Well of Lies

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Well of Lies Page 22

by Colin Perkel


  Mayor Dave Thomson had figured he might have a way out of the pickle, a way to defuse the anger, or at least deflect it away from council. One of the newly elected commissioners, Warren Hawthorne, was in Port Elgin at work for Union Gas when he was paged. The mayor wanted to see him right away. Hawthorne drove back and went into a private meeting with Thomson. The two men exchanged pleasantries. Then Thomson hauled out a scrap of paper, scrawled something on it, and slid it across the desk without saying a word. On it was written $150,000.

  “Can you use that to look after some of the PUC bills?” Thomson said.

  “I’ll have to think about it,” a surprised Hawthorne said.

  That night, Thomson told council that Hawthorne, who was not around to argue, had shown up in his office to ask for money for the PUC. The fuse on the explosive severance issue remained lit. In town, people who had wanted to believe that, somehow, the tragedy had occurred despite Stan’s honest, best efforts, found themselves appalled by the notion that he would be rewarded. Some were surprised to learn he’d been earning $69,000 a year, not out of line for the position he’d held, but certainly a handsome salary in a town where many people earn little more than the minimum wage. Council was split. The two new councillors, Charlie Bagnato, manager of the Walkerton liquor store, and Chris Peabody, teacher at Sacred Heart and part-time activist, opposed paying Stan. That left it to Councillor Steve Barker, a lawyer who lived outside town, to shore up their ranks. Barker was also adamant that Koebel should not get a penny beyond his absolute legal entitlement.

  “I will not spit on the seven graves,” said Barker in his distinctive drawl. “It’s not sufficient to say he didn’t mean to cause any harm. He did.”

  It was a good speech that clearly enjoyed the support of the non-media spectators. Councillor Audrey Webb, renowned in certain circles for her baked goods, waved her hands in agitation, trying to remember what she remembered. Deputy mayor Rolly Anstett looked at the mayor, trying to decide which way the wind was blowing. It was town lawyer Rod McLeod, whose own meter had already racked up millions in legal fees since the crisis hit, who saved the day or, at least, saved that night. While the municipality was obliged to pay Stan the $34,000 in outstanding vacation pay, McLeod said the rest of the severance agreement might not hold up because Stan hadn’t revealed the full extent of his malpractice when he’d signed it. McLeod said he wanted to examine Stan’s personnel file to see what the deal had been based on. But to do that, council needed to disband the PUC and take over what was left of it. That sparked objections from some residents, who felt that two new commissioners had just been elected and should oversee the town’s water. Ignoring them amounted to an assault on democracy. Councillors floated the idea of having the water and sewage brought under the auspices of the town’s works department.

  “Why not?” taunted gadfly Phil Englishman. “It all tastes the same anyways.”

  Even the Queen appeared amused. But McLeod’s opinion prevailed. At the end of the evening, the PUC no longer existed, ending a proud run of almost half a century. Stan Koebel would get his vacation money right away, but he’d have to wait several more months for the rest while McLeod, his meter still ticking, thumbed his way through the manager’s previously unblemished personnel file looking for a loophole in the agreement. When Stan Koebel sued the town for the balance of the money plus another $15,000 in punitive damages, council wilted in the face of a protracted and expensive legal fight of uncertain prospect. They voted to pay up, along with another $5,900 to cover his legal costs in fighting for his money. In return, Stan did accept a reduced severance of $48,000, rather than the $64,000 initially agreed to.

  “It really hurts,” said Englishman. “The bottom line is that Stan did not do his job.”

  News of council’s decision prompted the Toronto Star to run an editorial cartoon showing Stan holding his cheque as he danced on a grave with seven crosses. It was powerful. It was vicious. Someone, somewhere, took it upon themselves to fax a death threat to Stan’s new lawyer.

