by Colin Perkel
In Walkerton, the humming of the grapevine was getting more intense. From the Owen Sound hospital, Cathy Reich called her mom, who was looking after Aleasha’s big sister, who had also come down with bloody diarrhea. Reich asked her mother to stop giving Amanda tap water and to tell anyone else who might call the same thing. One person who did call was another mom with children at Mother Teresa. She immediately took bottled water to the school for her kids. Reich’s mom also called Aleasha’s great-grandmother, who lived at the Brucelea Haven nursing home. She mentioned to a nurse that they suspected something was in the water because Aleasha and Amanda were both ill. Reich also phoned her husband at work, and he, too, advised his employees against using the water.
At the health unit in Owen Sound, Middleton began contacting Walkerton’s schools. From staff at Mother Teresa, she heard that numerous children had come down with diarrhea and stomach cramps. Similar information came from a second elementary school, where absenteeism had also risen sharply. A call to Sacred Heart high school proved an anomaly. There didn’t appear to be anything unusual among the students there. Middleton concluded that whatever was going on, it appeared to be affecting the younger kids, those in Grades 2, 3, and 4, rather than the older ones. Patterson mulled over the information. Despite the paucity of details, despite the fast-approaching long weekend, it was becoming clearer that they had a public-health problem on their hands that required immediate attention. As they chatted, Middleton mentioned a strange part of her conversation with her contact at Mother Teresa.
“Is the water okay or is there something wrong with it?” she told Patterson she’d been asked.
Patterson took a deep breath.
“I’d better call the Walkerton Public Utilities Commission.”
Friday, May 19
4 P.M.
Stan had just arrived back at the PUC office when Dave Patterson reached him by phone. The two men had chatted briefly once before several years earlier and barely knew each other. Patterson was feeling a little uneasy about bothering the manager with what amounted to a fishing expedition without either hook or bait.
“Has anything unusual happened recently with the town’s water system?” he asked. “We’ve had calls from people concerned about the water and we’re looking at some illness in the community.”
Patterson mentioned the higher incidence of absenteeism at Mother Teresa, located on the south side of town.
“Well, there’s been some water-main construction at that end of town in the past week,” Stan told him. “We’re flushing the mains and we put in a new chlorinator on the well yesterday.”
In any event, Stan continued, the water usually tested fine even without treatment, but that wouldn’t be unexpected given that it came from a deep well.
“Have you had any complaints about the water?” Patterson asked.
“Yeah, about two or three weeks ago. We had some complaints about too much chlorine,” Stan said, noting he’d also heard a few hours earlier from James Schmidt.
“Anything unusual happen recently with the system?”
“Not really. The water is okay.”
“It might just be the flu or food,” Patterson allowed.
The topic switched to the previous Friday’s big storm. A front-page newspaper photograph of a flooded street leading to a Walkerton park was still fresh in Patterson’s mind.
“Could the heavy rain and flooding have had any effect on the water?” Patterson asked.
“Not likely,” Stan said. “It’s a closed-loop system that shouldn’t be affected by a rainfall.”
“Well, better keep a close eye on the chlorine levels in the construction area.”
“No problem. I’ll try to maintain high residuals over the weekend.”
Patterson wasn’t feeling much enlightened. An E. coli O157 outbreak remained a distinct possibility. But if it were E. coli, it would most likely come from food, not water. Certainly not treated water. Patterson and Middleton kicked about some ideas, possible causes. In his notebook, he jotted down E. coli, campylobacter, and salmonella. The pair also discussed viruses, but the symptoms didn’t add up. As he and Middleton considered their next moves, Middleton took two more calls. Maple Court Villa, home to about 150 Walkerton retirees, reported that several residents had come down with diarrhea. They wanted additional enteric outbreak kits from the health unit so they could collect specimens. Middleton promised to provide the kits and gave the home an outbreak identification number to allow the testing laboratories to link the specimens to a particular situation. The second call was from Brucelea Haven, the town’s nursing home. Several of its 135 residents had diarrhea, two with blood. Middleton asked the home to begin a line listing, a simple tracking procedure that gathers information on patients, when they began experiencing symptoms and what those were. She also provided an outbreak number and asked the home to collect specimens and keep them in a fridge until they could be picked up. With the holiday weekend about to start, a courier would be around to collect them on Tuesday morning for shipping to the lab. During the conversation, the nurse, Lisa Stroeder, mentioned that staff had heard about the ill Mother Teresa students. In addition, Dr. Michael Gill, who acted as the home’s physician besides running a general practice in town, had seen about a dozen or so patients at his office. Stroeder, whose husband worked for Aleasha Reich’s dad, had concluded it couldn’t be the nursing home’s food.
“Is there something wrong with the water?” Stroeder asked Middleton.
Middleton relayed the question to Patterson.
“I’ve just got off the phone with the manager of the PUC and my understanding is that the water is fine,” he said.
