STAN AND FRANK KOEBEL became certified waterworks operators without any formal training or testing. The Ministry of the Environment had begun implementing licensing in the late 1980s, and Ian McLeod had submitted the brothers’ names under a grandfathering program just before he retired. Automatic certification soon followed. No one checked to see if Stan had the minimum Grade 12 education, as stated on his application. The brothers were similarly upgraded again in the mid-1990s when the growing Walkerton water system was reclassified. From time to time, Stan attended educational programs in the form of conferences put on by various waterworks associations. But, for a man of limited educational background and intellect, keeping up with changing rules and technology didn’t come easily. Still, he was the boss. What was important to him was that the people around him considered him up to the job and that he didn’t disappoint them. A large bookcase stood against one wall in his office at PUC headquarters. An impressive collection of files and literature stocked its shelves: association newsletters, pamphlets, textbooks, ministry rules, and requirements pertaining to the operation of a waterworks, chlorination bulletin 65-W-4.
He seldom read any of it. Even had he wanted to, it’s doubtful he’d have understood much. Especially the government stuff, which often is written in the worst kind of dry, technical jargon. Nonetheless, Stan made up for his intellectual and technical shortfall with hard work and a demand for perfection. One time, he had a new summer hire trim a tree. The kid worked for the better part of a day trying to get it shaped just so and figured he’d done a great job. He called the boss on over to admire his handiwork.
“What do you think?” the youngster asked.
“It needs one more cut,” Stan replied.
“Where?”
“About four inches above the ground.”
If one of the guys hung a transformer on a pole and a wire wasn’t bent just right, Stan would make him go back up and do it again. No matter how straight it seemed, Stan always demanded something be moved a little this way or a little that. That was the way it was: Stan gave the orders and that was it. It had to be done his way. But at least the hydro wires were as straight and as neat as any town could wish.
From his backyard, Mayor Jim Bolden watched as Stan oversaw the replacement of an aging hydro line that ran along the western edge of town. The line, owned by Ontario Hydro, was in terrible shape due to lack of maintenance. So the town bought it and, within two years, the PUC replaced it, poles and all, within budget. Another time, Stan oversaw the relocation of the unsightly hydro wires on Main Street to the alley behind the buildings. The project proceeded smoothly, with the cooperation of the various property owners, and, again, came in within budget. Stan obviously knew what he was doing.
Still, the promotion from foreman was tough for the rookie manager. It meant giving up the hands-on outside work he enjoyed and was good at in exchange for paperwork, office management, and overseeing the budgets. Running a hydro and water operation, supervising staff, and answering to town council are complex tasks, doubly so for a man with rudimentary management and accounting skills. In fact, the brains behind the financial side of the operation were those of Big Johnny Bell, the long-time treasurer of the commission who had a college education in accounting. It was left to Bell, who had an affinity for numbers and still did McLeod’s income taxes on the side, to piece together the operating and capital budgets for the utility.
While the hydro side of the operation made money, the water side had always either run on a shoestring or lost money. If a main somewhere broke and needed replacing, crews simply used whatever material was at hand for the job. For years, no proper records were kept so that when pipes and sewers were put in the ground, the location was promptly forgotten. One time, some genius ran a water line inside the sewer line. When they dug up Main Street not so long ago to upgrade the water and sewer systems, crews found wooden catch basins no one knew were there. Other times, the mains weren’t put in deep enough and would freeze solid in winter, leaving some residents without running water. To induce a thaw, PUC workers would run a current from the nearest hydro pole through the pipes, a dangerous practice that eventually became illegal. Walkerton winters were always a challenge for the boys, even if, mercifully, there hadn’t been a repetition of February 9, 1934, when the town was noted as the coldest spot in Canada: −56°F. One particularly harsh winter, after the ploughs had cleared the roads, the frost penetrated deep into the ground and the pipes froze. The PUC responded by heading to stores in town and in neighbouring Hanover, where they bought up every available garden hose. They then connected the hoses from homes that still had running water to those that didn’t. It was seat-of-the-pants, catch as catch can. But gradually, the PUC took a more professional approach.
