Excerpts from “Local Water Diversely Known: The E. Coli Contamination in Walkerton 2000 and After”
These excerpts are drawn with the kind permission of UBC Press from an essay of the same name that appears in Joy Parr‘s 2010 monograph, Sensing changes: technologies, environments, and the everyday, 1953-2003. Sensing Changes is available from UBC Press. These excerpts have been condensed.
In the Ontario town of Walkerton in the week that followed the 24 May holiday weekend in 2000, seven people, all elders and children, died from the effects of E. coli 0157 H7 in the town’s water supply; in the six months thereafter, half the town’s four thousand residents bore the lingering effects of chronic waterborne illness. Blanket news coverage of events in the town was carried nationally through the Canadian media. Both CNN and National Public Radio followed the story in the United States. Soon, far from this one town in rural Ontario’s Bruce County, people lost their sense of certainty about good water. As a direct response to the circumstances in Walkerton, but not in Walkerton alone, the political and public disposition and regulatory frame governing drinking water has changed in Canada. Nowhere have these reconsiderations of the ways of knowing and governing good water been as closely followed, or as viscerally and intimately absorbed, as in the town of Walkerton itself, where the tragedy altered local politics, neighbourly relations, and popular understandings of the responsibilities of being and knowing in place. My goal here is to trace how local people, when their search for new understandings was made urgent by sickness and death and made specific by their habits of mutual responsibility in place, relearned what good water was and what the habitus and governance to yield good water must be.
The crisis over water in Walkerton forced townspeople to directly confront directly the clash between internal and external ways of knowing, between distinctions they embodied directly and discriminated among through their personal histories and local traditions and those of which they became aware indirectly through the mediation of epistemologies presented in words and measurements, symbols and signs conveyed to them by distant experts.
What I report here is based upon the transcripts of the judicial commission convened to inquire into the events in Walkerton and its supporting documents, all now public, and upon the prodigious local and metropolitan newspaper coverage. I attended the inquiry hearings when I could and observed some town meetings. I write about these events both as a scholar and as a daughter of the townships where they occurred.
How It Began
The first sign of trouble in Walkerton was diarrhoea, a common affliction, often transient, a shared “summer complaint” that would pass without grave consequence before its causes became clear or a more individual implication of kitchen incaution, a short-lived inconvenience non-specifically linked to “something I ate.” But the third week of May is still spring, not summer, in mid-western Ontario, and clusters of diarrhoea sufferers were emerging among the children of Mother Teresa Elementary School and the elders at Maple Court Villa (a seniors residence) and Brucelea Haven (the county nursing home). Such a high incidence of illness was not common, and the search for causes and remedies began quickly. The bodies of the young and old are vulnerable to diarrhoea. In the days before the holiday weekend, parents in numbers brought their children to the emergency room of the town hospital. Just in case, the administrator at Brucelea Haven instructed her staff to substitute boiled and bottled water for tap water throughout the facility. Because the manager of the public utility knowingly misled them with reports that the town water was “okay,” staff of the local medical officer of health initially focused their search on a food source of the spreading illness. Two days later, on Sunday 21 May, as a precaution, the health unit issued a “boil water” advisory. Only on 23 May, as the pattern of the illness and the Public Utility Commission’s manager’s deception became clear, was Walkerton’s drinking water established as the source of the contaminant that was making people sick. On Friday 26 May, Premier Mike Harris spoke in Walkerton of his sympathy with the townspeople and his “determination to get to the bottom of” the tragedy. That evening, in the home of Veronica and Bruce Davidson, the Concerned Walkerton Citizens was formed. Its first step was to demand from the premier a judicial inquiry into what had gone wrong with Walkerton’s water.1
The urban media began to file from Walkerton on the weekend after the 24 May holiday. A reporter on deadline begins quickly to sort out the parties to an event into the roles a satisfying story will require: a hero, a villain, and a mobile chorus whose divided and oscillating opinion will move the narrative along. In the “Walkerton Tragedy,” as the Toronto Star in its continuing coverage named the event, one of these parties was immediately clear. The hero was Kristen Hallett, the thirty-two-year-old Owen Sound paediatrician who had tested the stools of a boy and a girl referred to her on Thursday 18 May from Walkerton, found E. coli bacteria, and immediately reported the results to the Bruce Grey Owen Sound Health Unit. For city journalists, the other two expected players were frustratingly elusive. E. coli 0157 H7 was the contaminant that caused the sickness, but the move from cause to blame was disrupted by the contours of the social world in Walkerton.
