back

Keene mystery: What caused the typhoid?

SENTINEL STAFF

Some people still remember it as a detective story, startling not only for what it involved, but when it happened.

It was 1959, well past the discovery of modern medicines and long after the triumph over transmittable killer diseases, when a typhoid epidemic struck Keene.

Precisely how the disease got here is as much a story as how City Hall dealt with the public health emergency, ending with a resolution that, by the lights of today’s big damage cases — where hundreds of millions of dollars and endless years of legal wrangling are routine — is unimaginable.

Because, in the case of the 1959 typhoid epidemic, the beginning and the end came one upon the other, the role of Mother Nature was readily acknowledged and the ultimate injury was comparatively slight — only one person died, and only partly as a result of the disease.

The incident was, as well, the product of a remarkable set of coincidences and circumstances that, once discovered, affirmed that few things in life are a sure bet, not even that most precious of commodities — safe water.

But no one knew that in the beginning.

It was on Nov. 6, 1959, when 6-year-old Timothy Hockett was brought to Elliott Community Hospital in Keene, the precursor of Cheshire Medical Center, with unexplained severe nosebleeds, high fever, nausea and vomiting. During the next week, four more people were hospitalized with high fevers and a range of other symptoms. In time, nine additional people would come in — all from different parts of Keene and Swanzey.

The preliminary diagnosis was, incredibly, typhoid fever, a disease people thought happened only in backward foreign lands.

The Keene Health Department was notified, and, well before anybody had the slightest idea how the disease had gotten here, the city alerted state officials and, ultimately, the Epidemic Intelligence Service of the U.S. Public Health Service.

The public first heard of the development on Nov. 24, with this headline in The Sentinel: “Five Patients Are Checked For Typhoid.”

The public pronouncements of local authorities were guarded in those first news stories. No one came out and directly said that typhoid was the problem. but doctors said that, as a precaution, the patients were being isolated from others at the hospital.

There seemed to be nothing to explain the illnesses. And, even when a general cause eventually was determined, authorities had few clear clues as to where to look for its source.

Here, for example, is a conclusion from the Public Health Service field report on the incident:

1. Geographically, there was no direct relationship between patients.

2. Socially, there was little or no association.

3. Only one or two families had been to any restaurant in the preceding six weeks.

4. The families were supplied by four different milk companies.

5. The families dealt with nine different food stores. Three or more families patronized the same store in four instances. Five families obtained their food from the same food store, the highest degree of correlation.

6. There were no known Salmonella Group D carriers in the area.

7. The only common denominator for all patients was the city water supply.

But why was only one member of each household infected? After all, everybody drank water.

Those left to ponder that question were distracted by three reports of recent developments about the public water system: There’d been a water main break in southern Keene pipes in October, there’d been flooding in a West Street well, and there’d been a logging operation near a city reservoir in nearby Roxbury.

The first two matters were dispensed with quickly; there was nothing in them to explain the geographically widespread reach of the disease.

The investigators then slogged to the logging site, but with little reason to suspect anything amiss.

Twenty-five years earlier, following an epidemic of gastroenteritus that had been traced to untreated reservoir water, the city had installed a set of sand filters at one of its dams, and there’d been no water-related health problem since.

In the mid-1950s, Keene’s engineering consultant had urged the city to chlorinate its water regularly, in accordance with new federal clean water standards, but City Hall had rejected the advice, because the water seemed just fine.

Still, the investigators had only one straw — the logging operation around the reservoir — and in fact it was there, in the woods 200 yards from Woodward Pond, that they found what they were looking for.

They found the home of their Typhoid Harry in a temporary logging camp.

“I remember their retrieving the person in question from the Star Cafe down on Roxbury Street,” said Ernesta Lacey, whose husband, Thomas Lacey, was the city’s health officer at the time.

Dr. Lacey is credited by many for sleuthing out the source of the disease, which was confirmed in stool samples taken from one of the lumberjacks.

Here, based on interviews and records, is what did happen:

A year earlier, in 1958, Keene had contracted with a local logging firm to clear trees around its large pools of open water in Roxbury.

The cutting was uneventful; three loggers took up residence in a small shack they’d built in the woods near Woodward Pond, and it was there they and their horses lived in conditions conceivable only to people who have lived in the woods a long time and who don’t care much for sanitation.

They piled their wastes, both human and equine, in a pile to the back of their camp site, careful to position the pile on a slope leading away from the reservoir.

