by Colin Perkel
Sunday, May 21
2 P.M.
“The Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound Health Unit has issued a boil-water advisory for all Walkerton residents. Medical Officer of Health Dr. Murray McQuigge says close to one hundred people have called the Walkerton hospital complaining of diarrhea. Two children were sick enough to have been transferred to the Grey-Bruce Regional Health Centre in Owen Sound,” Pettigrew read on-air.
“Again, the Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound Health Unit is asking all Walkerton residents to boil water before being used for drinking and cooking.”
The advisory topped the news for the next several hours. By the end of the day, close to half of everyone in Walkerton had heard about it. Of those, almost one-third had heard it on the radio. A higher percentage heard about it through word of mouth. But more than half the population remained blissfully unaware of the warning to avoid the lethally contaminated water flowing from their taps. Moreover, in an inexplicable oversight, the health unit failed to notify the Walkerton hospital, which began moving to bottled water only as nurses on shift change or patients spread the word. It would also take two more days before Maple Court Villa and Brucelea Haven, homes to some of the town’s most at-risk residents, or the jail were formally notified. Still, what had begun as a low-key announcement on a local radio station was on its way to becoming one of the country’s biggest news stories.
—
For Peter and Esther Raymond, the news was desperate. Their toddler’s condition had taken a sharp turn for the worse. The bloody diarrhea persisted. She threw up constantly. She cried as painful cramps convulsed her. Her delicate face was becoming puffy. It was time to fly her to London. The next flight she would make would be to the East Coast for burial.
—
David Patterson heard the boil-water advisory he’d so recently crafted on the car radio as he made the twenty-minute drive from his home in Tara to the Owen Sound office. He’d been all but consumed by the crisis for two days now, and he struggled to make sense of it. He bounded up the stairs into the office, clutching his handwritten copy of the advisory, which he handed to Mary Sellars to type up and fax to the newspapers. Patterson then picked up the phone and called Stan Koebel, who had spent another three hours that morning flushing the system.
“Just want to let you know that we’ve issued a boil-water advisory for Walkerton,” Patterson told him.
There was a brief silence.
“I wish you’d called me before you’d done that,” Stan replied.
“We had no choice, Stan. You know. We can’t figure out anything else but the water.”
Stan told Patterson he’d been flushing at Mother Teresa school for sixteen hours and that chlorine levels were high.
“Any suggestions about what else we should be doing?”
Patterson considered. This wasn’t his area of expertise. But he told Stan it made sense to be raising the chlorine levels. He then headed to the boardroom for the first of what would become dozens of such gatherings aimed at controlling what was now clearly an epidemic. Life for the members of the health unit had been turned upside down, but Stan Koebel’s universe was disintegrating. He sought refuge in a reassuring routine: cutting the grass in the yard behind his home. Surely, if he went about his normal business, did as he always did, just pretended nothing was wrong, the growing sense of doom would go away? But the mental ramparts he was trying so desperately to build as a buttress against reality stood no chance.
Sunday, May 21
2:57 P.M.
“Is John there please?” the caller asked.
“John?”
“Koebel.”
“You must have the wrong number. I don’t know a John Koebel,” Stan’s wife responded.
Chris Johnson was puzzled.
“I was given this number by the manager of the public utilities commission. I’m with the Ministry of the Environment.”
“Oh, it’s Stan Koebel,” said Carole.
“Okay. This is Stan Koebel’s residence?”
“Yep. And he’s the manager of the PUC.”
“Stan is?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Then what’s John?”
“I don’t know who John Koebel is. It was his uncle that’s dead,” said Carole with a chuckle.
“Is Stan in?”
“Ah yeah, he’s just cutting the grass.”
Carole went out and called her husband. He turned off the mower. The sweat showed under his arms and on his flushed, furrowed brow.
“Hi, Stan, it’s the Ministry of the Environment Spills Action Centre calling. I’m sorry to bother you. We’ve had the adverse water samples in the Walkerton water distribution system and the possible E. coli cases.”
Stan still couldn’t quite figure out exactly who the caller was, even though he’d spoken to him a day earlier.
“You said there had been minimal adverse sampling in the past. Do you have any record of that?”
“Two weeks ago. I haven’t sampled for this week yet.”
Stan was lying and he knew it. How could he admit that he’d known for days about the results of the samples he’d taken less than a week earlier? Why even mention it when he’d heard nothing from the ministry people in Owen Sound? Surely they’d have called if there had been a problem.
“So you’ll be doing sampling on Tuesday then?”
“Oh yeah,” he answered confidently. “Yes.”
This was a far more comfortable area of conversation. Stan was sure the next samples would come up clean. They had to, given that they would be taken after almost three days of flushing and overdosing the system on chlorine. What else could he possibly do? He’d even called his counterpart in Wingham for advice, mentioning only the reports of illness but not the bad lab results.
“We’re flushing and superchlorinating,” he said. “Is that the right thing or not?”
“That’s all you can do.”
Stan figured he’d better call Mayor Dave Thomson to check whether he’d heard about the boil-water advisory. Yes, Thomson said. Dr. McQuigge had told him. To Stan’s relief, the mayor didn’t seem too concerned. For the first time in three days, the exhausted water manager began to believe the situation was under control. He couldn’t have been more wrong.
