Jayme Poisson is filling in for Kenyon Wallace, the Star’s transparency reporter, for the next few weeks. Through our recently launched trust initiative, we’ve received many emails from readers asking how we choose and pursue investigations and how we come to trust the information our sources give. Here, Poisson provides a first-hand account of how she and colleague David Bruser started looking into mercury contamination in Grassy Narrows.

It was about this time last year. We were parked on the side of the road just outside Carstairs, Alta., feeling pretty dejected when the call came through.

Colleague David Bruser and I had made the three-hour drive from Edmonton that morning. It was late afternoon, and we’d spent the day chasing what felt like the ghost of Kas Glowacki — a man we only knew as the mystery email author who had months earlier written “out of guilt” to the Chief of Grassy Narrows claiming that in 1972 he had dumped mercury-filled barrels behind a mill upstream from the First Nation in northern Ontario.

The email had been flipped to us via a source who was working closely with the community. He was at an impasse trying to reach Glowacki, who described himself as a former mill employee. If true, it would be bombshell information. The people of Grassy Narrows have suffered from symptoms of mercury poisoning for more than four decades and scientists had been saying elevated mercury levels in fish and sediment today suggest there is an ongoing source.

David and I tried for weeks to reach Glowacki from Toronto by email. Had he gotten cold feet? Was the whole thing a hoax? Still, neither of us could let go of that nagging feeling this could be more. And so, when we were heading to the National Newspaper Awards in Edmonton in May 2016, David suggested we rent a car to try to track him down.

We thought Glowacki lived in or near Carstairs because researchers at the Star had found a post office box registered to a man with the same name there. Once we had a general location, an online Canada411 entry gave us an address about 20 kilometres away.

The day ended up being one bust after another.

The address we found turned out to be Glowacki’s old house. The neighbour took our cards and said she would try to reach him, but made no promises. We had no luck at the gas station, grocery and hardware store where most people in the small-town community of 4,000 had an account. The pharmacy had an old account for Glowacki’s wife. The pharmacist called and left a message, but refused to give us the number. We tried the local bar. Nothing.

By the afternoon, we’d exhausted all our options. That’s when my cellphone rang.

It was Kas Glowacki. He had been having some health issues, he explained, and that’s why he hadn’t gotten back to us. He knew we were in Alberta.

“Where are you living now?” I asked.

“Medicine Hat,” he said.

We knew we needed to meet him in person to help us better assess his credibility. And likely, he needed to meet us to assess our credibility before talking. He said we could come over. The following day we made the six-hour drive.

That was the beginning of what has become a year’s worth of reporting on mercury contamination in Grassy Narrows.

The story of Kas Glowacki and the alleged dump led us to new sources in the Grassy Narrows, science and legal communities and new information that shed light on decades of government stalling and dissembling.

We learned and have revealed, among other things, that in 1984 the provincial government was told by its own environment minister that the lakes near Grassy Narrows can and should be cleaned; that Health Canada is keeping secret records that would say which babies tested high for mercury poisoning; and that the fish eaten today by the people of Grassy Narrows are the most mercury-contaminated in the province.

Earlier this year, we discovered with the help of an environmental group called Earthroots that there are higher than normal levels of mercury behind the old Dryden mill in the same spot Glowacki circled on a map. (The barrels Glowacki says he buried have yet to be found, though experts say they could be rusted through.)

The people of Grassy Narrows have been told by doctors that they are sick. Symptoms of mercury poisoning include loss of muscle co-ordination, slurred speech and tunnel vision. Fetuses are particularly vulnerable to cognitive damage.

Top scientists, leading authors like Margaret Atwood and Vincent Lam and others have called on the government to clean the river. While the province has promised a clean-up, they have recently been accused of stalling.

That next day in Medicine Hat, at Glowacki’s bungalow, we weren’t sure what to expect. We didn’t know if his story would ring true. If it did, we didn’t know whether he would go on the record with his claims.

Glowacki told us his story with confidence, great detail and consistency (David questioned his memory several times, and he’d always come back with a good reason he remembered something. For example, he said he was certain of the year because he had just had a baby). Our editors decided that while we couldn’t prove it was true, it was credible and certainly worth further investigation by the proper officials.

I asked Glowacki this week why he decided to meet with us that day.

What I didn’t know until now is that he had received a call from his former neighbour who told him there were “two characters trying to track me down for poisoning with arsenic.” We’d likely confused the neighbour with our impromptu appearance and Glowacki said he wanted to “get the facts straight, before my former neighbours thought I was someone sinister.”

About his decision to go public, he says he weighed the pros and cons and decided “that the whole thing should be more realistic with a face to the name.”