by Colin Perkel
Monday, May 15
As was his custom, Stan Koebel was up early for the start of the new workweek. He headed to PUC headquarters with Carole to clean and start catching up after his time away. There would be lots to do. He checked the computer system in the office that ran the town’s wells. Well 7 was flashing “fail,” signifying a power interruption. Assuming that Frank had replaced the chlorinator, Stan turned the well on from the office. It would be several hours before Well 5 would shut off automatically. On his desk, he found a stack of papers, including faxes from A&L labs. One set indicated what the laboratory needed for the microbiological testing of Walkerton’s water. Robert Deakin had spoken to both Stan and Frank about this but decided to spell it out in writing. Stan shoved the fax aside. A second fax, however, caught his eye. This one was dated May 5, the Friday before he’d gone away. Perhaps it had arrived while he was out of the office. Perhaps he’d just been too busy to pay it any attention. The report contained the results of the weekly samples taken May 1. Bacteria, although not E. coli, had been found in both the raw and treated water from Well 5. Results were similar for samples taken at the PUC shop and office. Stan wasn’t worried. The tests merely indicated the water quality was getting worse. All that was needed was some extra chlorine and the next set of tests would come up just fine. That’s the way it always went. He headed over to the PUC shop, where he told Steve Lorley he was going to haul him before the commissioners over the impaired driving charge. Stan looked decidedly unhappy. Al Buckle came in.
“Big storm must have knocked out the power to Well 6,” Buckle told him.
“What about 7?” Stan asked.
“We didn’t get the chlorinator in. Been too busy with the contractors.”
Stan frowned. That meant Well 7, which he’d just turned on, was running without any chlorine. Frank arrived.
“Mind if I have the day off being that I worked Saturday?” Frank asked.
What could he say? Frank and Bob McKay had spent most of their Saturday at the high school repairing the electrical equipment damaged by flooding from the big storm. The chlorinator would have to wait. There was too much else to take care of.
“Yeah, go ahead,” Stan said as he headed out. “Just get Al to sample Well 7 before you leave.”
That Al Buckle was, in the words of Larry Struthers of the ministry, qualified only to wash the floors wasn’t on anyone’s minds. Although he couldn’t legally do the weekly sampling because he had no licence, he’d been pressed into service whenever Stan or Frank couldn’t do it themselves. Frank had shown him the ropes and Buckle was pretty good at following instructions. It was also pretty easy to smooth over any problems with the log sheets. Then again, Frank didn’t care much for the whole sampling rigmarole anyhow. Over the years, he’d developed his own system and passed it on to Buckle, who asked no questions, and Stan had gone along with it. At one point, Frank used to go down and take a sample at the store at 125 Durham Street, until it changed owners and became a supermarket. Regular sampling day for the PUC was Monday, and staff at the store would be busy at the sinks washing and preparing vegetables for the post-weekend shelves. In his mind, Frank felt he was getting a couple of hairy eyeballs when he walked in and told them to “shut ’er down for a couple of minutes” so he could take samples. He didn’t need the aggravation. So he stopped going there but continued labelling the sample bottles, which he filled elsewhere, as having come from that address. Often, he would just go the tap at the PUC shop, fill a bottle, and label it as having come from some other place in town, such as the municipal office, where no one ever sampled, or the supermarket. It sure saved time and hassle. What did it matter anyway? Water is water is water, Frank figured. No one would ever know where the samples had come from, certainly not the lab. Stan, however, would usually grab a sample at home, perhaps at his mother-in-law’s place if he happened to be in the neighbourhood, or, most conveniently, from a tap at the PUC office. The same approach was taken to checking chlorine residuals. Often, Frank or Buckle would simply check a small bead in the chlorinator that indicated whether chlorine was moving into the system. Frank told Buckle that he could tell how much chlorine was in the water by “checking the bubble.” Buckle believed him. Absolutely. Buckle checked the bubble diligently. As far as Frank was concerned, doing everything exactly by the book wasted time no one had. Gradually, the PUC monitoring system became less and less reliable, but no one seemed to notice and no one seemed to be hurt by it.
Frank called Buckle over. Because Stan had said to sample at Well 7, he figured Well 5 was shut down so there was no need to bother with it.
“Go sample at 7,” Frank said.
“But 7 ain’t running,” Buckle responded, not realizing that Stan had just turned the well on.
“Stan says it is. So that’s the place to take samples.”
“You sure?”
“Look. Mind your own business and just do what you’re told. Now take the samples and hurry up and get back. I’m outta here.”
Frank went home. He, too, didn’t worry that the town’s main well was running without a chlorinator and would continue to do so for four more days. Heck. The water was good.
—
Stan drove around the corner to check on the big pipeline construction project on Highway 9. The job site was a mess. The pit holes, excavated areas where the mains were being laid, were full of water from the big storm and needed cleaning out. The project was running behind schedule and the contractor was anxious to get things moving. A missed deadline would cost the company money. Stan was eager to help, to show he could get things done. He agreed to the contractor’s request to send samples from the new main to the lab along with the PUC’s regular Monday samples of the town’s system. He called Al Buckle to bring over some test bottles. Buckle soon arrived with them, along with the samples he’d just taken at Well 7. They filled the empty bottles with water from the new main and Stan took the lot back to the PUC office, where he quickly filled out the submission forms.
