Province may fund dredging Red to fight jams

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This article was published 23/02/2011 (5490 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

BREEZY POINT — The provincial government may fund dredging of the Red River north of Winnipeg to reduce the likelihood of future springtime ice jamming.

Premier Greg Selinger said Tuesday his government would consider the move — while expressing regret that Ottawa has long abandoned the job. Federal dredging of the Red ceased in 1999.

“I wish the feds had never cut the program but they did,” Selinger said of the former Chrétien government.

Municipalities north of Winnipeg have long lobbied federal and provincial leaders to address the problem of river silting. It’s believed the river bottom in some areas has risen by over a metre since dredging was stopped.

On Tuesday, the subject came up again during a media tour here marking the 2011 launch of Red River icebreaking.

“We will work with these guys on a dredging program that makes sense,” said Selinger, who had been huddling in the cold with St. Clements Mayor Steve Strang, St. Andrews Reeve Don Forfar and Selkirk Mayor Larry Johannson as TV cameras fixated on an ice-pulverizing Amphibex 100 metres away.

“If he does that I’ll be ecstatic,” Forfar said later, referring to the premier’s comment.

His municipality along with Selkirk and St. Clements, through a corporation called North Red Community Water Maintenance Inc., oversees icebreaking on the Red north of Winnipeg.

The municipalities say ice jams would be less of a problem if there was a greater depth of water flowing between the ice and the river bottom. In 2009, when ice jams triggered costly flooding north of Winnipeg, there were spots where the river had frozen solid, they said.

“We have the technology to pinpoint where we need to dredge,” said Strang. “You don’t necessarily have to dredge the entire river.”

Two of the province’s three Amphibex icebreakers are also capable of dredging.

Harold Taylor, a former deputy executive director of the Red River Basin Commission, said Tuesday two dredging machines and a tugboat stored at Selkirk could also be pressed into service.

Meanwhile, Selinger said Manitoba’s flood outlook has not worsened dramatically in recent weeks, although the situation has grown more serious south of the border. The province will issue a new flood forecast on Thursday.

An official with the U.S. National Weather Service in Grand Forks said Tuesday Fargo received 17 centimetres of snow on Sunday and Monday while the community of Breckenridge, Minn., 70 kilometres farther south, got a 24-cm wallop.

larry.kusch@freepress.mb.ca