THE NEW MILLENNIUM brought little respite for Stan Koebel. There were several major construction and maintenance projects set to go, but Greg Diebold had quit, Al Buckle was on sick leave with carpal tunnel syndrome, and Bob McKay had hurt his knee. Tim Hawkins was back, but Stan continued to harbour doubts about his ability to function as lineman. Topping it all, council was still dithering about what to do with the waterworks, although it now seemed to be leaning away from leaving them with the PUC. Without telling Stan, council retained a consulting engineer. It also started billing customers directly for certain charges, again without telling him. Stan felt left out of the loop, as if he were losing control, and the persistent spring rains weren’t helping his mood.
“I’m supposed to be in charge,” he complained to Carole. “It doesn’t seem fair they’re billing the customers for the water and collecting money the PUC needs.”
He made the same complaint to the PUC chairman, but there didn’t seem much Jim Kieffer could do other than advise Stan to hang in there. Council, ultimately, was in charge and would make the decision. So Stan ran harder, from hydro meeting to hydro meeting, from project to project. And still events conspired to catch him off guard. One such event was the decision by the private laboratory that had long tested Walkerton’s water to get out of the business.
GAP EnviroMicrobial Services had come into being after its owner fell victim to the axe wielded by the Conservative government. For twenty-six years, Gary Palmateer had worked in the ministry labs that did the water testing before the province decided to shut them down in 1996 and turn the system over to the private sector. In Walkerton’s case, that made for a relatively smooth transition because GAP knew exactly what was required. Although the reporting guidelines were never updated to reflect the privatization of the laboratories – much to the consternation of senior Environment and Health Ministry officials – Palmateer nevertheless followed the rules that had applied to the public labs. Whenever he came across bad water samples from Walkerton, which he did on a dozen occasions, he notified the PUC as well as the ministry office in Owen Sound, which in turn was supposed to let the medical officer of health know. But the lab to which Stan Koebel turned when GAP closed in spring 2000 had no such history. Although A&L Canada Laboratories East, a U.S.-based franchise operation, had never tested for bacteria and was not accredited to do so, it nevertheless accepted water samples from Walkerton. In the absence of updated guidelines or regulations the provincial government felt no need to implement, A&L followed private industry practice in deeming test results to be confidential, to be shared only with the client. It certainly never occurred to Stan to discuss the notification protocol with A&L in the event bad water turned up. He simply assumed the company would tell the ministry, as GAP had always done. As recently as April 2000, after GAP passed bad results on to them, Larry Struthers of the Environment Ministry’s Owen Sound office spoke to Stan about the problem, but he neither followed up nor passed along the information to the medical officer of health.
A day after the unsettling phone call from Struthers, the PUC auditor raised the issue that Stan had racked up 99.5 unused vacation days. The credits had been accumulating over the previous decade, but had really shot up over the last few years. Although entitled to six weeks holidays a year, Stan typically took only one or two. What with the meetings and trying to attend various courses or conferences, he felt guilty about taking off again. He never did get to take that vacation.
If a well sits idle for too long, the volume of water it yields can decrease. So Stan took the town’s main well out of service and fired up Wells 5 and 6 to ensure their aquifers stayed open and clean. But he also had another reason to run Well 5, which had been put in service in 1979 as a temporary source. Unlike Wells 6 and 7, which were farther out of town and on a different power grid, Well 5 used PUC-supplied power. That meant it generated revenue for the utility as it pumped water. Stan figured that was pretty smart. He left it that way for eight weeks until May 2, when he changed the computer-operated cycle to put Well 7 back in service as the primary well, with Well 5 and then 6 kicking in as backups in that sequence. Stan was anxious for Frank to get the new chlorinator installed at Well 7. The old one had really been acting up, and the new one had been sitting in its box at the pumphouse now for almost eighteen months, “partly installed” is how he put it in his monthly manager’s reports to the utilities commissioners.
“It’d be nice to get ’er in,” he said to Frank yet again.
Early on the morning of May 3, 2000, Frank sent Al Buckle and Bob McKay out to Well 7 and told them to wait for him. Around 7:40 A.M., Frank arrived and told them to take the chlorinator out. Frank pulled the main disconnect to the power supply for the pump and Buckle proceeded to hacksaw through one of the plastic pipes. Within a few hours, they had taken the chlorinator, but not the well, out of service. Given that the installation should only have taken a few days, neither brother considered it much of a problem that the town’s main well was pumping raw water.