“Please rush. Thanks, Stan,” he wrote on the sheet for the samples from the new mains.
Tuesday, May 16
10 A.M.
The package provoked consternation at A&L labs the next morning. This wasn’t the way they’d explained the samples had to be submitted. Cathy Doyle, the lab’s assistant supervisor, called Stan. She explained they needed more water to do the proper testing. Stan seemed to be preoccupied.
“Do you have the results for the rush samples from the new main?” he asked.
“We just got them not fifteen minutes ago,” she protested.
“Well, we need them.”
Doyle relayed the conversation to her boss, Robert Deakin. They just don’t seem to get it, Deakin thought as he headed to the phone.
“It’s too soon to see any kind of result,” he explained to Stan. “We need a minimum of twenty-four hours.”
“Could you rush the samples anyway?” Stan asked.
“If something comes up, within twenty-four hours, we’ll let you know.”
Deakin asked why there were no samples from Well 5, which had shown bacteria from the May 1 testing two weeks earlier.
“It wasn’t running,” Stan replied. “But we need the rush ones done. We’re trying to get something up and running.”
Around Walkerton, people were starting to feel poorly. The flu was doing the rounds. Or so everyone thought.
Wednesday, May 17
8:30 A.M.
The lab technician called Robert Deakin over. Walkerton’s water was obviously contaminated. Deakin took a look himself. The samples from the construction site had all tested positive for bacteria, including E. coli. He checked the other samples. Raw water taken from Well 7 tested clean, but, strangely, the treated water from the well was showing serious contamination. The water from the town’s taps, including a sample labelled as having come from Stan’s house at 902 Yonge Street, showed similar problems.
“Better get a report to them right aw
ay,” Deakin said. “I’ll try to call them.”
“The samples for the main have failed,” Deakin told Stan. “The other samples don’t look good either.”
The second comment didn’t register with Stan, who was thinking about the bad samples from the Highway 9 construction site. He was wondering why they had failed. He barely paid attention as Deakin ran through a detailed list of the bad results.
“How many?” Stan asked when Deakin had finished.
The question struck Deakin as odd.
“Well, we did a membrane filtration test on one sample and the plate is covered with both coliform and E. coli bacteria. I haven’t had a chance to count how many yet, but it’s high. I’ll fax the report as soon as I can.”
“Okay, thanks,” Stan told him.
Late that morning, A&L faxed the results of the water-main tests to the PUC. A couple of hours later, they sent the other results, the ones showing serious contamination in the town’s drinking water. In the interim, Stan found Frank to let him know that the samples from Highway 9 had come back positive. He made no mention of Deakin’s warning about the others.
“We’re going to be reflushing, but we’ve got to send four more samples right away,” he told Frank. “We won’t be able to start up service until we get good results.”
Frank wasn’t worried. Although he’d never seen it before, he’d heard somewhere that mains often fail their first test, that it’s not unusual to find bacteria in new pipes. Even a discarded doughnut can cause problems. Besides, the main wasn’t on line yet. Flushing and rechlorinating would fix the problem. Stan passed on the same information to Al Buckle and asked him to collect four samples from the mains to be sent to the laboratory right away. At the construction site, he ran into the site supervisor, who asked to see the bad test results.
The two men headed back to the PUC office. The faxed results from the new main were on Stan’s desk. He gave the supervisor a copy. On the desk, the other sample results, the ones showing gross contamination of the drinking water, lay unheeded. Around town, doctors were starting to take calls about illness, diarrhea, nausea. Stan was running around, checking on other projects and preparing a report for the PUC commissioners’ meeting the next evening. There was always so much to do.
Thursday, May 18
Bob McKay turned up late Thursday morning at the PUC shop to let Frank know the knee surgery he’d had a week earlier had gone well. He’d be seeing the doctor at the end of the month and would have a better idea then of when, exactly, he’d be able to get back to work.
“How’s the money doing?” Frank asked, trying to be friendly.
As they chatted, Frank mentioned the construction on the Highway 9 water main.
“How’s that going?” McKay asked
“Not well. They had bad test results.”
“Not good.”
“Yeah. That’s going to set ’em back until they get ’em resampled.”
That Frank had even in passing mentioned the bad samples struck McKay as odd. Frank had never really warmed up to him and the two men had never talked much about the water.
“Oh yeah, Stan wants to see you,” Frank said as McKay prepared to leave.
After lunch, the construction contractors asked Frank about hooking up the fifteen-centimetre line from the Highway 9 water main to Saugeen Filter Supply, the farm supply outfit that took over the site after the Canadian Tire store closed. The store planned a grand opening for the coming long weekend and wanted to be able to clean up the front of the property. They also needed water for fire protection. No one would be drinking it, they assured him. Stan wasn’t around, so Frank decided to give the go-ahead, even though the mains hadn’t yet tested clean.
“Just make sure you leave the water running inside the building so there’s no chance of back-feed into our system,” he said.
