by Colin Perkel
“Stan, do you have anything to add at this point?” asked McQuigge, who found it surprising the PUC manager was even present given what he’d heard earlier about his state of mind.
Everyone turned to Stan Koebel, who briefly met their gaze before staring down at his clasped hands. He cleared his throat and began to talk about the new main construction on Highway 9 and the problems they’d had with it, interjecting quickly that it wasn’t connected to the system. But he made no mention of what he’d told Dave Patterson: that he’d had the bad lab results for days, that the chlorinator had been out of service. McQuigge could stand it no more.
“Come on, Stan,” he interrupted loudly, angrily. “Come on, Stan, come clean.”
Stan looked stunned. Thomson flinched. The room was quiet. They all stared at Stan, who seemed to be shrinking before their eyes.
“Didn’t you have a fax last Thursday showing your water was contaminated?” McQuigge asked.
“Yes,” came the almost inaudible response.
“And what were the results of those samples?”
“They all failed.”
“And didn’t you tell Dave Patterson that you had a chlorinator that hadn’t worked for some time?”
“Yes.”
A thick, heavy silence descended on the room. Someone let out a long, low whistle. Stan covered his face with his hands and began sobbing quietly.
“Why did you assure us the water was safe if the chlorinator wasn’t working?” McQuigge demanded.
“I believed we had good quality water, and assurances from Frank and myself,” he pleaded. “We thought we were flushing and chlorinating as a precautionary measure, to make sure it wasn’t the water.”
He took a deep breath before trying to explain further: the chlorination from Well 6 should have been sufficient to disinfect the system, even though the unit at Well 7 wasn’t working. The rationale seemed to make perfect sense. Years ago, unchlorinated water from Well 1 was disinfected as it mixed with treated water from Well 2. He talked about the overflow pipe at Well 7. The swamp in which the well was located might have flooded from the big storm and dirty water might have made its way through the flimsy flap and into the well.
“Look, we don’t know what’s happened here,” Bye began. “We have a number of situations that have to be addressed. Maybe it’s Well 7, maybe it’s the replacement of the mains.”
“That’s not possible,” Stan protested quietly, his voice breaking. “That can’t be.”
He was completely exhausted, befuddled. Bye threw out more possibilities.
“Maybe there’s problems with cross-connections or maybe there’s inadequate chlorination.”
His desperation clearly evident, Stan asked what he should do. It wasn’t the ministry’s job to offer that kind of advice, Bye responded. Get a consultant, he said.
A furious McQuigge was hardly paying attention. But if the doctor was angry, so was Thomson, who throughout the meeting had been struggling to grasp it all. McQuigge’s loud voice and accusatory tone bothered him intensely. It was as if he were trying to force Stan into making some kind of confession when he obviously didn’t have a clue. How dare he lay into Stan under the circumstances? How unprofessional! First he says the man is suicidal, then he attacks him, humiliates him, hangs him out to dry in front of all these people. The clock above the Queen ticked relentlessly.
“Think we’d better leave now,” McQuigge said to his team.
The light bulb had gone on for McQuigge. They’re going to blame the health unit for not acting more quickly. That, he decided, would never be allowed to happen. As he rose from his desk, McQuigge leaned toward Thomson and motioned him toward the windows.
“Dave,” he said. “Now’s the time to tell the public what you know.”
“Yes, you’ve already told me that once,” Thomson replied.
McQuigge was puzzled. He couldn’t for the life of him recall having said anything like that to the mayor.
The human mind is a marvellous instrument. In a heartbeat, it synthesizes huge amounts of information, interprets the raw and disparate data provided by the senses to create a cohesive, meaningful whole. But at the same time, it is fallible as an objective chronicler of record because every cell of who we are is brought to bear on the incoming information. Our thoughts, our emotions, our biases act as filters, as prisms, as mirrors, especially in times of stress. Then, too, we are all capable of self-deception when the objective and subjective realities of our worlds, of ourselves, collide. So, we see what we want to see, hear what we want to hear. Often, we become implacably convinced of the truth of a self-invention. Perception, after all, is nine-tenths of reality. It is real because we believe it so. It is no lie because we believe it to be truth, and if others also believe it, if we make others believe it, then it must be true.
