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Today the region, encompassing much of the South Saskatchewan River basin, is known as Palliser’s Triangle. It runs roughly from its westernmost point near Cardston, north to the confluence of the Red Deer and South Saskatchewan rivers near Oyen, before dipping south to Swift Current, Saskatchewan. And it has a lot of agriculture. This is because the drought that Palliser experienced abated and the region bloomed, as did settlers’ hopes of cultivating crops in the area. Palliser’s report, the first major survey of southeastern Alberta, was dismissed as pessimistic.

That change of perspective was just the first in a cycle in Alberta over the past 125 years, pushed along by dry years and wet years. People in Palliser’s Triangle have regularly had to manage drought or flooding, trying to smooth out the peaks and valleys of water supply. And for over a century now, the solution to flood and drought alike in the region has always been the same—build more irrigation infrastructure.

The Canadian Pacific Railway, having acquired much of the land in Palliser’s Triangle as part of a deal to build a transnational rail line, saw the potential to bring water to lands thought too barren to cultivate for food. It developed the province’s first large irrigation system, hoping to maximize its capacity to ship agricultural products east and transport European settlers and goods west. The CPR system began in 1903 with the construction of a weir at Calgary to divert water from the Bow River to the Chestermere Reservoir. The Bassano Dam, built in 1910, and an extensive network of canals allowed thousands more acres to be irrigated. Southern Alberta soon had one of the most extensive irrigation networks on the continent.

The CPR wasn’t wrong. The combination of a hot, dry climate and available water transformed the region. But today many Albertans are questioning whether further expansion of irrigation infrastructure is a good idea.

The first significant pushback to building more irrigation infrastructure in Alberta came from opponents of the Oldman Dam. Spurred by the 1984 drought in southern Alberta, Premier Peter Lougheed had commissioned a dam at the confluence of the Oldman and the Crowsnest rivers, just north of Pincher Creek. It would create the largest irrigation reservoir in the province. The Piikani Nation, where headgates were to feed a canal network west and north of Lethbridge, fought the project in the courts and on the land. The advocacy group Friends of the Oldman River was launched as well, alarmed that an environmental assessment hadn’t been done for the reservoir and dam.

After a court decision in December 1987 allowed construction of the dam to continue, an emergency debate was held in the legislature. “One of the most justifiable complaints about this project has been that the public—and when we’re talking about $350-million of taxpayers’ money, that means every taxpayer in the province—has not been given ample opportunity to voice their concerns,” said Edmonton-Glengarry MLA John Younie (NDP) in the legislature. “Those objections [are] both economic and environmental.”

Fred Bradley, MLA for Pincher Creek (PC), argued that the future of southern Alberta was at stake. “If we don’t have sufficient storage in the whole South Saskatchewan system, including the Oldman, there’ll be limits to development in the Bow River basin and the Red Deer River basin,” he told the legislature. By this Bradley meant that economic opportunities in those regions could be reduced if Saskatchewan didn’t receive its allotted water under a 1969 interprovincial agreement that dictates how much water must flow across the provincial boundary near Medicine Hat.

In May 1992, after the Oldman Dam was completed, a court-ordered environmental examination recommended that the dam be decommissioned, concluding “the environmental, social and economic costs of the project” exceeded its economic benefits. The Alberta government ignored the report.

Nearly four decades later, the arguments for and against more dams in the South Saskatchewan basin are much the same. People discuss the role of infrastructure in preventing flooding, mitigating drought and creating water security (for both Alberta and our neighbours), and question whether the benefits outweigh the financial and environmental costs.

The reservoir created by the Oldman Dam, for example, hasn’t always ensured water security. In December 2023 the province had 51 active water shortage advisories as drought gripped southern Alberta. In mid-August 2023 the MD of Pincher Creek saw its intake pipe exposed as water levels in the Oldman Reservoir dropped precipitously. The town had to truck drinking water in. That was also the situation for the rural municipality in 2016. Nor has the Oldman Dam always provided security to irrigators whose canals are fed by its reservoir. The initial water allotment for local farmers to begin the 2024 growing season was half the annual average.

But there have been undeniable economic benefits. Since the Oldman Dam opened, the number of irrigated acres in Lethbridge Northern Irrigation District has risen by more than 60 per cent. Irrigation has prompted a boom all along the Highway 3 corridor from Lethbridge to Medicine Hat, now an agri-food hub that processes potatoes and sugar beets grown using irrigation. The corridor includes greenhouses that fill Alberta’s grocery stores with tomatoes and cucumbers, while lentils, beans and peas flow through to international markets. The beef industry is also dependent on irrigation to supply feed crops and power “feedlot alley,” just outside Fort Macleod. Feedlots generate $1.6-billion in farm receipts in Lethbridge County alone.

According to a 2021 report by the Alberta Irrigation Districts Association (AIDA), irrigated acreage collectively represents less than 4.5 per cent of all cultivated land in Alberta’s 13 irrigation districts but produces more than a quarter of the province’s agri-food GDP.