He then headed out to Well 7 with Al Buckle to finish the job they’d started two weeks earlier: installing the new chlorinator, which had been in a box at the pumphouse for almost a year and a half. They began mounting the equipment on the wall, installing the scales, and lifting the tank onto them. There were several plumbing connections to make, and the motor on the booster pump, which had been overhauled, needed rewiring.
At the PUC office, Stan was agitated. He made it clear he was unhappy that McKay wanted to put his knee through workers’ compensation insurance so that he wouldn’t have to use up his sick days.
“I’m getting tired of everybody,” he told McKay. “No one wants to do anything.”
McKay was taken aback. The outside crew took their orders from Frank and always did as told. He wondered why Stan was telling him this instead of his brother, but McKay bit his tongue. Stan wasn’t done.
“Steve will only be with us for another two weeks if he loses his licence,” Stan said in reference to Lorley’s having run afoul of drunk driving laws for a second time.
Janice Hallahan, who watched the exchange from her office adjoining Stan’s and found it upsetting, decided to take an early lunch. McKay soon followed her out the front door as Stan turned back to preparing for the evening’s monthly meeting of the PUC commissioners. Besides dealing with the Lorley issue, he also needed to provide his regular monthly manager’s updates. He sorted through the papers on his desk, glancing at the laboratory reports showing the contaminated water. He slid the A&L faxes under a pile of papers. There was more than enough other stuff to tell them:
• PUC staff changed a forty-foot pole on McGivern Street beside the hospital. The old pole was rotten at the ground level.
• Changed over three-phase line and transformer at the Welcome to Walkerton sign at the south end of town.
• Highway 9 water project: pressure tested great, now waiting for water samples to come back, then we can start changing over the services.
• Disconnected hydro and water service to 105 Durham Street, the building has been torn down.
• Connected two underground hydro services in Snider subdivision.
• Relocated three-phase meter service outside for Granny’s Restaurant at the customer’s request.
• Connected one new underground hydro service in Fisher subdivision.
• Currently rebuilding the chlorine equipment at our seventh pumphouse.
• Flooding on the weekend caused some damage to the primary equipment at the WDSS.
• Disconnected 4 Yonge Street North for the weekend. Water was up to the main floor.
• Sewage plant’s three-phase service was changed over to the new equipment on May 17.
• Disconnected hydro and water at 15 Orange. The home was damaged by fire.
• Contractor has started the water and sewer project on the old Durham Road and OH borrowed a 25 KVA transformer from us on May 14, 2000.
That evening, the commissioners, including Mayor Dave Thomson, accepted Stan’s report without discussion. They teased Chairman Jim Kieffer about his twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, which he planned to celebrate on the long weekend. Outside, Bob McKay waited in his car. He’d driven a worried Steve Lorley to face the music before the commission. Stan had already made it clear Lorley would likely be fired.
“How’d it go?” McKay asked when Lorley emerged.
“I still have my job,” Lorley smiled.
In Hanover, two-and-a-half-year-old Mary Rose Raymond was running a fever and suffering from diarrhea. Her mom, the family doctor, was not yet terribly worried. Neither was Tracey Hammell too concerned as Kody began exhibiting similar symptoms at home in Walkerton.
It Can’t Be the Water
Thursday, May 18
9:30 A.M.
THE LITTLE GUY was in pain. His swollen tummy ached. Bob Panabaker, the child’s family doctor in Hanover, suspected appendicitis. Because the nine-year-old was diabetic, Panabaker decided to refer him to a pediatrician rather than directly to a surgeon. Only two full-time pediatricians work in the region, Kristen Hallett and Ewan Porter, whose offices are located in a convert
ed three-storey house in the western corner of Owen Sound about forty-five minutes to the north. Hallett, who was on call, took the referral, and the boy’s parents drove him up to the Owen Sound hospital. The noon hour normally provides some much needed downtime for Hallett, a chance to eat a pasta lunch brought from home and heated in the microwave, but instead she drove over to meet her newest patient.
Trim, fit, and possessed of a winning smile that exudes confidence without arrogance, the energetic Hallett hadn’t planned to be a pediatrician. She was from the St. Catharines area in southern Ontario and had graduated as a pharmacist. But two years in the business left her wanting more. She pondered earning a doctorate with the idea of becoming a clinical pharmacist in a big hospital but opted instead for medical school. The refreshing ways of children and the complexities of treating their illnesses led her into pediatrics. Helping sick kids would provide the challenges she sought, but not in a big city, where the plethora of sub-specialties would limit the opportunity to apply everything she’d learned. Finding work in a smaller centre close to home proved impossible and she grew tired of looking. When she heard of an opening in Owen Sound, much farther from St. Catharines than she would have liked, she initially balked. She gave in finally, and moved there in July 1999 at the age of thirty-one.
Hallett examined the boy in the hospital and quickly ruled out appendicitis. She put him on an IV to control his diabetes and settled him in bed to wait and watch. That evening, he developed bloody diarrhea, at just about the same time as a second young patient, this one a girl, arrived at the hospital.
“I don’t think I’ve referred anyone to you before,” Panabaker said to Hallett. “And now I’ve sent you two in one day.”