Stan Koebel, as manager of the Public Utilities Commission (PUC), the putative villain, had gone to ground by 26 May, and testifiers to his villainy were nowhere to be found. Koebel had been raised in town. His father before him had served as public utilities manager. He met the town’s criteria as a guardian of its shared interests. In his twenty-eight years as a civic employee, he’d become “one of the most experienced guys around.”2
[A]s often happens with hinterland events, the explanations of what happened in Walkerton fell by default to obliging, if remote, urban commentators. John Gray, in an op-ed page of the Saturday Globe, described Walkerton as three hours in driving time and one hundred years in attitude from Toronto, a traditional face-to-face society where outsiders were suspect, local loyalties were strong, and people (close to their rural roots and in their own time) made the best of the hand they were dealt. City commentators were inscribing Walkerton as the “rural other,” in Gray’s words, “the kind of place you think you came from and to which you might some day return.”3
This characterization comforted urban dwellers. It located Walkerton’s predicament in their past rather than in their present. It affirmed the capacity of the modern regulatory state to protect them as citizens. Yet it validated growing provincewide concern that the ranks of the experts monitoring the environment and public health had been perilously depleted.
“We’ve lost an innocence and we will be changed forever . . . The silence, the tears and the downcast eyes say all those things. Not a word needs to be spoken.”
Sue Ann Ellis, Walkerton Herland Times
In Walkerton, the priority was compassionate care. Concerned to protect those traditions of discretion they would need to rebuild their community on a more sound footing, citizens were wary of premature “finger-pointing” by city media and discomfited by journalists’ insistent sidewalk interrogations and their intrusions upon funerals.4
But already in the local sorting-out of events, there were gestures towards something else. Walkerton Herald-Times columnist John Finlay confessed bewilderment that “home” had “suddenly stop[ped] providing the safety and security which are expected.” Sue Ann Ellis, reporter/photographer at the paper, wrote of an eerie silence, louder than blades of the medivac helicopters, filling the town, a silence born of uncertainty and disbelief. “We’ve lost an innocence and we will be changed forever,” she observed. “The silence, the tears and the downcast eyes say all those things. Not a word needs to be spoken.” Turning a faucet, she wrote, hearing a helicopter, and smelling bleach (the disinfecting agent being distributed for use in high concentrations throughout the town) had become tacit links to an unforeseen and still largely unspeakable consequence.5 The burden was deathly, the continuing illness painful, pungent, and intimately disabling.
How We Evaluate Water Quality
Historically, few people drank water, possibly because from many sources it was unappealing to the senses. But by the 1930s the practices and aesthetics of water shifted. Palatability became an important feature in this newly desirable commodity – drinking water.6 Aesthetic distinctions are learned. Many people like best what they know best, which is often what they knew first. The contemporary vocabulary of taste is relatively impoverished by comparison with, say, colour. Rather, we commonly recognize and can recall water by place and can be drawn into extended, even acrimonious, discussions of how the municipally treated water of the place where we live compares with water in cities we have visited or with the well or spring water we drink at this cottage or that farm. This too was the case for Stan Koebel and his brother Frank, also a Walkerton public utilities employee, both of whom grew up in town but in a household that took its water first from a spring and then from a well. Into his adulthood, Frank Koebel preferred the raw water to that treated with chlorine, which, by taste, he found less clean, fresh, and familiar.7
The local aesthetic objections to chlorination were multiple and of long standing. Town officials sympathetically referred complaints about the smell of chlorine from taps, especially first thing in the morning, and the effects of chlorine on clothing to their public utilities staff.8 …
Historically, the water drawn from wells in Walkerton had been hard, and this raised further aesthetic issues in town. The high mineral content left unsightly iron stains on kitchen and bathroom fixtures and rapidly corroded water tanks. It made bathing and showering less pleasant and doing laundry more of a chore. Chlorination accelerated the precipitation of rust from the water. But the local preferences for softer water and water that bore minimal traces of chlorine were problematically linked. The near source of softer water, Well 5 to the southeast, was shallow, prey to surface contamination, and thus unsafe without treatment. Well 5, as it turned out, was the site of the E. coli contamination in May 2000.9
These contending aesthetic preferences were complicated by the town’s predisposition towards thrift, a trait for which Walkerton was known in Bruce County. Householders in Kincardine, twenty-five kilometres to the west, were charged $57.08 monthly as a fat rate for their water; in Port Elgin, forty kilometres to the north, they were charged $35.20. Residents in both towns paid an additional metred charge for the amount of water they used. Walkerton levied a fat rate. That rate, in October 1999, was $16.50 – half that in Port Elgin, a third that in Kincardine.
