Well of Lies

by Colin Perkel

  Wednesday, May 24

  9:30 P.M.

  “I’m going on the air first thing in the morning to tell all the media that this tragedy could have been prevented,” McQuigge told the startled mayor by phone.

  “Can’t you wait, at least until after I’ve talked to council? We’re meeting at 8 A.M., you know.”

  “No, I can’t wait,” McQuigge replied. “The public needs to know that this could have been prevented.”

  Thomson reluctantly acquiesced. McQuigge called Patterson.

  “I’m going to be on Canada AM at seven in the morning,” McQuigge told him. “I’m going to tell them everything we know.”

  Patterson set his alarm clock. This was one broadcast he wasn’t going to miss. Five hours had passed since seventy-five-year-old Vera Coe had died in the Walkerton hospital. She’d undergone a radical mastectomy for breast cancer nine days earlier and appeared to be recovering. She had developed symptoms of E. coli poisoning on the day the health unit put out the boil-water advisory.

  Thursday, May 25

  5:30 A.M.

  Murray McQuigge sat down at his office computer and typed up the statement he had brooded over most of the night. The first glow of the new day was on the horizon when he headed down to the CTV satellite truck parked outside the front of the building. The TV crew was already waiting to do the interview that was scheduled to air live on the national show, Canada AM. McQuigge told them he wanted to make a statement and they passed that on to the studio in Toronto. Shortly after 7 A.M., interviewer Wei Chen’s voice sounded in his earpiece.

  “Have you ever seen anything like this?” she was asking.

  “No. We’ve never seen anything like this.”

  “What’s happened here? Why has this happened?”

  “Well, I’m about to make a statement and it’s a statement we’d prefer not to make.”

  On the street that parallels the Sydenham River just metres from where McQuigge stood, a truck went by. Chen gave him the go-ahead.

  “Yesterday, there were questions of the chief medical officer of health of Ontario and myself about whether we acted with all possible speed to warn the citizens of Walkerton that their water might be contaminated,” McQuigge began reading.

  He recounted the events leading up to the boil-water advisory, including the calls his people had made to the PUC, although he didn’t mention Stan Koebel by name. Several times, he emphasized that the PUC had assured the health unit the water was “safe and secure.” The PUC had received a fax the previous Thursday showing that the water was contaminated but had failed to notify anyone.

  “On Sunday,” he continued, “our investigation pointed to the water supply and we no longer believed what we were being told by the Walkerton PUC and we issued a boiling-water drinking advisory to the town of Walkerton and phoned the mayor of Walkerton to inform him.

  “We told these findings to the Walkerton town council at a meeting that we called for at 2:00 P.M. on Tuesday.”

  Chen, who had been listening patiently to this point, could hardly believe her ears. Nothing in his tone had prepared her for what he had just said.

  “Dr. McQuigge, Dr. McQuigge…” she interrupted.

  “Yes?”

  “Could I just get you to stop a moment?” Chen asked, her face incredulous.

  “These public officials knew for some time that the water was contaminated and if they had informed the public, these deaths…?”

  “That’s correct,” McQuigge interjected.

  “These people who are sick, this could have been prevented?” Chen managed to complete her sentence.

  “These deaths could have been prevented,” McQuigge agreed.

  Chen looked past the camera, as if pleading with someone to rescue her.

  “What is the explanation that they’ve given to you when you’ve confronted them?”

  “I wish I knew,” McQuigge went on. “There is no explanation for this, when we talked to them.”

  Chen looked stunned. She exhaled loudly.

  “I can’t believe that this negligence could happen,” she said. She appeared to be genuinely angry.

  Patterson grimaced as he watched. A cauldron of emotions churned within him and he fought back tears. It was all out now. He headed to Owen Sound. At the office, he and McQuigge embraced and cried. In the early-morning quiet, they shored up each other’s spirits as they talked. The two men felt very alone in a world they thought had let them down badly.

  “Folks, we needed to go public with this, and hopefully it will take the heat off the staff,” McQuigge told the morning outbreak meeting.

