Lessons from the past: Historical records and emergency planning
By Joseph Scanlon
(Posted February 10, 2011 on http://www.homeland1.com/emergency-managementtraining/articles/970998-Lessons-from-the-past-Historical-records-and-emergencyplanning/)
Surprising sources can provide useful information about disaster response in the past
Some years ago, while studying evacuations during the 1997 Red River floods in Manitoba,
my researchers and I were struck by how many people we interviewed had very clear
memories of an earlier flood. We found the same phenomenon after a snow emergency in
Prince Edward County, an island county along the shores of Lake Ontario.
AP Photo/Rodney White
In this Wednesday, April 9, 1997 file photo,
houses in south Fargo, N.D., are ringed
with sandbags as water from the Red River
backs into their yards.
Because of that, when studying the 1917 Halifax explosion, when a munitions ship blew up
with one-seventh the power of the first atomic bomb, I made a point of talking to oldtimers.
One woman recalled how she had left her desk to head upstairs seconds before the
explosion shattered the glass where she had been sitting. Later she got involved in
registration and inquiry, and I learned how that worked in 1917.
"Progress" isn't always good
Such memories are useful not just for research, but for disaster planners, because they
often reveal that changes are not always for the good. When doing a study in northern
British Columbia, for example, we discovered that people used to accept isolation as a fact
of life in winter and prepared accordingly.
Now they assume they can jump in their vehicle and drive to the nearest store. When roads
are blocked by snow or washed away by floods, today's rural dwellers have far more
problems than their predecessors. This is especially true now that there's so much
dependence on electric power.
We also discovered that new infrastructure such as new roads often mean that old systems
are abandoned. For example, when a bridge is built, the ferries stop running and are often
sold or scrapped.
Last September, a number of communities along the coast in Newfoundland found
themselves cut off because of roads and bridges being washed away as a result of
Hurricane Igor.
Those communities, known as outports, used to be self-sustaining or dependent on the
regular visits from supply boats. Now they are less so, because they are linked by major
centres by road.
When hurricane damage left one community isolated, they had to use a small boat to
transport a pregnant women and an elderly person to hospital.
Drilling down into a pandemic
Memories of course are not of much use when studying much earlier events such as my
present interest, the 1918–20 influenza pandemic, the so-called "Spanish flu."
(It's now known that the flu originated in Kansas and was carried to Europe and to Spain
by U.S. soldiers. The Americans and their Allies were reluctant to admit how many of their
troops were affected. but neutral Spain openly admitted it had a pandemic.)
Someone would have to be at least 95 to have any memories at all, and these are not likely
to be significant. But this doesn't mean one can't learn lessons from history.
Last summer, two of my researchers, Casey Hurrell and Nicole Marion, and I studied how
three communities in Ontario dealt with the second deadly wave of the flu in the fall of
1918 and the early winter of 1919.
We found all kinds of records, most of which, we believe, would be available in any
community, and we learned things that we believe would be useful to anyone planning for
another pandemic. At the very least, they would make you think; at best, they provide
guidelines or precedents.
The communities we looked at were St. Thomas in southern Ontario, near WindsorDetroit; Kingston in eastern Ontario, just across the St. Lawrence from New York State;
and Kenora in northern Ontario, just a boat ride away from northern Minnesota. We
found that all reacted in much the same way, though there were some differences.
In Kenora, for example, the two-year-old library was turned into an emergency hospital.
The nursing staff consisted mainly of female volunteers, but the supervisor was a very
experienced nurse, Mrs. Dr. Ferguson as she was known, the wife of the town's Medical
Officer of Health and, more important, the former Lady Superintendent of the Royal
Jubilee Hospital. Like most women of that era, she had stopped working when she married.
Kingston also opened an emergency hospital, but St. Thomas did not. It housed extra flu
patients in the existing isolation hospital right next to the cemetery.
In all three communities, there were volunteer efforts to help those who were sick. Some of
these women were given an hour or two of training, then allowed to wear a badge with the
letters "S. O. S." for "Sisters of Service." Many were sent to assist with contagious patients
after only an hour or two of lectures.
In Kenora, for example, downstairs in that same library building, another woman, Annie
Earngey, wife of the mayor and, again more important, president of the Women`s Institute,
was running a soup kitchen so that people stuck at home, too ill to care for themselves or
their families, would have warm food.
Earngey rounded up some men with cars to deliver the soup. They were well aware that in
1918–19, many people, no matter how ill, could not afford the $1.50 a day charged for
hospital care, even if that care was in the emergency ward of the library.
In Kingston, women with cars called on individual homes.
In all three communities, the local Board of Health decided to shut down public facilities
such as schools and theatres (both live stage places and the moving-picture type), as well as
churches and other gathering spots, such as pool halls.