Sunday, May 21
5 P.M.
After the second strategy meeting of the afternoon, Patterson heard from John Alden of the London public-health lab, whom he’d paged earlier. Alden, who was at home, listened as Patterson explained the pressing nature of the situation and the health unit’s suspicion that the water in Walkerton was contaminated with E. coli O157. He offered to meet Patterson at the lab to get tests started immediately. With that arranged, Patterson called James Schmidt and asked him to collect water samples in Walkerton. Restaurants would probably be the best bet because they’d be open. In addition, he asked Schmidt to get samples from the health unit office and the hospital itself.
“About twenty samples is what we need. I’ll come down to Walkerton right away to pick them up and take them myself to London,” Patterson said, ignoring McQuigge’s advice to send them down by taxi.
Patterson called two other members of the health unit at home and asked them to report to work the following day, the Victoria Day public holiday. He then set out for Walkerton. It was well after 8 P.M. when he stopped by Brucelea Haven to pick up the stool samples they’d stashed in the fridge. He then met up with Schmidt, who passed on the water samples he had gathered from the town’s taps. There was one more stop to make: Maple Court Villa nursing home, where Patterson picked up more stool samples and some vials of the water as well. At neither place did he remember to mention the boil-water advisory.
Sunday, May 21
8:30 P.M.
A blood-curdling scream pierced the Sunday-evening calm of the McDonald home, a sound that will always stay with Jamie. He bounded downstairs to find five-year-old Ian doubled over in agony. He bundled the child into the car and drove the few hundred metres to the
hospital, where about twenty or thirty people, a cross-section of the community, filled emergency. All looked pale and miserable and hunched over. Dr. David Barr examined Ian and told his worried dad to keep him hydrated with bottled water.
“This is going to be Third World Mexico for the next few weeks,” Barr told a disbelieving McDonald.
Sunday, May 21
10 P.M.
Dave Patterson had barely begun the two-hundred-kilometre drive to the laboratory in London when his supervisor called him en route to tell him that little Mary Rose Raymond was in critical care. Patterson wanted to cry. When Murray McQuigge heard the same news, he began to wonder whether there would even be enough dialysis machines in the province to look after an expected deluge of hemolytic uremic syndrome. The concern abated when he heard that evening about peritoneal dialysis, a method by which fluid is pumped through the child’s abdomen to flush out the toxins. Patterson arrived in London well after midnight and called John Alden at home. Alden promptly joined him at the lab to take possession of the water samples and get the analysis started. It was after 3 A.M. when Patterson made it back home to Tara, having almost run into a deer on the way.
Death on a Holiday
Victoria Day, Monday, May 22
7:30 A.M.
DAVE AND CAROLYN BIESENTHAL had raised four kids, two boys and two girls, in their quiet corner of Bruce County. One of them, Laryssa, had put Walkerton on the international map in a way that had made an entire town swell with pride. As part of Canada’s Olympic rowing team, she had brought home a coveted bronze medal from the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. Not shabby for a homegrown girl from a little Ontario town, which considered it as good as gold and threw a huge parade in her honour. But no matter where else she lived or travelled, Stonegate farm was always home and the long weekend in May found her there for some rest and relaxation. With her were six friends from the rowing team that was preparing for the 2000 Games in Sydney still a few months off. It didn’t get much better than this when it came to comfortable peace and quiet. A contented hush fell over the countryside on the holiday Monday. But that hush was rudely smashed by the jolting mechanical roar of helicopters coming and going at the local hospital a few short kilometres to the east.
“There must have been one helluva car accident somewhere,” Dave said to Carolyn.
—
Hours and days were starting to blur for Dave Patterson. The issuance of the boil-water advisory the previous afternoon had only thrown the health unit into more frantic activity and he’d managed to get just a few hours of sleep for a second straight night. It wasn’t quite 8 A.M. when he asked James Schmidt to collect a second set of water samples in Walkerton and get them to London. The health unit outbreak team had been scheduled to assemble at about 2 P.M., but Dr. McQuigge called everybody in to Owen Sound early. The team scrambled to the office. McQuigge started the meeting at 10 A.M. Patterson hurried in about an hour later, missing the recap of the events of the past few days that he already knew well. McQuigge’s own morning had been occupied with an unending series of phone calls with other health officials, hospitals, doctors, laboratories. McQuigge had also talked to several local radio and TV reporters looking for information on the outbreak. He used the opportunities to get the message out about how to avoid secondary cases, those in which caregivers become infected. Shortly before 1 P.M., McQuigge heard from local Environment Ministry supervisor Phil Bye, whom the health unit had alerted earlier in the day. McQuigge impressed upon Bye the magnitude of the epidemic and the need for an immediate investigation. Bye, who two years earlier had overruled Michelle Zillinger’s recommendation to take legal action against the Walkerton Public Utilities Commission, promised to send in one of his officers right away.
Victoria Day, Monday, May 22
12:55 P.M.
