Conspiracy of chances

Lee Greenberg, Gary Dimmock
Ottawa Citizen
September 28, 2002

The brothers walked ahead, leading their parents up the rocks of High Falls. On the steamy June 23 afternoon, the first Sunday of summer, the two boys – Aaron, 7, and Adam, 9 – were keen to wade in the shallow pools along a dammed channel of the Madawaska River near Calabogie.

The boys’ father and mother – Mike and Cyndi Cadieux – had been separated for the past two years, but were finally putting differences aside for the sake of a family outing. It was to be salve on old wounds: some lounging, some laughing at a place they had visited dozens of times over the years, on days much like this.

But on this day, the fun would last all of 30 minutes.

A gate at the Barrett Chute Generating Station – just above the spot where the Cadieuxs stood and some 20 other sunbathers lazed about nearby – would suddenly sweep open and send a deadly torrent of water equal to two Rideau Rivers surging down the channel.

Barrett Chute Generating Station
– Ottawa Citizen

The channel is a hydro spillway – a safety valve of sorts – but, by all accounts, it had never been used to relieve pressure on the dam except during the spring runoff. Locals, like the Cadieuxs, had long since laid claim to the exposed riverbed as a beautiful summer playground.

Now, inexplicably, the river was rushing to reclaim its rocks, rampaging down High Falls in a deafening thunder.

In a matter of seconds, people would be hurled against trees or submerged by the advancing wall of water, describing later how they’d only escaped death by some miracle. But not everyone would escape. A family finally coping with separation was about to be permanently, tragically shattered.

It was just after 2 p.m. when Mike first noticed the pool was rising, slowly filling up like a sink. His older son, Adam, was off to the right, on higher ground playing along the tree line. But Aaron was to the left with Cyndi, on a lower shelf of rock, wading in water that was creeping higher and higher.

—

Nearly three months after the tragedy at High Falls, it’s clear the OPP investigation that was supposed to last several weeks will stretch into several months. And still the key events of June 23 are shrouded in secrecy.

Employees of Ontario Power Generation – the provincial agency that operates the Barrett Chute station – have received memos reminding them to keep quiet. Their bosses in Toronto stopped speaking soon after the incident and insisted that all questions be submitted in writing.

Something extremely unusual happened that day, something that reaches beyond the events of a single afternoon. A conspiracy of chances, played out over months and even years, set the stage for disaster. Then in a moment – a fateful, fatal decision not yet publicly revealed pending completion of the police probe and a probable coroner’s inquiry – unleashed the pent up violence of the Madawaska at the worst possible time.

The accomplices, remarkably, include a wet spring and a suffocating heat wave, which not only sent the Cadieuxs to High Falls but also created an enormous spike in electricity demand as people across Ontario switched on air conditioners.

At the same time, Ontario’s electricity supply was limited – partly because of an extended shutdown of one of its key nuclear power generators. So the province’s response to the call for more power was to tap, in turn, one of its greatest resources of hydroelectricity: the same Madawaska River system to which swimmers throughout the Ottawa Valley were flocking.

Why some went to High Falls – situated as it is just below a hydro dam that held back millions of tonnes of water – can only be explained by questionable security measures and what sociologists would call local knowledge, an accumulation of experience over generations that convinced the sunbathers they had nothing to fear.

But four other factors – to degrees that can’t yet be ascertained – would transform fearlessness to terror in an instant: A fledgling open market for electricity in Ontario that appears to have put extra pressure on OPG to respond quickly to commercial demands; A new computer system that can automatically override decisions by dam operators; A disabled generating unit among the four turbines at the Barrett Chute station that ultimately forced a diversion of water through the spillway at High Falls, and; A water warning system that tragically, obviously, failed to alert the Cadieuxs and others to the impending peril.

—

Up the rocks some 150 metres, away from the crowd of sunbathers, was where Mike, 39, and Cyndi, 32, had gone for some of their first dates as a young couple.

On this afternoon, they had picked the same spot. And it was Mike, at his wife’s behest, who had first slid down the slippery, wet rocks to make sure it was safe for the boys.

Below the family, scattered on what area residents call the "hot rocks," the 20-odd sunbathers lounged about, while a group of teens swam across the bay farther down, a floating beer cooler in tow.

The Cadieuxs felt so comfortable, so safe, that when the water began rising, Mike calmly pulled Aaron out of the pool, then turned to retrieve the few belongings they’d left on the rocks.