Everyone can agree that the winter of 2023–2024 wasn’t the first time southeastern Alberta has experienced drought. Where people disagree is in what we should do about it.

Earlier this year AIDA released a report on the future of water management in southern Alberta. “The Adaptation Roadmap for the South Saskatchewan River Basin” recommends a multi-option build-out over 20 years involving more infrastructure, including a new dam on the Bow River just south of Brooks, another upstream near Cochrane, a third on the Red Deer River east of that city and a fourth on the upper Belly River, along the western edge of the Kainai Nation, southwest of Lethbridge.

The report also proposes a new off-stream reservoir—one supplied by a canal or pipe—along the Red Deer River south of Oyen to provide irrigation to the Special Areas, three sparsely populated municipalities atop Palliser’s Triangle. The Special Areas were constituted by the province in response to the mass abandonment of the area during the 1930s Dustbowl, and they have remained under provincial governance ever since. Irrigation could transform the region.

The AIDA report is currently being evaluated by the province. Budget 2023 allocated $5-million to study the feasibility of the Eyremore Dam near Brooks, with a report due in spring 2025.

Richard Phillips, general manager of the Bow River Irrigation District, is likewise bullish on building more infrastructure. He says AIDA’s report balances the needs of southern Alberta’s irrigators against those of municipalities while creating more resilience against not only water-supply variations consistent with historical trends but also those predicted by climate change modelling.

Phillips is also the chair of Irrigating Alberta, a consortium of 10 irrigation districts set up to manage the nearly $1-billion that has been allocated to the Alberta Irrigation Modernization (AIM) program. AIM, announced in 2021, is the province’s largest-ever one-time investment in irrigation. The districts themselves are contributing $163-million. More than $407-million will come from the Canada Infrastructure Bank, with the province contributing the remaining $245-million. The 56 projects covered under AIM—including four new off-stream reservoirs—have the potential to increase Alberta’s irrigated area by 84,000 hectares.

Phillips says demand is high for expanding irrigation, but he argues new infrastructure won’t lead to more water being used. In the past, “expansion of irrigation districts has been based on [creating] efficiencies …both on-farm improvements and district improvements,” says Phillips. “We’ve more than doubled the irrigated area since the 1970s but we truly don’t use any more water than we did then.”

In 1976 southern Alberta’s 320,000 hectares of irrigated land was using 2.1 billion m² of water annually. As of 2022 some 600,000 hectares in Alberta were being irrigated using 2 billion m² of water. A 2015 report prepared for irrigators, “Economic Value of Irrigation in Alberta,” says water efficiency in Alberta almost doubled from 1965 to 2010, largely through the use of more-precise irrigation systems.

Now, much of the AIM funding will be allocated to converting open canals to pipelines. This is projected to reduce the estimated 10 per cent of a southern Alberta canal’s water that is currently lost to evaporation.

But water needs vary year to year. A flash drought in 2017 and a prolonged one across western Canada in 2021 saw irrigation districts divert more water than was typical. In wet years such as 2010 through 2015, districts diverted far less. So new infrastructure in Alberta would be about “taking a long-term view… to improve water management for both wet extremes and dry extremes and everything in between,” says Phillips.

Just as with Alberta’s last major drought, which lasted from 2001 into the spring of 2002, the end of 2023 going into 2024 saw an El Niño weather pattern dry up southern Alberta before transitioning into a more neutral pattern. After shrinking alarmingly over the winter, reservoirs in Phillips’s district and the neighbouring Eastern Irrigation District, which draw water from the Bow, were near or above normal levels heading into the growing season.

The “solution” to flood and drought alike has always been the same—build more irrigation infrastructure.

Asked why more infrastructure is needed if Alberta has managed to weather two major droughts in the past quarter century, as well as several extremely dry years, Phillips pointed to the situation faced earlier this year by irrigators who rely on the Oldman system. Going into 2024 the Oldman Dam reservoir was at its second-lowest level ever—drier only in the spring of 2002. The St. Mary Reservoir, whose namesake river feeds into the Oldman downstream of the dam, began this year nearly empty. That situation led to an initial halving of the normal water allotment for St. Mary River Irrigation District farmers, down to eight inches.

“It was a very different picture there,” says Phillips. “This Roadmap (report) isn’t just about the Bow but the whole South Saskatchewan. Many recommendations will improve the Oldman and its tributaries as well.”

And the Roadmap isn’t just about irrigation, says Phillips; it will also develop resilience for flood and drought management. Indeed the report (and nearly every similar one commissioned by the province in the past two decades) says a changing climate is the main reason to build more water infrastructure. “If climate-change models are accurate—and time will tell—we’d expect to see more extreme cycles of flood and drought,” said Phillips. “We’ve seen some pretty crazy things in recent years… Last year we had a good snowpack in the mountains, but it all came down a full month before you would expect to see it. If that continues, it just becomes so much more important to be able to capture the water when it’s available.”

