Flood protection for Dauphin a necessity

Brandonites know about flooding.

Anyone who has lived in this city over the last two decades — or longer — has a pretty good idea what it means to come within a hair’s breadth of disaster when a river overflows its banks.

During the historic 2011 spring flood along the Assiniboine River, Brandon faced an unprecedented, and some would say gruelling, 120-day race to construct massive earth dikes and put into place lines of super-sandbags around low-lying areas of the city.

With help from the Canadian Armed Forces, city crews and volunteers managed to hold back the water that rose nearly seven metres above normal. The high water mark forced the evacuation of nearly 1,400 residents from low-lying parts of the city, including the region known as the Flats in the north-end flood plain.

And what was dubbed a one-in-300-year flood has become a repeating cycle, as the flood waters in 2014 flowed higher through Brandon than 2011. And this year, we are still watching the flood waters go down from the peak on July 12-13, when the Assiniboine reached a height of more than 1,182 feet at First Street.

What saved Brandon more than once now has been a combination of early provincial flood forecasting, which prompted city and provincial crews to deploy emergency infrastructure such as super-sandbags, and a series of permanent dikes and pumps that were cost-shared between three levels of government. According to provincial records, the total cost of the Brandon Flood Protection System Enhancements project was upward of $27.5 million.

We have been extremely fortunate, both that we have partners in government to help bankroll such a project and that Mother Nature did not give us more water than we could handle.

At least not yet.

Dauphin has not been so fortunate. Severe flooding this summer has caused a horrendous amount of damage to that community. Aerial photos of flooding from the end of June and start of July show exactly what could have happened to the city of Brandon had historical events gone only slightly different.

Dauphin’s emergency involved an unprecedented accumulation from a series of severe storms that ultimately dropped a staggering 450 millimetres of precipitation in parts of the region within just a few short weeks.

The resulting overland flooding came quick, raising the Vermillion River that runs through that city well beyond its banks. But because there are no provincial monitoring gauges installed on the river within Dauphin itself, the actual peak of the river’s flood remains an unknown.

Bridges became submerged, Dauphin’s downtown was submerged and the flooding ultimately breached the basement of the Dauphin Regional Health Centre, which will now likely be closed for the better part of a year for cleanup and repairs.

According to a recent story by the Dauphin Herald, the City of Dauphin is now looking for ways to mitigate the damage if flooding experienced at the start of July should ever come again. Among those discussions, according to the article, was the need for better monitoring of the river upstream of the city, within city limits, and improved riverbank elevation data, along with the possibility of developing a new river diversion project that could help protect homes and businesses along the river, and the hospital.

Dauphin city manager Sharla Griffiths told city council on July 13 that there currently is just one station upstream of Dauphin at the Vermillion dam, and one downstream where the river crosses Highway 20 north of the city.

She said that additional monitoring, when combined with accurate and comprehensive riverbank elevation data, would go a long way to forecasting potential flooding, identifying vulnerable areas and implementing timely mitigation measures.

These measures are necessary because the topography of the area surrounding Dauphin does not allow for several weeks of advanced warning like Brandon has when water enters the Assiniboine River watershed.

“When we look at Dauphin being a city, and it’s the largest urban concentration in the Parkland, I think it’s valid for us to ask the province to entertain a discussion about this,” Griffiths was quoted as saying in the Herald, adding that any such project should not cause problems further downstream.

“The last thing we want to do is cause more flooding downstream at the cost of saving the city. However, there has to be a trade-off and it would be in consultation with our neighbours.”

As Brandonites, we sympathize with all the affected residents and farmers in and around Dauphin who have sustained damage to their property and livelihoods. With so many lives having been affected by this natural disaster, we support the City of Dauphin’s council in its efforts to reinforce its flood protection against any such future catastrophe.

And while we assume that such discussions are already underway, we urge the provincial and federal governments to provide the same level of protection, care and funding that Brandon has received over the last several years in our own flood-fighting efforts.

The changing nature of our Prairie climate makes timely flood forecasting, active river monitoring and robust infrastructure in every vulnerable community an absolute necessity.

This year’s western Manitoba flood fight has become a stark reminder of that fact.

» Matt Goerzen, editor