  But his defence of the health unit’s credibility had poured gasoline on a brushfire. The crush of media intensified. The tragedy befalling Walkerton had entered an entirely new plane: it had been preventable, the deaths had been preventable. A stunned town, already reeling from the plague upon them, felt sick to the very soul. The world beyond, which had been watching with a mixture of grim bemusement and dismay, was horror-struck. Preventable? This was no accident? Walkerton, the obscure little town in the verdant Saugeen river valley, was suddenly infamous.

  Shattered Trust

  Thursday, May 24

  7:45 A.M.

  PUBLIC UTILITIES CHAIRMAN Jim Kieffer walked the few blocks from his tuxedo rental business to the council chambers after a telephone call saying the mayor wanted to see him and Stan Koebel.

  “Where’s Stan?” Dave Thomson asked.

  “I just walked over,” Kieffer responded. “I thought he’d be here.”

  “Look, I want to get the meeting going,” Thomson said. “I’ve got other commitments. Would you please go and get him?”

  Thomson handed his car keys to Kieffer.

  “I guess he’s working with some people trying to set up some more flushing. They were going to start the second flush of all the pipes and start working on the standpipes.”

  “Well, I want him down here and I want him down here now.”

  “What have you got in mind, anyway?” Kieffer asked.

  “Suspend him without pay,” Thomson responded.

  Kieffer was surprised. The previous evening at Your Place, the restaurant attached to Rob’s Sports Bar and Roadhouse next door to the municipal offices, Thomson hadn’t mentioned that possibility.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Kieffer said.

  “Why not?”

  “Stan and Frank are the only two that really have any kind of understanding of the water system. If we suspend Stan, we might lose Frank as well. No one knows the system like they do. Besides, there’s still the hydro to run.”

  “Well, go get him and we’ll see.”

  Kieffer drove up to the PUC office, where he ran into Janice Hallahan. He asked her to call Stan’s wife to see if she’d come down to the office.

  “Is everything fine?” Hallahan asked, her face betraying what she already knew.

  “It doesn’t look good,” Kieffer replied.

  When he returned with Stan to the municipal building, Thomson called them into his office.

  “Do you know where the problems were, what happened?” Thomson asked Stan, who looked even more haggard, despondent, and frightened than he had previously.

  Once again, Stan repeated what had already been revealed at the meeting with McQuigge two days earlier, and at the council meeting the day before. Thomson was having trouble hiding his disappointment. As manager of the PUC, he felt Stan had owed it to him to say, “Yeah, the tests were bad and I knew we had a problem.”

  Still, Kieffer’s advice appeared to have softened Thomson. He suggested Stan and Frank stay on and run the hydro side while the provincial Ontario Clean Water Agency would be asked to take over the water. Stan shook his head but said nothing. It was all over.

  As soon as they had left, Thomson convened yet another special council meeting. For days he had given Stan the benefit of the doubt. As mayor, he had sat on his hands after McQuigge called him about the boil-wat
er advisory on the Sunday. He had done nothing even after Stan told him the same day he was working on the system. He had then deflected, defended, waited. He had refused to believe that the man he had trusted had misled him. Suddenly, he could deny no more: Murray McQuigge’s allegations about Stan were true. And the mayor realized that he, too, had been lying to the public. Thomson burst into tears. When he composed himself, council passed a resolution retaining the services of the Ontario Clean Water Agency for six months, a motion quickly rescinded when a lawyer noted only the PUC had that authority.

  By the time Stan and Kieffer returned to the PUC office, Carole had arrived. Hallahan knew the media would be looking for Stan and suggested it was probably best to get him to a secure location. Stan and Carole talked it over briefly before deciding to head out of town to a friend’s place for at least a couple of days. Stan gave Hallahan a telephone number where he could be reached and left. Minutes later, investigators from the Environment Ministry entered the PUC office, walked past the large poster in the small lobby that read Brockton Water Tastes Great!, and asked to see Stan.