Southeastern Alberta saw record flooding events in 2010 caused by overflowing creeks running off the Cypress Hills. That was only a prelude to the swamping of communities along the Bow and the Elbow rivers in 2013, including downtown Calgary. Says Phillips: “This Roadmap is about adapting to highly variable water supply so we can still have the water we need, regardless of what the weather is looking like.”

Do the benefits outweigh the costs The Oldman reservoir hasn’t always ensured water security.

But just as they were in the 1980s during construction of the Oldman Dam, the benefits and drawbacks of more dams and reservoirs are open to debate. Biologist Lorne Fitch has been vocal in his opposition to more such infrastructure in Alberta. Fitch worked with Alberta Fish and Wildlife for 35 years before teaching at the University of Calgary and co-founding the riparian stewardship organization Cows and Fish.

“We have seriously overallocated water diversion flows in all of the southern regions,” he says. “As a consequence, many river sections aren’t functioning ecologically anymore. Fish populations have declined, riparian cottonwood communities have suffered, and so the overall impact of irrigation on our rivers has been profoundly negative.”

The Alberta government, despite its enthusiasm for irrigation, doesn’t dispute Fitch’s assessment of the state of wildlife. It announced at the start of a recent and ongoing fisheries engagement process that “native trout populations across the east slopes of Alberta have experienced severe declines in population size and distribution.” A 2018 U of C research paper shows that the population of rainbow trout in the Bow River, for example, shrank by as much as 50 per cent from 2003 to 2013 (Fitch wasn’t one of the study’s authors). This finding was corroborated by Alberta Environment field samples in 2018, 2019 and 2020.

The moratorium the government enacted in 2006 on issuing new water licences in the South Saskatchewan River basin eased some pressure on the environment, says Fitch. But he argues the move didn’t come in time. The amount of water that has already been allocated, he says, can, in a bad year, exceed the supply. “The reality is, the volume that has been licensed may, in some years, exceed the flow in our rivers. The past hasn’t been a good template for the future.”

In 1988 Alberta’s irrigation districts used their full water allocation on the South Saskatchewan River basin. Between that year and the 2006 moratorium, a half-billion more cubic metres of water was allocated from the basin. Collectively Alberta’s irrigation districts today comprise by far the largest water-licence holder in the province.

Moreover, new dams and reservoirs could put pressure on the shortgrass prairie, as the financial allure of cultivating native grasslands might prove too tempting to ignore. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature has called the Great Plains “the world’s most endangered ecosystem,” with more than 50 per cent of it converted to crops and much of the rest intensively grazed.

While Fitch isn’t against all developments that impact water—whether irrigation, industrial expansion or resource extraction—he says there doesn’t appear to be much will in Alberta for exploring how much is too much. “We’ve failed to recognize limits and thresholds. The more we cross those lines in the sand, the less resilient we are to changes—and climate change is going to be a big factor, a wrench in the works.” If our environment is already overextended because of our inability to respect ecological limits, he says, “we’re in serious trouble.”

Fitch is critical of the AIDA’s Roadmap report, calling it a product of the “irrigation lobby.” He describes the 19th-century economic theory known as the “Jevons paradox,” whereby technology increases the efficiency of a resource and lowers costs, which in turn further drives demand and ultimately increases overall use of the resource. And, indeed, greater efficiencies haven’t appreciably reduced the overall amount of water used by Alberta irrigators.

In the driest parts of winter 2023–2024, Fitch said the common refrain from farmers, politicians and “the man on the street” was that they hoped more snow and rain would save southern Alberta from drought. “The problem is, hope isn’t a strategy,” he says. “It’s an acquiescence to doing nothing or doing the wrong things. And that’s why we need a better, overarching, objective review of how we manage water.”

A key part of such a review, he explained, would be to help more Albertans understand how logging on the Eastern Slopes of the Rockies is limiting forests’ ability to act as a sponge. Healthy forests slow the release of runoff in times of both drought and flooding. “But the larger the footprint of logging, the greater the runoff…. We’ve subjected the sponge to too much pressure, and the headwaters can’t hold as much anymore. It runs off so much faster, as we’re giving it many more conduits, with roads and cutlines and off-highway vehicle trails.”

Fitch said what he’d like to see is more objective oversight of water management in the province, considering all resource development and its impacts on the environment along with land-use planning. “We have to be a lot smarter about this stuff.”

Fitch isn’t alone in his criticism. Retired agronomist Ross Mackenzie, who worked for Alberta Agriculture for nearly four decades, primarily as a research scientist, believes better on-farm water management and soil-moisture monitoring could make a bigger difference than digging more dams and reservoirs.

“Typically, a cereal crop such as wheat, barley or canola… most years you only need to put on 10 to 13 inches—roughly, depending on precipitation—of irrigation water,” he says. Despite this, he says, irrigation districts commonly provide up to 18 inches per field. Mackenzie remembers working with a farmer in 2023 in the Eastern Irrigation District who was facing the possibility of seeing his 12-inch allocation reduced during a particularly dry spring and early summer. But strict on-farm management proved more could be done with less, he says, with that farm garnering average or above average yields just through improved water use. “He was very careful how much water he put on each field and then reallocated to other fields, particularly silage corn, which was important for the (cattle) feeding operation.”