Middleton passed that along to Stroeder, who asked if it would be advisable for the nursing home to boil its drinking water anyway. Middleton told her that couldn’t hurt. It didn’t sound to Stroeder like a ringing endorsement. Still dissatisfied, she took her fears to Edythe Oberle, the home’s director of nursing. Within an hour, the nursing home had removed any juices made from town water and started using boiled or bottled water, despite the added expense. Ultimately, forty-six residents of the home fell ill, but the decision to stop using tap water then and there undoubtedly spared many other of the vulnerable residents an agonizing descent into illness and death.
Patterson pondered. In and of itself, diarrhea among residents of nursing or retirement homes is not uncommon. But such outbreaks, which can be caused by several bugs, tend to be confined to the facilities. Here, however, a pattern, vague as it was, was emerging. Whatever was making people sick appeared to be hitting the very young and the very old, typical of E. coli O157. Usually, a widespread outbreak can be traced to a large gathering, a wedding or church supper perhaps, or, as had happened in 1992 with the Jack in the Box, to a restaurant. During each of her calls, Middleton had made a point of asking whether the patients had attended some kind of gathering: a school trip, a graduation dance, a party, anything that could tie them to a common event. Nothing. Moreover, the chances of the two disparate age groups sharing the same sort of food or being at a single function seemed remote. Patterson thought about the water as a possible source, but considered that highly unlikely. Never had there been an E. coli outbreak in North America linked to a properly treated municipal water system, and Stan Koebel had told him Walkerton’s water was okay.
Had Patterson thought to familiarize himself with the town’s water file, kept in the health unit’s Walkerton office, he might have been a little less certain about Stan’s assurances. The file included numerous laboratory reports from prior to the fall of 1996, when the Ontario government had decided to get out of the water-testing business and leave municipalities to find private laboratories to do the tests. Many of those reports indicated contamination of the water. Although the regular lab reports had all but ceased after the 1996 privatization, there was one in the file showing E. coli in the water from as recently as August 1999. The file also contained three in-depth Environment Ministry inspe
ction reports from the previous decade, the last done by Michelle Zillinger in early 1998. All documented deficiencies, including E. coli and other contamination, failure to test the water in accordance with provincial guidelines, and failure to disinfect it properly. The file was kept in the Walkerton office run by James Schmidt, the unit’s on-the-ground inspector and a self-described dedicated employee with a conscience and a passion for public health. His practice was to glance at the incoming documents, if he had the time, put them in a file, and forget about them. If there were problems with Walkerton’s water, he figured, that was the Environment Ministry’s concern.
Friday, May 19
4:20 P.M.
From head office in Owen Sound came the request to James Schmidt to deliver outbreak kits to Maple Court Villa. They had a need for them, was all he was told. He didn’t ask any questions. About the same time, a woman called to tell him about the illnesses at Mother Teresa. He told her he’d already heard from the school and that he was looking into it. Schmidt gathered up the outbreak kits and delivered them to Maple Court Villa, then turned his mind to the long weekend and headed home to nearby Hanover, where Patterson reached him just as he walked in the door. Patterson relayed what he had been hearing throughout the day.
“Has anything happened in or around Walkerton that would have involved a large group of people?” Patterson asked.
“Not that I know about,” Schmidt replied.
The history of E. coli contamination in Walkerton’s water system contained in the file stashed away somewhere in Schmidt’s office never came up. He never thought to mention its contents, not that he remembered them anyway, and no one at the health unit head office thought to ask.
At the PUC, long-time clerical worker Viv Slater went over to Stan.
“I’ve had calls asking if the water’s okay,” she said. “Small kids have been getting sick. And Maple Court called as well.”
“I can’t understand how it could be the water,” Stan said.
He went to have a chat with Hallahan. They’re probably dealing with a flu epidemic, he said, not sounding particularly worried. Still, he told Hallahan, he’d go out and check the chlorinator at Well 7 to make sure it was working properly. Perhaps, somehow, the water-main project had contaminated the system, although that was highly unlikely. But the uneasy feeling gnawing at him was taking on a new urgency. Sick children? The last thing in the world Stan Koebel needed was a problem with the water, especially one that would become public. Not with all the other stuff going on and the uncertainty over what would happen to the waterworks with the hydro side leaving. It wouldn’t look good.
Never before had Stan flushed the town’s water system after a single bad test result. Still, he figured, if there was a problem, flushing and increasing chlorine levels would surely fix it. He might have given more thought to the fact that Well 7 had pumped unchlorinated water into the system for almost the entire week, but he didn’t. He got into the truck and headed over to the PUC shop. It was late afternoon and he wondered if he’d find anyone still there. He pulled onto the gravel in front of the rectangular single-storey shop, its grey aluminum siding glinting dully in the afternoon sun. To his relief, he spotted Frank, who was just getting ready to call it quits for the week. As he and Al Buckle walked toward their cars, Frank noticed that Stan looked even more worried than he had earlier in the afternoon.
“We’ve got a problem out here on Highway 9,” Stan told him, absent-mindedly pointing in the direction of the construction site. “They’re still getting bad samples. We gotta do a bunch of flushing this weekend. I’m going to start on a couple of hydrants right now.”
Frank couldn’t see what the big deal was.
