Recommendations have been made in the second and final report of an inquiry into the tainted water tragedy in Walkerton, Ontario. Seven people died and 2,300 became sick two years ago when E. coli bacteria leeched into the town’s drinking water supply from a nearby dairy farm. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Dan Karpenchuk reports:
Transcript
Recommendations have been made in the second and final report of
an inquiry into the tainted water tragedy in Walkerton, Ontario. Seven people died and 2,300 became sick two years ago when E. coli bacteria leeched into the town’s drinking water supply from a nearby dairy farm. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Dan Karpenchuk reports:
In his first report three months ago, the head of the Walkerton inquiry, Associate Chief Justice Dennis O’Connor, outlined what went
wrong and who was to blame. In his final report, O’Connor makes 93 recommendations aimed at preventing another tragedy like Walkerton. He provides a blue print for fixing the province’s water systems. That includes having the province spend 800-million dollars immediately to upgrade water systems, and beef up programs and policies designed for water protection. He says there should be a safe drinking water act, a separate drinking water branch as well as a watershed management branch both to be created within the environment ministry. And there must be tougher enforcement of water regulations for farms and municipalities.
Without that, O’Connor says the threats to safe water in the Great Lakes region will grow. If the recommendations are implemented, many people will be able to rest easier knowing that Ontario could be working on improved watershed protection. But that may be wishful thinking. Already the Ontario government is taking a “go slow” approach, mainly because of the money it might have to spend… almost four times as much as the environment ministry’s current budget. The next step, it says, is consultations with communities across the province.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Dan Karpenchuk.