Thomson mulled over McQuigge’s parting words. What was he getting at? Was it a threat? Didn’t he say, “Don’t you blow the whistle on me or else Brockton will…?”
As he left the council offices, McQuigge noticed a Do Not Drink the Water sign had gone up over the drinking fountain. Similar signs had been going up in buildings all over the town. At the schools, water fountains and taps were shut down and covered over, bottled water brought in. People were advised to wash their hands with bleach amid rising fears about the disease spreading, especially among children.
Tuesday, May 23
3:30 P.M.
In the council chambers, the mood was grim. The first step, they decided, was to call Steve Burns, a consulting engineer who had studied the town’s water system back in the early 1990s and was therefore familiar with it. They would try to set up a meeting with him for the morning. One of the councillors argued they should try to get Burns in that afternoon. A phone call confirmed that Burns was prepared to come immediately and on his arrival, council reconvened in a special session. Shortly after they began, Stan Koebel arrived and joined the discussion. Burns asked what he knew about the situation. In a monotone, Stan began by saying there had been some historical bacteria problems with Wells 5 and 7. At times he appeared confused, even disoriented. He’d looked at the A&L lab results showing the bad water the previous Thursday. One of the office girls had set the report on his desk. There had been complaints about too much chlorine in the water. He’d been flushing the system since Friday and was continuing to do so. When council suggested the town’s works or volunteer fire department could help him out, he jumped at the offer. Burns said he’d have an action plan by morning.
“There’s no magic to it,” he said. “It’s a matter of flushing, chlorinating, and taking samples.”
To Stan it sounded exactly like what he’d been doing for so many hours over so many days.
—
In London, eighty-three-year-old Edith Pearson had already arrived from Walkerton after taking what would be the last trip of her life. Her family had lied that she had a heart condition to get the Walkerton hospital to admit her in the first place. In the critical-care unit, two-and-a-half-year-old Mary Raymond was losing her struggle. It had been just five days since she came down with a fever and diarrhea, just hours since she seemed to be getting better. But the E. coli poison had reached her brain, causing myriad tiny strokes. Her distraught mother held her tightly in her arms and clutched her to her breast as the unresponsive toddler quietly, imperceptibly, drew her last breath.
—
Around Walkerton, where poisonous water gushed from every hydrant in town, word of the two deaths began spreading from family to friends to neighbours to strangers. Anxiety and concern gave way to grief and panic and fear. What on earth was happening? Who’s next? Slowly, the world was starting to notice. Reporters and photographers were arriving in droves. A small, sleepy town in Bruce County in midwestern Ontario was unwillingly, unwittingly, sliding to the top of the national news. It was as if a protective veil has been ripped aside, as if some giant invisible hand had swept the town into a strange dimension of darkness.
Blowing the Whistle
Wednesday, May 24
8:15 A.M.
AT WALKERTON DISTRICT Secondary School across the road from Mother Teresa, the day began with the usual playing of “O Canada,” followed on this day by the Lord’s Prayer. About eight hundred students attend the high school, seven hundred of whom bus or drive in from area towns and communities. The boil-water advisory had been in place for more than two full days now, but no one in Alex Cooper’s Grade 10 geography class appeared to be perturbed. It seemed a little creepy, partly because no one had really explained what exactly the problem was, although Cooper had suggested before class that he thought it was E. coli.
“Omigod,” someone said. “What’s E. coli?”
