Well of Lies

by Colin Perkel

  Park promised to have the local Environment Ministry office in Owen Sound follow up. Hoping to spur quicker action, McKay mentioned that the Walkerton waterworks was using an unlicensed operator, although he didn’t mention Al Buckle’s name. A local inspector would look into it, Park said.

  “Can you leave my first name off that?” McKay asked hopefully.

  Saturday, May 20

  10:30 P.M.

  At the Legion hall near the Tim Hortons, Stephanie Smith was enjoying the wedding reception for a friend on her volleyball team. Everyone seemed to know the water was bad. A short distance away, Stan Koebel was giving up on another day of flushing and worrying. Nearby, Fred Pearson was fretting over his eighty-three-year-old wife, Edith. She’d been to emergency after a day of terrible cramps and bloody diarrhea, but they’d sent her home with instructions to drink plenty of fluids. In Owen Sound, Mary Rose Raymond had been admitted to hospital with tummy troubles. In a nearby bed, Aleasha Reich seemed slightly better.

  Burning Questions, Boiling Water

  Sunday, May 21

  9:50 A.M.

  THE MEDICINE Jamie and Cathy McDonald had given their children appeared to have worked. So, with Ian and Kylie feeling somewhat better, the family headed to Hanover for church services, where something odd happened: a teenager asked Pastor Merv Brockwell to offer a prayer for the water of Walkerton. Strange as the request seemed, Brockwell did as asked. The McDonalds looked at each other and frowned. They decided to stop drinking their tap water. At the Becker’s round the corner from his house in Walkerton, travelling salesman Todd Huntley picked up his Sunday newspaper. A girl at the slush machine was filling a plastic cup with the icy, sugary, bright purple mixture. The woman behind the counter went over to her.

  “Sorry, my dear,” she said. “You can’t buy that. The water’s no good.”

  The girl frowned.

  “Where’d you hear that from?” Huntley asked the clerk.

  “Oh, a policeman just came in and said the water’s bad.”

  Huntley didn’t know what to make of it. Word of the mounting incidence of illness in the town had yet to reach him. He was just about to leave when another officer walked in. He, too, knew about the bad water.

  “Who told you?” Huntley asked.

  “I just hear it,” the cop said.

  Newspaper in hand, Huntley went home. He soon forgot the odd conversations in the convenience store. But forgetting wasn’t an option for Dave Patterson. It seemed like his head had barely hit the pillow when he had to drag himself out of bed again. From his kitchen, he touched base with James Schmidt and was contemplating his next move when Murray McQuigge called. CKNX radio in Wingham was looking for information on Walkerton’s water. McQuigge had told them the health unit was investigating a spate of illnesses in the town. He asked Patterson to canvas area hospitals to see if they could ascertain the hometowns of the patients displaying the by now familiar symptoms. A check with Bev Middleton revealed that she had spoken again to a nurse at the Walkerton hospital who had come on duty at 7 A.M. Five people with bloody diarrhea had come through that morning and ten others had called about similar symptoms. No one new had been admitted. The excruciatingly uncomfortable waits in the emergency room were growing longer.

  “People are angry,” the nurse told Middleton.

  Hanover hospital had also seen another dozen patients over the past day, the Owen Sound hospital two new ones. All the patients in the three hospitals were from Walkerton. The exception was little Mary Rose Raymond, who lived in Hanover, although Middleton learned from her mom that the family had eaten in a restaurant in Walkerton on Mother’s Day a week earlier. At last, Patterson thought, whatever was causing the outbreak must originate in the town.

  Minutes later, another piece of the puzzle slipped into place. The Owen Sound laboratory confirmed its earlier presumptive result on one of Kristen Hallett’s patients: it was E. coli O157 making the youngster ill. In addition, tests on a second patient were showing early signs of E. coli poisoning. There was little doubt now. The search that had started two days earlier pointed squarely in one direction: an E. coli outbreak that had started in Walkerton.