To develop Well 7, the PUC borrowed $350,000. Other major upgrades to the water system were needed as well. That meant more borrowing. It didn’t make much sense to John Bell to be paying interest to the bank, so he devised a scheme to self-finance by borrowing from the electricity side of the PUC. In that way, the hydro side would benefit from the interest payments. Bell also figured it would make sense to start putting money aside to build a reserve fund so future projects could be done without borrowing. Stan made the pitch to the commissioners. They thought it a great idea and approved it. Year by year, the reserve fund grew. The part-time commissioners – two elected officials and the mayor – were suitably impressed. The finances were in order, the utility was well run, and, perhaps most importantly, Walkerton had pretty well the cheapest water rates in the area. In the battle among small towns to lure new residents, business, and industry, cheap water is a major selling point. At one time in the early 1990s, Stan toyed with the idea of putting in usage meters as a way to generate revenue, which could then have been used to look for better water or to upgrade the system. Other towns were going that route both as a cash generator and as a conservation measure. The more it costs, the less people use, as they cut down on the waste that has made Canadians among the highest per capita users of fresh water in the world. The idea went nowhere. Stan figured massive rate increases or meters weren’t wanted, so he never formally proposed them and no one offered. Instead, there were a few small rate hikes over the years that financed refurbishment of the town’s two water towers and provided some money to upgrade parts of the distribution system. Walkerton residents continued to enjoy cut-rate water.
Managing a motley crew of outside workers also brought its challenges. Stan became more demanding. The two women in the office found him harder to get along with than his predecessor, and the atmosphere was often strained when he was around. Dealing with Frank, who along with a stubborn streak had never thought too highly of his big brother’s abilities, was especially difficult. Over the years, Frank had developed a strong, hands-on familiarity with the job, and when it came to the water end of things, Stan seemed to rely heavily on his advice. Not only did Frank have the intellectual edge, he also had a natural touch with things mechanical. It didn’t seem right to him that he should have to play second fiddle just because Stan was older and had arrived on the job a few years earlier. It especially bugged him when Stan, who always began his days early, would show up at the PUC shop first thing in the morning with a clipboard and pile of papers looking, at least in Frank’s mind, altogether too self-important.
“I can’t work with my brother,” he’d say to one of the other guys.
Frank made up for being the number-two man by working overtime, often taking home more money than Stan. Frank also had a penchant for giving orders, evident even before he became foreman. He brooked no challenge to his authority. Al Buckle didn’t seem to mind much. It was March 1992 when, in his late forties, Buckle got a job with the PUC as a general labourer after years in the construction business. He cut the grass, pulled weeds, dug post-holes, and fixed water leaks. As Frank’s helper, Buckle did as he was told, and that was only as much as he needed to know. He put up with his foreman’s alcohol-induced irritability on the job but shared friendly beers with him when the volunteer firefighters crossed the road from the fire station opposite the municipal offices to Rob’s Sports Bar and Roadhouse. At work, sometimes Frank would tell him to get lost. Buckle did. Sometimes Frank’s speech would be slurred. Buckle took it in stride. He didn’t complain when he showed up at work dressed in fairly good clothes only to have Frank order him into a muddy trench he hadn’t expected to be digging. At the wells, he watched the way Frank did things and copied them. From time to time, he was told to take chlorine measurements or fill out readings on the log sheets, something he was not legally allowed to do. He did as told. He said nothing when Stan or Frank changed the numbers. Both were qualified operators and Buckle didn’t ask any questions. But it was nearing the end of the road for Don Herman, who felt he could no longer please either brother. Little more than a year after Buckle joined the PUC gang, Hermy slipped into retirement, a little bitter at the way the brothers had treated him in his final years.
