After nearly 19 years of service to the town of Wareham, Bob Ethier, director of public health, is leaving his post — though he has no plans to leave the town rudderless. 

Ethier said he was first hired as a health agent, and worked his way up to managing the department as director. Ethier said Wareham is “a tough place to be a public health director.”

“We got a lot of things going on,” he said. “We have a big rental housing population, so that needs to be regulated and inspected. We have a lot of food service industries in town, and they all need to be inspected on a schedule of twice a year, as regulated by the state.”

That many inspections keep the department busy.

“There are a lot of issues that public health’s responsible for,” Ethier said. 

For that reason, he said he’s not fully leaving just yet.

“I’m still going to be in public health,” he said. “I’ll probably be helping the town out because there’s a lot to do.” 

Because of the pandemic, he said things like inspections are behind schedule. 

“Restaurants closed; there’s new ones opening,” he said. “They need to be inspected and to get back on that twice a year schedule.”

Ethier said he’d be available for the town as needed. 

“I probably will be around at least for a couple of months helping the new director out,” he said, adding that he’d been helping with the search for his replacement.

Leading through a pandemic

At the end of his tenure, Ethier, like other public health officials around the globe, has had to navigate the unprecedented challenges created by the covid-19 pandemic.

Ethier praised the Wareham Board of Health, noting that having both a doctor and nurse on the board was “a great help [...] especially during covid.”

He explained that he typically meets with the board twice a month — a practice that continued all throughout the pandemic. 

“We kept [the board] informed of everything that was going on,” Ethier said. 

He also said that the department “had meetings twice weekly” with emergency personnel — including EMS, both fire departments and the police — the town administrator and everyone else involved with the town’s pandemic response. During those meetings, he said the group discussed covid case counts and other related information the town received from the state.

Ethier said he was a little disappointed that after years of training to do flu shot clinics, the town was never given the opportunity to participate in the covid-19 vaccine rollout. 

“We were all prepared for this thing,” he said. “And then the state just yanked it out of our hands. [...] I think that we would have distributed the vaccine quicker and certainly we would have gotten more of the population [vaccinated] in a more timely manner.”

Accomplishments

Throughout the years, Ethier helped the town establish several programs.

“I’m proud of the housing inspection program,” he said, adding that he worked with the Board of Health to set it up. “I think that’s a big accomplishment so people do not have to rent houses that don’t meet the state sanitary code or the fitness [standards].”

He said landlords are required to ensure that properties meet certain standards, “and that wasn’t happening,” before the inspection program was established in 2015. “What was happening was we were getting called out all the time on housing complaints: ‘my heat’s not working, this is not good, the windows are broken, the flooring is a mess.’”

With a program in place, the Health Department was able to get properties inspected more regularly and could take action more easily when properties fail to meet the code, Ethier explained. 

On the environmental side, Ethier said he was also proud of the town’s regulation requiring that any new septic system installed within 500 feet of a waterway must be a special denitrification system, which reduces nitrogen pollution more than a typical septic system. 

Ethier and the Board of Health passed that regulation in 2013.

“We believe that that’s made a big difference,” he said. Although they are expensive, the denitrification systems “protect the waters” and “keep the groundwater cleaner,” Ethier said. 

He thanked the Board of Health, the Health Department staff, Town Administrator Derek Sullivan, the Board of Selectmen, the Police Department, Wareham EMS, both fire departments, and all emergency personnel for years of support.

“We worked together like family,” he said, saying the Health Department had a great relationship with other town departments. “It was a pleasure to work with all of them.”

Ethier said he is proud of what was accomplished while he worked for the town for nearly two decades. “I will miss it though,” he said, adding that he enjoyed spending “so much time and so much effort” in a job that’s focused on helping people. 

“I think that the town — because of the efforts of all the departments I mentioned — is a safer place,” Ethier said. “It’s a good place to live.”