  Sunday, May 21

  Noon

  Dave Patterson reviewed his notes. Nothing obvious appeared to tie together the high incidence of E. coli–induced illness among the young and old or the widespread nature of the outbreak. There had been no single event that could account for a food source. On the list of suspect sources, that put water on top, the tap water supplied by the municipality through its public utilities commission headed by Stan Koebel. Patterson mulled over Stan’s contention that the water was okay, but his discomfort had grown to a near certainty that something was terribly wrong. The time for waiting for definitive answers was over.

  Advising people to boil their drinking water is not without its risks. For one thing, there’s a very real danger of accidents leading to burns or scald injuries. An advisory can cause anxiety and have a devastating effect on businesses, such as restaurants, and on tourism. If, ultimately, it turned out to have been unnecessary, people would be furious at the disruption to their daily lives and the health unit’s credibility would take a serious hit. Still, there seemed no way around it. With Murray McQuigge’s agreement, Dave Patterson sat down at his kitchen table, picked up a pen, and began writing what would undoubtedly be among the most important paragraphs of his life:

  “Although the Walkerton PUC is not aware of any problems with their water system, this advisory is being issued by the health unit as a precaution until more information is known about the illness and the status of the water supply.”

  As Patterson worked on the wording, McQuigge called the man who had hired him as medical officer of health a decade earlier. Mayor Dave Thomson had been reeve of Brant Township and a member of the county’s board of health when the then middle-aged doctor applied for the area’s top public-health job. Armed with a fresh degree in public health from Harvard after twenty years as a family doctor in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, McQuigge impressed the board as a knowledgeable professional and they hired him immediately. Despite being a small-town Ontario boy himself, McQuigge couldn’t have been more different from Thomson in approach. Brash, brimming with confidence, and possessed of a highly developed sense of self, the bull-necked McQuigge struck the slightly built, soft-spoken Thomson as a man very much in control of himself. And yet both men shared something a little less obvious beneath their vastly different exteriors: a steely ego. Over the years, they ran into each other fairly often at various meetings but, beyond that, had few dealings. Until, that is, there was a salmonella outbreak in the mid-1990s in a county hospital. McQuigge came out swinging against the poultry industry. The investigation ultimately led to the destruction of thousands of hens at a barn in the United States, even though the actual contamination was found to be in improperly cleaned mixers in the hospital kitchen. The farmer in Thomson bristled. He felt McQuigge had gone too far too quickly in tarring and feathering the entire poultry industry, a key agricultural player in Bruce County. As far as Thomson was concerned, the outbreak had nothing to do with the poor hens.

  “I really didn’t appreciate you going around and blaming somebody till you knew who it was,” Thomson told the doctor.

  When McQuigge later made a big production about ordering a cleanup after a fire at a mobile-trailer park, Thomson’s image of him as an intemperate man with a barely controlled temper solidified.

  Dave Thomson, it is fair to say, was not a worldly man. His life revolved around the mixed cattle, hog, and sheep farm in Brant Township on which he was born and raised, the only boy among four sisters. He had attended a one-room school. Only when it came time for Grade 8 in the fall of 1945 did the country boy head to the big city, Walkerton, where he was to stay with his father’s sisters. But even on the first day of high school, the routine of the farm tugged at him. There was hay to bring in, the second cut of alpha-alpha, and at noon he phoned his mom and s
aid he’d be happy to come home and help if they’d come and get him. They did. The next morning, he said, “I think I’ll just stay at home and help you.” He never did get back to school. One day, a neighbour, who was on council in Brant Township, asked the fifteen-year-old Thomson to be his part-time superintendent, looking after the two roads in his section, one of which ran to the boy’s family farm. He jumped at the chance. For a couple of years, young Davey helped put up snow fences, break the roads in winter, or use a pony grader to grade them in the summer. Then he spent a year as the second man on a two-man snowplough, raising or lowering the wing before moving up to the driver’s seat. When his folks moved into town, he took over the farm. A year later, he married Helen, and they raised four sons, three of whom still farm in the area.