  “He’s just left the building,” Hallahan told them.

  So they took Kieffer into Koebel’s now abandoned office, closed the door, and began interrogating the bewildered part-time commissioner who had been acclaimed to his position four times.

  —

  Had an earthquake or tornado struck Walkerton, the damage would have been obvious. But the sunny streets bore no witness to the devastation being wreaked by an invisible killer that made its way through pipes hidden underground and in the walls of homes. “It looks the same, so how can it be bad?” one child asked of the tap water. It was a question everyone wanted answered. Still, except for the invasion of reporters, cameras, and satellite trucks, the town appeared eerily normal. Nothing alerted a casual observer to the pain and confusion, the grief and illness, or the terror that swept from house to house, fanned by screaming newspaper headlines and TV reports. Except, of course, for the sickening, gut-wrenching sound of the helicopters like some throbbing cosmic migraine. Every flight added to the feeling of dread. Who’s next? Who’s going to die? In the hospital about one hundred walking wounded waited in various states of pallid misery. As yet another helicopter took off, a nurse leaned against a corridor wall and slowly slumped to the floor in utter despair. Beneath the veneer of normalcy, daily life had been turned upside down. In homes around the town, hundreds and hundreds of people were coping with the ugly symptoms of E. coli. Frantic parents agonized over sick children, children over their sick parents. Almost everyone was either ill or knew someone who was. Grieving families prepared funerals. Day cares and schools were shut down, restaurants closed. Around town, signs sprang up on the roadsides. E. coli. Please Go Away or Pray for the Children of Walkerton. Store clerks donned gloves, bars served drinks in disposable plastic mugs. The smell of bleach began to permeate everything. At the popular Tim Hortons across the road from the stone house built by Joseph Walker, a large trailer with its own water supply sat in the parking lot to serve customers their daily fix of coffee and doughnuts. In the fresh morning air, reporters and photographers leaned against their cars drinking steaming coffee. They swapped stories about motels in which they couldn’t shower before beginning yet another frantic, confusing round of news conferences and hospital visits and calls to head office. McQuigge’s pronouncements had lent a new urgency to the story.

  CBC Radio reporter Dave Seglins had been doing live reports via his Toronto newsroom when he heard McQuigge’s comments. He was aghast. For several days, the doctor had been the voice of authority, the narrator, if you will, as the tragedy unfolded. But now a demon had suddenly emerged from the chaos in the form of Stan Koebel. On the spur of the moment, Seglins drove over to the PUC office, where he saw a man getting into a car. He walked over with his tape recorder.

  “Hi,” he said. “Sorry to bother you. But can you tell me who’s in charge of the water?”

  “I am,” came the soft reply.

  Until that moment, Seglins had had no idea he was looking at Stan Koebel, who appeared dolefully resigned to the questions that would follow. Seglins thrust his microphone in Stan’s face.

  “Did you know there was a problem with the water last Thursday?” he asked.

  “I’m sorry, I can’t say,” came the dazed, seemingly robotic response. “Dave Thomson will explain everything later.”

  Seglins pressed him further.

  “I’m sorry, I just can’t say,” he said before driving off into self-imposed exile. It was the first and last public comments Stan would make for months.

  —

  In London, a worried Doug Matsell, the hospital’s chief pediatric kidney specialist, spoke to reporters:

  “There are children in intensive care who are not getting better; they are getting worse,” he said. “I cannot say there won’t be more deaths. In fact, I worry that there will be more deaths.”

  Thursday, May 24

  11:45 A.M.

  Word of Murray McQuigge’s pronouncements spread rapidly through town. Residents reeled from the notion that the catastrophe could have been, should have been, prevented. Several of them crashed a news conference, where Dave Thomson and Jim Kieffer were trying desperately to explain themselves. Terry Flynn, the town’s newly hired media spokesman, had prepared a statement, which the nervous mayor read to the assembled reporters. Nothing in his world could ever have prepared him for this.

