Well of Lies Read online

  Copyright © 2002 by Colin N. Perkel

  Published in hardcover by McClelland & Stewart 2002

  Digital edition published 2016

  McClelland & Stewart and colophon are registered trademarks of McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House Company

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication is available upon request

  Cover design: Rachel Cooper

  Photographs supplied courtesy of The Canadian Press

  Ebook ISBN 9780771071102

  McClelland & Stewart,

  a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited,

  a Penguin Random House Company

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  v4.1

  a

  In Memory of:

  Lenore Marie Al, Vera Coe, Evelyn Hussey,

  Edith Pearson, Mary Rose Raymond, Laura Eva Rowe, and Elizabeth Trushinski.

  And to the people of Walkerton who suffered through so much.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1. Angel of Mercy, Angel of Death

  Part One: Before the Storm

  2. A Town and Its River

  3. Just Another Well in the Swamp

  4. Good Intentions

  5. Labour Pains

  6. Gathering Clouds

  Part Two: The Deluge

  7. Night of the Storm

  8. It Can’t Be the Water

  9. In Search of a Hidden Attacker

  10. Burning Questions, Boiling Water

  11. Death on a Holiday

  12. Ripping the Veil

  13. Blowing the Whistle

  14. Shattered Trust

  15. Welcome to Little Walkerton

  Part Three: Murky Waters

  16. Pride and Protest

  17. Going Back Home

  18. A Town Under Siege

  19. The Politics of Water

  20. City Suits and Civil Suits

  21. Trial by Public Inquiry

  22. Severance

  23. Humanity and Failure

  Epilogue

  Photo Insert

  Acknowledgements

  Angel of Mercy, Angel of Death

  Walkerton, Ontario, Canada

  Saturday, May 20, 2000

  TWENTY-TWO-MONTH-OLD Kody woke up violently ill, his diaper stained blood red. He kept throwing up. Tracey Hammell tended her only child while still trying to enjoy the sunshine as she indulged in that Canadian rite of spring known as the garage sale. Kody’s sickness had actually begun two days earlier, and Tracey’s mom had advised her to watch the boy and wait. She had heard there were other kids in the neighbourhood falling ill. Must be the flu going around, they thought. But Kody’s condition this bright Saturday morning was getting worse. Tracey abandoned the knick-knacks on her front lawn and called the Walkerton hospital.

  “Kody is like deathly ill and I thought it was the flu so I just left him, but he now needs to see someone,” she told the nurse.

  “What are his symptoms?”

  Tracey described them.

  “Well, we’ve got a waiting room full of people. So we won’t be able to get to him right away.”

  “Then, when can I come? He’s really sick. He needs to see somebody.”

  “Best to wait until four this afternoon. Just make sure you get fluids into him so he doesn’t get dehydrated.”

  “But he won’t drink.”

  “Do whatever you have to do to get it in him. Get a syringe.”

  And so Tracey Hammell got a medicinal syringe she had been using to give him Children’s Tylenol, filled it from the kitchen tap, picked up her listless child, held his pale head back, and forced the water down his throat. Kody could barely register a protest. That afternoon, Tracey and her mom took Kody to the hospital. In the already crowded waiting room, she found herself sitting next to Stan Koebel’s twenty-year-old son, Jacob. Stan, the hard-working, long-time manager of the Walkerton Public Utilities Commission, the man in charge of the town’s water and electricity, wasn’t there. Jacob was with a girlfriend, who had hurt her arm. Tracey knew him well. Her parents were old friends of Stan’s parents. In years gone by, she had spent a lot of time babysitting Jacob and his sister, Stephanie, who now lived with her husband two doors down from the Hammells.

  “I can’t figure out why Kody’s sick and he’s throwing up and stuff,” said Tracey to Jacob, making conversation. “I think it might be the flu.”

  “It’s not the water,” Jacob retorted. “My dad has been out all night flushing the system and he’s been testing the water and it’s not the water.”

  Tracey was struck dumb by the comment. The notion that water was causing Kody’s illness had not entered her head. But her mom was curious.

  “What do you mean, Jacob, it’s not the water?”

