The Winnipeg River is flowing at record levels in Manitoba because authorities no longer have another option to control flooding in much of northwestern Ontario and northern Minnesota.
The floods on the Winnipeg River, which are about three and a half times higher than usual at this time of year, have already forced hundreds of people to flee their homes and washed away roads in Whiteshell Provincial Park.
This is a result of the inflow, which is expected to increase only in the coming days, raising the water level to two-thirds of a meter higher in some places in Manitoba.
“We’re seeing record tributaries in the Winnipeg River system, tributaries we’ve never seen before,” said Scott Powell, communications director at Manitoba Hydro.
According to the Lake of the Woods Supervisory Board, the river flowed at 120,000 cubic feet per second on Tuesday at Seven Sisters Falls, more than the water that flowed down the Red River this spring in the midst of this year’s flood.
Officials on both sides of the Manitoba-Ontario border say the volume is unprecedented, but there is nothing the agency can do to reduce flows.
The river drains an area larger than the sea and almost all of it is flooded, said Matthew DeWulf, an executive engineer on the lake’s forest control board.
“There’s literally nowhere else to put the water,” Devolf said in an interview with his Ottawa office on Tuesday.
“Basically, the watershed is full and there’s nowhere to go but downstream, and unfortunately this whole area drains into this very narrow canal we call the Winnipeg River.”
The Forest Lake Supervisory Board is responsible for managing water levels in both the Lake Lake, which flows directly into the Winnipeg River, and Lac Seul, which flows into the Winnipeg River via the England River.
The board was forced to release water from Lac Seoul because a dam on that lake could be threatened if the water exceeds the maximum level, DeWolfe said.
The lake of forests rises
The board is also draining as much water as possible from Lake Forest, where the lake level has now risen to the point where waves in its southern basin threaten residential property and farmland in Minnesota, Ontario and a small corner of Manitoba, Buffalo Point who sticks out in the lake.
“This area is very flat and has a very unstable shoreline,” Devolf said, explaining that the southwest shore of the forest lake is grassy and shallow like a prairie lake, not rocky and steep like the Kenora.
“It’s a very open bay at the southern end of the forest lake, and when the winds, when they get stronger, they create huge waves.”
In its latest forecast for Lake of the Woods, the control board expects the lake to rise another 10 to 13 centimeters next week. At the same time, the flows from Lac Seoul remain high.
That means flows on the Winnipeg River must continue to rise for several more weeks, DeWolfe said.
“This is a very, very gradual rate of increase at the moment, unless we get a significant amount of rainfall,” he said, adding that he could not predict with any certainty when the waters would recede, given the vast area that is flooded.
“We are dealing with conditions that have never been seen before, so we have nothing to compare with.”
Hydro can’t hold it
Manitoba Hydro, which operates six dams on the Winnipeg River west of the Ontario border, is unable to hold water, said communications director Scott Powell.
“These are flowing rivers, as we call them. We don’t have large reservoirs in front of any of our stations on the Winnipeg River,” Powell said in an interview Tuesday.
“So when these streams come in, we have to pass them down the river, through our spillways, through our generator stations and turbines, and we have to keep passing them down to move that water,” he added.
“No matter what we do in certain places, there is a limit to how quickly some parts of the river will fall due to natural limitations in the natural water flow.
On Tuesday, Manitoba Infrastructure and Transportation officials said they were focused on keeping property owners safe and would consider a compensation program later.
Jay Dehring, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Manitoba, said holiday homes on the Winnipeg River may need to start making some of the same decisions that property owners in the Red River Valley have made since the Flood of the Century in 1997 destroyed or damaged thousands of homes.
“You have to have this reality check: will I restore this or will I move away from it,” Döring said in an interview Tuesday.
“And if I can rebuild it and raise it higher, will it look ridiculous on stilts?”
Powell said he would not speculate on the need to relocate or build villas or homes on the Winnipeg River for now.
“These are certainly the highest tributaries we’ve seen since 1907, when the recordings began. So it’s certainly not common,” he said.
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