Mackenzie is critical of Alberta Agriculture for cutting its funding for staff to help irrigation farmers improve such water management techniques. “We have one irrigation extension person that works out of Brooks, but obviously he can’t speak to all farmers across 1.7 million acres of irrigated land. One person can’t do it all.”

Mackenzie also says irrigation districts haven’t picked up the slack left by the province. “Irrigation districts aren’t promoting using good management; they’re just screaming ‘We need more dams, more reservoirs for more water.’ In most years, we’ve had ample water.” A typical year, he notes, sees most districts use 60 per cent of the water available to them, with only some of them nearing 80 per cent of their water licence. “Most irrigation districts in the past 50 years have never used their full allocation. [Then] they have a couple of dry years, low snowpack in the mountains, and they’re saying they need more reservoirs. Most of the time, we don’t,” he says. “We just need to manage our water very carefully and we can do quite nicely.”

In fact, between 1987 and 2020, the average annual water use by irrigation districts comprised 53 per cent of their licences.

The Oldman Reservoir: Spurred by the 1984 drought, Peter Lougheed commissioned a dam at the confluence of the Oldman and the Crowsnest rivers. It remains Alberta’s largest irrigation reservoir.

Looking westward, in December 2023, over a part of the Oldman Reservoir that normally would be under water. Going into 2024 the reservoir was at its second-lowest level ever—drier only in the spring of 2002.

Mackenzie questions the need for the Eyremore Dam, which would be downstream of diversions for the Eastern, Bow River and Western irrigation districts. “All it would do is hold water to make sure (Alberta) is meeting its allocation to Saskatchewan to give them their fair share of water… We have to ask ourselves: for the one time in 20 years or once in 10 years that we’re a little bit short of water, do we really need to be building new dams?”

Mackenzie adds that money is another precious resource in short supply—and that the Eyremore Dam is expected to cost more than $1-billion.

Similarly, Dwayne Rogness, director of the South East Alberta Watershed Alliance (SEAWA), one of province’s 11 watershed planning and advisory councils, says he’d like to see more drought-resistant crop rotations. “Why aren’t we promoting a more drought-tolerant rotation?” he says. “Irrigators want to have row crops in their rotation, but when there’s only so much water, you need to think about adapting and being resilient (at the farm level).”

Rogness was an agricultural fieldman for Lethbridge and Warner counties for over 17 years prior to joining SEAWA, and grew up farming near Lake Diefenbaker in Saskatchewan (which lake was itself created in 1967 by damming the South Saskatchewan and the Qu’Appelle rivers). He says farmers and ranchers across Palliser’s Triangle are already capable of adapting to drought. “We take what the Bow and Oldman rivers give us. We make the best of all those (upstream) situations,” he says. “In all honesty, in the SEAWA watershed, someplace every year is under drought conditions.”

We need more drought-resistant crops. “When there’s only so much water you need to adapt.”

He likewise praises irrigation districts for developing efficiencies in their systems. But he, like Fitch and Mackenzie, doesn’t necessarily share their vision for the future. “Does that mean we add more irrigation?” he says. “I’m not sure.” SEAWA, he adds, is focused not on technological solutions to water shortages, but on natural initiatives, including replanting native species such as cottonwoods, sagebrush and wheatgrass in riparian ecosystems, promoting water conservation, and raising awareness of the role of biodiversity in overall watershed health.

For Richard Phillips, back at the Bow River Irrigation District, the answer is clear. Building more river infrastructure—more dams and reservoirs—will help prevent flooding while making southern Alberta better able to deal with drought. It will help irrigators too, of course, almost as a bonus. And most importantly, he says, building more infrastructure will constitute a recognition that providing a safe water supply to Albertans is a priority. “Districts have demonstrated time and time again that when water is short, people come first,” he says. He cites multiple declarations by districts to that effect. “Irrigation expansion isn’t a threat to water supply for towns, cities, people anywhere.”

Originally from Calgary, Alex McCuaig has been a journalist in southeastern Alberta for more than 15 years, working at the Brooks Bulletin, Medicine Hat News and Western Producer.

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Read more from the archive “More Irrigation, Fewer Farms” June 2021.

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The post Damming the Rivers appeared first on Alberta Views.

It’s a large, popular lake about 65 km west of Edmonton. At the northeast corner is Moonlight Bay, a body of water as lovely as its name, with a big sandy public beach at a provincial park and many lakefront property owners.

Wabamun” means “mirror” in nêhiya-wêwin (Cree), and the situation here is a kind of mirror for Alberta.