Frank’s love of the bottle was compounded by increasingly complex health problems. A borderline diabetic, Frank’s blood pressure was consistently too high. He began putting on serious excess weight, though it didn’t show that much on his bull-like frame. The first clear sign of how bad it was getting was a mild heart attack in January 1997. But he returned to the job and the drinking continued. Stan did his best to discourage it, even sending him home one day to sober up. In early 1998, Frank had a second minor heart attack, after which he spent more than a month at a rehabilitation centre. At the shop, Stan laid down the law: there would be no more beer in the fridge, no more drinking on the job. Not that the boys used to run around drunk all the time. Not when there were high-tension wires to handle or poles to climb, a job to get done. On special occasions, though, such as birthdays or anniversaries, it wasn’t unusual to knock off early and have a couple to celebrate. The arrival of out-of-town road or other construction crews also offered an occasion to chug back a few at one of the local motels, and Stan participated over discussions about the projects. This is, after all, a hard-drinking county. But Frank’s illness had cast a new light on things. Stan decided there would be no more drinking during any part of the workday, not even on special occasions. Frank would be coming back and there’d be no temptation. Frank did seem much better when he returned from drying out. The boys were busy with water-main reconstruction on Main Street, and he immersed himself in work with renewed vigour. For a while, at least, things appeared to be humming along.
Days after Frank was felled by his second heart attack, Stan received another piece of unwelcome news: a Ministry of Environment inspector would be coming down from Owen Sound as part of the government’s waterworks inspection program. It was only the third time in more than a decade that the ministry had formally inspected the town’s facilities, the first time in three years. Previous inspections had turned up numerous deficiencies, including the presence of potentially dangerous E. coli bacteria in the water and a lack of proper testing and training. The ministry had written Stan, making it clear that the presence of E. coli indicated unsafe water. Each time, he promised to do better, but bad results kept turning up, dozens of times over the years. Stan didn’t relish the prospect of an inspection. Ministry people made him nervous. Seemed like there was never a familiar face from one contact to the next. He was pleasantly surprised when a friendly, relatively young woman showed up a week later and introduced herself.
In the male-dominated world of environmental officers, Michelle Zillinger was something of an anomaly. Zillinger had already spent eleven years in the business in various locations around the province when she joined what was essentially an old boys’ club at the Environment Ministry’s local office in Owen Sound in the fall of 1997. She was given the task of inspecting area water and sewage works, and Walkerton’s number came up in February 1998. Checking the records, Zillinger noticed E. coli had consistently shown up over the past three years. She immediately concluded there was a problem with the way the PUC was disinfecting.
Adding chlorine or a chlorine compound is an established method of getting rid of bacteria in water. As it dissolves, hypochlorous acid is produced. It’s highly effective, as long as the acid has the fifteen minutes or so it needs to work its way through the outer membrane of the bacterium and cripple its ability to reproduce. Tracking the amount of chlorine in drinking water subject to bacterial contamination is therefore crucial. It’s especially critical when its source is a vulnerable well, such as Well 5 was, a fact explicitly noted and discussed during its construction in 1978, a fact promptly forgotten by everyone.
A pile of government guidelines laid out the various requirements for chlorination and monitoring, although few people, even those ministry officials charged with overseeing compliance, seemed familiar with them. Ian McLeod never did have much use for red tape. Still, he figured it was best to keep the government officials happy. In 1980, the ministry had written him to praise his excellent monitoring of the water quality and for his chlorine records. Had they looked more closely at the daily operating sheets for Well 5, they might have noticed that all the chlorine numbers looked suspiciously similar. McLeod and his protégés seemed to find it simplest to fill in the log sheets with columns of identical numbers reflecting the ideal values the ministry people wanted to see. Heck, it made them happy, and that meant they stayed off the manager’s back. The water, coming as it did from a deep well, was good. Everyone knew that. In fact, many a small town didn’t bother adding any chlorine at all. Besides, people in Walkerton were pretty quick to let McLeod know they didn’t much care for the taste and smell of chlorine. A couple of times, the PUC even flushed the system to lower the levels of the chemical after a barrage of complaints. Frank, too, hated the taste of chlorine in the water. As far as he was concerned, the less the better.
In preparation for the inspection, Stan went out to the wells to spruce them up. He looked over the log sheets that Al Buckle had been filling out in Frank’s absence. On several occasions, Buckle had not made it out to the wells and had simply marked the column for chlorine residual with a dash. That wouldn’t do, Stan decided. But he worried perfect numbers might raise suspicion. So under his careful hand, what had started life out as dashes became 0.4s, not quite the recommended chlorine level, but close enough.
