southern Quebec and parts of the Maritimes and the eastern U.S. It looked beautiful, but the consequences were severe—slick roads and sidewalks, downed hydro lines and widespread power outages.
“I remember that there was an area between Montreal and the Eastern Townships that [the media] were calling the Black Triangle, where power was lost for up to three months,” recalls Jean Guay, then senior vice-president, customer service, with Standard Life Canada.
While the company’s Montreal head office didn’t lose power, many employees and their families weren’t so lucky. So the building was transformed into a shelter for employees. Other floors housed area residents who needed a place to stay.
The cafeteria, usually open only for lunch during the week, began serving three meals a day—for free—to the approximately 80 people living in the building and to those employees who could go home but who weren’t using their appliances in an effort to ease the hydro burden. And the children living at Standard Life were kept entertained with movies shown in the 125-seat theatre and an arts-and-crafts room that had been set up.
But while taking care of displaced residents was important, business had to continue. “We were one of the only insurers with its head office in the middle of the crisis,” Guay says. “But we had to serve the rest of the country.”
Standard Life ran on an emergency plan during the height of the crisis: call centres remained open to serve client needs, payroll focused on getting employees their paycheques, and insurance payments due to clients were mailed out. Regional offices kept local clients connected to the company.
Guay credits Standard Life’s business continuity focus for enabling things to run smoothly after the storm.
“Companies might look at the money they put into their business continuity plans and think, When will we use this? But this was evidence that those occasions do happen.”
Guay says the ice storm taught him that it’s important to plan for every eventuality but also to know that you’ll never be fully prepared.
“No matter how many scenarios you can imagine, when a crisis happens, chances are, it will not match any of those scenarios. But we got through [the storm] well, and we survived.”
Neil Faba is associate editor of Benefits Canada. neil.faba@rci.rogers.com
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