  “A few people are trying to accuse my dad of the water being bad,” Jacob said sullenly.

  As Dr. Paul McArthur examined Kody, Tracey asked him about the strange comment from Jacob.

  “So what’s this water thing I’m hearing out there?”

  “There’s no confirmation and I really shouldn’t be saying anything, but I’m going to tell you: Please don’t drink the water,” McArthur responded.

  He advised her to keep the youngster hydrated with bottled or sterilized water and to keep a close eye on him. The family went home. The next morning, Kody looked even more dreadful. He couldn’t hold his head up. Her panic mounting, Tracey called the hospital.

  “You’ve got to see him. He’s lifeless. His eyes are rolling in the back of his head. He’s just vomiting and has diarrhea every two minutes. He can’t take it any more.”

  This time, the hospital told her to bring Kody in right away. A doctor examined him. Kody was obviously very ill, he told Tracey, but it wasn’t clear what was ailing him. She asked if he could take some blood or run some tests, but the doctor demurred.

  “He’s not totally dehydrated yet. You have about four hours, so best to take him home.”

  “I’ve got four hours until he’s totally dehydrated and you’re sending him home again?” Tracy asked incredulously.

  “Yes. We’re really backed up here and there are no beds and we won’t take an infant this age.”

  But the worried family insisted.

  “We want to go somewhere where you can find a bed.”

  Minutes later, the doctor came back.

  “There’s a bed available in Guelph and there’s one in Owen Sound,” he said. “Your choice.”

  “Are we supposed to go on our own or what?” Tracey asked.

  “Yep. Away you go,” the harried doctor responded.

  Tracey swallowed hard as the doctor retreated.

  “Guess we’d better get going,” she said to Kody.

  The Hammells bundled the sick boy, who now suddenly seemed to be craving water, into the car and drove north forty-five minutes to Owen Sound.

  “Why weren’t you in here sooner?” the admitting nurse asked as soon as they arrived, her concern evident. “Why doesn’t he have an IV hooked up?”

  “They wouldn’t do it in Walkerton,” Tracey replied.

  “That’s just BS,” the nurse said and immediately set about putting Kody on
an IV without waiting for a doctor’s instructions.

  For three days, Kody lay in the pediatric ward at the Owen Sound hospital, until Dr. Ewan Porter, the pediatrician, told Tracey her toddler’s kidneys were failing.

  “He’s a very sick boy,” Porter said. “We can’t do any more for him here. We’re going to fly him to London.”

  Tracey had known that Kody was extremely ill, but until that moment, the unthinkable hadn’t occurred to her.

  “Can he die from this?” she asked the nurse as soon as Porter had left the room. “Do you think he can die from this?”

  “Yes,” the nurse replied. “It’s very possible and things aren’t looking good now.”

  “Can I go in the helicopter with him?” Tracey pleaded.

  “I don’t know if they’ll let you go,” the nurse said gently.

  “If he’s going to die, he’s not going alone.”

  “You just tell them that,” the nurse said.

  As she tended to her son, Tracey’s brother arrived. He was in tears. He motioned his parents aside and spoke softly to them.

  “Why’s Greg crying?” Tracey asked. “What’s he so upset about?”

  “He’s just feeling bad for Kody,” her mom soothed.

  What she didn’t tell her daughter was that Greg had just heard on the car radio while driving to the hospital that two-and-a-half-year-old Mary Rose Raymond, who lived in nearby Hanover, had died of E. coli bacterial poisoning. In Walkerton, fifty-six-year-old Betty Trushinski, who lived three houses down from the Hammells, had also heard about the girl’s death. Health conscious and an avid water drinker, Trushinski had worked in the dietary department of the Walkerton hospital for twenty-five years. On the same day Tracey had taken little Kody to the hospital for the first time, Trushinski left work early because her stomach was hurting. She was still feeling poorly.

  “Why couldn’t it be somebody our age who’s already had a full life?” she remarked to her husband, Frank, upon hearing that Mary Rose had died. “It’s just not fair.”

  —

  When the paramedics arrived to transport Kody, Tracy said, “I have to go with him. He’s only a year and a half old. I have to go.”