During her visit, Michelle Zillinger made it clear to Stan that the number of bad test results he was getting was unacceptable. Stan mentioned how residents complained about the chlorine. Zillinger was sympathetic. She knew that to be a common complaint. She asked Stan to produce the monthly log sheets from the well. He showed her the February sheets, which he had finessed. So while the numbers appeared to reflect reality, the reality was the amount of chlorine in the system fell short of the guidelines. Zillinger didn’t ask to see the sheets from previous months. No one had ever told her she should. But had she done so, she, too, might have noticed that the February logs were an anomaly. The others all showed perfect, unvarying chlorine dosages and readings day after day, even though in any normal system, the amount of chlorine used can vary widely, even by the hour.
Zillinger was troubled by what she saw. She stressed the importance of chlorination. Stan said he’d do better and promised to start a proper sampling program immediately. He listened attentively as she walked him through the various requirements. She explained proper record maintenance. She also pointed out he hadn’t kept any logs under rules that required operators of waterworks to have at least forty hours of training a year. Stan didn’t mention that no one was getting much training. It’s not like there was any money or time for it. Still, he was grateful for her personal attention and detailed advice, the first a ministry person had ever provided him. He noted her visit down as six hours of training on a handwritten log he immediately began keeping.
While other municipalities were also failing to meet the guidelines, Zillinger was particularly worried by what she found in Walkerton. There had been so little improvement since the previous inspection three years earlier, so many of the same problems. Given the potential danger of pumping contaminated water to the town’s taps, she decided that a reliance on Koebel’s promise to do better, no matter how sincerely made, just didn’t cut it. It was time for legal action. Zillinger wrote up her report and recommended issuing a legally binding order to the PUC. It didn’t happen. The culture that infused the Owen Sound office amounted to an unwillingness to rock the boat. Asking for voluntary compliance with the guidelines had been for years the ministry’s preferred method of dealing with problem waterworks. The Conservative government of Premier Mike Harris, with its pro-business approach and antipathy toward red tape, had made it abundantly clear that aggressive enforcement and prosecutions would not be the order of the day. Besides, the government’s severe downsizing of the ministry had effectively hobbled its ability to police environmental violations. And so, despite the strong and well-considered views of the woman who had joined his staff in the ministry’s Owen Sound office just a few months earlier, supervisor Phil Bye overruled any direct action. The situation didn’t seem too bad, Bye said. There were indications that Stan Koebel was trying to make improvements. Instead, Bye recommended sending a stern warning letter threatening legal action if Stan failed to take appropriate measures. Zillinger realized there was no point pressing her case. She drafted a letter pointing out the many deficiencies with the Walkerton water system along with a warning that legal action would follow if they weren’t promptly addressed. Compliance, the letter warned, would be “closely monitored” over the next several months. Koebel, as manager, was given sixty days to respond. The letter, along with Zillinger’s detailed inspection report, went out in May 1998 under Bye’s signature. Copies of both the letter and report were sent to the area’s public-health unit, the municipality, and Stan’s elected bosses at the PUC.
That the commissioners had Zillinger’s report and the letter threatening legal action put Stan on the spot. Not that the people he answered to understood much of the technical mumbo-jumbo. None had read the Ontario Drinking Water Objectives, the guidelines under which waterworks operated. They weren’t required to and no one had ever suggested they undertake the task. Like most elected commissioners in small towns everywhere, they had no expertise in the area of water. Nor were there huge numbers of qualified people clamouring to become a part-time commissioner, not even for the $500 or so they were paid every three months. Most who stood for office were civic-minded citizens who were acclaimed election after election, sometimes only leaving their posts when they died. It was after one such death that Jim Kieffer, whose brother had once got stuck up a pole, moved up to become chairman. It wasn’t their job to ask questions about the day-to-day operations. That’s what the manager was for: to ensure whatever needed doing was done, to let them know if there were any problems. Ian McLeod had liked it that way, and so did Stan Koebel, who assured them the little matter with the ministry was well in hand. He told them he’d talked things over with the helpful inspector and had set up a new sampling system. He also announced he’d started a training log as the ministry had demanded. The commissioners took him at his word. There was no reason not to. That unpronounceable Escherichia coli that had been detected didn’t mean much to them. It sure didn’t have the ring of something that could kill anyone, not to them, not even to most of the ministry people for that matter. Whatever it was, Stan would take care of it. Just as reassuringly, the ministry had said in its letter it would be monitoring the situation closely.
