The final cost of the 2011 flood won’t be known for some time but the toll it took on rural Saskatchewan residents is clear.
A couple of angry delegates at the Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities midterm convention last week said the provincial agency charged with flood forecasting didn’t do a good enough job.
Dennis Blackburn, councillor in the RM of Estevan, told Doug Johnson, the Saskatchewan Watershed Authority’s director of regional services, that the Rafferty Dam reservoir should have been drawn down to much lower levels before spring.
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Flooding downstream of the reservoir through the Souris River valley left half of the village of Roche Percee uninhabitable and farmland under water. The water went on to cause extensive damage in Minot, North Dakota.
“You people ran all that water through that valley and flooded everything. You had four floods there. You guys waited till Boundary Dam had their gates wide open and then you opened all the gates up on Rafferty,” Blackburn said.
“I remember full well standing there with Grant Devine and he said we’re building a dam here and this is for flood control. And you, sir, and you people did nothing except flood everybody in that valley.”
Reg Jahn, councillor in the RM of Coalfields and mayor of Roche Percee, said forecasters must be able to do a better job.
But Johnson said forecasting a onetime 130-millimetre rainfall is hard to do.
Several reviews of how the flooding occurred and was handled are underway. He said the operating plan was developed for a spring melt, not excessive rainfall.
“It’s difficult to operate and plan around a five-inch rainstorm coming in June after a series of wet events,” he said. “There was just nothing else that could be done. I know that the operating plan … did work up until the rainfall.”
The combination of spring flooding and rainfall could have emptied and filled Rafferty reservoir four times over the course of a few months, Johnson said.
The reservoir holds 439,600 cubic decameters of water and is the second-largest reservoir the watershed authority controls. The largest is Lake Diefenbaker at 9.4 million cubic decameters.
As part of a review of the province’s dams done after the extensive and prolonged flooding, the authority was instructed to work with the International Souris River Board and the International Joint Commission to review operations at Rafferty, Alameda and Boundary dams.
Operation of Gardiner Dam on Lake Diefenbaker is also being reviewed.
Throughout the flooding, rumours of damage to Rafferty Dam circulated. Inspections found minor damage at several dams and the government authorized spending $1.9 million on urgent repairs.
The $23-million emergency flood damage reduction program the province implemented helped some, but not all, areas. In some places the work simply couldn’t be done before the water arrived.
Johnson said 193 communities, 132 RMs, 849 yard sites, 14 First Nations and nine other locations such as parks or Hutterite colonies applied. As of Nov. 8, 56 percent had been paid or notified that they didn’t qualify. About $9 million has been paid out, said Johnson.