Wabamun has long attracted praise. Early settlers called it “White Whale Lake” because of its huge and abundant whitefish. The Grand Trunk Pacific Railway Company laid out the Village of Wabamun, intended as a lakeside summer resort beside Moonlight Bay, and tourists flocked from Edmonton. “Wabamun,” wrote the Edmonton Bulletin in July 1914, “[has] the largest fleet of motorboats and launches of any lake in the province.” Commercial fishing boomed, peaking in 1956 with over a million pounds of whitefish hauled from the lake. That same year, right next to the village, the Wabamun power plant began producing electricity. When the fishery declined quickly in the late ’50s, sprawling coal mines and adjacent TransAlta coal-fired power plants to the north and south of the lake offered new jobs. Tourism continued. Cottagers built around the lake. A sport fishery thrived. Zon loved to restore old cars and built a big garage on his property. He could swim from shore. “I spent all my free time there,” he says.

In 1982 the lake water was near historically high levels. A heavy snowpack melted the following spring. One morning in May 1983 Zon noticed “a sloughy smell, like you usually only smell in the fall” when water levels drop and near-shore water plants decay. “I walked over to the weir,” he says, “and I saw a trench dug [through the weir] and it was draining. I said ‘Hell, that’s no good.’ So, I phoned the department of environment and expected them to say, ‘Thank you very much, sir; we’ll look after it.’ And here I am now, 40 years later.”

Zon and his son Dwayne met me at the weir in August 2021. He’s an older man now, thin and slightly stooped, but he walks with pace from our vehicles down a dip in the dirt road to the weir, a thick bundle of papers in his hand.

The old steel weir at Wabamun Lake was destroyed by unknown persons in the early 1980s. The Alberta government built a replacement weir—the road—at a lower level. Photo by Tadzio Richards.

Alberta lakes are in trouble. Starving fish. Shrinking water levels. Blue-green algae. Many of the 600+ lakes in the province face these and other issues: invasive species, pollutants, cumulative impacts from development and, as scientists David Schindler and Bill Donahue wrote in a peer-reviewed paper in 2006, “the impending water crisis” on the prairies due to climate change.

For those who live by, visit, use and play on Alberta lakes, the problem is what to do about the issues. The water is owned by the Crown, but lakes are subject to a range of jurisdictional oversight, from the federal government (fisheries, navigation etc.) to the province (shorelines, lakebeds) to municipalities that give local development permits. Historically, in response to problems in lakes, Albertans either advocate to solve a single issue that affects them personally or, as has happened now and again, they try and collaborate to find solutions that will benefit the health of the whole lake and all lake users. Neither approach can fully deal with the challenges.

For starters, it can be hard in this province to even agree on the problem that needs fixing.

Wabamun Lake is a good example. Moonlight Bay has weeds. That’s what lakefront property owners call the aquatic plants that grow in abundance in the shallow water. Paddling here you can see these plants underwater, so thick and high in places that the vegetation clings to the blade of a kayak paddle dipped just beneath the surface.

Are the aquatic plants a problem It depends on who you ask. Wabamun Lake is 19 km long—83 km², among Alberta’s largest lakes—and has many users: the hamlet of Wabamun (formerly a village), the summer village of Seba Beach, tourists, property owners, fishermen, the Paul First Nation on the east side of the lake, a railway line on the north shore and the Sundance power plant on the south side. Not everyone cares about the plants in the water. But some people do, and among them is Nick Zon.

The “weeds” are lowering property values, says Zon. Artificially low water levels in the lake are causing excessive weed growth, he claims, arguing that this problem would be solved if the government would “raise the weir.”

The weir has been an issue for nearly a century. The lake has only one natural drainage point, Wabamun Creek, a small creek on the Paul First Nation reserve, just south of Moonlight Bay. Over the years, the creek has often been dammed by beavers, which jams up the drainage point. Back in 1912, unknown people—likely farmers trying to expand cropland—dug a trench, a new outlet from the lake to drain into the creek to lower the water level. Some lakefront property owners didn’t want that, and in 1927 they built a weir at an agreed upon height to block the trench. In 1946 the province legally committed to maintain the weir.

“People think if that weir were lower the water level would go down,” says Don Meredith, a biologist and until recently the communications lead for the Wabamun Watershed Management Council. When he and his family came to the area, “and issues started coming up about the lake,” he says, “I’d go to meetings at Wabamun village, back in the ’70s and ’80s. Lake level was always one [of the issues]; it was either too high or too low. I remember with the weir early on somebody actually went and blasted the thing down. I would ask, ‘Does anybody know who did this?’ and people would say, ‘Yeah, some do, but nobody’s talking.’ ” That was in spring 1983, when unknown people destroyed the weir at night. The province built a replacement weir. But Zon and other property owners asserted that the new weir was built too low.