  “At 10:00 P.M. last night, I received a telephone call from Dr. McQuigge, who informed me that he was going to release a statement to the media this morning on the sequence of events over the last week. Dr. McQuigge advised me that it was his opinion that the information that we were receiving from the public utilities commission may not be factual.

  “As such, I requested a meeting this morning with the chair of the PUC, Mr. Jim Kieffer, and the general manager, Mr. Stan Koebel, to clarify the facts as we know them. I asked Mr. Koebel if in fact the PUC had had the results of testing for E. coli on May 18, 2000. He told me that he was aware that the PUC did receive analytical data from their lab on Thursday.”

  “If Mr. Koebel had the faxed lab results, why didn’t he act sooner?” a reporter asked.

  “Mr. Koebel said he did have the lab report on Thursday, May 18, but he did not believe it was as serious as it came to be,” Thomson replied.

  Thomson’s right arm was shaking. He jammed his hand into his pants pocket in an effort to hide the tremor as reporters and residents went on the offensive.

  “Why wasn’t this information brought to the public right away?” shouted Phil Englishman, a part-time pilot and resident of the town.

  “I did not ask that question,” Kieffer said as he twisted and crumpled a piece of paper he was holding. “We were too busy trying to get the system flushed and chlorination into it. There were just too many things we were trying to track down.”

  “Is it true they didn’t know the potential danger of E. coli?” asked another reporter as Kieffer sipped on bottled water and Thomson looked uncomfortable.

  “At the particular time, yes,” Kieffer stammered. Terry Flynn stealthily reached over and extracted the sheet of paper from his fiddling hand.

  “Somebody is going to pay,” one resident exploded. “These people are being paid. They should be fired.”

  “These guys are responsible for these people’s deaths, as far as I’m concerned,” came another angry voice.

  Within hours, provincial police would begin swarming the town, adding to the confusion.

  Welcome to Little Walkerton

  Thursday, May 24

  1 P.M.

  JANICE SMITH had just gotten home with five-year-old Tamara after yet another visit to the Walkerton hospital when the phone rang.

  “Get her up here right now,” a nurse told her. “She’s going to London.”

  Like so many others, Janice hadn’t thought too much of it when Tamara came down first with stomach cramps and then
with diarrhea. And like so many others, she’d been to the Walkerton hospital several times, only to be sent home again each time. Tamara could barely get off the couch. Her brown, wavy hair was bedraggled, her normally bright green-brown eyes dull. By the time a week had gone by, the already compact little girl had lost enough weight for the loss to be noticeable. Her yellow pallor gave her the look of a jaundiced baby. Her lips were puffy and cracking, her thirst constant.

  The nurses rushed the youngster into the ER and immediately hooked her up to an IV. Her dad, Brad Smith, took one look at her and went to pieces.

  “I can’t take it any more,” he cried.

  Hospital staff gave him a tranquilizer. They planned at first to transfer Tamara to London by ambulance but decided instead to send her by helicopter. Now it was Tamara’s turn to be terrified. One of the flight paramedics gave her a teddy bear, with cuddly white fur, sympathetic brown eyes, and a blue scarf around its neck embossed with the word “Pioneer.” As they wheeled her from the ER, she suddenly realized her bear was missing.

  “Where’s my teddy? Where’s my teddy?”

  Brad ran back inside to fetch it. The reporters and photographers waited.

  “Are we going to cover her up?” the paramedic asked.

  Brad nodded and they pulled the sheet over her head. As they wheeled her toward the awaiting helicopter, Canadian Press photographer Kevin Frayer began taking pictures from a distance. At that moment, a gust of wind blew the sheet off her face. Click. Across Canada and abroad, people picking up a newspaper the next morning saw little Tamara’s face peeking out from a shroud of white sheets, her furrowed brow, half-closed eyes, and slightly open mouth exposing a mix of plaintive dread and exhaustion. Next to her head, the white bear lay on its back staring stoically into space, its fluffy arms outstretched as if to say, “Hold me.” If there had been any misunderstanding as to depth of the trauma befalling the once sleepy town, that image dispelled it.