COLIN PERKEL
 Brockton
Mayor David Thomson takes a drink of Walkerton tap water following
the lifting of the town's boil water order in Walkerton, Ont.
WALKERTON,
Ont. (CP) - The ceremonial clinking of glasses filled with tap
water echoed through a community hall Tuesday to signify an end
to one of the saddest chapters in Canada's drinking-water history.
As about 150
residents applauded, key players in the six-month struggle to
make the water in this town safe to drink took a very public gulp
- a toast to water finally exorcised of its killer bacteria. "This
day has been so long in coming that it almost feels anti-climactic,"
said Dr. Murray McQuigge, who made the decision Tuesday to lift
the boil-water advisory he imposed May 21 as E. coli shattered
this once sleepy community.
"It may
be anti-climactic," said McQuigge, "but it is a serious
step in getting this town back to normal."
Getting from
water that killed seven people and sickened 2,300 others to Tuesday's
first safe sip has been an arduous process, the cost of which
is approaching $14 million.
Five kilometres
of water-mains have been replaced, a state-of-the-art filtration
system has been installed, the plumbing in each of the town's
1,816 buildings has been disinfected, hundreds of private cisterns
and wells have been disconnected. And thousands upon thousands
of samples have been taken.
"Today's
announcement means a gigantic burden has been lifted off our shoulders,"
said Mayor Dave Thomson.
"Today
is a day for optimism."
But despite
the applause and some sense of relief that the taps have been
turned back on, residents were not ready to celebrate.
For some,
the pain is too fresh. Others are still suspicious.
One resident
wanted to know how long bottled water would still be available.
For the "foreseeable
future," was the response.
McQuigge,
who said test results show the water is now "perfect,"
acknowledged that getting the town back to normal won't be as
easy as turning on a tap.
"I hope
that will happen over time."
A judicial
inquiry into the disaster has heard how heavy rains washed bacteria-laden
cattle manure into one of the town's wells. The water was then
pumped to taps around the community.
The deadly
strain of E. coli that caused so much grief has an uncanny ability
to survive for days in cold water.
Paradoxically,
the bacteria are killed easily by chlorine - and should have been.
At the very
least, they should have been detected through a rigorous process
of sampling and testing the water.
But as the
inquiry heard Tuesday, haphazard and sloppy chlorination and sampling
procedures were routine at the utilities commission that ran the
water system into an almost inevitable catastrophe.
Al Buckle,
a front-line water worker, testified how he was directed by his
superiors - water manager Stan Koebel and his foreman brother
Frank - to mislabel water samples.
"My view,
they knew it was being run the way they want it run," said
Buckle. "I took it it was running right."
Monitoring
levels of crucial chlorine was almost farcical, violating almost
every guideline in place, he said.
There was
only one test kit for three wells, explained Buckle, who simply
did what he was told.
"Mind
your own business, go do what you were told," Buckle said
Frank Koebel would say if he asked too many questions.
Records of
test results were falsified or invented, the inquiry heard.
Rows and rows
of numbers were recorded on scores of log sheets which, ultimately,
were meaningless.
Yet alarm
bells never went off for the ministry officials that reviewed
them.
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