Farmers face fear, frustration over possibility of spring flooding
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- Published on Friday, January 13, 2017
By Miranda Leybourne
Submitted
Farmers in the Westlake-Gladstone region are looking forward to spring with trepidation and a sense of frustration over flooding that they fear will once again happen on their lands, thanks, some of them claim, to the Ducks Unlimited (DU) dam at Big Grass Marsh.
The permanent structure fixed crest steel weir dam replaced a gated dam which featured removable planks in 1999. The new dam doesn’t allow variable control in the flow of the water, which frustrated some anonymous farmers to the extent that an illegal trench was dug around the structure in the autumn of 2015.
It seems not much has changed in the mood of the people affected by excessive flooding on farmland, despite dialogue with DU, the Whitemud Watershed Conservation District (WWCD) and the Municipality of Westlake-Gladstone.
Aaron Schmidt farms in the area that’s been affected by the flooding. He said as soon as the spring runoff starts, the ditches will be full of water and soon after, so will the fields.
“You’re basically left with evaporation as your only drainage,” he explains. “Everybody has got to run the water onto somebody else’s [ditches]...we can’t do nothing with our water.”
Schmidt and four or five other farmers had a meeting with the local municipality recently, and said most of the frustration that the farmers are feeling is aimed at the Big Grass Marsh dam.
“They kind of stuck that structure in there...and it’s not adjustable so we can’t ever manage it. If [the water level] is too high, no one cares,” he says. “They should let the RM control [the dam].”
Schmidt says ideally, the Province of Manitoba would evict DU from the entire site, and tear the dam down.
“That’s what should be done,” he proclaims. “Before Ducks used to exist, they also ruined all our hayland out there...there’s 20 quarters of native hayland out there that’s Crown land and municipal land that you can’t even use.”
Rick Andrews, manager of provincial operations for DU, says the issue of excessive water around the area of the dam is complex and multifaceted.
“There’s certainly been some above average precipitation over the last ten years -- a huge amount of rain, well above the normal has occurred in that watershed,” he reasoned. “The drainage ditches all run into that marsh. The Conservation District has many ditches and rains coming into that area. So when you do have a large amount of precipitation and very wet years, the water wants to get to the marsh.”
The flatness of the land and the narrow outlet downstream of the dam also makes the flooding worse, said Andrews.