“Confidence in the safety of groundwater, in the cleansing qualities of the natural overburden around wells, was common throughout Canada in 2000.”
Besides taste, and their long-standing experience of the consequences of judging good water by a somatic inference, the residents of Walkerton believed that their well water had been purged of impurities by geological processes. If groundwater, water filtered through an aquifer, was safe, then municipal drinking water drawn from drilled wells was safe. This was a long-standing belief, a verity passed down through generations of water managers in Walkerton – and not in Walkerton alone. Confidence in the safety of groundwater, in the cleansing qualities of the natural overburden around wells, was common throughout Canada in 2000. The beliefs in the reliability of judgments based on taste and the innate purifying properties of drilled wells were sustained by similar epistemological dispositions to reason locally about the direct point of contact between water and the body.
The journalists, lawyers, and scientists brought to town to witness and investigate the growing tragedy had some difficulty assimilating the commonplace assumptions about water in Walkerton. For those from outside the area struggling in good faith to “sort things out,” these local beliefs were commonly too alien to be creditable or even recognizable as part of the story.
Plainly, risk assessments about water in 2000 were being made according to two knowledge systems, one vernacular, dependent on the senses and the local oral traditions by which such sensuous information was passed on, the other professional, dependent on scientific data disseminated in the civil service reporting, which, buffered through the arbitrage of provincial politics, guided discretionary action at the Ministry of the Environment. [Town councillor Mary] Robinson-Ramsay had a grasp of how both knowledge systems worked and could serve as an interlocutor between them. Several of her colleagues on the teaching staff of Sacred Heart High School who, with Ron Leavoy, the local printer, and Charlie Bagnato of the town’s liquor store, led the Concerned Walkerton Citizens, also showed themselves able to interpret between these different ways of knowing and make useful sense of them for others.
The lawyers at the inquiry were not similarly situated. When it became apparent during background interviews for their appearances at the inquiry that the Koebel brothers and their staff had been falsifying chlorination records, Paul Cavalluzzo, O’Connor’s lead counsel in Walkerton, and both the Koebels’ own attorneys were confounded. None had experience with fraud that was not grounded in greed.10 In the inquiry hearing room, many hours were spent reading documents into the record, a process that baffled local residents unfamiliar with lawyerly standards of evidence. Many hours too were spent trying, in vain, to place on record the oral transmission, by time and place, from this individual to that individual, of the unspoken consensus shared in town about how to know good water.11 The inquiry report noted many instances in which municipal officials had not asked questions about assumptions and actions the inquiry commissioner and his staff thought would have been questionable. O’Connor found that the Koebels had breached the trust of the community.12
And yet the Koebels, the council, and the public utilities commissioners had assiduously enacted the local consensus about what was desirable in municipal drinking water. Mary Robinson-Ramsay had told the inquiry as much.
“Plainly, risk assessments about water in 2000 were being made according to two knowledge systems, one vernacular, dependent on the senses and the local oral traditions by which such sensuous information was passed on, the other professional, dependent on scientific data disseminated in the civil service reporting, which, buffered through the arbitrage of provincial politics, guided discretionary action at the Ministry of the Environment.”
The Aftermath
The municipal council of Brockton, a new entity formed by provincial streamlining initiatives to merge the town with surrounding rural townships, dissolved the Walkerton PUC in January 2001, thereby hoping to prevent payment of the terms of termination [to the Koebel brothers] to which the PUC had agreed. In their final severance settlements, Stan received $48,000 and Frank, $55,000. Management of the town’s waterworks was turned over to the provincially run Ontario Clean Water Agency. Physicians from the University of Western Ontario Medical School undertook a seven-year study of the long-term health effects of E. coli. And the government of the province has committed $50 million to support the Clean Water Centre of Excellence to be located in Walkerton. In April 2003, the Koebel brothers were charged with reckless endangerment, breach of trust, and forgery. But the lessons learned in Walkerton are spreading slowly. December 2002 reports of the Ontario Ministry of the Environment show that half of the province’s water treatment plants are still in default of proper testing protocols and in violation of the safety rules implemented after Walkerton.