  Humanity and Failure

  June 29, 2001

  MORE THAN A YEAR after his visit to Walkerton, Premier Mike Harris returned. This time, he would be under oath. Scores of people began lining up early, some getting up at the break of a hot sunny dawn, waiting to hear the premier answer to the judicial inquiry he had called so reluctantly twelve months earlier. Dozens of reporters and photographers descended on the inquiry building as satellite trucks again filled the parking spots in the biggest media crush since Stan Koebel had testified over three frosty December days. This time, there were real protesters, some from out of town, who chanted noisily as Harris was whisked into the small inquiry room (“We’re wise to Mike Harris’s lies”), some from Walkerton who stood silently behind placards (Mike Harris Is Killing Ontario). And then there was the protester who walked around with an anti-Harris sign until reporters hounded him into admitting he was really an undercover police officer. Standing quietly behind a sign with her mother was fifteen-year-old Nicole Longmire, a Grade 9 student at Walkerton District Secondary School and one of the many who had fallen ill from the contaminated tap water.

  “I want him to admit that what happened was partly his fault,” Nicole said. “It would be nice to hear him admit it, although it won’t take away all the hurt that I had to live through.”

  The hard wooden surplus benches from the old Brampton courthouse were packed as Harris became the 107th witness and the first Ontario premier in more than half a century to testify before a judicial inquiry. But beyond a grim sense of satisfaction at seeing the province’s top politician forced to swear on the Bible and sit in the seat once occupied by Stan Koebel, Harris’s evidence offered little comfort for the people of Walkerton. In the days and weeks leading up to his testimony, documents put before the inquiry had revealed years of warnings from scientists and senior bureaucrats about the hazards of slashing the Environment Ministry almost in half. So, too, were there warnings about the confusion created by the rushed privatization of water-testing laboratories, implemented in just two months despite expert advice to phase it in over two or three years. Even a letter from the health minister to the environment minister calling for an immediate regulation to clarify the reporting protocol in the event a laboratory detected bad water had disappeared into a black bureaucratic hole. Two cabinet ministers had already testified that the various risks had been assessed and were deemed to be “manageable.” Not a shred of paper among the million documents the government offered the inquiry showed any risk assessment was ever done.

  “These reductions will have an adverse impact on the delivery of environmental protection service levels, which in turn will increase public health and safety risks,” Paul Cavalluzzo quoted from one top-level ministry document.

  “There’s risks in everything,” Harris replied. “But I can tell you at no time was it ever brought to cabinet’s attention, to my attention, that the implementation of these [cuts] would cause increased risk to the health and safety of any citizens anywhere in the province.”

  “We’ve got document upon document upon document of increased risk to health and safety,” Cavalluzzo countered.

  “If I felt there was any risk and it had been brought to my attention, we would not have proceeded,” Harris insisted.

  In a familiar defence of his government’s neo-conservative policies, the premier explained that his government had inherited a budget deficit of almost $11 billion that was bankrupting the province. Getting the public’s fiscal house in order had to be his top priority, he argued.

  “We felt the biggest risk to the people of Ontario was doing nothing.”

  Time and again he rejected the contention that his government’s policies or procedures had any part in the tragedy. There would be no apology, no concession that, just maybe, his government might have, or ought to have, done anything differently, no acceptance of any responsibility of any kind.

  “I’m accountable for any action, any policy t
hat our government has taken,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “I accept that accountability.”

  Under the circumstances, it was difficult to fathom just what the premier meant by accountability.

  After more than five hours of testimony, Harris was quickly ushered down the front steps, through the crush of reporters and photographers, into the trademark minivan and was whisked away.

  “I felt sick listening to him,” said resident Joan Weiler.

  After ten months, well over one hundred witnesses, hundreds of thousand of pages of documents, transcripts, and exhibits, the Walkerton inquiry was essentially over, although further searches of the premier’s office would leave lingering questions about just what Harris might have had to hide. In its final submissions to O’Connor, the government, not surprisingly, denied any role of any description in what was one of the country’s worst public-health disasters. It was, the province insisted, Stan Koebel’s fault. That prompted an agitated Bill Trudell to deliver one of the best performances of his life as he lashed back at the government. His final impassioned words resembled that of a lawyer desperately trying to persuade a jury to spare his client the noose as he rejected the notion that Stan Koebel, by his wilful fraudulence, had single-handedly brought the disaster upon both himself and a trusting, unsuspecting town.

