Chapter 24 #2
Twenty blissful minutes later and after an exciting downhill ride, Jack entered the far western end of Main Street and allowed his speed to drop considerably.
Sitting back on his seat, Jack even allowed himself to travel for several blocks no-handed.
He was feeling rather good about his idea of a possible waterborne explanation, although it would mean everybody in town was at some degree of risk, including him and Laurie.
Yet with not one case outside of the downtown area, he wasn’t overly concerned although he thought it prudent until proven otherwise to encourage everyone when in town to drink bottled water, which he planned to suggest to Bob.
What was particularly tickling his intellectual fancy was that if this possible-prion dementia problem was being spread by drinking water, how similar the situation would be to the case solved by John Snow nearly two hundred years ago.
The difference, of course, if it turned out that it was waterborne, was that the source would most likely involve contamination by an animal rather than human waste like in nineteenth-century London.
At the far end of Main Street, he coasted and then banked.
After passing the hulking and empty Bennet factory, he rode into the small parking lot in front of the Bennet Municipal Water Department building.
Similar to the mill, the structure had some interesting architectural flourishes, including a series of Lancet arches along its lengthy front facade.
After a short moment of indecision of what to do with his bike, Jack maneuvered it inside one of the double entrance doors and leaned it up against an interior wall.
In contrast to the moderately decorative exterior, the interior was devoid of any decoration whatsoever and in need of a coat of paint.
As a consequence, he doubted if anyone was going to complain about the Trek. Besides, there was no one in sight.
About ten feet away was a closed, opaque-glass door with the word Office painted in old-fashioned lettering.
Although Jack was eager to go into the office and find a knowledgeable person to question, he couldn’t help but see down the wide hallway to where it opened up about fifty feet away.
Plainly visible was an enormous, open water storage tank.
With no one in evidence to suggest he wasn’t welcome, Jack wandered down to the end of hallway and just stood for a moment, gazing out at the impressive, acre-sized interior filled with a number of expansive water tanks.
There were five of them in a row, serving as a study in perspective.
He could now understand why the building occupied such a large footprint.
Continuous, deep-throated water pumps could be heard but not seen, and the air was understandably humid.
In the middle distance, at the third tank several men in coveralls were working.
Whether they saw Jack or not, he didn’t know, but if they had, they ignored him.
Jack walked directly up to the nearest tank and looked in.
He guessed it was about ten feet deep. The water was crystal clear and constantly on the move.
There was a slight chlorine odor. At somewhere around a hundred-feet square, he wondered just how many gallons the tank might contain.
He had no way of guessing, but imagined it had to be a lot.
After standing there for a minute or two, Jack turned around and returned to the office and tried the door.
As expected, it was unlocked, and he entered.
Inside, the combination of the furniture and the décor appeared like the set for a movie taking place a hundred years ago.
Front and center was a worse-for-wear secretary’s desk.
At the desk was a middle-aged, full-figured woman with her hair piled on top of her head.
She was wearing old-fashioned, oversized eyeglasses and a nondescript dress.
Her name was Pat Skinner, as indicated in block letters set into a small wooden, triangular stand on her desk.
Although her furniture appeared ancient, she was typing into a modern computer monitor.
She smiled pleasantly as Jack approached and removed a single earphone.
“Can I help you?” she asked cheerfully. Jack had the feeling they didn’t get too many visitors.
“I have some questions about the water department,” Jack said pleasantly. “Might there be someone who could give me some basic information?”
“Hmmm,” she mused. “Perhaps, Lachlan Harper, our municipal utilities director, would be willing to talk with you. Let me see if he’s available.” She replaced her earphone then pressed a button on an old-fashioned phone.
While he waited, Jack’s eyes roamed around the room.
There were four individual offices each with a glazed door emblazoned with the occupants’ role in the same antique lettering as the office door.
There was a Director, a Finances, and two Water Operators.