“I know what Wabamun used to be and what, with a little government help, it could be again.” Don Meredith

At the same time, Meredith and others tried to resolve multiple issues at the lake. Spurred by a 2004 government-commissioned report on Wabamun Lake by Schindler, a University of Alberta limnologist, their strategy coalesced around the idea that problems are best addressed by approaching lake management with a public interest mindset, as opposed to focusing only on individual concerns. Environmental issues have rarely been dealt with that way historically in Alberta. For instance, in 1985 a regional planning commission released a comprehensive management plan for Wabamun. It was “sent to all levels of government around the lake,” wrote Meredith in an article on his blog, “and it was dutifully filed and forgotten about. Why Because of the age-old problem in this province where no one department or indeed government is responsible for lake management. The result is, on any particular lake issue, the buck is passed from one jurisdiction to another and nothing significant gets done.”

“Wabamun” means “mirror” in nêhiyawêwin (Cree), and the situation at the lake is a kind of mirror for Alberta. The lake has had booms—a commercial fishery, a long era of coal power—and now it faces decline. What is done now, at the community level and in government, could determine if that decline will continue or whether another way is possible.

Health advisory in 2021 at Wabamun Lake for blue-green algae, which can produce toxins causing rashes and sickness. Photo by Tadzio Richards.

By August 2021 the old weir is a rusting steel sheet with lake water flowing around it. The new weir is the road, which is paved with cement across the bottom of the dip, blocking the outlet. Lake water laps at the cement. It’s been a record-setting hot summer and water levels are low. If the water were higher it would flow over the cement weir into the creek, which meanders close to the lake at this spot, a low, marshy bit of ground allocated to the reserve. The new weir is visibly lower than the top of the old one that was destroyed. Zon has a blueprint of the old weir in his bundle of papers and pulls it out, struggling to hold it still as the documents flap in the wind.

Zon’s papers tell a saga. Moonlight Bay is the shallowest part of the lake, and Zon and other cottagers there wanted the weir rebuilt. It became an obsession. He organized petitions, met with government officials, researched old reports and contracts related to the weir and filed FOIP requests that revealed internal government memos related to the issue. He kept all the files.

In 1988 he and his fellow advocates met with the environment minister, Ken Kowalski. The minister agreed to fix the situation, but instead of rebuilding the old weir, the government issued itself a permit to store gravel in a waterway and built a roadway across the trench next to the old weir. This caused a new kerfuffle (the road was higher than the weir) and so the government knocked the road down to where it is now: 724.55 m above sea level, an elevation measured by a surveying company and approved by the government.

This approval is the crux of Zon’s issue. He thinks the new weir was put in 18 inches too low. Usher, the company that did the surveying, admitted in a 1988 letter to Alberta Environment that they “cannot confirm or dispute the accuracy” of the work without cross-referencing it with “benchmark” measurements made by the railway company earlier in the century. But this wasn’t done. Zon got a meeting with Premier Ralph Klein and showed him the Usher letter, urging more survey work be done at the weir. Klein’s office sent Zon a letter saying, “Everything is fine at Wabamun.” The local MLA gave the same response. As did Environment Canada, whose representative told Zon, “Nothing you’re going to show me is going to change anything.”

But Zon persisted. Through the 1990s the lake levels remained low. Aquatic plant growth increased. In 1997 Zon and other cottagers appealed to the Environmental Appeal Board about TransAlta’s Wabamun power plant, alleging that warm “cooling water” discharged from the plant into the lake was causing weed growth and weak ice in the winter. The board agreed and recommended mitigating measures, such as increased weed cutting and putting up warning signs around the lake about the ice. Zon also had documents showing the power plant was built using the old CNR benchmarks and he alleged that TransAlta built the Wabamun plant 18 inches too low relative to average lake levels—which, as he speculated in his notes, would mean that if water levels were unusually high, as in the early 1980s, the company’s options would be to “raise the plant or lower the lake.” The Board did not comment.

In 2006 Zon applied to the Court of Queen’s Bench to certify a class action suit seeking $25-million in damages against TransAlta for harming the lake and an order “requiring Alberta to raise the lake level by ‘fixing’ ” the weir. Acknowledging Zon as “a committed advocate,” the judge cited Schindler’s 2004 report to the Alberta government on Wabamun Lake, which noted that complaints about fluctuating lake levels date back to the early 20th century, with low levels leaving some “high-and-dry” and high levels leaving others flooded. “Mr. Zon appreciates the likelihood of flooding if he and the other plaintiffs prevail,” wrote Madam Justice Topolniski in dismissing the application. “[Other] class members living on a ‘flood plain’ might well view his attitude towards them as the antithesis of a fair and objective representative plaintiff…. This action… is unsuitable for class certification.”

Zon was devastated. “The merits of the case weren’t even discussed in court,” he says.

I ask if I could take a photo of him by the weir. “I would appreciate it if you wouldn’t take photos of me,” he says. “I’ve had a rough go. They didn’t take the suit kindly, me poking around and asking questions, finding this and that.”

“Who’s ‘they?’”

“I’m hoping they’re retired,” he says. He stares at the old weir, steel jutting from water, a channel carved in the bank. “Just ask yourself: Who is big enough to do this?”