—

The first aboriginals to have contact with the river called it ‘mad water’ and the name stuck. The Madawaska became known as Mad River.

Early European settlers to the area were mostly fur traders and log drivers who lived hard and died young. They accepted their yearly losses to the river as a matter of fate, and legend has it there’s an unmarked grave every kilometre or so along the shore, for the scores of loggers swept to their deaths over several generations.

But while the Madawaska pioneers rightly regarded their river with fear, in the early part of the 20th century the province’s fledgling electricity industry looked at it with hope, as a vast reservoir of unfulfilled promise.

Hydroelectric power is generated when large volumes of water fall down massive tubes, called penstocks, and onto turbines. The water hits the turbines, spinning them and, in turn, driving a generator.

Power generating capacity is directly proportional to the height that water falls. Thus, the enormous potential of the Madawaska: A small stretch of the river, between Bark Lake and Arnprior, drops 244 metres – the equivalent of nearly four Niagara Falls. The lower Madawaska would become a jewel in the crown of Ontario Hydro.

Today the lower Madawaska consists of five generating stations – Mountain Chute, Barrett Chute, Calabogie, Stewartville and Arnprior – and two other control dams upstream that regulate the amount of water coming into the system.

Dams serve as storage facilities, holding water upstream, in the forebay, as potential energy. But every inch of additional water places massive extra pressure on the dam walls. A dam is "overtopped" – with potentially disastrous consequences – when water levels exceed the height of the dam walls.

But having too little water in reserve can also wreak havoc. In 1995, a dry winter and even drier summer lowered water levels throughout the Madawaska system. Then a generator at Pickering’s nuclear station went off-line. Hydro officials in Toronto decided to use the Stewartville generating station, the second-last on the Madawaska, to make up for the lost electricity supply. They opened it up, and already-low water levels got so low that residents remember how they could walk across the once-mighty Madawaska without getting their feet wet.

The Barrett Chute station was built in 1942. The dam featured an opening into the main course of the river for generating electricity, and a spillway gate above the High Falls channel for use as an overflow valve – a kind of safety drain to discharge excess water, typically from spring flooding, when it can’t be passed through the turbines quickly enough.

—

Mike picked up the cooler, sunglasses and a new pair of sandals, and tossed them aside on dry land.

Then, he recalls, one of the boys started screaming that the water was coming.

The pool started rising fast. Adam was off to the side, still on higher ground and closest to his father. Aaron was surrounded again by water, about 10 metres away in the other direction.

One boy to the left, one to the right. "Which one do you go for?" he says.

Seven-year-old Aaron Cadieux and his brother Adam, 9, had eagerly led their parents on the path to High Falls, a favourite spot for family outings. When the wall of water came, their father, Mike Cadieux, didn’t have time to rescue both of his sons.
– Ottawa Citizen

The hot rocks at High Falls have been a place to cool off for as long as people can remember. Technically, people aren’t supposed to go there. But Hydro officials and local authorities have turned a blind eye to the routine use of the area for sunbathing. In fact, it is publicized as a tourist destination on Web sites promoting the region.

Over the years, warning signs about the dangers at the dam would often be used as kindling for fires. Even after June 23, some new signs were taken by partygoers.
– Ottawa Citizen

In rural Renfrew County, accessible pieces of paradise like the rocks are hard to find. Property along the Ottawa River is largely privately owned. The Logos Land waterpark charges admission. Even the most obvious spot, the Renfrew public beach, is regularly shut down because of pollution.

High Falls is an alternative, and though it is set imposingly in the shadows of a massive concrete dam, no one had ever heard of someone being injured there.

"People have been going there for decades," says area MPP Sean Conway.

In fact, the spot is so quasi-official that, only weeks before June 23, Greater Madawaska Council had requested increased police patrols at High Falls after someone noticed that bonfires were not being properly extinguished and litter was piling up.

"The property was being abused," says Reeve Barry Moran. "There was generally a lot of rowdiness."

Years ago, a request for added patrols would have gone straight to Ontario Hydro. But the security detail that patrolled the area was fired in a round of layoffs years ago.

Police who would be called to the scene on June 23 said they were "shocked" to find no signs warning against trespassing.

Jimmy Campbell – a retired Hydro worker who spent 39 years on the Madawaska system and helped build the dam at Barrett Chute – never put that much faith in warning signs.