In late October 1959, rains fell as they hadn’t fallen in years. The rainfall for Oct. 25 alone was 1.3 times the monthly average.

Relentlessly, the rain leached through the pile of manure and feces and flowed down an embankment into a stream that, unknown to the loggers, took a turn and led into the brook that carried Woodward Pond water to the city of Keene.

It was there that the undetected organisms from one of the loggers entered the public water supply.

Under normal conditions, the Salmonella Group D organisms would have been trapped in the filters through which all the water passed before it entered the pipes of the public water system, but due to a terribly unfortunate bit of timing, the filters weren’t working at 100 percent just then. Only days before, they’d been cleaned, and the particular sort of sand traps used at the time were at their least efficient stage of operation in the days immediately following a cleaning.

The organisms, then, swept through the filters, into the water system and ultimately into the pipes of homes and businesses in Keene and North Swanzey.

Why people from only 14 of those homes got sick is a mystery, explainable only by the supposition that the rainfall was so heavy that it diluted the toxic poison. The U.S. Public Health Service said it would have expected at least 250 people to contract typhoid.

To assure that the problem wouldn’t get worse, officials burned the loggers’ encampment and immediately chlorinated the city’s reservoirs.

Those steps came too late, of course, for young Timothy Hockett and the 13 others hospitalized for typhoid.

In 1999, at age 46, he recalled the experience as being long. The Keene man says he stayed in the hospital for close to two months, his schoolwork being brought to him in his room. There was a neighbor from Manchester Street, a girl, who was in the same ward. Other than that, he remembers little.

Following his release, he says he continued to have nosebleeds for a dozen years or so, but then they ended.

When asked if he has any trepidation about drinking water from the tap today, he says, “No, not really.”

He doesn’t recall the litigation that resulted from the infection; he was named as a plaintiff in a suit that demanded $50,000 from the city government. His lawsuit, and those of 13 others, were filed in December 1960, almost exactly a year after the incident.

The cases, which cumulatively demanded about three-quarters of a million dollars from the logging company and, in effect, Keene, since the city had hired the logger, were among the first piles of paper on Richard Fernald’s desk when he took over as city attorney that year.

His job: settle fast.

“Here I was, the brand-new city attorney, and I’m trying to find out what to do,” he recalled recently. “We didn’t have any insurance for this.”

He remembers there were eight lawyers, and they decided to negotiate with the city jointly to avoid drawing out the matter through separate litigations.

Fernald said of his talks with the lawyers, “I tried to put the best spin on it, that we were a public service, that we didn’t know quite how it happened. I worked out a tentative agreement with the attorneys for all the typhoid victims and a settlement that would cost the city $105,000, but, to get the settlement finalized, I had to get the permission of the city council.”

He recalled, however, that he was afraid to bring the matter up in a public meeting of the city council. “I couldn’t just get up and explain the liability of the city of Keene,” he said, as he feared any public discussion and debate about the issue could send the plaintiffs’ settlement demands higher.

So, to avoid that public discussion, Fernald said he made private visits to the 15 city councilors, explaining the pros and cons of the settlement offer.

“It took about three days,” he said, “and when the city council meeting came, a councilor got up and moved (the settlement), there was a second, no discussion, it was approved. The Sentinel went ballistic with the right-to-know law, but it was done, and we had the settlement.”

The settlement granted differing sums to the different plaintiffs; superior court records show Timothy Hockett was awarded $2,331.33.

The typhoid epidemic was later written up as a case study of how to track intestinal water-borne diseases. The report concluded, among other things, that such incidents are “still very much a reality” despite safety steps put in place by public health authorities, and it used that argument to oppose suggestions at the time that reservoirs be used for recreational purposes.

In time, new state and federal regulations requiring filtration for open bodies of drinking water were promulgated. They prompted the recent construction of a 6 million-gallon a day water-treatment plant on Keene’s east side.

Al Merrifield, who was Keene’s health officer for several decades, was new to the job in 1959 when the typhoid struck. Now retired, he says the new treatment system makes it “very unlikely” another problem could occur with the water system here.

But he grants that no technology is perfect. Just a couple of years ago, for example, the Milwaukee water system was polluted by agricultural runoff, despite modern safe-water precautions.

Any possibility of a problem in Keene? “It’s still possible,” he said. “That’s why there has to be constant vigilance and testing to prevent these things from happening.”

back