  “It’s not dishonesty, it’s not cunning,” Trudell said of Stan’s frantic, futile attempt to cope with the unimaginable catastrophe that hit one long weekend in May.

  “It is humanity, it is a failure.”

  Epilogue

  THE DAY IS RAW. In the town of Stratford, at one of the city’s busiest intersections, a man dressed in a heavy, bright orange protective suit is perched atop a cherry picker wielding a pair of wire-cutters through thick work gloves as he makes connections to a traffic light. A yellow hood covers his ears, the strap pulled tightly under his bulging chin, the white hard hat he is wearing blends into the sky. His face is ruddy from the cold, his forehead revealing a crease of concentration.

  “I’m happy to be working,” says Stan Koebel.

  The job does not last. In Walkerton, a For Sale sign swings idly outside the modest bungalow at 902 Yonge Street. The asking price is $64,000. Stan is packing his truck as he and Carole prepare to leave town for good.

  Frank Koebel remains on sick leave while lawyers haggle over a permanent solution, but Dave Patterson has finally slipped into retirement. Janice Hallahan, Bob McKay, and his PUC buddies work for the new hydro utility where Tim Hawkins is acting foreman. In Owen Sound, Kristen Hallett tends her patients. Beth Conroy, exhausted by the months of spiritual crisis in the town, is pastor at a church in St. Catharines. Walkerton’s Lutheran Church has a vacancy. The McDonalds are living in London. Their family has grown by one. It takes eight months for their house in Walkerton to sell to another resident, and then only after the price drops three times. The Hammells, too, are gone. They could not stand living on their street any more. Hanover is now home. Kody, like some two dozen other kids, still needs regular hospital checkups. He will likely need them for at least the next twenty years. His protein levels are consistently too high, a sign perhaps of permanent kidney damage. It makes him cranky. In his living room is a carved wooden angel. Many, many others still suffer lingering, unexplained after-effects of E. coli poisoning. Doctors tell a couple their young child will need a new kidney in the foreseeable future. The pregnant mother confides that she expects her still-to-be born baby will one day be the donor. Brad Smith has returned to live in Walkerton, to be closer to his daughters. In his wallet, he carries a folded newspaper picture of Tamara on the gurney. The newsprint is yellowing. He looks at it for comfort when life suddenly feels like hell again. On the anniversary of the disaster, families mourn the loss of their loved ones. The media return, keeping Bruce Davidson and Ron Leavoy of Concerned Walkerton Citizens busy. A permanent memorial garden has been planted off Yonge Street on what was a bare lawn in front of the county building. On the day the Governor General comes for the formal opening, “killer” appears on the sidewalk outside Stan’s house before being quickly whitewashed over. The media leave again. The town looks forward now. The Victorian-era buildings and houses seem to stand just a touch taller and prouder. There is a third traffic light. Newman’s restaurant hums evenings and Rob’s Sports Bar and Roadhouse is often packed late nights. Draft beer and other more exotic drinks are again served in glasses. Dave Thomson is firmly in charge of council, but Councillor Charlie Bagnato wins his battle to have “Brockton” painted over on the landmark north water tower and “Walkerton” painted back on. Main Street bustles in its small-town way. There is a movement afoot to split from Brant and Greenock. Wells 5 and 6 are plugged and abandoned. Well 7 supplies the water via a state-of-the-art filtration and chlorination system run by OCWA, for whom Al Buckle cuts the grass, not corners. Well 9 is under development as the search for another water source goes on. Sometimes, it hardly seems to matter. Many people still use bottled water.