In Walkerton, taste was an authoritative vernacular knowledge, trusted as a guide to direct, embodied, and unmediated truth about water. Such knowledge is made and remade within the social and cultural history of the sensing body and was being remade in Walkerton as the events of 24 May 2000 discredited taste as a test for safety. To know good water was no longer a privilege of commitment to place, a feature of a body adapted to discern local truths. The new definition of good water as safe water depended on scientific expertise tied more to profession than to place. Thus, the derogation of the authority of taste was a challenge to local confidence in certain local ways, to this locally embodied knowledge, and to local sovereignty. Water bore the current that reshaped understandings of safety and sovereignty in Walkerton. Like a tide, it flowed two ways. Water carried far from town the implications of local beliefs and practices. These, in turn, were being remade, both before and after the tragedy of 24 May 2000, by international influences. Good water emerged as a complex of decisions about risk guided by knowledge and hedged by uncertainty.
NOTES
1 The events of these days are clearly chronicled in Colin Perkel, Well of Lies: The Walkerton Tragedy (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2002), 1-175, and in Report of the Walkerton Inquiry, Part One (WI, One) (Toronto: Queen’s Printer for Ontario, 2002), 7-12. http:// mail.tscript.com/trans/walkerton2000.htm.
2 http://mail.tscript.com/trans/walkerton2000.htm. Janice Hallahan questioned by Freyja Krisjanson, 15 November 2000; Jim Kieffer questioned by John Grace and Paul Cavalluzzo, 16 November 2000; Stan Koebel questioned by Glenn Hainey, 20 December 2000.
3 Globe and Mail, 9 June 2000, A15; Globe and Mail, 20 June 2000, A6; Globe and Mail, 10 June 2000, A14.
4 “Community Has Strength to Overcome Tragedy and ‘Town in Deep Sorrow,’” Walkerton Herald-Times, 31 May 2000, 4; “Under My Hat,” Walkerton Herald-Times, 7 June 2000, 5; Letter to the Editor, “Recent Disaster Opens People’s Eyes to the True Value of Town Officials,” Walkerton Herald-Times, 14 June 2000, 8.
5 “Media Feeding Frenzy …” Walkerton Herald-Times, 31 May 2000, 5; “Eerie Silence Fills Air,” Walkerton Herald-Times, 7 June 2000, 4.
6 Jamie Benidickson, “Water Supply and Sewage Infrastructure in Ontario, 1880-1990s,” Walkerton Inquiry Commissioned Paper 1. All the commissioned papers are available on the CD version of the Report of the Walkerton Inquiry (Toronto: Queen’s Printer for Ontario, 2002).
7 WI, Two, Frank Koebel questioned by Brian Gover, 6 December 2000; by Mike Epstein, 7 December 2000; and by Paul Burnstein, 7 December 2000.
8 WI, Two, Jim Boulden questioned by Paul Cavalluzzo, 28 November 2000; by William Trudell, 29 November 2000; Stan Koebel questioned by Brian Gover, 19 December 2000.
9 WI, Two, Jim Boulden questioned by Paul Cavalluzzo; Frank Koebel questioned by Brian Gover, 6 December 2000; WI, One, 206.
10 Perkel, Well of Lies, 203.
11 A good example is WI, Two, Stan Koebel questioned by Earl Cherniak, 20 December 2000, 169.
12 WI, One, 4, 19, 42, 229. The economists who prepared a study for the commission on provincial-local relations and drinking water in Ontario similarly reasoned from a unitary epistemology of interest: “Provincial testing requirements that reinforced the obvious self- interest in testing by the municipalities made perfect sense.” “It is never in the economic interests of a particular community to provide itself with impure water although it might well be in the interests of the majority not to provide decent public transit or welfare systems.” See A. Sancton and T. Janik, “Provincial-Local Relations and the Drinking Water in Ontario,” Walkerton Inquiry Commissioned Paper 3, 3, 4, 35, 50.
Feature Image: View of Walkerton, Ontario, Google Earth, Accessed 13 May 2025.