  Great uncle Sandy had been something of an entrepreneur in his day and had achieved some measure of fame and fortune by designing a steel horse collar. Unlike padded collars, these were impervious to sparks and he had great success selling the contraptions to fire departments in the northern U.S. Now some folk said they weren’t much good because they made the horses sweat, but when the Great War erupted, sales of the fire- and bullet-proof collars shot up. The Thomsons began buying property. Later, they would provide the financing for others in the area to buy their own farms. The Thomsons prospered. In 1966, with the oldest boy in the earliest grades, it was getting to be time to do away with the one-room school of Thomson’s youth. Some people wanted to build a new consolidated school smack in the middle of the township, but trucking kids to the middle of nowhere in the winter seemed like a fool idea to Thomson. Better, he thought, would be to build in Walkerton, near the high school. That way, one school bus, whose canary yellow colour was slowly becoming familiar, could take all the kids at once. Thomson ran for school trustee, and was elected in the fall of 1966. Within two years, Brant Central opened across from the public high school in Walkerton. When a neighbour wanted to run for the new consolidated school board, Thomson, his mission complete, decided to step aside and put his name in for council. He was elected as a Brant Township councillor in the fall of 1968, beginning a career in local politics that would span five decades.

  Sunday, May 21

  12:40 P.M.

  “We’ve got stool cultures showing E. coli O157. It’s a deadly serious bug,” McQuigge was saying. “Can you think of any food-borne sources?”

  There was pause as Thomson consulted in the background with his son, who told him about the volunteer firefighters’ Backstreet Boys “tribute” concert at the Walkerton arena a week earlier.

  “A lot of families were at that,” Thomson offered.

  “I hadn’t heard that,” McQuigge said. “Do you know what food was served?”

  Thomson consulted his son again before telling McQuigge that pop and pizza had been available.

  “Those aren’t likely sources of O157,” McQuigge said.

  He also said the public utilities commission, whose board Thomson sat on as mayor, had reassured the health unit that the water was safe.

  “Look, I don’t want to send off any alarm bells, David,” McQuigge went on, “but I’m going to issue a boil-water advisory just as a precaution because we don’t have a clue what this is. There’s different people sick.”

  After thirty-four years in local politics, Mayor Dave Thomson was used to being called at his farm home. You learn pretty quickly in small-town or rural public life: if people have questions or want to complain about something, they grab you on the street or pick up the phone and get you at home. Thomson didn’t mind particularly, although he hated being disturbed on Sundays. Still, McQuigge’s call was highly unusual. Thomson wasn’t sure what to make of it. He detected no urgency in McQuigge’s voice. The doctor sounded his typical self: forceful, imposing. If he didn’t want to send off any alarm bells and the boil-water advisory was just a precaution, why bother? But that was McQuigge for you. Always going off half-cocked, just like he’d done with the hens. Whatever was going on, the health unit would take care of it. If there was bad food some place, it was up to McQuigge and his crew to find it. Still, Thomson called Stan Koebel at home.

  “Is the water okay, Stan?” Thomson asked. “I hear there’s people getting sick.”

  “I think the water’s okay,” Stan replied.

  There was no point mentioning the bad test results. By Tuesday, anyway, everything would undoubtedly be fine. Thomson shook his head and went back to enjoying his Sunday with his family. For two days, he would make no effort to find out what was happening in his town, no effort to help warn its many unsuspecting residents.

  Sunday, May 21

  12:52 P.M.

  As head of the public-health unit, it fell to Dr. Murray McQuigge to issue the warning to people to boil their drinking water. Patterson had read his kitchen-table draft to him over the phone and McQuigge had transcribed it. But how to ensure the public would hear it, given the long weekend? The obvious answer appeared to be a local radio station. In this part of the world, radio is a key means by which people get information. Its immediacy and wide listenership make it an ideal medium for letting people know what the weather will bring or about school-bus cancellations, a relatively frequent occurrence in the county. The health unit had previously used radio to disseminate information about rabies and meningitis outbreaks as well as for previous boil-water advisories issued for two smaller towns in the region, Wiarton and Meaford. The emergency plan for the Bruce nuclear power plant on the western edge of the county depends heavily on radio. McQuigge had recently been involved in the plant’s Y2K millennium bug preparations and radio would have played a vital role had anything gone wrong at the stroke of midnight, December 31, 1999. Besides, with the long weekend, the nearest local daily, the Owen Sound Sun-Times, wouldn’t be publishing for two more days. Television, with its wide audience, was one other obvious option. But which TV station to use? How to be sure people would be watching the right channel? No. Radio was the best bet, McQuigge decided.