John Earl was at home when the Spills Action Centre in Toronto phoned to ask him to respond to an incident of adverse water quality and disease outbreak in Walkerton. Earl had been with the Environment Ministry for a quarter-century. Following his degree in environmental studies in 1974, he’d joined the regional office in Owen Sound and never left. Over the years, he’d drifted up through the ranks to the position of senior environmental abatement officer, working mostly on the industrial side. In April 1999, he assumed responsibility for communal water though he had never had any training on water-related issues. His first contact with the Walkerton PUC occurred a few months later, when the testing laboratory, GAP, sent along results of samples that showed bacteria in the town’s water, specifically E. coli. Earl didn’t grasp the significance. He didn’t follow up. Nor did he know he was supposed to forward the results to the public health unit. Like so many others, he’d never heard of E. coli O157 and had no idea it could kill. A few months later, a second set of adverse samples arrived in his office, but Earl was on vacation and a colleague forgot to tell him about them. In October 1999, Earl was temporarily shipped back over to the industrial inspection program. Larry Struthers, another long-time and equally untrained member of the Owen Sound office, took over communal water for six months. On April 12, 2000, Struthers handed the responsibility back to Earl. The two men talked about outstanding issues for two hours, but Walkerton didn’t come up. In all, the ministry received seven faxes in April indicating that there was bad water in Walkerton, but any alarm bells had been muffled by bureaucratic ineptitude, complacency, fuzzy guidelines, and a general antipathy toward aggressive action. Besides, municipal water systems took up just a tiny fraction of the ministry’s time. It was, as the highest-level ministry managers had decided, a non-priority.
Earl headed to the office, arriving about an hour later. He contacted Dave Patterson, who informed him of the alarming number of cases of gastric disease, likely due to E. coli O157.
“We’ve run out of options,” Patterson said by way of explanation for the day-old boil-water advisory.
“What do you need from me?” Earl asked.
“We need you to get all bacteriological sampling results in the past two weeks, records of flows, records of chlorine residuals, and any other potentially useful information on the water there,” Patterson replied.
“We also need any documentation regarding the construction and disinfection of water mains. Oh yeah, find out whether the operating authorities knew of any unusual events in the past two weeks. You should be able to get all the information from the manager, Stan Koebel.”
Earl scanned a faxed report of the calls to the Spills Action Centre and jotted down a few notes in his almost illegible handwriting.
“Situation started on Friday. Illness in Walkerton. Bloody diarrhea. Two hundred calls. One hundred people entering in three hospitals. Using unlicensed operators at the water system.”
Earl talked to Phil Bye, who asked him to get a map of the water distribution system in Walkerton and to find the most recent ministry inspection reports. He then called Stan Koebel to say he’d be down within the hour. He noted the various pieces of information he wanted and asked him to have them ready for his arrival. It was a call Stan had been dreading. Although it was only early afternoon, he felt exhausted after another morning of running around and flushing hydrants. At times, it felt as if he were moving through molasses. For what felt like the hundredth time in several days, he drove down Yonge Street, past the Becker’s and Valu-Mart, and turned right at the corner across the road from Walkerton District Secondary School onto Highway 9. He drove up the hill, Mel’s Diner and Saugeen Filter Supply on the right, the Energizer plant on the left, past the visitor centre that featured a large poster of Laryssa Biesenthal in her rowing shell and the road leading to the PUC shop, down the dip past Percy Pletsch’s old farm and Stonegate, and turned right at the second mile-and-a-quarter. A few minutes later, Stan pulled up at the small cement-block pumphouse that housed Well 7. He felt sick. The daily log sheet was a mess. Earl would immediately know something was wrong. He left the sheet there, fetched the ones from the other wells, and went back to the office
to await the unwelcome visitor.
As Earl drove down to Walkerton, it occurred to him that the anonymous caller had detailed information about the town’s system. He wondered if someone had deliberately poisoned the water.
Victoria Day, Monday, May 22
2 P.M.
Despite the brightness of the day, the grey offices that were home to the health unit were bustling in a gloom the fluorescent lighting couldn’t quite dispel. Telephones rang constantly. People clutching notepads scurried up and down the stairs rather than wait for the old, slow elevator. There were hurried conversations, meetings, more scurrying, more meetings. The health unit was moving into crisis mode. Some tracked patients. Others offered advice to doctors on the best treatment for E. coli poisoning and on what signs might herald kidney distress or failure. New information was posted on the unit’s Web site, which saw the number of queries start a steep climb from the usual one-thousand hits per day to thirty thousand. Copies of the boil-water advisory were faxed to the local newspapers. Literature was prepared so other staff could start work the following day with all the information at their fingertips. In mid-afternoon, James Schmidt called to say he’d collected a second set of water samples and delivered them to the lab in London. Dave Patterson instructed him to repeat the entire process yet again the following day. In addition, he told Schmidt to deliver a series of notices on E. coli and preventing its spread to all food premises in Walkerton.
The health unit had now gathered information sheets on 120 patients, which were divvied up among the team members. They analysed the data, paying special attention to the onset of the illness and to where patients lived. McQuigge took it upon himself to call the parents of every child under five he knew to have diarrhea, about fifteen in all.