Well of Lies

by Colin Perkel

  “Why is that?”

  “It’s nice and cold, clear and clean, and tastes good.”

  “What did the chlorinator do? What was it supposed to do?”

  “Put chlorine in to kill the bugs.”

  “And what bugs was the chlorinator there to kill?”

  “Just some bugs or whatever was in the water.”

  From Buckle’s testimony, it became increasingly clear that what had been going on at the PUC was more than simple oversight, more than simple sloppiness. Frank had directed him to mislabel water samples, orchestrated a system in which critical guidelines were ignored, where expediency took precedence over safety concerns, where records were falsified or simply invented. Rows and rows of numbers were entered on dozens of log sheets that, ultimately, were meaningless. And in the tragedy that was Walkerton, Al Buckle learned a valuable, if belated, life lesson:

  “You do what you’re told, but to what I know now, how danger the water is, I would have definitely stated that I don’t feel comfortable in doing it and I’m not going to do it your way any more. I would have questioned him.”

  But the truly disturbing picture emerged only when Frank testified. Dressed uncomfortably in a black suit perhaps more appropriate for a funeral, the burly foreman tried to explain the seemingly inexplicable. He held back nothing as he described drinking on the job, the routine falsification and fudging of the records, the deliberate mislabelling of samples, and the attitude that prevailed at the PUC that chlorination and adherence to ministry guidelines just weren’t that important. He said Stan knew about it, participated in the falsifications, and suggested they’d learned the way of doing business from their former manager, a drunken Ian McLeod. At times, Frank’s pudgy fingers would rise to his face and rub his wet eyes. But he kept on going, kept baring his soul.

  “Did you ever think it was wrong or inappropriate to enter fictitious numbers into the operating sheets?” Brian Gover asked.

  “I would say it wasn’t completely correct I was to be doing that, yes.”

  “If you had some concerns about whether it was an appropriate practice to do those things, my question to you is: Why did you do them?”

  “Because I didn’t have the time to dedicate to the situation.”

  “Did you ever raise that time constraint concern with Stan Koebel or anybody else?”

  “He was in the same situation I was.”

  Frank Koebel left the inquiry building surrounded by three police officers for protection. But there was no lynch mob. There were no angry protesters, only a few photographers wanting one last shot. It looked more like he was under arrest. In Walkerton, a stunned community felt as if the town had been crucified.

  A few days later, as Brian Gover stood in line for his early-morning coffee at Tim Hortons, an older man buttonholed the not yet quite awake lawyer.

  “You that fella on the TV?” he asked, his face a breath away from Gover’s.

  “I am with the inquiry,” allowed Gover, as he tried in vain to put a little more distance between himself and the crotchety stranger.

  “Well, I’ve got a complaint,” the man said. “There’s too much damn chlorine in the water.”

  —

  While everyone now wanted to hear from Stan Koebel, it was Dave Patterson who got to testify next at the inquiry.

  The public had always been led to believe that it was Dr. Murray McQuigge who had been the hero of the moment in issuing the boil-water advisory, yet Patterson’s actions were of more critical importance. It was he who had done so much to track down the E. coli in the water. It was he who had spoken to Stan Koebel about the water and who finally recommended and drafted the boil-water advisory. For the better part of three full days on the stand, he recounted in detail those gruelling, seemingly endless hours and days that had begun with Dr. Kristen Hallett’s call on the Friday of the May long weekend.

  Of all the lawyers in the room, perhaps the one paying the most attention to Patterson’s words was Bill Trudell. More than any other witness, possibly even more than Frank, it was Patterson who held out the potential for providing the most damaging evidence against Stan. It was on Patterson’s word that McQuigge had pointed the finger at his client, had repeatedly told the world how Stan had withheld the information about the bad test results, reassured them the water was safe while the health unit frantically sought answers and hundreds of people fell ill. So while McQuigge had been the face and voice of the accusation against Stan Koebel, it was Patterson who was the source of that accusation. When it was time to cross-examine the grey-haired assistant director of health protection, the attention level rose several notches. Trudell went at Patterson with quiet fury and indignation. His forehead furrowed, he glared at the witness above his square-rimmed glasses. He seemed to summon every angel in the universe to his side.

