by Colin Perkel
“Ask him about the levels of chlorine in the system. Also, check whether they’re keeping a close eye on the water there. And let him know we have more illnesses.”
Saturday morning’s dawn had found Stan Koebel back at Well 7. He could smell the chlorine. As the orange sun peeped over the horizon, he headed over to Mother Teresa yet again and opened the hydrant. A little later, Frank joined him for a spell, and the two brothers opened several other hydrants at various locations. Around town, the water gushed. Around town, people were doubling over in pain and rushing to the washroom. At midmorning, with levels in the water towers plunging, Well 5 kicked in automatically and began pumping. Stan went over to the well. The chlorine levels looked good. And then it was back to check the hydrants. It was hot work. Now and again, he filled his hard hat with water from a hydrant to quench his thirst. The ring of his cellphone interrupted his reverie.
“Hi, Stan. How ya doin’?” Schmidt asked. “What’s going on?”
“Well, we’re flushing the lines,” Stan replied, the sounds of gushing water audible in the background. “We’ve just replaced the chlorinator and done some mains work.”
“Anything else? Any other unusual events you can let me know about or tell me? Is everything okay with the system?”
“No, no. Everything’s okay,” Stan replied.
Schmidt asked about the chlorine levels and noted down Stan’s responses. It didn’t occur to him to ask about the chlorinator or why Stan had replaced it. Nor did it strike him as odd that Stan was out flushing a water main on the Saturday morning of a long weekend. Nor did it occur to him that there might be a connection between the reports of illness and what Stan was doing. The call, however, left Stan rattled. He drove over to the PUC office and went to his desk. From under a pile of papers, he fished out the lab results from the previous week. He sat down and, for the first time, studied them closely. It looked really bad. But hell, if it was that bad, surely the lab would have passed the results on to the Ministry of the Environment? And surely the ministry would have given him a call? In any event, there was no need to panic. The flushing and extra chlorine would take care of any problems. Stan took some time out to help his daughter fill their backyard swimming pool and get it ready for the season. He took a swig from the garden hose every now and again.
Saturday, May 20
Noon
Bob McKay was fretting. The unusual flushing he had witnessed and his wife’s mention of the sick kids had nagged at him through the previous evening and into the morning. Over the backyard fence, his neighbour mentioned hearing from Cathy Reich that two or three kids had been taken to Owen Sound hospital with blood in their stool. Reich had also passed on her suspicions about the cause.
“Could there be something wrong with the water?” asked the neighbour, whose own daughter had also taken ill.
“It’s a possibility,” McKay told her. “Anything’s possible.”
Her family, too, stopped drinking from the taps.
Just before lunch, McKay noticed another hydrant being flushed near Mother Teresa. Again, there was no one in sight. What was going on? Someone should come and check things out, he thought. He headed home and called his mother.
“Mom, what should I do?” he asked, after explaining what was bothering him and what he had in mind.
“Bob,” she said, “you do the right thing.”
Had his relationship with his boss been better, McKay might simply have picked up the phone and called Stan Koebel. But it had always been clear to him that Stan, or Frank for that matter, didn’t much like being questioned. Steve Lorley had once said to him, “You do as you’re told, you’ll be fine here.” Besides, the layoff threats and ensuing unpleasantness made such a call impossible, especially when his suspicions might prove groundless. No. Calling Stan wasn’t an option. McKay scanned the Blue Pages of the phone directory until he found the number for the Ministry of the Environment office in Owen Sound. A recording referred him to the ministry’s emergency hotline, the Spills Action Centre, in Toronto. At 12:20 P.M. on Saturday, May 20, McKay called the hotline, where he reached Chris Johnson, a recent graduate who had been hired full-time just weeks earlier. As the new kid on the ministry block, the long weekend shift fell to young Chris.
“Spills Action Centre speaking.”
McKay gulped.
“Yes, um, I’m just wondering if I could, ah, file, a complaint on a new system going in, you know what I mean?”