He hands over a stack of papers—old reports, notes chronicling his efforts over decades, his summation of events: “Management of the lake has been delegated to an act of vandalism and an admitted error in survey.”

The Wabamun Lake watershed—the lake and land that drains into it—covers 259 km² near Edmonton. Map courtesy of Wabamun Watershed Management Council.

Driving around Wabamun Lake reveals a landscape both in transition and at risk of stagnation. The power plant closed in 2010 and was imploded in 2011, a blow to employment in the Village of Wabamun, where the adjacent plant and coal mine are now fields of grass and gravel behind chain link fencing. In 2021 the village became a hamlet, joining Parkland County. Tourists still flock to the beach and boat dock in summer, but the big municipal government building in the middle of the former village sits mostly empty. From nearly any point around the lake the smokestacks of the remaining power plant—Sundance, which transitioned from coal to natural gas in 2021—are visible on the south shore, though public access to the lakefront is limited by private property, a fact communicated in road signs. No Trespassing. No Parking. No Access to the Lake. Once on the water a speckle of boats sail, jet, motor and drift with fishermen casting lines. From 2008 to 2021 it was catch-and-release fishing only here—no eating—after a train derailed in 2005 and spilled nearly 800,000 litres of oil into the lake. Anglers are now allowed to keep a few whitefish, walleye and burbot. No signs of the spill remain visible from a kayak, though greenish algae scums the surface in places, a result of naturally high phosphorus levels mixed with development runoff into the water.

“The number of lakes that are suffering is a key to understanding the whole lake system.” Ray Makowecki 

Lake health decline is not unique to Wabamun. Fisheries biologist Ray Makowecki, formerly with Alberta Fish and Wildlife, says the end of what could be called the “golden era” in Alberta lakes was “roughly the mid ’80s, say, 1985.” Before that, lakes in the province were “pretty healthy [for] water quality and fish habitat and fisheries,” he says, in a phone interview. After that, “we saw decline,” he says. “One of the more dramatic changes was the drought [in the mid ’80s and again in the early 2000s]. We lost about 35 lakes in northeast and central Alberta—they no longer supported fish, simply because of declining water levels.”

Among lakes similar in size to Wabamun, Muriel Lake, near Bonnyville, saw dramatic water level declines and lost all its pike, perch, whitefish and walleye sport fish. Pigeon Lake, 108 km southwest of Edmonton, also saw water level declines, along with outbreaks of toxic blue-green algae. “Increased development, land use changes and increasing populations” were all factors, says Makowecki. While some lakes are “coming back” in terms of fish numbers, he says, “the number of lakes that are suffering, or have suffered in the past, is a key factor in understanding the whole lake system” across the province.

Consistent with this big-picture view, declining sport fish populations and other issues at Wabamun were obvious by the end of the 1990s. The Alberta government contracted David Schindler—Alberta’s most prominent environmental scientist—to chair a committee of experts to review previous studies and make recommendations to guide future management of the lake. Along with better monitoring of water quality and an end to “overfishing,” Schindler’s 2004 report recommended “that a permanent citizen panel, whose objective it is to protect the health of Wabamun Lake… be established and maintained. This panel must have members who are selected by, and representative of, the community of Wabamun Lake users.” 

“There is no coherent provincial monitoring program for lakes in Alberta.” Bill Donahue

Bill Donahue, a member of Schindler’s expert committee, says they recommended the citizen panel because of “a lack of transparency, accountability and public responsibility when it comes to Alberta Environment and their decision making.” The recommendation, he says, “was in the wake of hearings out at Wabamun for the expansion of coal power plants.” Donahue had presented evidence at those hearings that “showed significant, clear and huge increases in all of the pollution associated with coal mining in terms of metals, organic contaminants, chemicals, starting pretty much exactly when coal mining and coal burning started in the Wabamun area.” Consultants hired by industry, however, claimed the opposite, presenting data that Donahue said was “literally laughable.” Instead of submitting their data for peer review, he says, “they wanted me to engage in a public tour where we would go and give our competing presentations. I said, ‘Why would I do that You’re wrong. I’m not going to debate you if you don’t even know enough to know you’re wrong,’” he says. “Alberta was pretty complicit in that. Deceptive public communications by both industry and government were why one of our recommendations was for a citizen panel—to provide transparency” at a ministry that “should be responsible for the sustainable management of the environment in a dispassionate and unbiased way.”

Formed in 2006, and initially under the auspices of Alberta Environment, which provided funding and a secretary, the Wabamun Watershed Management Council included representatives from local communities, provincial and federal governments (though Environment Canada only attended one meeting) and environmental and recreation groups. “We spent the first couple of years just learning about lake biology,” says Don Meredith, a member of the panel from the beginning. “We wanted to write a plan, but we never got on to it,” he says, because the provincial government “didn’t know what this is—coming up with a watershed management plan. That was new ground. As a result, we had a lot of turnover of [volunteer, non-remunerated] council members; people got tired and said ‘I don’t want to do this anymore,’ leading to nothing. But some of us stuck around. And we finally got things moving. But it took a long, long time.”

