Resilience and Reform: Remembering the Walkerton Water Crisis 25 years later

By David Nesseth  

Ed Houghton’s nine days on the ground in Walkerton are now something of a blur. But the emotion remains vivid as he recalls becoming the de facto spokesperson for a tragedy that would grip the nation — informing the public and media, one death at a time, of the devastating toll of E. coli-contaminated drinking water. 

Now Executive Director of the Ontario Municipal Water Association (OMWA), Houghton was called over the Victoria Day long weekend in 2000 by the Walkerton utility’s general manager, who knew of Houghton’s experience dealing with a cryptosporidium outbreak four years earlier in Collingwood, Ontario. The general manager — who would later be imprisoned for risking public safety — told Houghton a boil water advisory had been issued and that he needed help.     

Arriving in Walkerton before sunrise the next day with Collingwood’s water superintendent, Terry “Hock” Hockley, Houghton quickly grasped the seriousness of the situation. Local hospitals were admitting residents with bloody diarrhea, and the town’s chlorinator wasn’t functioning. Before initiating system flushing, Houghton requested the past 60 days of water sampling and lab reports, as well as distribution system drawings. 

“It didn’t take me very long after I started reviewing the reports that I saw a trend, and I saw issues,” Houghton said, during a webinar recognizing the 25th anniversary of the crisis, which was hosted by the Walkerton Clean Water Centre (WCWC) on May 21. “The lab results showed many many signals that should raise significant red flags, but obviously hadn’t.”

As Houghton discussed flushing plans with Hockley that day, he watched Walkerton Utility Manager Stan Koebel — his eyes red, voice shaking — walk out of the office. It would be the last time Houghton would see him until months later at the Walkerton Inquiry. 

“I went from trying to restore the health of the water system with Terry Hockley to becoming the spokesperson for the utility,” Houghton recalls. “I attended all the media events. I was informing everyone what we were doing, and informing the media and the public that we now have the first death, the second death, and so on.” 

While Houghton says it’s clear that Koebel and his younger brother Frank — the utility’s foreman — were “certainly neglectful,” the systemic problems went far beyond Walkerton. 

“Was Walkerton an anomaly, or were they the norm?” Houghton asked during his webinar presentation. Given the state of technology, funding, and training in 2000, he believes it was, “unfortunately,” closer to the norm for many small municipalities. 

As information emerged — from unusually heavy rains to a freshly fertilized cattle farm and the shallow, poorly protected Well 5 — the tragedy became a national wake-up call. The Walkerton Inquiry, led by Ontario Associate Chief Justice Dennis O’Connor, would become a pivotal moment in Canadian environmental and public health policy. 

Twenty-five years later, the former judge says he still feels the resilience of the Walkerton community, which lost seven people and saw more than 2,300 sickened by drinking manure-tainted water. 

“It’s one of my strongest lasting memories,” O’Connor tells the WCWC webinar, recalling how eager the community was to find out exactly what had happened. “It was simply the resilience in the community spirit of the people who went through this devastation.” 

Central to what went wrong was Well 5, a GUDI well (groundwater under direct influence of surface water) that, O’Connor noted, should never have been approved by the province in 1978. 

“Nobody ever revisited it, but it was a dangerous well and an accident waiting to happen — and eventually did,” he says.  

Walkerton operators routinely entered identical data into their records, and no one noticed. They skipped required residual checks and based chlorination decisions on public complaints. While O’Connor said the Koebel brothers weren’t bad people and truly “loved their community,” the system had failed them — and everyone else. 

“People weren’t trained properly,” O’Connor says. “Everybody tends to focus on the two water operators in Walkerton, but the failures are much wider than that. The failures were throughout the system at every step of the way.”  

O’Connor’s 121 recommendations reshaped water protection policy in Ontario. He was satisfied by the academic expertise that formed the recommendations and state-of-the-art best practices, but notes that real safety remains an evolving process.  

“Human experience tells us in whatever field we look at that as time goes on circumstances change, and in the case of drinking water, new threats emerge,” O’Connor says.  

O’Connor notes that he’s pleased Ontarians can have greater confidence in government based on how they responded to the Walkerton water crisis with the creation of Ontario’s Safe Drinking Water Act (2002) and the Clean Water Act (2006). It was a period in time when guidelines began to shift into legislative requirements, with a sharper focus on system operations. Multi-stakeholder source protection committees were formed and gradually O’Connor’s recommendations began to form Ontario’s drinking water protection framework.  

“I take my hat off to the drinking water community for actually developing really sound policy that got implemented because it made sense,” says O’Connor.  

His recommendations also led to the creation of the WCWC, which has helped to train thousands of water professionals, and hosted the 25th anniversary discussion for the current crop of water professionals, most of whom would not have been working in the sector at the time.

Brian Bates, the Walkerton Clean Water Centre’s CEO, called the event a “solemn but essential anniversary” as the sector moves from a “reactive” position to a “preventative” one.