The restless teenagers quieted as the announcement sounded over the intercom: the town’s water had been contaminated and was unsafe to drink. The cause was unknown. There followed several minutes of detailed instructions on how to wash hands: put a blob of soap, which had mysteriously appeared in the normally empty washroom dispensers, in the middle of the palms and spread it outwards. Rinse off thoroughly, then use paper towels to close the taps. It seemed like the dumbest thing they’d ever heard. What’s the point of using paper towels on the taps if they were washing their hands in contaminated water? Cooper told the class to wait and left. He returned a few minutes later.
“They hadn’t thought that through,” he said. “They’re going to rethink it.”
It was shortly before the lunch hour when the principal made another announcement.
“For your safety, we are going to send you home for the next two days while we sort this out.”
“Yes!” A soft chorus arose from the class, fists punched the air, high-fives were exchanged. “Two days off!”
The teens streamed outside into the sunshine. They were greeted by the highly unusual sight of the yellow school buses waiting to take them home. Not even on the worst snow days are the buses brought in early. No matter, school was out for two days, and they busily chatted and made plans to get together. They had no idea they wouldn’t see the inside of a classroom again for three weeks, that it would be almost four months before they’d be returning to their own school again, eight months before they could drink from the fountain. Nor did they know that in London, fellow 10th grader Jessica Crawford had just undergone emergency dialysis. When she was released from hospital three weeks later, her hands and arms were scarred from the 150 needles she’d had stuck in her, her stomach permanently etched by the dialysis.
Wednesday, May 24
11:58 A.M.
Frank Koebel was in the PUC shop at lunch hour when someone turned up the radio. Despite the boil-water advisory issued three days earlier, despite all the talk of illness, despite his brother’s frantic flushing and insistence on raising the chlorine levels, the commotion still appeared somewhat abstract to him. He and his family had continued to drink the water. All this fuss and feathers was just that, he figured. Sure they’d usually try to flush the system each year in the spring but that was to get rid of rust and make sure the hydrants were working, not to get rid of bacteria. Sure, he’d heard on occasion about samples that suggested the possibility of bacteria in the water, but the resamples always came back clean, so the chances were that the bad ones were the result of contamination of the sampling bottles or taps. In any event, a little bacteria couldn’t be that bad. Although Stan had never really shared the results of the inspection reports that revealed serious contamination problems, surely the ministry hotshots would have picked up on something serious enough to cause the kind of crisis unfolding around him. He stopped chewing as the news began:
“A baby and an elderly woman have died of an E. coli bacterial infection that has left hundreds ill in Walkerton, Ontario.”
Frank Koebel’s blood ran cold. A week later, he went to emergency with stomach cramps. He was given a muscle relaxant. He was also given a bottle for stool samples. He never used it.
—
Engineering consultant Steve Burns had arrived at council at about 8 A.M. that day with the action plan he’d spent much of the night preparing. The room was crowded: Janice Hallahan was on hand, as was Jim Kieffer, the PUC chairman. Also present was Ed Houghton, the manager of the utilities commission in Collingwood, which in 1996 had suffered through a six-month boil-water advisory after the parasite cryptosporidium was found in its drinking water. Stan Koebel was also there. He had just spent a couple of hours showing the system to Houghton, whom he’d asked the night before to come down to help out. Houghton discussed what the PUC had been doing. Stan stayed quiet. At some point, ministry supervisor Phil Bye showed up along with two of his superiors. The group talked about dumping all the highly chlorinated water from the two large towers and the threat that posed to the environment. They talked about Wells 6 and 7. Burns raised the possibility that a main might have been left open at the Highway 9 construction project causing the contamination.
“No, no, no,” Stan protested and he began to weep. “That’s not possible. The system was under pressure.”
Terry Flynn of Frontline Corporate Communications joined the meeting, starting the meter ticking on a public-relations contract that would cost the town $46,000 a month, close to half a million dollars, by the time it was done. Flynn warned council to prepare for an onslaught of reporters demanding access and answers. The calls were already pouring in. Then someone came in and whispered something to the mayor no one there had heard before: People had died. There was a stunned silence. It seemed as if Stan Koebel would explode.