April had been a wet month, with heavy rain on the 20 and 21. But the rainy weather had given way to more than a week of glorious sunshine and unseasonably high temperatures, affording farmers a great opportunity to get onto the land. Across the fence from Well 5, Dave Biesenthal had taken advantage of the perfect days to spread the manure that had been accumulating over the winter from his cow-calf operation on the fields, plough it into the ground, and get his corn planted. In and around town, bare legs and arms emerged from a winter of hibernation, as coats and sweaters drifted toward the back of closets. Mothers pushed their strollers at a leisurely pace, kids on bicycles took to the streets, and students sat on benches and munched their doughnuts as they caught a few rays. Everywhere, people greeted one another with “Beautiful day, eh?” All seemed right in the world. Although still technically weeks away, it felt as if summer had already arrived. The light showers that had fallen May 1 before giving way to another week of warm, sunny days only added to the mood of optimism in both country and town. Even Stan Koebel was feeling a little better about life, busy as it was. He’d sent off the weekly Monday samples to the new lab, and although A&L had some funny ideas about how to fill out the submission sheets and the amount of water they needed to do the tests he wanted, it didn’t seem like anything that couldn’t be sorted out later. After all, the old lab had always known what to do. Stan was also looking forward to a waterworks association conference in Windsor. While it would take him away from Walkerton, it would also be a respite from the day-to-day pressures. Janice would take care of the office. Frank could look after the outside work, especially the big water main construction project out by the corner of Highways 4 and 9 on the south end of town. But the great weather couldn’t last.
The early-morning rain was heavy on Monday, May 8, when Stan reached Frank at the shop.
“How are things going? With the highway job?” he asked.
“They haven’t got good sample results yet,” Frank replied. “Oh yeah. I didn’t want to tell you this over the phone, but Steve lost his licence again, got picked up by the cops…for impaired.”
“Well, I guess we’ll have to deal with it when I get home.”
“Yeah, and Bob’s going in for knee surgery tomorrow.”
That took Stan by surprise. He knew McKay had twisted his knee climbing a snow-covered slope at work in January, causing a pop that made both Lorley and Hawkins take notice. Although he’d hurt it again a month later, it seemed to be doing better, and Stan had been under the impression McKay’s therapy was working. Oh, well. Frank could figure it all out. But Frank was having trouble figuring it out. He hadn’t gotten around to installing the new chlorinator at Well 7, which had been pumping raw water into the system now for five days. In the wee hours of the next morning, Well 7 shut down altogether. Well 5, with its long history of bacterial contamination, took over. Well 6, with its relatively new chlorinator, didn’t kick in, possibly due to a lightning strike. Throughout the town’s water system, chlorine levels fell lower and lower. With Stan away, and so much else to do, no one was paying much attention.
At the waterworks conference in Windsor that day, rookie Environment Minister Dan Newman delivered a glowing report on the state of Ontario’s water. He made no mention of the billions of dollars needed to upgrade the province’s ailing water and sewage system. He did not mention the deep budget and staffing cuts to his ministry or the confusion created by the hasty dismantling of the public laboratories that used to test municipal water. He didn’t mention the problems the changes had created as to how bad results were reported or the fact his ministry knew many small towns were not treating or testing their water properly to save money. He did not mention that several senior officials in his ministry had been sounding the alarm for years.
“Ontario’s drinking water is second to none,” he boasted from the podium, adding that the PUC managers were to be congratulated for delivering “safe, reliable water.”
The PUC managers weren’t buying. After Newman left, they passed a resolution demanding the province return to its role as guardian of the province’s water, not unlike the one Walkerton’s council had passed two years earlier and sent to Premier Mike Harris, to no avail.
At A&L labs, the weekly samples taken that Monday arrived from Walkerton. Robert Deakin wasn’t happy. The labels on the bottles didn’t match the submission forms, which was on GAP letterhead. Nor had they sent enough water, an issue Deakin had discussed with Stan. He called the PUC, only to be told the manager was away. When he insisted on talking to the next guy in charge, Frank called him back. Deakin tried to explain the problems: there were no samples from Well 5, the forms weren’t filled in properly, and they hadn’t sent enough water. Frank didn’t have a clue what he was on about.
“Just proceed with what you have,” he said.
Outside, the rain continued to fall, as it did almost non-stop for the rest of the workweek. But on the Friday night, the violent collision of atmospheric warm and cold fronts spawned savage thunderstorms and it really began to pour. At the local arena, Frank helped out with a night of well-attended fun in which the town’s volunteer firefighters put on a show impersonating the Backstreet Boys and Spice Girls, much to the delight of the families and kids. But lightning made the hydro foreman in him antsy. He left early and drove around for a spell to see if there’d been any damage. It didn’t seem like there was and he went on home. His wife was at work and the kids were still out, so he watched some TV, then hit the hay. He was soon oblivious to what meteorologists would come to describe as a “60-year rainfall.”