Following a few tense days, there is hope that the worst is over for flooding in the Estevan area.
For the first time in roughly a decade, the Souris River spilled its banks last week, flooding out a number of low-lying areas along the river. Locally, the hardest hit area was the Woodlawn Regional Park as a significant portion of the campground, picnic area, sports fields and Rotary Park are under water. The floodwaters also threatened homes near the park as well as further down the river, but thanks to the community spirit of local volunteers those residences were spared from any significant damage.
Although much cleanup and damage assessment remains, it does appear the worst of the flooding has passed. During its daily conference call Monday, the Saskatchewan Watershed Authority said that because of the cooler weather over the weekend, the amount of water running into Boundary Dam through Long Creek had decreased significantly, allowing them to reduce the volume of water they are discharging into the Souris River. That discharge, which was as high as 150 cubic metres a second last week, was responsible for the flooding.
"The reservoir now, we have drawn it down to 16 centimetres below its full supply level from a flood surcharge so that is going to afford us to reduce further downstream flows later (Monday) and further reduce the impact on the people down there," said John Fahlman of the Watershed Authority.
"At the same time, the diversions from Boundary to Rafferty Dam are still running at full capacity just to keep (Boundary) able to accept what is still coming in."
With the situation at Boundary seemingly under control, it appears the SWA will now be focusing on the Rafferty Dam reservoir. Fahlman said there is still a significant amount of snow in the Weyburn area that has yet to melt. Once it does, that runoff will eventually find its way to Rafferty and will likely force the SWA to release water from that reservoir into the Souris.
"All that water does end up as inflow into Rafferty," he said. "The flows into there are continuing and they are sustained the reservoir came up another 30 centimetres (Sunday) and is about one metre into the flood stage. There is still about two and a half metres of flood storage which we think is going to hold a lot of the water coming in.
"At some point we will have to start spilling out of there, even if it is completely after spring runoff just to get the flood stage down. It is a balancing act because the spill out of Rafferty and Boundary both go through the same system downstream. We want to keep the flows through Estevan to the point where they don't have to go through the same type of thing again. We are optimistic we can."
That optimism will likely be welcomed by the RM of Estevan which, as the owner and operator of Woodlawn Regional Park, has been hit hard by the flood. RM administrator Greg Hoffort said although they have a fair bit of work ahead of them, the situation could have been worse.
"Though it was bad, with lots of land flooded, there were only two dwellings that we are aware of where people actually had to leave them. Given those volumes and how wide the river was that is probably reasonably remarkable," said Hoffort.
"Some guys did a lot of admirable work to get theirs and other peoples properties so the losses, dwelling-wise, were kept to a minimum. It's pretty amazing the water that went in."
As for damage to the park, Hoffort said they won't get a true read until the water recedes further.
"The water stopped just short of entering Doug Third Hall," he said. "We have two main washrooms inside the park; one took on a substantial amount of water however that is a brick building with a concrete floor and no insulation so we are hoping there is minimal damage. A lot of stuff was under water and there will be a ton of cleanup of debris. There was deadfall and picnic tables floating all over the park, but we'll see in a week.
"We know we took water into the Rotary Hall, we just don't know the extent of how bad it is until we actually get in there. Hopefully now with the flows subsiding we can actually get in there and take a better look."
Hoffort added that the flood also prompted the RM to declare a state of emergency Thursday morning.
"We needed to start looking at cutting some roads and getting into places so in discussion with Saskatchewan Emergency Measures we did declare a state of emergency. It gives the council the ability to take some more extraordinary measures and access some places they need to go and do some procedures, if necessary, without going through a lot of getting permission to enter land. It just makes things a little easier; it was not that there was any real life threatening situation by any means."
The flood also caused some nervous moments for the City of Estevan as they had to monitor the water level around the water treatment plant that is situated next to the Souris.
City manager Jim Puffalt said crews placed sandbags around the facility last week to prevent any major flooding. However some water seeped into the basement through an outlet pipe.
"The river had reached the height of the outlet pipe so the water was coming in to the treatment plant so we had to pump it out and sandbag it," said Puffalt who noted the situation did not pose a major threat to the city's water supply.
"Sask. Environment would not let us operate the plant if it was in jeopardy like that, and of course we wouldn't operate the plant if it was like that. We take the purveyance of water very seriously."