  “All right,” Trudell began, his voice dripping disgust. “You’re under oath and I’ll get to it now: You find somewhere in your notes where Stan Koebel ever said to you that the water is fine or that he ever reassured you that the water was fine, or that he ever said it was safe or he ever said it was secure, before you and Dr. McQuigge went public and said that he said it.”

  He paused, as if awaiting a confession, an admission. And then he went on, his voice resonating like a preacher, its tone growing in accusatory emphasis with every word.

  “Where did he say it? He didn’t, Mr. Patterson. He never said it to you. Because it’s not in your notes and it’s not in your report to the Ministry of the Environment. What you did is you attributed it to Mr. Koebel. And then you and Dr. McQuigge went public. And you said he told you it was safe. He told you it was secure. He assured you. And he never did it. And look what’s happened since then?”

  Patterson wasn’t budging.

  “What he did not do was share any of the knowledge that he had,” Patterson replied calmly and firmly. “As I said, the impression that I had every time that I talked to Stan Koebel was that the water system was normal. There was nothing. I asked him, ‘Is there any unusual events. Is there anything I should be aware of?’ He provided me with nothing.”

  Trudell wasn’t about to give up. He sniffed loudly.

  “And then you know what you did with Dr. McQuigge? You went on to issue press releases: ‘The PUC has assured us from the start that the water supply was secure.’ You let that out, didn’t you? You destroyed Stan Koebel by saying these things.”

  The word “destroyed’ seemed to hang in the air and fill the room.

  “No,” Patterson replied. “How many opportunities did he have to share the information that he had, to tell me that there was a problem? He did not do that.”

  It was high drama, spectacular even. It was breathtaking. But, ultimately, it was futile.

  —

  The aim of a judicial inquiry is not to ascribe blame or find fault. It is, at heart, a fact-finding exercise, a way of uncovering the truth about events as a prelude to making recommendations on how similar events can be avoided in the future. It does not punish except in the form of public exposure. There is no sentencing, no jail cell at the end of a long corridor waiting to swing shut with a deafening, metallic clang. And yet, for Stan Koebel in particular, the chair on which he sat might have been in a prisoner’s box. Trial by public inquiry. A massive array of evidence already gathered. A verdict of guilty already pronounced in the court of public opinion. A newspaper cartoon – one of the gentler ones published at this time – showed Stan Koebel alongside that paragon of incompetence and sloth, Homer Simpson, with the simple caption: “Separated at birth?”

  When Stan Koebel looked around the room that icy mid-December morning, camera flashes split the air while lawyers and spectators stared at him. Photographers contorted themselves, waiting for him to pick up the glass of water on the table in front of him and take a sip. He glanced around the room, resting his gaze for a brief moment on his family: his parents, Carole, Jacob, Stephanie. His psychiatrist sat unobtrusively to one side. Pa
stor Beth too. He flashed the briefest of winks at them. A wan, resigned smile flitted momentarily across his slips. He reached into a pocket and withdrew a handkerchief and blew his nose, a thunderous sound echoing through the microphone on the lapel of his black suit and out the large speakers into the expectant room. Then the cameras fell silent and the judge arrived. It was time. At the stroke of noon, Monday, December 18, 2000, the inquiry began hearing from its last witness of the year. Unlike with any other witness, it was Stan’s own lawyer, Bill Trudell, who stood up first and began a gentle probing.

  “Mr. Koebel, have you ever testified before?”

  “No, I have not.”

  “And have you ever seen so many lawyers gathered around before in front of you?”

  “No, I have not.”

  “They’re all good people and they all have jobs to do, and so we’re just going to start and go through it. Right?”

  “Right.”