  The paramedics agreed. The whole family escorted Kody’s gurney to the waiting red-and-white chopper. Tracey climbed in, too preoccupied to be nervous about her maiden helicopter flight. With the two paramedics on board, the pilot fired up the engines and a deafening noise filled the cabin. One of the paramedics handed Tracey a headset with a microphone. He gently placed a second set on the head of the unconscious little boy on the stretcher.

  “Just keep talking to him,” the paramedic told her. “He’ll probably hear you.”

  As the helicopter roared into the sky on its flight to London, Tracey began talking.

  “Kody, fight please,” she said over and over. “I can’t imagine my life without you.” And in her head she kept thinking, You can’t die. You can’t die. Please don’t die.

  Four doctors were waiting when they arrived in London, and they set to work immediately. The child had blown up like a balloon. Even his long blond eyelashes had disappeared under the puffy lids of his seemingly lifeless blue eyes. So swollen were his little arms and legs that the doctors had trouble drawing blood and called in a cancer nurse to do the job. Once, Kody stirred and looked straight at his frantic mother.

  “I’m okay, Mommy,” he said before drifting back into blackness.

  Dr. Doug Matsell, a kidney specialist, explained that Kody needed blood-cleansing dialysis to take over for his tiny nonfunctioning kidneys. They’d start in the morning, he said. Why not right away? Tracey asked. Matsell explained they didn’t have the staff or an operating room. Not to worry. The nurses would keep an eye on him through the night. Tracey again summoned up all her nerve.

  “Is he going to die or what?” she asked, the tremor in her voice belying her attempt at brave detachment.

  Matsell took a long look at the petite blonde mother standing before him.

  “Do you want me to tell you the truth, or do you want me to sugar-coat it?”

  “I want the truth,” she said, fighting back tears.

  “It’s a possibility,” he said after a pause. “We’ll do all we can.”

  Kody was put to bed upstairs, hooked up to all kinds of hightech monitors, while his mom sat on a bed next to him.

  “I’m okay, Mommy,” Kody murmured at one point. “Get under the covers. I’m okay.”

  Tracey drifted off to sleep, praying for her child, only to be jolted awake at 4 A.M. by a cacophony of beeping machines, a hideous, electronic distress call. She took a few moments to orient herself in the gloom. Her husband, Kevin, bolted over from his bed. Kody was barely stirring. There was no hospital staff around. Tracey rushed out the door to look for help. She almost collided with two nurses running in from the other way.

  “Excuse me, ma’am,” said one. “You’re going to have to step back. His heart is under stress.”

  Doug Matsell, responding to the page, hurried to examine Kody. We can’t wait for a gurney, he said, nodding at Kevin. As soon as Kody had been detached from the various tubes and machines, Kevin picked up his son, and followed the doctor and nurses straight down to the pediatric critical care unit. There was no time to staff an operating room. They prepped the little boy, asked his parents to leave, drew the curtains around the bed, applied a local anesthetic, and performed the surgery right then and there to insert the dialysis tubes. To Matsell’s consternation, Kody didn’t even flinch when they sliced into his tummy.

  —

  The following day, Frank Trushinski drove his wife, Betty, back to the Walkerton emergency room, which had sent her home a day earlier. Her diarrhea had been bloody for three days now and her hands were swelling. This time, she was immediately admitted and soon transferred to London, where Frank and their three children kept a bedside vigil. Two days later, she began having difficulty breathing. Within another two days, the fifty-six-year-old was dead: her brain, lungs, liver, kidneys, and intestines destroyed by the vicious verotoxin produced by E. coli O157:H7.

  —

  For two hellishly long weeks after the emergency operation, Kody’s parents kept an almost constant watch by his bedside. He was hardly conscious, barely alive. Although his condition appeared to stabilize, it wasn’t improving. Then he took a turn for the worse. The doctors had inserted the tubes, but the fluid wasn’t draining as it should have done. Kody’s blown-up stomach protruded like some grotesque pregnancy. He whimpered in pain, refusing to be touched. Once again, he went under the knife to have the tubes reinserted, this time in the operating room under full anesthetic. He improved almost immediately. Three days later, he was well enough to leave the critical care unit. An exhausted Matsell, who had barely left the hospital himself in weeks, prompting two of his own boys to visit him as he made his rounds, cracked a broad smile. It was a moment he would never forget:

  “I can finally tell you: He’s not going to die,” he told Tracey.