Those decisions had a number of implications. They meant that children had to be cared
for somewhere else. They meant that teachers, most of whom were single women, were
available as volunteers.
And they meant that there would be no church funerals. In the three communities we
studied, most of the dead were buried within 36 hours after a small graveside service.
Some existing accounts of the flu report that there were problems with disposing of so
many dead, but that does not appear to have been true in St. Thomas, Kingston or Kenora.
Even in January, with the temperature well less than zero, Kenora kept burying its flu
dead.
Varied sources of information
How do we know all these things?
The first important source is local newspapers. The flu came and went very quickly, so one
need glance at only a few papers in autumn 1918 to find stories about the flu response.
At that time, most papers carried stories about two main events: the war in Europe and the
deaths of local persons in that war, and the response to the flu and the deaths of local
people from the flu.
If you simply wanted an overview of the flu response, you could get that in a few hours or a
day at most by looking at microfilm in the local library.
The second source we looked for was the minutes of the local Board of Health. Since the
newspapers had reported board decisions, we had the dates, so we knew exactly when to
look. The minutes had disappeared from Kingston (they were supposed to be in the
Queen's University archives), but we found the original minutes in both St. Thomas and
Kenora.
That showed us something else: The newspaper reports were completely accurate. Perhaps
reporters in those days knew shorthand or were simply meticulous, but whatever the
reason, we knew that we had an accurate account of what happened.
And those sources were only a start.
We found that cemetery records are generally well preserved and that they were more
detailed in 1918–19 than they are now. Any doubts about the severity of the flu were
quickly removed when the records showed that 15 times as many people were buried
during the peak of the pandemic than in the preceding October or November.
A quick look at provincial vital statistics (all deaths had to be registered) made clear there
was only one reason for the increase. For name after name after name, cause of death was
listed as "pneumonia" or "influenza" or "pandemic influenza."
There were many other records.
Even though there were few if any church services, churches did record deaths. That was
also true for hospital records. These were not so readily available (we had to fill out some
lengthy forms to get the records in Kingston), but hospital officials were otherwise
generally cooperative.
In one community, we also found records at a funeral home, and in 1918–19 those records
listed cause of death. They also recorded that for every death, a taxi was provided to take a
member of the clergy to the cemetery.
Similarities and differences
Of course, 1918–19 was different than today. For one thing the flu struck after Canada had
been at war for more than four years. That meant that there was already an active
volunteer community. It also meant that women had started taking on jobs once reserved
for men.
And it meant that many trained medical people, both physicians and nurses, had left their
communities to serve soldiers at the front. It also meant, of course, there was a shortage of
young men.
But even a quick review of the decisions that were made would allow consideration of
whether the same decisions would be as appropriate now, at the very least providing a
starting point for discussion. It's always easier to make a case for doing something when
one can show that it has been done before.
Of course in Canada now there is one other major difference. In 1918–19, most people
could not afford to go to hospital except in Kingston, where, presumably because of the
Queen's University medical school, ward hospital care was free.
Now virtually everyone in Canada is covered by state health insurance. (When I had a
hernia operation at the Shouldice Clinic in Toronto my total bill was zero.)
It seems likely that in a future pandemic more people will expect to be able to go to hospital
than in 1918–19 when, at least in St. Thomas and Kenora, most flu victims remained at
home. Given the extent of the flu (an estimated 50 percent of the population became
infected), that raises some serious issues for health emergency planning.
While getting a quick read on how the Spanish flu was dealt with would not be all that
difficult, getting a more comprehensive view would take more time. Nonetheless, it would
certainly be a useful summer project for a student, one that would benefit everyone
involved.
Incidentally, as might be expected, one other place we looked was community histories.
Although all three communities we studied had published various histories, almost all
ignored the Spanish flu. That may have been because it was overshadowed by war, or
because it came and went so quickly.
For the three communities we studied, we have now corrected that. Casey, Nicole and I are
writing a monograph for each community and will donate these to the communities, their
libraries and their museums or archives.
Joseph Scanlon is professor emeritus and director of the Emergency Communications
Research Unit at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. He has been doing disaster research
for 40 years.
For a detailed account of the role of women volunteers during the pandemic, see:
Scanlon, Joseph, Terry McMahon and Casey Hurrell (2009) "Almost only women: Canadian
volunteer response to the 1918-20 pandemic" American Journal of Disaster Medicine Vol. 4
No. 6 (November-December) pp: 331-344
Joe Scanlon is professor emeritus and director of the Emergency Communications Research
Unit at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada.
For many years, he was an instructor of the Hostage Commanders Barricaded Persons course
at the Canadian Police College.