—
Three people had now died: Lenore Al, Mary Rose Raymond, and Edith Pearson, who passed away in a morphine haze in London as her family watched helplessly. It had been just four days since the Walkerton emergency room had sent her home with the standard recommendation to drink plenty of fluids. In Owen Sound, the phones in the health unit’s head office rang off the hook. It was the same situation at its smaller branch offices. Among the many calls, there were pointed questions. How on earth did this happen? Gradually, it seemed, the questions were shifting to accusations. You people knew there was diarrhea. What took you so long?
Fiercely proud as he was of his organization and the way it had responded to the outbreak, the mere suggestion that the health unit had mishandled the situation rankled McQuigge. Still, he felt certain that Mayor Thomson would tell the public what he’d heard from Stan Koebel. Surely, McQuigge said to Patterson, the mayor would use a news conference to mention the information, or rather misinformation, Stan had provided the health unit during its initial frantic search for the cause of the epidemic. Better a day late than never.
Dave Thomson was both nervous and unhappy. He had no desire to hang Stan out to dry, certainly not at McQuigge’s behest. His blood boiled every time he thought back to how the bull-headed McQuigge had gone after Stan. Where was the compassion? The mercy? Everything about that confrontation, more like an ambush, a sniper attack, was wrong. What was the point of the iron fist? Stan couldn’t have been expected to defend himself under the circumstances, what with a ministry investigation underway and possible charges coming down the road and all. Thomson knew Stan’s parents. He had run into Frank Sr. during his days as the town’s works foreman, and the elder Koebel and his wife came out to the Thomson farm now and again to buy eggs. They were decent people. And Stan had always seemed dedicated and knew the ins and outs of the PUC. Maybe there was another explanation for what had happened. It made no sense to go around pointing fingers until all the facts were in. No. A quiet backroom chat, Thomson decided, was what was called for. No going off half-cocked. Maybe that was McQuigge’s style. It wasn’t his.
“Why did the public utilities commission tell the health unit the water was okay?” a reporter asked at an afternoon news conference.
“I can’t honestly answer that question,” Thomson responded.
When the PUC heard there was a problem, he continued, they started to flush the system and continued
flushing diligently. It was only days later, he said, that E. coli was confirmed to be in the water. A half-hour later, in another TV grilling, the interviewer asked if the public had been notified as quickly as it should have been. That’s a matter of opinion, Thomson replied. The Ministry of the Environment had only issued the boil-water advisory as a precaution, he said, getting his facts mixed up. During yet another TV interview at 6 P.M., he was asked whether enough had been done when people first started to show symptoms of illness. And again, he defended Stan Koebel and the public utilities commission. The PUC had acted very reliably, he said. After all, the manager had upped chlorine levels and begun flushing on Friday even though he didn’t know anything was wrong.
McQuigge fumed. While Thomson had praised the health unit for acting appropriately during one of the interviews, he had said nothing about the adverse water samples, nothing about the defective chlorination, nothing about what Stan knew and didn’t tell. Nothing! Throughout the afternoon, McQuigge voiced his concerns to his staff: it wasn’t even close to being a matter of opinion about whether the public was notified as quickly as possible. Thomson’s silence and prevarication amounted to letting the health unit’s credibility hang out there in the wind. No. If the bloody diarrhea was going to hit the fan because of some dope at the public utilities commission and a wishy-washy mayor, none of the spatters was going to sully McQuigge. Besides, who would take the unit’s urgent advice seriously if it were being tarred with the same dirty brush as those incompetents? He was still stewing as he drove home that evening, when a plan formed in his mind. People had to know why it had taken him two long days to issue the boil-water advisory. Telling the world what he knew carried the risk of upsetting the mayor, Stan Koebel, and perhaps others, thereby getting in the way of dealing with the crisis. If ever there was a time to be working together, this was it. But protecting his reputation had to take precedence. The time had come to set the record straight.