Final stage of Rapid City dam repairs approaching

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 24/08/2022 (1350 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The embankment at the Rapid City dam is finally scheduled for replacement more than two years after it was burst by floodwaters.

At the end of June and beginning of July 2020, Westman received what provincial officials referred to as a one-in-1,000-year rain event.

Area rivers swelled and communities were flooded. While the dam at Lake Wahtopanah in Rivers held up after dealing with higher water flows than it was built to handle, the earthen embankment of the dam at Rapid City burst when the reservoir could no longer handle the flow of the Little Saskatchewan River.

The dam at Lake Wahtopanah ultimately held, and it has been slated for improvements in case of another historic flooding event.

Both Rapid City and Neepawa, which saw the Park Lake dam destroyed in the same flood, have had to wait until this year to tender major repairs to their respective structures.

In the aftermath of the 2020 incident, which drained the reservoir lake in Rapid City, some residents lost access to drinking water after their wells ran dry.

The president of the local wildlife association said the draining of the lake was dissuading potential tourists from visiting the popular beach there.

Then-Infrastructure Minister Ron Schuler gave the Sun a dim assessment of the failed structure in January 2021, saying: “It was never really engineered in the first place, because no engineer would put their stamp on that kind of a dam. It was basically doomed to fail.”

Manitoba Infrastructure originally stated it would take two years for repairs to be complete, which some residents told the Sun in previous stories was too long.

The destruction of the beach was a tough blow for locals, who in 2016 had spent $30,000 in federal and municipal governments to restore it, along with a $261,000 project in 2019 to dredge the Little Saskatchewan River of excess sediment and vegetation.

Those improvements didn’t last a single year.

The replacement of the embankment, which is the final step, is scheduled to be finished either on or before Nov. 30, which would be roughly two years and five months since the original incident.

Last October, the province awarded a tender to a Minnedosa company to excavate 2.5 hectares of sediment deposited in the reservoir during the fateful storm.

Then, last November, the province tendered repair work on the dam’s spillway — the structure that controls the outlet of water from the reservoir.

At the time, Manitoba Infrastructure told the Sun that the embankment repairs would be completed in mid-to-late summer to allow for the spring fish spawning season to end, but the tender was not posted until Aug. 19.

“It’s a major asset for the community of Rapid City and the surrounding area,” RM of Oakview Reeve Brent Fortune said in a Tuesday phone interview.

“It’s nice that the provincial government is getting ahead and getting some more work done on it.”

He agreed that water access had been an issue since the embankment burst, especially for homes on the north side of the reservoir lake.

However, Fortune said that the amount of rain received this year had helped out in that regard though it hadn’t solved all the issues.

“Mother Nature created a problem and we just had to deal with it,” Fortune said.

Commenting on the time frame of the repairs, Fortune said he understands that “things don’t just happen overnight.”

“They’re going to redo it again, they’re going to do it right, not a Band-Aid solution,” Fortune said.

“If we have other major floods … it’s got a chance at holding. We’ll hopefully be able to get some normalcy back in the area.”

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