  Across the country, boil-water advisories proliferate. There have been as many as eight hundred by some counts. But who’s counting? In Ontario, there are tougher new provincial drinking-water laws in effect. Critics dismiss them as inadequate without a comprehensive plan for protection, treatment, monitoring, and enforcement that ends with the tap but starts with the source, and billions of dollars in structural upgrades. Mike Harris worries even less about the naysayers. He is leaving politics anyway. A chill goes down Stephanie Smith’s spine when she hears about a cryptosporidium outbreak in North Battleford, Saskatchewan, that causes dozens to fall ill after the parasite finds its way from the city’s sewage plant into the drinking water system downstream. The filter that should have caught the bugs wasn’t working properly but no one alerted residents, who are split over the wisdom of a class-action lawsuit. A judge there consults Dennis O’Connor on how to run a public inquiry.

  The direct costs of the Walkerton disaster, unmeasurable in terms of pain and suffering, already top $60 million. The final tally, most of it being borne by provincial taxpayers, will likely show an amount closer to $150 million – $30,000 for each man, woman, and child in the town. But who’s counting?

  At Stonegate, Night of the Storm is doing well. The Biesenthals tend their cows and crops and feel like they farm in a fishbowl. They now think less about leaving the land and yellow-brick farmhouse they love. In Hanover, a newborn baby boy gurgles. Peter and Esther Raymond again have a child. The Saugeen River flows ever westward.

  Dr. Kristen Hallett, a pediatrician in Owen Sound, sparked an intense hunt for a stealth attacker after being puzzled by an unusual coincidence of symptoms in two young patients.

  Dave Patterson, of the public health unit, received almost no recognition for his role in discovering what was befalling Walkerton and advising residents to boil their water.

  Photos: Brent Davis/The Record, Kitchener, Ontario

  Dr. Murray McQuigge shares a moment with his wife Cory during the judicial inquiry. The outspoken medical officer of health took most of the glory for solving the E. coli mystery.

  An evacuation helicopter takes off from the Walkerton hospital. The sound of the choppers, used to ferry only the most seriously ill, still haunts those who heard them.

  A distraught Brad Smith helps paramedics rush his five-year-old daughter Tamara to a helicopter for an emergency airlift to London from Walkerton hospital.

  Photos: Kevin Frayer/Canadian Press

  Accompanied by her teddy bear, Tamara Smith watches apprehensively as she is wheeled to a waiting helicopter. This photograph was seen around the world.

  Pallbearers carry the casket of Edith Pearson from Sacred Heart Catholic Church. The deaths of seven people and illnesses of 2,300 others from E. coli poisoning rocked the town.

  Ontario Premier Mike Harris listens to questions from reporters outside Walkerton’s municipal offices as anxious residents watch. In the background, Dieter Weiss holds his sign.

  Photos: Kevin F
rayer/Canadian Press

  Holocaust survivor and nascent activist Phil Englishman joins other angry town residents in demanding information about the crisis and its cause from the mayor.

  Kevin Frayer/Canadian Press

  Businessman Jim Kieffer was acclaimed to the Walkerton Public Utilities Commission four times. As PUC chairman, he trusted Stan Koebel to look after the town’s water.

  Kevin Frayer/Canadian Press

  Bruce Davidson co-founded the group Concerned Walkerton Citizens. Dubbed a quote machine, here he talks to reporters covering a big protest that never happened.

  Brent Davis

  Veterinarian Dave Biesenthal and Night of the Storm. In 1978, the Walkerton PUC located a shallow well next to his farm. The consequences two decades later were disastrous.

  Kevin Frayer/Canadian Press

  Walkerton’s mayor, Dave Thomson, faced pointed criticism about his handling of the unfolding water crisis, which he appeared to ignore for almost two full days.

  Jim Rankin/Toronto Star

  Stan Koebel, with daughter Stephanie McQueen. Here, the water manager listens as lawyer Bill Trudell pleads for the public to suspend judgment on the cause of the E. coli tragedy.

  Brent Davis/The Record, Kitchener, Ontario

 

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