“Okay,” said Johnson. “What’s your name?”
What if there was nothing to his suspicions?
“I don’t wish to give that,” McKay said, not for a moment thinking that call-display technology at the centre could render his attempt at anonymity moot.
Instead, McKay talked about the failed samples Frank had mentioned two days earlier and the hydrant flushing he’d seen. In his nervousness, he forgot to bring up what he’d heard of kids being ill. After getting numbers for Stan and Frank Koebel from McKay, Johnson promised to look into it. It was early Saturday afternoon that Stan received a message from the PUC answering service to return a call to the Spills Action Centre in Toronto. He had no idea what the centre was but called anyway, using its toll-free phone number.
“Uh, I had a complaint of adverse water samples taken in the Walkerton area on the new main they are putting in,” Johnson told Stan.
“Okay, which new main?”
Johnson said he didn’t know. Instead, he asked a few basic questions, such as whether Walkerton had its own water-treatment plant and how to contact its operator.
“You’re talking to him,” Stan replied. “These samples: who brought them down?” he asked, still unclear to whom he was talking or where they were located.
“Um, well, what I got was an anonymous call. I’m in Toronto.”
Stan told him they had two or three different mains under construction. He said he’d been flushing since 5 P.M. the previous day and that the chlorine residuals seemed fine.
“Okay, this complaint was for the water samples on Thursday. Said a lot of them failed. It was an anonymous complaint,” Johnson went on. “So I take it as an anonymous complaint.”
“Okay,” Stan replied. “So we’re not sure if it was that or not?”
“No. I just wanted to inquire and find out what’s going on.”
“Yeah. We have a fair bit of construction and there’s some concern. Um. I’m not sure. We’re not finding anything, but I’m doing this as a precaution.”
“So, you haven’t had any adverse samples then?” Johnson asked suddenly.
“Um, we’ve had the odd one, you know,” Stan said, his voice rising slightly. “We’re in the process of changing companies because the other company had closed the doors. So we’re going through some pains right now to get it going.”
Stan didn’t mention the disturbing laboratory reports, which had been lying on his desk unheeded for almost three full days, even though he’d studied them just a scant few hours earlier. He said nothing about the test results showing serious contamination of the town’s drinking water, contamination that included potentially lethal E. coli. The secret, the fear, the worry stayed bottled up. He had tried to share it with Frank a day earlier, to no avail. There was no one to help now. So Stan Koebel kept quiet. And he kept flushing. No one need ever know.
Saturday, May 20
1 P.M.
The sense of unease Dave Patterson felt was getting stronger. Still nothing definitive. Still no clear cause. Then he heard from a Walkerton mother, worried because her daughter had used the drinking fountain a day earlier at Mother Teresa and a teacher had warned the child not to do that. Patterson told her the health unit was aware of a diarrhea outbreak and was in touch with the hospital. They had also talked to the public utilities commission and had been told the water was fine. He’d barely put the phone down when the Walkerton hospital called to say that someone had come in and said a local radio station was warning people against drinking the water. Ther
e had in fact been no such broadcast, but the town’s grapevine had gone into overdrive and, as is to be expected, the message had become garbled. Patterson, of course, knew nothing about such a report. And again he simply relayed what Stan Koebel had told him: the water, apparently, was fine, but he promised to investigate further. A quick check with the laboratory turned up nothing new. Remembering that he had yet to hear from James Schmidt, Patterson called him at his Hanover home and left a message asking him to take the ten-minute drive over to Walkerton to check the chlorine levels in the town’s tap water himself. Patterson was deeply worried. It was time to involve Dr. Murray McQuigge, the head of the health unit. His boss wasn’t going to be pleased to be disturbed at the cottage, but it had to be done.