More often than not, he says, signs would get used as kindling for campfires.

But some years ago, when Ontario Hydro built a fence along the other side of the river but left the High Falls side open, he and his co-workers were left wondering why the job was left half-finished.

"We discussed it in the gang," he said grimly. "In my opinion, they should have fenced it here like they fenced it at Niagara Falls. . . . A life there isn’t worth any more than a life here."

—

Mike began to move toward Aaron but was swept by rising water. It moved the 260-pound man three or four metres, but he managed to get to higher ground, near Adam.

It was Cyndi who managed to wrap her arms tight around the younger boy, Aaron. Then she looked over at her husband.

She looked, he says, as if she knew they were going to die.

—

Highly unusual weather this spring set the stage for the tragedy at High Falls.

Tom Adams, who closely monitors the province’s power-generating operations as executive director of the Toronto-based watchdog Energy Probe, believes it was a rare imbalance of a dry early spring followed by extremely wet weather in June that left OPG scrambling to manage its water levels that day at Barrett Chute.

"Normally, in the spring, they let a lot of water out just before the freshet – the spring thaw," he says.

Snowmelts and spring rains join forces to raise water levels everywhere. Power generators "open the system up" during this period, allowing water to run its course down the Madawaska and into the Ottawa River relatively unhindered. Then they narrow the sluice gates at the end of the spring.

This year was different from most. The spring runoff, according to Mr. Adams, was virtually non-existent. Snowmelts came down as trickles.

"They may have left the levels higher than normal," said Mr. Adams, suggesting that OPG held back as much water as it could for potential power generation.

Then, in June, the skies opened up. More than double the normal 70 mm of rain fell on Calabogie.

Mr. Adams believes that at this point, OPG "found themselves in a situation where they had more water than they knew how to deal with."

OPG executives have said that heavy rains had caused water to build up behind the dam in the weeks before the tragedy. That put pressure on the turbines, they said, and as a result they were forced to release water through a secondary channel – the High Falls spillway.

No one in the area can ever remember a discharge during the summer – let alone a massive release like the one on June 23 – down High Falls spillway.

Mr. Campbell, a veteran of the river, says it was simply unprecedented. "Never," he says bluntly. "We never spilled in the summertime."

Barrett Chute dam
– Ottawa Citizen

They didn’t hear the roar of a two-metre wall of water until it was on them.

It was at that second, as the Mad River came crashing down from the sluice gates above, that Mike let out a desperate yell: "Swim as hard as you can."

—

While it was a wet June that left OPG with a brimming reservoir above the Barrett Chute station, it was the unseasonably balmy weather on June 23 that helped create a critical situation at the dam that Sunday afternoon.

In a "cascading" or interconnected series of dams, generating stations are used as part of a "peaking" system which responds to sharp spikes in demand for electricity.

Typically, these spikes come during the "electricity rush hour" between 4 p.m. and 7 p.m. – the time when people are cooking supper.

But on June 23, the spike in demand came much earlier than that. And it came because temperatures rose – very early in the day – from an expected 28 degrees to a sweltering 31. The historical average temperature for June 23 at Calabogie is 25.

Cyndi Cadieux, who made home with her two boys in a two-bedroom apartment in Calabogie, had three fans running before noon that morning. It still wasn’t enough to keep the boys cool, which is one of the reasons they’d decided to head to High Falls.

But in tens of thousands of homes across Ontario, the first response to the muggy weather was to crank up air conditioners. The provincial power system would have to react by cranking up its production.

But on June 23, that wasn’t easy to do. Just this week, it was reported that on June 11 Unit 6 at the Bruce B nuclear generating station went down due to an accident during maintenance. It would stay down for the entire summer, cutting the station’s power output by 25 per cent.

According to Bruce Power, the four units of the Bruce B plant produce enough electricity to supply a city the size of Toronto. With one-quarter of that electricity gone, the IMO was scrounging for power from other sources.

The Madawaska stations were about to get a tap on the shoulder and a request to make more electricity.

—

Aaron was pulled under and disappeared. But the torrent sent Cyndi cartwheeling violently down the falls. She hurtled along the overflow passageway, over two 90-degree chutes, until she was entangled in a shrub at the bottom of the falls. There was a gash on her head; she had died before she stopped tumbling.