Cheaper solution to flooding available

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 15/05/2015 (3800 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As a Lake Manitoban, I want to see an effective solution to the problem of prolonged and artificial flooding on Lake Manitoba and Lake St. Martin. As a Manitoba taxpayer, I don’t want to see the public purse squandered to do it.

Premier Selinger has proposed to spend nearly a half-billion dollars on a new outlet channel to Lake Manitoba that engineers say will drop the lake level only 1.1 feet from its peak in a one-in-200 year event. This means in 2011, the lake would still have remained well above the level at which most of the damage occurred, which is no solution at all.

This proposed outlet could be effective only if it was used to lower the lake level in advance of a flood. But there is no indication such a channel would be used that way, and strong reason to suspect that is not even possible. The “emergency channel,” draining Lake St. Martin was built hurriedly in 2011 with inadequate engineering and little regard for environmental and sociological impacts. It inflicts material harm to both fish and wildlife and raises the ire of local First Nations, many of whom are still flood evacuees. History shows the emergency channel cannot even be fully opened when flooding occurs on Lake Manitoba (last year) or Lake St. Martin (right now).

What chance then is there that a larger project — one that triples the size of the existing emergency channel and adds three new channels to boot, including the Lake Manitoba outlet — will ever obtain an environmental approval allowing the structure to be opened outside of the most dire emergency? Almost none.

So if built at exorbitant cost, the value of the proposed Lake Manitoba outlet will be primarily to clean up after a flood has occurred, not to prevent a flood in the first place.

Why bother?

It seems our current government is more interested in the optics of being seen to be doing something as opposed to actually doing something.

Manitobans can’t afford to spend a half-billion dollars needlessly just to make the current government look good.

Former Manitoba premier Ed Schreyer has proposed a solution that could work. A description of the project was recently provided by water policy expert Jim Collinson on these pages (April 28, Another outlet for Lake Manitoba).

The primary natural inflow to Lake Manitoba is from Lake Winnipegosis via the Waterhen River. In 2011, the deluge of water from the Portage Diversion accounted for roughly half the inflow to Lake Manitoba.

The other half came mainly from the Waterhen River. When Lake Winnipegosis is high, flow on the Waterhen is high. And Lake Winnipegosis has been high since 2004. The Schreyer solution proposes lowering Lake Winnipegosis by pumping water over a narrow isthmus into Cedar Lake to the north. By reducing inflow to Lake Manitoba, this also alleviates downstream flooding on Lake St. Martin and the Dauphin River stemming from the use of the Portage Diversion and Fairford Water Control Structure. And if that were not enough, as an added bonus, the extra water can be used to generate more power at the Grand Rapids generating station, taking advantage of the infrastructure already in place. Flows on the Saskatchewan River that feed the Grand Rapids station have been falling for more than a century, so the extra water is badly needed.

This idea is not new. Indeed when the 2012 study conducted jointly by the KGS Group and Manitoba Infrastructure and Transportation explored potential solutions to flooding on the Assiniboine and Lake Manitoba, the Lake Winnipegosis pumping station was on the table. They found the channel and pump station would be more effective in lowering Lake Manitoba than the currently proposed outlet at about half the cost. The environmental concerns are far fewer, and construction is easier.

Help in paying for its capital costs would come through extra generation of hydroelectric power. In short, it works better, is cheaper, and it helps to pay for itself. What’s not to like?

Our current government evidently didn’t like it — they are forging ahead with a more expensive and less effective option, preferring to spend too much to obtain too little. Go figure.

 

Scott Forbes is an ecologist at the University of Winnipeg.