How soon we forget a tragedy - From the Cluttered Desk with Keith Roulston
How quickly time flies (particularly for an old-timer like me). It wasn’t until I read a story in one of the farm papers that comes to our mailbox that I realized it was 25 years ago this month that the Walkerton water crisis occurred.
For those of you who don’t remember or were too young at the time, the crisis came when drinking water contaminated with E Coli 0157:H7 was pumped into Walkerton’s waterlines. Thousands of people became sick. Seven people died.
The story was covered everywhere. I recall images from back then as air-ambulances lifted off, taking deathly-ill patients to city hospitals for more intense treatments. The local hospital was overwhelmed.
Being a farm paper, the story I read focused on the family of Dr. David and Carolyn Biesenthal. The couple purchased a farm on the edge of Walkerton where the veterinarian operated his practice for horses and kept a small herd of purebred Limousin beef cattle.
As word of the water tragedy spread, the news about the source of bacteria concentrated on the Biesenthal farm, which was located near Well No. 5, located on the western edge of Walkerton. As word of the tragedy spread, speculation about the source of the infection began to concentrate on manure from the farm.
Reacting quickly, Mike McMorris, assistant-manager of the Ontario Cattlemen Association (OCA - now the Beef Farmers of Ontario) and Stan Eby, the Bruce County cattle producer who had been elected OCA president only months earlier, visited the Biesenthals to prepare them for the onslaught that would come their way.
Still Dr. Biesenthal was taken by surprise. “We had an inkling something was going to happen, but it just exploded that day,” he said in the Farmtario article. “That’s the day our lives changed. We have a lane that’s a quarter of a mile long. We had to put tractors at the end of the lane to keep people from coming in. The media was there like bees to honey, or bears to honey, maybe.”
McMorris and Eby crafted a document with talking points for the Biesenthals to use when the press came calling, but one day Biesenthal called McMorris confessing he hadn’t used it.
“He said, ‘I assumed there was somebody with a horse that needed veterinary assistance, so I walked into (the office), they sat down and the first thing he said was, ‘What’s it like to kill seven people?’ And he (Biesenthal) said ‘I didn’t use your story.’” (As a reporter from that time, I’m embarrassed for my industry!)
Fortunately, Dr. Biesenthal was no ordinary farmer. Aware of criticism of livestock farmers in urban media, farm leaders had recently started the Environmental Farm Plan (EFP), enabling producers to document every farm action in minute detail. Dr. Biesenthal was an early adopter of the EFP and it proved critical.
“We might have been a test case for the value of an Environmental Farm Plan when you put it in perspective,” Dr. Biesenthal admitted in the story. “It was like a gold mine for us because we could do everything we wanted to do and keep track of it.”
During the subsequent Walkerton Inquiry looking into the cause of the tragedy, under Ontario Chief Justice Dennis O’Connor, the EFP showed the Biesenthals had adhered to the best practices for manure handling.
Further research showed that a 134-millimetre (five-inch) rainfall had taken place and inadequate chlorination had been used in Well 5. Walkerton Public Utilities Commission, operators of the well, under brothers Stan Koebel, manager of Walkerton PUC and his brother Frank, falsified the records to make it appear that they had put more chlorine in the water. Years later, they pled guilty and, on Dec. 20, 2004, were sentenced to a year in jail and nine months house arrest.
But bigger fish also got fried in the crisis. Part of the reason the Koebels had been able to get away with their fraud was that the provincial government had won the election on a promise of cutting government expenses under the “Common Sense Revolution”. Among the expenses they cut was overview by provincial officials of local PUC operations.
At the Walkerton Water Inquiry, Ontario Premier Mike Harris took the stand and admitted that, “Walkerton was a wake-up call for all of us.”
To win the election, Harris had promised more cost cutting, including closing hospitals like Clinton Public Hospital. Harris retired in 2002 and turned the Progressive Conservative government over to Ernie Eves. He was defeated in 2003 by Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals.
The lesson of the Walkerton water tragedy is to be careful what you wish for. The Harris government cut costs, but among the victims were the seven people who died at Walkerton and the hundreds made ill.