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4 THE RURAL VOICE
Keith Roulston
The danger of contrariness
Keith
Roulston is
editor and
publisher of
The Rural
Voice. He
lives near
Bluth. ON.
I recently got around to reading
Well of Lies, Colin Perkel's book on
the Walkerton water crisis. It reads
like a thriller but there's something
chilling in what it says about our
rural culture.
The reassuring thing is that it took
an incredible chain of things going
wrong for the tragedy to occur that
saw 2,300 Walkerton and area
residents get sick and seven people
die because of E. coli -poisoned
water. In fact Perkel could have
called his book Worst Case Scenario.
If it hadn't been for a 40 -year rain
storm, the incompetence and
ignorance of Stan and Frank Koebel
which went unseen by overseeing
councillors and public utilities
commissioners and undisciplined by
Ministry of Environment inspectors,
would not have hurt anyone.
But what's unnerving is that the
same seeds that led to Walkerton's
tragedy are present in nearly every
rural community. When I spoke
recently with a former councillor and
a former PUC commissioner from a
nearby munici-pality, they agreed the
only difference with the Koebels was
they got caught.
Writer and humourist Dan
Needles once told me the thing he
liked about living in the country was
that country people were contrarians.
We don't easily buy into the latest
fashion, a tradition that is refreshing,
but our contrary nature also leads us
to a distrust of "experts". Engineers,
rural councillors would say only half -
jokingly, are those guys who try to
make water run up hill.
And so it's easy to identify with
Stan and Frank Koebel. They knew
Walkerton's water came from deep
wells and it had to be pure despite
warnings from the "experts".
Therefore all this stuff about
chlorinating the water was just
bureaucratic nonsense — so stick in
some numbers that will keep the
paper-shufflers happy, even if you
have to make them up.
The part-time local politicians
trusted their full-time staff to do their
jobs and didn't know they were fud-
ging the figures. Still, I'll bet some of
those elected officials wouldn't have
worried about the safety of Walker-
ton residents anyway because they
too believed the chlorination and
paperwork were useless red tape.
Their constituents, meanwhile, were
more likely to complain about too
much chlorine in the water than not
enough.
But what about the Ministry of
Environment officials who should
have been looking over the shoulders
of the Koebels? Certainly with the
cutbacks by the provincial govern-
ment there weren't as many people to
do the job of inspecting the water
systems of western Ontario, but it
went further. The cutbacks sent
signals that the government also
agreed that a lot of this red tape was
nonsense so why would people at the
local MOE office stick their heads in
a wringer by forcing people to adhere
to rules that nobody believed in?
It's not just water, either. For
years I heard MOE officials attend
local councils to complain about open
burning at local landfills. Councillors
would promise to do better but the
next Saturday there'd be a plume of
smoke from the dump. If someone
complained there'd be knowing looks
when someone mentioned a "light-
ning strike". It's hard to convince
many country people of the danger of
chemicals from burning plastic and
household waste: after all once it's up
in the air its gone, right?
Seven deaths and 2,300 sick
people shocked us into understanding
the danger that can lurk in our
supposedly pure water, but it hasn't
really changed our underlying distrust
of rules and rule -makers.
Read A Wel! of Lies and watch for
the attitudes of yourself and your
neighbours in it. The least we owe the
victims of Walkerton is to learn from
our mistakes and change our ways to
make sure it doesn't happen again.0