Despite another weekend of heavy rain, the flood situation along the Souris River is improving.
After reaching its peak earlier this month, the river has been receding gradually in the days since. There were fears that the roughly two inches of rain Estevan and area received over the weekend could cause the river to swell again but John Fahlman of the Saskatchewan Watershed Authority said that won't be the case.
"The rain came, the inflows were the same as a couple of weeks ago but we got the reservoirs down far enough before (the rain) that we could store it in there and not have to increase the flows back up to what they were," said Fahlman in an interview Tuesday morning.
"We have some storage in the (Boundary and Rafferty) reservoirs so we feel comfortable that we can drop the flows and leave them there going forward until the reservoirs come down quite a bit."
As of Tuesday morning, Fahlman said Boundary was sitting near its full supply level and releasing water into the Souris River at a rate of 40 cubic metres per second. However they planned to drop that outflow down to 20 m3/s later in the day. Rafferty was flowing at 30 m3/s as of Tuesday and Fahlman said there were no plans to make any changes in the immediate future.
"That will mean 50 m3/s coming out of the reservoirs," said Fahlman. "Over the next day, to two days, as the valley drains, (the river) should go back and stay within the channel. As far as we can tell, we are going to be able to leave it there unless we get another rain storm like this and right now it doesn't look like that is on the horizon.
"As Boundary inflows drop we will eventually turn that off but will increase Rafferty releases to make up for what we turn it down. Basically we just want to get the reservoirs down."
Although there is some storage space in Rafferty to handle any future rainfalls, provided they aren't too large, Fahlman said the best thing for area would be some dry weather.
"I would like the landscape to get a chance to breathe and drain off a bit, maybe the ground dry up a bit," he said. "If we get another two inches in a week we might have to bump it up again but we looked at the weather modelling this morning and right now it is not saying that."
