Clarkson: Flood money won't help Delta 0
By Jordan Maxwell, Portage Daily Graphic
Don Clarkson, president of the Delta Beach Association, said that the government's three-year, $99.2 million plan for flood mitigation in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Quebec will do little to deal with current issues facing Lake Manitoba.
Federal funding distributed by the government was announced last week to help Manitoba and other flood-affected areas with flood mitigation and protection.
While the three-year, $99.2 million plan seemed like a new investment in the flood fight, Don Clarkson, president of the Delta Beach Association, doesn't believe that to be the case.
"I heard the Premier (Greg Selinger) comment on the money and it sounds to me that the Province has already spent the money. This is not for flood mitigation but there's the increase in diking that they've done along the Assiniboine River Channel, east of the Portage la Prairie, last year," said Clarkson.
According to Clarkson, the money will be used to pay for last year's expenditures for the increase in diking and other flood mitigation strategies which were built last year in an attempt to relieve water from the Lake.
However, Clarkson thought it was a fruitless effort on behalf of the government because the funding doesn't do anything to deal with water levels at Delta Beach.
"It doesn't really solve any of our problems at Delta Beach," he said. "Basically the main issue we have is that we have too much water going in artificially and there's not enough water going out of the lake."
Ongoing issues
The Delta Beach Association has been a vocal critic of the Portage Diversion and the government's unwillingness to look at the science reports about the lake.
Clarkson said that to prevent another flood, the government needs to start work on the Fairford Dam to release some of the excess water in Lake Manitoba.
"The thing is we have the Portage Diversion built in the 70s. At no time since the building of the Diversion have they increased the capacity to get the water out of the lake. They've turned around and increased the capacity without any consideration of how to remove the water from Lake Manitoba," he said.
The solution is simple, he added.
"There's approxmiately about 9800 cfs exiting at the Fairford Dam. If we added another 6,000 cfs, which is the recommendation from the engineers and the scientists, we'd now increase the capacity coming out of the lake by 50%. The number of days it would take to remove the water out of the lake would increase dramatically.
"We were having about 20,000 cfs going out and 36,000 cfs going in and that 16,000 cfs difference is what allowed the lake to rise. It's like putting two drains on a tub instead of one," said Clarkson.
And none of this is new. Clarkson said these recommendations were made when the government first built the Diversion, however minimal funding stymied the project.
In a report from the Association of Lake Manitoba Stakeholders, it's learned that as time passed the levels got worse as a result of the project's postponement.
In the 1950's, according to the report, it took three years for the lake for rise four feet. By 2011, it rose "four feet in three months, leaving people no time to prepare or shore up defences."
What's more, the report also chides the notion that the wind storm last May was a "freak occurence." Due to the frequency of wind storms around Lake Manitoba, it wasn't to blame for the freakish flood, according to the report.
Government's reponses
So who is to blame? According to Clarkson, it's the government, who responded by saying their investments "save the taxpayer money and reduce hardship of families."
"The province invested more than $120 million in flood protection infrastructure last spring, primarily by diking the Assiniboine River, which protected tens of thousands of Manitobans," said Jean-Marc Prevost, of cabinet communications.
"All provinces agree with us on the need to create a permanent national disaster mitigation program. Prime Minister Harper has been receptive to this idea in his conversations with Premier Selinger, and Minister Toews also confirmed last week that something along the lines of a permanent program is in the works, so we look forward to that as a next step. "
jordan.maxwell@sunmedia.ca
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