Better flood protection needed for Manitoba First Nations: report

WINNIPEG – An independent review says the Manitoba government generally did a good job of responding to the disastrous flood of 2011, but needs to improve flood forecasting and protection for First Nations.

A task force report says the province started preparations well ahead of time and officials worked around the clock to deal with one of the biggest floods in Manitoba’s history.

The report also praises the government for breaching a dike and expanding a flood diversion to ease pressure on the Assiniboine River.

But the review says inexperienced flood forecasters struggled with outdated models and computers as they tried to predict how much water was building up in rivers and lakes.

The report also says the province should urge the federal government, which has primary responsibility for First Nations, to develop an emergency management plan for flooding on reserves.

At its peak, the 2011 flood forced 7,100 people from their homes — about 2,000 aboriginals have not returned almost two years later.

Problems started when severe rainstorms upstream in Saskatchewan and the United States caused the Assiniboine River to swell. Forecasters were caught off-guard and plans had to be rushed to build up dikes in Brandon and other communities. Residents in low-lying areas of Brandon, the province’s second-largest city, were given hours to flee.

“The flood forecasting model being used … is a snowmelt model and is unable to produce reliable runoff forecasts for rainfall events,” says the report released Friday.

“Contrary to traditional understanding, most of the largest floods in Manitoba are the result of rainfall on top of, or shortly after, the snowmelt event.”

The government should explore other forecasting models, the report suggests, and also look at boosting equipment and staff levels in forecasting and emergency management.

“The lack of a data management system for handling large volumes of hydroclimatic — rainfall —data created an immense amount of work for the staff. To gather the data, (forecast centre) staff had to visit several Internet climate websites, access the data one station at a time, and finally copy and paste data from each website into Excel spreadsheets.”

The report said the magnitude of the flood would have been a challenge to any forecaster, “let alone a forecast team whose experience ranged from six months to three years.” The 2011 flood followed the retirement of long-time chief forecaster Alf Warkentin.

The report makes 126 recommendations, including that the government should look at more water storage, such as dams, along the Assiniboine River.

Manitoba suffers some level of flooding every spring as meltwater flows in from as far away as the Rocky Mountains. In 2011, there was a perfect storm of heavy snow in winter, heavy rains in spring and saturated ground unable to absorb any runoff.

The province has dikes, dams and channels to keep water moving around communities and into lakes, but that can mean choosing to raise lake levels near cottages to spare Winnipeg and other larger communities.

Residents around Lake Manitoba were angry that the province increased the capacity of the Portage Diversion to divert water from the Assiniboine River into the lakes.