  Several days later, he told the relieved parents that Kody’s bloodwork had shown remarkable improvement. The turnaround was so dramatic, in fact, that Matsell was inclined to be cautious. Just in case the lab had made a mistake, he said, he was going to have them run the blood tests again. They heard him returning even before he’d quite gotten through the door.

  “Yippidee doo,” he sang. “You did it, buddy! You finally made the turn!”

  It was indeed as if a miracle had occurred, as if an angel had touched Kody. Matsell looked at a smiling Tracey.

  “I’m not very religious,” he said. “But there was something up above that helped.”

  On the day they arrived home in Walkerton, four weeks after their ordeal began, a grief-stricken Frank Trushinski walked down the sidewalk, past the house in which Stan Koebel’s daughter lived, to welcome the Hammell family home.

  “Betty is Kody’s angel,” he said.

  A Town and Its River

 
FROM ITS SOURCE in the Osprey Wetlands in the Dundalk highlands, one of the highest points in Ontario, the Saugeen River winds toward Lake Huron about two hundred kilometres to the west. The river, one of the larger ones in the province, gathers strength along the way, fed by numerous smaller creeks and waterways, several of which also have “Saugeen” in their names (derived from an Ojibwa word meaning “mouth of the river”). The gentle hills of Grey and then Bruce County overlook the river as it flows through Hanover directly east of Walkerton. Once a logger’s paradise, much of the original bush has long been cleared, leaving small stands of maple, birch, cedar, and poplar that still feed area lumberyards. In the spring, deep winter snow melts away to reveal fields stubbled with last year’s corn. This is primarily cattle country, mostly beef, but there are also dairy, sheep, pig, and poultry operations. In the sky above the ubiquitous round concrete silos topped with colourfully striped metal domes, Canada geese honk and turkey vultures search for carrion. Groundhogs peep from their burrows on roadside ditches as tired brown fields turn almost overnight to shimmering, verdant green, at times overlain with impossibly yellow dandelions. Freed from a seemingly endless winter of confinement, cattle graze contentedly, while songbirds search out a nest, occasionally choosing an unused roadside mailbox. In the mist of dusk, a horse-drawn buggy clatters purposefully along the gravel shoulder of the highway, just a metre or so from the trucks and cars whizzing by. At the reins, a bearded, black-clad Old Order Mennonite heads toward a destination he’ll never seem to reach. It’s hard to tell if he’s going backwards or forwards in time, but it’s safe to say that even on this glorious, sunny dawn of the new millennium, there’s not a soul in the nearby town that wouldn’t want to turn the clock back on the disaster of May 2000.

  —

  Just shy of Walkerton, the Saugeen drifts south to a meeting with Otter Creek as it loops back sharply almost due north and makes its way into the proud capital of Bruce County. The river is about fifty metres wide where it approaches the Highway 4 bridge to Hanover at the northeast corner of town. Generally placid in the winter, the Saugeen loses its calm in the spring. Fed by melting snow and seasonal rain, the icy water roars over the dam built years ago, often spilling into the low-level plain in the valley. Levels fall sharply in summer months, allowing the adventurous to walk along the concrete ledge below the dam all the way to a sluice cut out toward the far end. Near the sluice, outdoors enthusiasts have built a fish ladder so the salmon can bypass the dam. It wasn’t that long ago that an eight-year-old boy slipped from the ledge and disappeared in the maelstrom below the sluice. It was left to Irwin Lobsinger, the town’s former mayor and long-time volunteer firefighter, to come up with the old-fashioned way to find him. Lobie made up a bundle of blankets to approximate the boy’s weight, attached it to a length of rope, and threw it into the water where he’d disappeared. When the bundle came to rest, Lobie rowed over and found the body, a cruel reminder that hidden in the life-sustaining water lurks an ever-present danger.