In fact, the only monitoring the ministry did was to await Koebel’s response. It came in July 1998, two weeks after the sixty-day deadline had passed. His letter suggested he was doing his best to meet their concerns. “We will be up to the minimum sampling program by the end of July,” he wrote, a clear sign he was still violating the testing guidelines five months after Michelle Zillinger had visited. He also promised to maintain the recommended amounts of chlorine in the system and even held out the idea of installing special equipment to ensure that happened automatically. Yet even as he penned his letter, Stan knew the chlorine levels were once again too low. Zillinger had convinced him that proper disinfection was more than just red tape strung out by an indifferent bureaucracy. Frank, though, remained unpersuaded. Stan would boost the levels to as close to ministry guidelines as he dared, and Frank would immediately lower them to a level he deemed acceptable. Given that Frank was the foreman who visited the wells regularly, Stan didn’t have much chance of winning the bizarre chlorine tug-of-war. He tried talking to his younger brother about it, to no avail. Frank’s almost religious faith in the quality of the water was not for the shaking.
Testing chlorine levels at the wells was Frank’s job; Stan looked after monitoring the distribution system. Usually, that meant taking a sample at his home or office. As long as he found some chlorine, he was happy. Stan knew that the numbers Frank wrote down on the wells’ daily log sheets were bogus, but no one at the ministry ever looked closely at them. Using Frank’s figures, he carefully did the math to compute the monthly averages and sent them to the ministry to meet its request for annual updates. He worried about submitting reports he knew were phony. He needn’t have. A year after Zillinger’s visit, Stan received a letter from the Environment Ministry’s Owen Sound office.
“The ministry conducted an inspection of your facility on February 5, 1998,” it stated. “There has been a noticeable improvement in the operations of your waterworks since that time. I thank you for your efforts and cooperation in this regard.”
Stan passed the letter onto the commissioners. He had dodged another bullet. Although Michelle Zillinger remained of the opinion that stronger action had been called for, the local ministry office was officially delighted by Stan’s response. He was obviously well intentioned. Then again, it is also true that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Michelle Zillinger’s February 1998 inspection report had also landed in the laps of town councillors, and at least one of them found it alarming. Mary Robinson-Ramsay had gone into local politics after watching short-sighted councillors almost succeed in committing the historic town hall to the wrecker’s ball. Robinson-Ramsay was an unusual councillor in other ways. Although she’d lived and taught in Walkerton for twenty years, she was born in Toronto, raised in rural Ontario in neighbouring Grey County, and had gone to high school in Switzerland. Her grandfather was one of the first medical officers of health in Ontario. Her physician father was also a medical officer of health. In addition to attaining a music degree from the University of Toronto, she’d spent time in rural South Africa, where serious water-borne diseases, especially in rural areas, are not uncommon. She knew Zillinger’s report spelled trouble.
“Fortunately at this time, there were no major problems as a result,” she wrote in a note she prepared for a council meeting. “Probably oversight rather than deliberate neglect.”
Even if looking after the town’s water supply was the PUC’s responsibility, Robinson-Ramsay realized that it fell ultimately under the municipality’s jurisdiction. A Toronto Star newspaper report on the problems created by the Conservative government’s decision to get out of the water-testing business only served to underscore her concerns. The article noted that the ministry had singled out twenty-three municipalities for substandard testing of their drinking water. To Robinson-Ramsay, this proved the importance of having the provincial government act as a watchdog. But the government was going in the exact opposite direction.
“We have worked too hard for too many years to create good public health to allow it to degenerate due to neglect,” she wrote.
She suggested council think about hiring a qualified public works manager to oversee both water and sewage. She argued that the increasingly complex management of water required regular and ongoing technical expertise. But her fellow councillors, who didn’t seem to grasp her concerns about bacteria, decided against any action. What’s more, they had only been elected for a one-year transition term because the town was set to merge with two neighbouring townships in light of municipal amalgamations the Tory government was demanding. They felt that any decision was best left to the council of the new municipality, due to take office six months later. There was no urgency anyway. The PUC, under Stan’s diligent leadership, was taking care of any problems and the ministry had said it would be watching closely. Councillors argued further that the report had been sent to the medical officer of health, Dr. Murray McQuigge. He would no doubt act if he thought it necessary. What they didn’t know was that McQuigge figured the ministry was taking care of matters and would let him know if there were problems. Still, Robinson-Ramsay did manage to get council to accept her proposal to ask Premier Mike Harris to ensure the Ministry of the Environment remained responsible for water quality. They also asked that the premier take another look at how smaller municipalities were coping with the various other responsibilities the province was thrusting upon them. Harris’s response didn’t amount to much.