  Trudell asked a few simple questions: his age, his length of service at the PUC, what, briefly, he’d done there, letting him see a friendly face. Before they’d come in that morning, Stan had shown Trudell a statement that he and Carole had prepared.

  “You told me that there’s something that you wanted to say to the commission this morning. Is that right?” Trudell asked.

  “That’s correct.”

  “And before I go any further, you go ahead.”

  “Okay,” Stan said. He looked down at a piece of paper and began reading in a soft, steady monotone. It was as if all other sound had been sucked out of the inquiry room by a giant vacuum.

  “I’m not very good at words, so I wrote down a few things,” he began.

  “If I may read: Words cannot begin to express how sorry I am, and how bad I feel about the events leading up to, and including, the last seven months. I accept responsibility for my actions. I am one of the pieces of the puzzle that came together in May, and I am grateful for this opportunity to speak. Thank you.”

  For the first time since the E. coli disaster had struck the town, here was an apology, an admission of responsibility. Imperfect, perhaps, but an acknowledgement nonetheless. A simple but profound expression of remorse that few could doubt. Trudell paused a second or two to let the words sink in. Now the tough slogging would begin as the lawyer attempted to set the stage, to create the backdrop, to control the lighting, fading gently from pre-show darkness to a gentle, diffuse spotlight. He would get to the heart of the matter, to his client’s heart, in only the most general of ways by going straight to the questions everyone wanted answers to.

  “Now, Mr. Koebel, did you ever tell Mr. Patterson or Mr. Schmidt on May 19 or May 20 that the water was safe or the water was secure?”

  “No, I did not.”

  “Mr. Koebel, when is the first time that you read the bad sample results in relation to the distribution system?”

  “On Saturday, May 20.”

  “And where did you read them?”

  “In my office.”

  “And where were they?”

  “Under a pile of other papers and documents on my desk.”

  Stan Koebel had drawn a line in the sand beyond which he would not cross. He could and would admit to falsifying records and sloppy testing procedures, misleading the ministry and the utilities commissioners. As manager, he alone was ultimately responsible for those acts of omission and commission, which he chalked up to complacency. He could offer up a belated admission that he was spectacularly unqualified for the job he’d held for a dozen years. But how could he possibly admit to sitting on a report showing potentially lethal bacteria in the water even as people lay dying? How to face the fact that if he’d acted appropriately even one or two or three days earlier, scores, perhaps hundreds of people might have been spared the terrible torment and suffering of E. coli poisoning? How could he ever again face his neighbours? How could he ever face himself? And so he drew a line in the sand under which he buried the damning fax.

  Trudell sat down. He’d barely taken ten minutes. Stan had dipped his toe into the scalding water and it had not burned. It was Brian Gover’s turn to ask the questions. Frank Koebel Sr. sat erect, watching his son testify, his head and shoulders falling slightly with each revelation, finally slumping almost to his knees. He left the room and did not return. For two-and-a-half more days, Stan Koebel submitted to unrelenting scrutiny. With each break in the proceedings, photographers followed his every step, clicking away in what surely must have been among the all-time most photographed pee breaks in history. At lunch hour, Stan would disappear home to take medication, to escape the glare. Hour upon hour, he answered questions in a heavily sedated monotone, his replies just a few words. Steve Lorley could barely believe this was the same man who had been his tough-minded, demanding boss. At times Stan looked as if he’d collapse, but he held on, clinging to his reality.

  “Mr. Koebel, you’d never flushed after an initial bad test before,” Gover asked, his voice betraying a sympathy of which Bill Trudell might have been proud. “Is that right? You’ve told me that before?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Isn’t it true that those extraordinary efforts of the May long weekend are one of these two things: they’re one of either a precautionary measure or an attempt to cover up a problem that you knew existed within the town’s water system. It’s one of those two isn’t it, Mr. Koebel?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Which one is it?”

  “It was for precautionary measures.”