“How’d it go with the chlorinator?” Stan asked.
“It’s up and running,” Frank replied. “Got it done this morning.”
“Good.”
Al Buckle hesitated for a couple of minutes, figuring there might be some overtime in the offing, but Stan didn’t ask.
“See youse later,” said Buckle, who got into his car and drove off, leaving the two brothers alone.
“I’m pretty worried about all these bad samples that are coming back,” Stan went on as Buckle’s car disappeared from sight. “They say it’s in the distribution.”
Frank was quiet.
“People calling the office this afternoon asking about the water,” Stan continued. “Some kids getting sick. Even got a call from the public health guys. They wanted to know if the water was safe. Said it was okay.”
Stan wanted desperately to make Frank understand that this was different. Serious, even. There was something in the water. Bacteria. More than ever, he wanted his younger brother, to whom he had so often turned with water questions, to understand just how worried he was, to say or do something to make it right. Frank considered.
“No way that can be,” Frank said. “It can’t be the water.”
“They’re saying it is.”
“Can’t be.”
“Well, I’m going to start flushing and upping the chlorine tonight anyway.”
“Hell, it can wait till Tuesday.”
Frank could see Stan wanted him to help. But he had other plans for the evening. He didn’t offer and Stan didn’t ask.
“I’ll give you hand tomorrow,” Frank said, and off he went.
Friday, May 19
5:30 P.M.
Stan grabbed some equipment and drove the few blocks to Mother Teresa. He opened the hydrant out front. With its location at the south end of town, flushing there would allow the system to draw fresh chlorinated water from Well 7. Stan’s digital chlorine analyser registered a barely detectible level of the chemical. As water gushed from the hydrant, he headed west along Highway 9, past the water tower, past the Biesenthal farm, turned right at the next concession, and pulled up at Well 7. He was there when Hallahan, who had stopped at her parents’ house after running some pre-weekend errands, reached him on his cellphone.
“Just wanted to make sure everything’s okay,” she said. “Do you need me to do anything?”
“No, no. Everything looks fine, but I’m flushing and increasing the chlorination levels, just to be sure.”
Bob McKay was taking it easy resting his bum knee when his wife, Brenda, came home with the children. Their piano teacher had mentioned that a couple of dozen kids were ill at Mother Teresa and had asked her if she’d heard anything similar, which Brenda hadn’t. Bob didn’t give it much thought. A little while later, he headed out to the PUC shop looking to borrow a tool to inflate the tire on his riding lawnmower. There was no one around. But he did notice that a fire hydrant across the street from the shop had a length of hose on it. The hydrant was open.
“Kind of odd they’re flushing out a water main after hours on a long weekend,” he told Brenda when he got home.
Then it struck him: Could the flushing be connected to the failed Highway 9 samples Frank had told him about the previous day and the sick kids Brenda had mentioned? He made a decision: The family stopped drinking the water.
At Well 7, Stan found the chlorine levels looking pretty good. At least the new chlorinator was working properly. He cranked it up anyway and headed back to the open hydrant at the school. By 7 P.M., the chlorine level there had risen a notch. It had been a long day and Stan decided to head home for a quick bite and some brief down time. It didn’t last. JoAnn Todd, director of the Maple Court Villa seniors residence, was on the phone.
“I’ve heard rumours the water’s unfit,” Todd said.
“The water’s okay,” Stan replied. “It comes from a deep well so it can’t be contaminated.”
Stan Koebel cut a lonely figure that Friday evening as he made several more trips to the hydrant outside Mother Teresa. Each time, the chlorine levels were higher. He didn’t really have a clear idea of what reading he wanted, but the digital analyser was starting to show a good amount in the system. He shut the hydrant down and headed back one more time to the pumphouse in the
darkness, where a quick test showed high levels of the disinfectant. It was 11 o’clock on the Friday night of the Victoria Day long weekend when the troubled manager of Walkerton’s Public Utilities Commission headed home.
In Search of a Hidden Attacker
Saturday, May 20
11 A.M..
INSTEAD OF RELAXING on the long weekend, Dave Patterson was searching for answers. The Owen Sound hospital laboratory had just reported that stool cultures from one of the two children referred to Dr. Kristen Hallett were showing signs of E. coli O157, although the analysis had yet to be confirmed. The second case appeared normal. Patterson immediately called Bev Middleton at home to ask her to check the Walkerton hospital for an update. A few minutes later, Middleton was able to tell him that the emergency department there was full. Ten children and as many adults had been seen. Two were ill enough to be admitted. Another thirty or so people had called asking for information. Six stool specimens had been collected, but the one result they had so far was negative. The hospital also told Middleton that some of the patients had been asking about the town’s water.
“I think you’d better head to the office and fax down the three fact sheets that we have on HUS and E. coli to the hospital,” Patterson told Middleton. “Oh, better check with Hanover as well. Just tell them what’s going on, and send them the faxes too.”
Patterson hung up and called James Schmidt at home to bring him up to date. Given the comments from the patients in the Walkerton hospital about the water, he asked Schmidt to call Stan Koebel again.