  CKNX radio in Wingham, about thirty minutes from Walkerton, first broadcast to the public in 1926, though its initials dated from 1935. In the late 1930s, towns around the area clamoured to host NX’s Saturday-night live “Barn Dance” broadcast. Radio had begun a swift ascent as the primary conduit for fast-breaking news against which no newspaper could compete. Even to this day, almost two-thirds of people in Bruce County twelve years and older tune in to CKNX at some point during the week. Still, it’s fair to say, the latter half of the 1900s were not exactly kind to Canadian radio’s newsgathering operations, especially those at smaller stations. Reporting staffs were either pared to the bone or eliminated. With rare, mostly big-city exceptions, private radio newsrooms go unstaffed after-hours and on weekends. Just about the only live radio news Canadians get in off-hours comes from Broadcast News in Toronto, a subsidiary off The Canadian Press, the country’s national news agency. But CKNX does have someone in its newsroom during parts of the weekend. Coming in before five that morning, Gord Dougan had found two messages on the station’s answering machine. Both appeared to be from the same person and both had come in sometime Saturday evening or overnight.

  “You better do something,” the caller said. “There’s something wrong with our water supply up here in Walkerton. I think there’s contamination.”

  Dougan didn’t know what to make of it. Was it a hoax? The best way to find out, he figured, was to call the medical officer of health. He waited until a more reasonable hour, reaching McQuigge at home at about 9:30 A.M. Did the doctor know of any problems with Walkerton’s water? Could there be a link to the previous week’s floods?

  “The water supply for Walkerton is from a deep well so it should be secure. It shouldn’t be subject to any contamination,” McQuigge told him, adding that the incubation period for gastric illness would suggest the problem predated the floods.

  McQuigge went on to say that one hundred people had phoned the town’s hospital, two dozen had shown up with symptoms of
diarrhea and cramps, and one stool sample had tested positive for E. coli. In addition, two children were in hospital in Owen Sound for observation. The health unit was doing its own tests. He promised to call as soon as he had any further information. At 11 A.M., Dougan began his newscast with this understated opening:

  “A number of people in the Walkerton area are not having the best of long holiday weekends. The Walkerton hospital has received about one hundred calls from people suffering from diarrhea.”

  Dougan reported McQuigge’s comments and repeated the information on the noon newscast. He then left for the day, leaving the newsroom unstaffed. When McQuigge called minutes later to inform the station of the boil-water advisory, he got voicemail. Undaunted, he left a message saying he was putting out the warning and was heading to his office in Owen Sound. Then, not realizing it was the Environment Ministry he was calling, he contacted the Spills Action Centre in Toronto to ask for an emergency number for the province’s public health branch. Paul Webb, who took the call, laughed aloud when McQuigge said he was investigating an E. coli outbreak in Walkerton. But after checking with someone, he told McQuigge the hotline had received an anonymous call a day earlier.

  “We know they’re working on the drinking water lines up there,” said Webb.

  “We knew that too, but the PUC there is telling us that everything is fine,” McQuigge replied.

  “That’s what we were told too.”

  Webb then told McQuigge that the Spills Action Centre had tracked down a John Koebel, the manager of Walkerton’s PUC, who’d reported “minimum adverse sampling” in the system.

  “Well, we’re really into something,” McQuigge said grimly. “We’ve got over one hundred and twenty cases of something and we think it’s E. coli bloody diarrhea.”

  “Oh jeez.”

  Hundreds more people might have drunk Walkerton’s poisonous water had not McQuigge’s voicemail to CKNX triggered a pager carried by reporter Scott Pettigrew. He immediately headed to the station and, based on the voicemail, quickly wrote the 2 P.M. newscast.