The Winnipeg River flows at a record high in Manitoba because officials have no choice but to control flooding over a wide strip of northwestern Ontario and northern Minnesota.
The Winnipeg River floods, which at this time of year are about 3.5 times their usual volume, have already forced hundreds of people to flee their homes and razed the roads of Whiteshell Provincial Park.
This is the result of inflows that are only expected to increase in the next few days, raising the water level by up to two-thirds of a meter more in some parts of Manitoba.
“We’re seeing record entries into the Winnipeg River system, inflows we’ve never seen before,” said Scott Powell, Manitoba Hydro’s director of communications.
According to the Lake of the Woods Control Board, the river was flowing at 120,000 cubic feet per second on Tuesday at Seven Sisters Falls, which is more than the water flowing down the Red River this spring at the height of this year’s flood.
Officials on both sides of the Manitoba-Ontario border say the volume is unprecedented, but no agency can do anything to reduce the flow.
The river drains a larger area than the Maritime and almost everything is flooding, said Matthew DeWolfe, executive engineer at the Forest Lake Control Board.
“There’s literally no other place to put water,” DeWolfe said Tuesday in an interview from his Ottawa office.
“Basically, the watershed is full and there’s nowhere to go except to flow downstream, and unfortunately this whole area drains into this very narrow canal that we call the Winnipeg River.”
The Lake of the Woods Control Board is responsible for managing water levels in both the Lake of the Woods, which drains directly into the Winnipeg River, and Lake Seoul, which drains the Winnipeg River through the English River.
The board has been forced to release water from Lake Seoul because a dam on the lake could be threatened if the water exceeds the maximum level, DeWolfe said.
The forest lake rising
The board is also draining as much water as it can from Forest Lake, where the lake’s level has now risen to the point that the action of the waves in its southern basin threatens residential properties and farmland in Minnesota, Ontario and a little corner of Manitoba. , Buffalo Point, which enters the lake.
“This area is very flat and a very unstable coastline,” DeWolfe said, explaining that the southwestern shore of Forest Lake is grassy and shallow as a prairie lake, not rocky and steep as it is in Kenora. .
“It’s a very open bay at the southern end of the forest lake and when the winds, when they get up, create huge waves.”
In its latest forecast for the forest lake, the control board expects the lake to increase by another 10 to 13 centimeters over the next week. At the same time, the flow of Lake Seoul remains high.
That means flows along the Winnipeg River should continue to rise for several more weeks, DeWolfe said.
“It’s a very, very gradual rate of increase right now, unless we have a significant amount of rainfall,” he said, adding that he could not predict with certainty when the waters will recede, given the large area that is experiencing flooding. .
“We’re dealing with conditions that have never been seen before, so there’s nothing to compare them to.”
Hydro can’t contain it
Manitoba Hydro, which operates six dams on the Winnipeg River west of the Ontario border, has no capacity to hold any water, said communications director Scott Powell.
“These are river power plants, as we call them. We don’t have large reservoirs in front of any of our stations on the Winnipeg River,” Powell said Tuesday in an interview.
“As these flows arrive, we have to pass them through the river, through our overflows, through our generating stations and turbines and continue to pass them to move this water,” he added.
“No matter what we do in certain places, there is a limit to the speed at which certain areas of the river will fall due to natural restrictions on the natural watercourse.”
On Tuesday, Manitoba Infrastructure and Transportation officials said they were focused on keeping homeowners safe and will consider a compensation program later.
Jay Doering, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Manitoba, said home fields along the Winnipeg River should start making some of the same decisions that Red River Valley property owners made after that the 1997 flood destroyed or damaged thousands of homes.
“You have to have that reality check: am I going to rebuild or will I move away from that,” Doering said Tuesday in an interview.
“And if I’m able to rebuild it and lift it higher, will it look ridiculous on stilts?”
Powell said he would not yet speculate on the need to move or raise any house or house along the Winnipeg River.
“These are certainly the highest inflows we’ve seen since 1907, when the records began. So it’s certainly not a common occurrence,” he said.