“Thank you for writing to inform me of council’s resolutions regarding the realignment of provincial municipal services,” Harris wrote. “I have noted council’s views and appreciate being kept informed of its activities.”
Ramsey-Robinson didn’t run in the ensuing election in which Dave Thomson, who lived out of town, came to office. The Zillinger report was soon forgotten, a mere blip in the consciousness of the municipality. At the public health unit office in Walkerton, it was filed away, essentially unread. Stan Koebel was again left to his own devices. But Koebel’s tough juggling act was getting tougher. Johnny Bell, who had been an invaluably steady hand on the tiller of the PUC’s finances as secretary-treasurer, went home one evening and had a massive heart attack.
Bell’s death left a huge hole in the PUC office. The silver lining for Stan was that it didn’t take too long to find a replacement in the form of Janice Hallahan, clerk-treasurer in nearby Neustadt (One of Canada’s Prettiest Villages, the sign says), birthplace of former prime minister John Diefenbaker. Conscientious and personable, Hallahan exuded confidence and competence. Her background in business administration and accounting and varied experience in municipal finances made her ideally suited for her new job, which she tackled with enthusiasm. In Hallahan, who was born and raised in Walkerton, Koebel found a managerial soulmate on whom he could lean as heavily as he ever had on her predecessor.
At the beginning of 1999, the PUC’s reserve fund for the water system was a healthy $449,401. This was money that could be used for system upgrades and maintenance on Well 5, on which virtually no work had been done in almost twenty years. Of its three working wells, Well 7, the newest, was the one on which the town relied most heavily. It produced more than enough good quality water. The one problem was its balky chlorinator. Flush with cash, Koebel ordered two replacements, one each for Wells 6 and 7. The new units were compatible with an automatic chlorine residual analyser, which Stan hoped to add on at some point. The device tracks chlorine and shuts a well down automatically if levels fall too low either due to mechanical failure or an upsurge in contamination. That would preclude the hassle of the constant manual checks that fell to Frank and his helper Al Buckle, who mostly relied on weigh scales that had never worked properly and a bubble in the chlorinators to judge chlorine dosage. Having duplicate equipment would also make repairs and replacing parts smoother. It would be efficient, modern, and safe, just like the ministry wanted. Stan asked Frank to take care of installing the new chlorinators when they arrived. Frank had other things to do.
At about the same time, the Tory government in Toronto, forever looking to downsize, made a far-reaching decision that would create more problems for Stan: it announced plans to break up the century-old monopoly enjoyed by the publicly owned Ontario Hydro and deregulate the electricity market. What Bill 35 essentially meant was that utilities such as the one Stan ran would be forced to go out onto the open market to buy power. Utilities were given less than two years to figure out what they wanted to do. They could sell to Hydro One, one of Ontario Hydro’s successor companies, or form cooperatives or amalgamate with other area utilities to form large enough outfits to compete. Walkerton’s PUC hooked up with a group of other small-town operators to search for the best way to face the brave new world of deregulated electricity. There were endless meetings, many of them out of town, and Stan found himself away from the office and his regular work. Until this point, Stan had been spending as much as 20 per cent of his time managing the town’s water. But the introduction of Bill 35 saw that allotment of time plunge drastically. From then on, he was able to spend mere minutes a day on water. The legislation also created waves of uncertainty for the town and PUC in general, for Stan in particular. What would happen to the water operations if the PUC had to divest itself of the hydro side? Perhaps the municipality would take over the water itself. Maybe the PUC could continue running the water only. Perhaps an outside agency could come in. What would it all mean for the PUC staff? What would it mean for him? The ground under Stan Koebel’s feet was starting to feel like quicksand.