Monday 28 November 2011

R.M. remains vulnerable to flooding

BY ROBIN BOOKER

Photo from Carol Parafenko                                      Roadway Flood in Mossbank Sask. summer of 2011.
South of Mossbank, Kevin Stark turns his pickup off Highway 2 onto a gravel road. Frost has already driven most of the green colour from the landscape. Sweet clover skeletons sway on the edge of wheat stubble, waving at a mob of Canadian geese scrounging through a sun-bleached field.  Harvest has been finished for weeks and farmers are just wrapping up their fall field work. It's been a much better fall than local farmers had anticipated. 

“The way the spring was coming I thought we'd be harvesting until, who knows, November,” remarks Stark. 

Stark not only farms in the Rural Municipality of Lake Johnston, he's also its reeve. He was in charge of the RM's affairs when the flood came.   

Usually it's a combination of ground saturation, high snow pack, and a quick melt that causes flooding problems in Saskatchewan. However that wasn't the case in Mossbank this summer.  Spring had already come and gone before it flooded.

 “Most people were done seeding when the rain came,” says Stark. 

 A weather system moved in and dumped enough rain to cause flash floods. In one day alone, over 10 centimetres of rain fell in the municipality. The runoff basins higher in the watershed were still full from the spring melt, and the waterways couldn't contain the volume of water wandering downward.  

“It came down so hard and so fast that it wouldn't soak in—it would just run,” Stark recalls. 

From his truck seat Stark points to where the high water mark was. There is still a hint of amazement in his voice as he describes the scene from earlier in the summer. He estimates the water crested around three metres above the road—and there were other problem spots in the municipality. 

“We must have had seven or eight roads that were under water—where we had to run pumps and dig ditches to run the water away from the roads.”

Water levels remain high in areas like Clark Marsh, known as Dry Lake to the locals. It's located a couple of miles west of Mossbank. A road running through the marsh “used to be the Number 2 highway and it's still under water. That's never happened before,” says Don Smith, curator of the local museum and the 'go-to-guy' for local historical information.

The RM received an overwhelming amount of precipitation in a very short time. However the flooding problems experienced in the municipality were not just a product of the rain they received, or the short amount of time they received it in. The manner in which humans have influenced the water ways throughout the area exacerbated the situation. 

The practice of draining land for agriculture purposes arrived with the first settlers, and it remains an important land management strategy. Farm equipment grows bigger every year and the machines work much more efficiently when they don't have to go around pot holes in the fields. 

Modern farmers have access to large construction equipment capable of much more ambitious projects than their predecessors would have taken on. Today’s farmers’ purchase or rent equipment like excavators, bulldozers, and scrapers which they pull with their tractors. There are also local contractors who will drain areas for farmers.  

As a result of this channelization there have never been fewer sloughs and low areas to hold water back than there are today. This means the area has never been more vulnerable to flash flooding than it is right now.  

According to Saskatchewan Wetland Conservation Corporation, 40 per cent of Saskatchewan wetlands have been lost and half of those remaining are threatened by human activity. Ducks Unlimited claim over 250,000 hectares of wetlands have been eliminated in southern Saskatchewan since 1950.

So when it pours it has to run because there are few places for water to sit. 

“There's never been a quarter of this much water (in Dry Lake). So I suspect that some of the guys upstream were draining and it's never showed up until this year,” says Warren Jolly, a local farmer who was affected by the flood.   

Stark stops his pickup and looks across Dry Lake. The wind kicks up white froth and waves pass effortlessly over what used to be the Highway 2. This basin hasn't seen this much water as far back as memory can reach. Now waves wander shore-to-shore in the basin, slowly wearing at the local understanding of the watershed.  

“Over the years people have drained a little slough into the next slough, and it probably had a bearing on it.  But in a normal year it really doesn't make a big difference. I hope we never see anything like that again,” says Stark, as he pulls his pickup into drive and heads back towards Mossbank. 


No comments:

Post a Comment