If you ever drive through the countryside east and south of the city, the farther you go downstream along the Red Deer River, the more you might notice the ravines and gullies that define the countryside. It’s easy to imagine how this traditionally dry zone might look if some of those ravines and gullies held a good amount of water.
The provincial government has the same notion and recently announced a two-phased study on the impact of piping river water into some of these features, during times when river flow is high, such as during early spring breakup.
Water from times of heavy runoff would be stored in deep, natural ravines that exist in drier areas of Stettler and Paintearth Counties, said Drumheller-Stettler MLA Jack Hayden, minister of Agriculture and Rural Development. It would then be made available for watering livestock and even household needs when local sources dry up, he said.
Some of that stored runoff could also be available for processing plants, although there are none in the area right now.
A “tiny” level of irrigation may also be included as needed to keep the system flowing, Hayden added. The latest version of the plan does not include creating a capacity for big irrigation projects, because for municipalities, that’s a deal-breaker.
In Hayden’s and the government’s eyes, storing a portion of high water flows could make a quality difference for farms and families that rely on surface water. He called the project “drought proofing.” The water would mostly be used for watering cattle, for some household use and for recreation purposes, not for irrigating crops.
It’s an idea that’s a lot easier to sell during an unnaturally wet July than in the middle of a drought and who knows, maybe that was part of the plan.
Naturally, municipal ears perked up quickly when the studies were announced. Red Deer in particular led the battle against a proposal to pipe river water out of our drainage basin, to service a mall/race track project near Balzac, which is in the Bow River watershed.
The municipalities that live on the river won that battle and killed the diversion scheme. The eventual solution, which saw the paid transfer of water rights from an established irrigation district, basically set the benchmark for the cash value of water in Alberta. Nobody wants to go through that battle again, least of all the provincial government.
This idea is different. There are no grand schemes for dams or other massive projects on the table. The only new construction would be pipelines to take the water to those storage areas. And nobody’s water allocation on the river would be put in jeopardy. That includes every downstream user, right to the province of Saskatchewan, which is allocated half the river’s flow.
So City Councillor Buck Buchanan, our representative in the Red Deer River Watershed Management Group, along with other city officials are not calling us to arms on the proposal.
Playing with water is a favourite pastime for the provincial government, which has dabbled in dreams of diverting northern rivers to the south, and of damming the South Saskatchewan in an environmentally protected zone near CFB Suffield, to create a vast artificial lake in that river’s coulee. (Really, who in that dry grassland area wouldn’t want some nice waterfront? Except for all kinds of environmental alterations required, of course.)
There aren’t many details of this project to reveal; nobody’s even begun to seriously study it yet.
But at first glance, this look doable.
Take a nice drive south and east, and imagine what effect filling in a few of those ravines might have.
Greg Neiman is an Advocate editor.