A day earlier, McQuigge and his wife, Cory, who had just been diagnosed with breast cancer, prepared for the approaching long weekend by loading their car and heading for the refuge of the family cottage in Muskoka. It would be the ideal place to spend some much needed time together, to relax, to enjoy a benignly busy unofficial start to the summer. A quick check with the office had turned up nothing out of the ordinary and the medical officer of health had begun to put the worries of the workaday world behind him. It was to be a short-lived respite. McQuigge was puttering around his cottage when the phone rang. Dave Patterson apologized for disturbing him and laid out the grim, unfolding puzzle he was facing. One presumed case of E. coli, the child in Owen Sound, and as many as thirty cases of bloody diarrhea in the Walkerton area, one also showing preliminary signs of E. coli poisoning. Most of the illnesses were from Walkerton, but nothing seemed to tie them together. McQuigge expressed his satisfaction with the steps the health unit had taken. Nevertheless, he said, if any other cases of E. coli turned up, they should start interviewing the patients directly for more information.
“Look, there’s something very wrong here,” Patterson pleaded. “You should come back.”
There was a long pause.
“Okay,” McQuigge sighed. “I’ll head back.”
McQuigge broke the news to his wife and the couple packed up and began the long drive home. Their planned weekend getaway had lasted less than twenty-four hours. In the interim, Schmidt had arrived at the health unit office in Walkerton, where he had attempted, without success, to detect chlorine in the tap water. He called Patterson to tell him, adding that he’d go out and check the levels at other locations. He also mentioned that his wife, a nurse at the Hanover hospital, had told him of patients from both the town and nearby Durham who all had similar symptoms to those in Walkerton and Owen Sound. Patterson decided to call Stan Koebel a second time. Once again, the water manager explained he was flushing mains. Once again he mentioned finding reasonable levels of chorine in the drinking water. Once again, he made no mention of the lab report he’d just finished studying. Overall, it sounded to Patterson as if everything was working normally. He suddenly remembered the comment from the Walkerton hospital about the person who had mentioned hearing something about the water on the radio.
“Maybe you should call the radio station and let everyone know things are okay, Stan,” Patterson said.
Perhaps it was his own anxiety, perhaps it was his own unwillingness to believe that the manager of a town’s water treatment plant might be withholding critical information, but Patterson’s spur-of-the-moment suggestion really didn’t make much sense. It was quiet on the other end of the line. There was no way on earth Stan was going to make a call like that.
“I’m not very good at public speaking, but I’ll see what I can do,” Stan answered after a long pause.
Patterson hung up and checked his voicemail, where he found a message from Schmidt, who said he’d had no luck detecting any chlorine in any of the town’s water. However, because part of his work related to public swimming pools, all Schmidt had was a standard kit familiar to any homeowner with a pool in the backyard. These kits are not sensitive to the low levels of chlorine ordinarily used to disinfect drinking water. Municipal systems barely entered the health unit’s realm of activity or consciousness. Just to be sure his kit was working properly, Schmidt had actually shown some rare initiative by taking it along to the public swimming pool in Hanover, where he tested the water and got a reading. He then asked the pool attendant to check their records to see if they jibed with what he’d found. They did. The fact that Schmidt could detect no chlorine bothered Patterson, but he nevertheless felt somewhat reassured by what he’d heard from Stan Koebel, who was undoubtedly using more sensitive equipment. Chlorine, Patterson knew, is a potent bacterial disinfectant and conventional wisdom was such that as long as there’s a detectable level to be found, the water must be safe to drink. Nothing in his experience suggested otherwise.
Saturday, May 20
6 P.M.
Dr. Murray McQuigge arrived back home in Kemble northwest of Owen Sound and immediately called Patterson. The Walkerton hospital had logged over a hundred calls from people inquiring about diarrhea in family members. About half mentioned bloody diarrhea. Thirty people had shown up at the hospital seeking attention, although no one had been admitted. That was one positive, McQuigge thought. He and Patterson discussed the possibility of a food-borne outbreak that could be tracked to Walkerton itself, given that people outside the town had also been affected. A suspicion the outbreak was water-related kept surfacing, but Patterson reminded his superior that Koebel had said the water was okay.