As he thought about how little he knew about the civil engineering of municipal water, he marveled that whenever he turned the water on wherever he happened to be, he’d never thought very much about where it came from and what went into making it safe to drink.
“Excuse me!” Pat called out to get Jack’s attention. “Mr. Harper wants to know if you are a resident of Essex Falls.”
“I am not,” Jack said. “Tell him I’m a medical examiner from New York City, and I am here at Dr. Robert Neilson’s request to lend a hand at investigating a possible outbreak that could be waterborne.”
“Oh, my goodness,” Pat exclaimed before going back to her telephone call. A moment later she removed her earphone and pointed for Jack’s benefit at the closed office door across from her desk. “Director Harper will see you now.”
Jack thanked the woman before striding over to the indicated door.
It was unlocked, and he walked directly in.
The inside office appeared the same as the outside just with a few personal touches like photographs and knickknacks, but all the furniture was from the same era.
As for Lachlan Harper, he was a burly, full-bearded, late-middle aged, muscular Scotsman with pale skin that was mildly erythematous, particularly along the sides of his rather bulbous nose and across his cheeks.
His eyes were a shocking blue and his hair had a definite reddish tint.
“What kind of outbreak are you investigating?” Lachlan asked with no preamble, obviously concerned. He grabbed a couple of chairs from the side of the room and positioned them near the center in front of his desk. He motioned for Jack to sit and once Jack did, he took the other.
“I don’t mean to alarm you,” Jack said right off.
“What I believe Essex Falls might be experiencing is not the usual E. coli or salmonella problem or something similar but rather something much different.” At that point Jack formally introduced himself and Lachlan did the same.
Jack learned the man had been trained as a hydraulic engineer, a type of civil engineer that specialized in dealing with water, and had worked at the Bennet Municipal Water Department for the last fifteen years.
Jack then described the fourteen and possibly fifteen cases of neurological disease that Dr. Nielson had so far seen, which certainly captured Lachlan’s interest, especially when Jack described the problem as some kind of “transmissible spongiform encephalopathy.” Jack then asked if Lachlan had ever heard anything about infectious prions, but he hadn’t, although on further questioning he remembered having heard something about mad cow disease, which Jack explained was bovine spongiform encephalopathy.
Nor had Lachlan heard of any plans or even trade gossip about future testing of municipal water for infectious prions or whether there was such a test available.
“Let me be clear,” Jack said. “I’m certainly not suggesting that these patients of Dr. Nielson got their dementia from municipal water.
It’s just an idea that occurred to me as a possibility after I spent a lot of effort ruling out solid food sources like infected beef or deer meat.
To be honest, what made me even consider the idea of a waterborne source was that all the patients live in downtown Essex Falls.
Tell me this: Does the Bennet Municipal Water Department only provide water here in town? ”
“That’s correct,” Lachlan said. “In the outlying areas people draw their water from wells or directly from one of the many lakes, which is a bit of a risk, especially if they’re also not being responsible about their septic systems.”
“Maybe you could give me a short version of what you people do here in the water department,” Jack suggested. “I did notice those five ginormous, open water tanks down the hall.”
“Certainly,” Lachlan said. “Those five open vats represent the stages our water goes through to make sure of its potability. We pump it in from the reservoir continuously, then subject it first to Coagulation, then Flocculation, followed by Sedimentation, Filtration, and finally Chlorination. At that point it’s pumped up to a holding cistern built into the mountain to our immediate north.
It’s the cistern’s elevation that provides the water pressure here in town. That’s it in a nutshell.”
“Do you have much of a problem with vermin in this building?” Jack questioned. “That might sound like a weird question coming out of the blue. What I’m trying to do is get an idea of the possible potential sources of infectious prions if it turns out that Dr. Nielson’s outbreak is waterborne.”
“Vermin is not one of our main problems,” Lachlan said with a shake of his head. “We have some pests, mostly the six-legged variety, but I’d call it minimal.”