  The fog had proven impenetrable, even to the piercing lasers shone by some of the brightest legal talents in the business. Still, it made no sense. His explanation defied logic except perhaps as a flimsy fig leaf covering the most achingly pathetic shortcoming in his very sense of self. It was almost over and still Stan could not come completely clean. He had survived hours of examination, coming perilously close to, but never quite stepping over, the line. Not even when Earl Cherniak, representing Murray McQuigge and David Patterson, pulled and tugged on him with all the gentleness of a pitbull.

  “They had called you because there were reports of sickness,” Cherniak asked. “They wanted to know about the water system. Yes?”

  “Yes, and I said I thought the water was okay.”

  “I mean, they would certainly take it that you meant that the water was safe, wouldn’t they?”

  “No, sir.”

  “They wouldn’t take it that way?”

  “No, I don’t know how they took it, sir.”

  “But you understood that’s why they were calling you, didn’t you?”

  “To see if the water was okay.”

  “To see if the water was okay?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Meaning safe?”

  “No, to see if the water was okay.”

  “Well, is there a difference between the water being okay, sir, and the water being safe?”

  “I think there’s two variations to it, yes.”

  “Well, maybe you better explain to the commissioner what the difference is between safe water and okay water?”

  “We knew we had adverse samples with 4/9 Highway and I wasn’t sure if the system was intact or not. So if the water was of good quality or not.”

  “But you said it was okay?”

  “I thought the water was okay.”

  Soon, it was all over. Stan Koebel had spoken, offered up his accounting of the tragedy that had occurred, had accepted some measure of responsibility, tried his best to explain the earthquake that had collapsed his world, leaving in its stead a mound of still smouldering rubble. This time, there would be no police escort from the building. There was, of course, no need. Instead, Gus van Harten, an aide to the inquiry, would be the getaway driver. But Van Harten was never trained to be a getaway driver. He’d forgotten to warm up the car that frozen December day, and so Stan sat helplessly trapped in the vehicle surrounded by photographers before van Harten could scrape the windshield clean and defrost the windows
and they could flee in safety.

  “How’s he doing?” Trudell asked Carole Koebel a few hours later by phone.

  “He got in the front door. He hit the couch and that’s it,” she responded.

  Exhausted and drained of every last ounce of energy, Stan had escaped a mocking, hostile world into the blackness of sleep.

  Severance

  THE NATIONAL MEDIA that showed up for the Monday-night council meeting weren’t there to listen in on discussions about zoning variances or complaints about tree-cutting or garbage pickup. On the agenda was an issue that perhaps more than any other had divided the community: Stan Koebel’s $98,000 severance, agreed to by the virtually defunct public utilities commission days before the municipal election in November 2000. In the immediate aftermath of the crisis, Bill Trudell had successfully negotiated having Stan put on compassionate leave. But the revelations of the dangerous corner-cutting that Stan oversaw as manager darkened the picture. Still, Trudell insisted that firing Stan, who somehow wanted to believe he would wake up one morning and find out it was all a bad dream, would amount to cruel and unusual punishment. It would leave him in dire straits, perhaps shatter the last shred of self-respect he clung to, push him over the edge into an abyss from which no one returns. So Trudell made the case for Stan’s resignation in exchange for financial recognition of both his twenty-eight years of service and his perilous state of mind. Although predisposed to help the man they knew as dedicated and industrious, the elected commissioners, Jim Kieffer and Richard Field, hedged. The optics were, to say the least, not good. Trudell pressed hard and, finally, everyone bought into the plan. The commissioners agreed to pay Stan for his unclaimed 99.5 days vacation plus another $64,000, almost a year’s salary, in exchange for his resignation. It seemed the humane thing to do. And it sent shockwaves through the community and sparked anger across the country. But the utilities commission, which soon after divested itself of its electrical operations, had an embarrassing problem: it didn’t have the money to pay him. So it asked the municipality to pick up the tab, dropping a political stick of dynamite into the small council chamber as reporters and TV cameras looked on.