“We are worried about the water supply, despite reassurances,” McQuigge jotted down in his notepad.
Patterson continued to brood over the mystery. Was it even a Walkerton outbreak? What could be causing it? Then it suddenly occurred to him:
“Dig out water system file,” he wrote down, but he promptly forgot to ask for it.
Later that evening, Patterson called his immediate supervisor to let him know that he’d spoken to McQuigge and that they were awaiting additional lab results. Factoring in the incubation time for E. coli O157, the two men began trying to pinpoint the start of the outbreak, and came up with an event on the Mother’s Day weekend, perhaps May 14 or 15.
Saturday, May 20
9 P.M.
Bob McKay had spent the afternoon lounging around the house, taking time out to check that the flushing at Mother Teresa was continuing. As the day wore on, his conversation with Chris Johnson at the Spills Action Centre nagged at him. They didn’t seem to have had any idea that there had been bad samples. Surely the ministry should have known about them? McKay had himself developed a mild case of diarrhea. His daughter had also been having tummy problems for a couple of days. He was becoming increasingly antsy, wondering whether his whole family was falling ill. He had checked at the school again earlier in the evening. The hydrant was still open. He could stand the anxiety no more. It was 9:30 P.M. Saturday when he decided to call the ministry hotline again.
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Brenda said.
At the Spills Action Centre, Brian Park answered the call. McKay said he’d phoned that afternoon and this time, he mentioned his own illness and relayed the information he’d heard from Brenda about the twenty-five sick students.
“I just wondered if something was being done about this,” McKay said.
“Um,” came the response.
“I’ll take a water sample tonight, if you want me to do that,” McKay offered.
Park ignored the suggestion, asking instead about the sick children. McKay explained the illnesses had begun a day earlier, that kids had gone to hospital with blood in the stool. Park pulled up the earlier report filed by Chris Johnson and told McKay that the action centre had spoken to someone in charge of the Walkerton works department.
“John Strader?” McKay asked, suddenly afraid the ministry had wasted its time talking to the man in charge of the town’s roads and sewers rather than its tap water.
“No it was a John Koebel,” Park said.
“Stan Koebel.”
“Ah, no, it says John, who is the man
ager of the Walkerton Public Utilities Commission,” Park insisted.
There wasn’t much use arguing the point. How to make these people understand the gravity of the situation? McKay repeated his concern about the illnesses.
“That’s not normal,” he said for emphasis.
Park advised him to call the Health Ministry, although McKay was pretty sure the people he really wanted were from the Environment Ministry. Still, he wrote down the number Park provided.
“Is there any avenue I can take here, other than talking to you?” McKay asked one more time, his frustration and despair rising in lockstep.
“Well, you could contact the city of Walkerton. Have you done that yet?”
“Ha, forget that!”
“You don’t want to do that, eh?”
“No, no. You might as well be hitting yourself against a…you know.”
“They won’t listen to you?”
“No, no.”
“I see. Yeah. Your best bet is Ministry of Health because they’re the ones that regulate drinking water quality.”
Park, an employee of the Environment Ministry, was wrong of course and McKay knew it. When it came to drinking water, they were God. Still, he called the number Park had given him, only to be greeted by a strange recording. In his haste to dial, he’d forgotten to use the area code. So after calling back the hotline in Toronto to check the number, he reached the public-health unit for Simcoe County in Barrie. There, the call-taker told him that Walkerton was out of their area. Call the health unit in Owen Sound, McKay was told. Tired of getting the runaround and increasingly worried about what was going on in town, McKay called the Spills Action Centre one last time. It was now almost 10 P.M. Saturday.
“It’s Bob from Walkerton,” he said, letting his guard slip. “I got absolutely nowhere with that number. Now if you could please just do something, get rolling on this. That’s all I ask, okay?”