And frustration. As Meredith wrote in a 2014 article on his blog, at one early meeting, “after I had repeated what a fisheries biologist had previously told the council about pike needing aquatic vegetation in which to spawn and how cottage development had destroyed much of that habitat,” another council member replied, “Well, the fish are going to have to get out of the way. I will not have weeds growing in front of my house!”

“The point I was trying to make at that early meeting,” wrote Meredith, “was that the lake’s fish populations were indeed the ‘canaries in the coal mine.’ If the fish were not thriving, it might indicate the lake’s health was in some kind of trouble, regardless of whether you had vegetation growing in the water in front of your cottage or not. And if the lake’s health was in trouble, then many of the reasons why people come to the lake were threatened.”

With the health of the lake “slowly deteriorating,” says Meredith, the now independent council (Alberta Environment withdrew funding in 2010) identified key threats to the lake such as blue-green algae and cumulative impacts from development and climate change. The weir was not among them. “The lake level of Wabamun is largely governed by the amount of snowfall over the winter and rain events or dry spells during spring and summer,” reads the council’s website. “Evaporation… is the chief cause of water loss,” and the effect of Wabamun Creek (and the weir) on the lake is “like a straw draining a swimming pool.”

“People think we should be able to control the water level a lot easier,” says Meredith, talking about the “straw” wording. “It’s been quite the issue. We were trying to tamp it down.”

In 2020 the council, now mostly composed of lakefront property owners, organized a “steering committee” representing local municipalities, the province, TransAlta and others to come together—“it was like herding cats,” says Meredith—to review, agree on and release the Wabamun Lake Watershed Management Plan, essentially a non-binding plan for action. 

“Every day, provincial, municipal and Indigenous governments, industry, private landowners, and others in the Wabamun Lake watershed make land use and other decisions that can affect lake health,” reads the plan. “While many of these decisions are well intentioned, it is difficult to see the ‘big picture’ and [to see] if individual actions by different jurisdictions are complementary to lake and watershed well-being. A watershed management plan is meant to provide this landscape-level view … [and to help] coordinate who is doing what, in order to ensure activities are integrated and that they lead to a collective shared goal or outcome.”

Guided by a shared vision of the lake watershed—“a healthy ecosystem with a robust economy and a thriving community”—the plan recommends using the precautionary principle for all lake management decisions. It also details priority areas for action such as more water-quality monitoring, shoreline restoration, and better alignment of policies and plans between different levels of government. “Where possible,” said the steering committee, these actions should be done through “existing budgets” and “existing stewardship initiatives.”

Quoted in Alberta Outdoorsmen magazine, conservationist Lorne Fitch praised the council for “the herculean task of preparing a watershed management plan.” But he cautioned that community-led landscape-level planning has historically been hampered by the provincial government offering “empowered” citizens “little in the way of resources [and] little or no technical assistance.”

Meredith, quoted in the same article, agreed. “I hang in there because I know what the lake used to be and believe that with a little government help it could be again.”

Across the lake from the Sundance power plant, a train derailment spilled oil into Wabamun Lake in 2005. Photo by Tadzio Richards.

Waiting for government help could be in vain, says Bill Donahue. He has a Ph.D. in aquatic science and a law degree, both from the University of Alberta. In 2015 he was appointed vice-president and chief monitoring officer at the independent Alberta Environmental Monitoring, Evaluation and Reporting Agency (AEMERA). That agency had been created in 2014, after a research team led by Schindler found that oil sands pollution wasn’t being detected by Alberta’s environment ministry, a finding that sparked international outrage, embarrassing the government into creating the independent body. When the NDP government folded AEMERA back into government, Donahue stayed on as executive director of science in the new Environmental Monitoring and Science Division (EMSD). The entire project was hampered by a lack of funding, he says, citing “dishonesty, incompetence and intentional deception” at the highest management levels of the ministry as reasons why he resigned in 2019, not long before the UCP dissolved the EMSD as an entity in the department.

“There is no coherent provincial monitoring program for lakes in Alberta,” Donahue says. As a result, “in many cases you’ve got community groups or cottage associations trying to do their own community-based monitoring in the absence of any leadership and resources from the province. So, you’ve got fractured and disjunct decision-making based on fractured or absent information about lakes—their status, what’s going on, there’s no real understanding of what specifically is affecting any individual lake.”

The NDP government made a mistake when it brought AEMERA back into government, he says. “AEMERA was created [to do environmental monitoring] in a way that was transparent and scientifically defensible and not driven entirely by a need to defend fill-in-the-blank industries’ priorities, whether its oilsands or coal mining or power plants or oil and gas,” he says. “That’s similar to the reasons why we recommended that public panel [at Wabamun Lake], which was that the department had shown itself to be either unwilling or unable to properly deliver scientific environmental monitoring and assessment.

“Ideally that should be done by government,” Donahue says. “That is the role of government. A ministry of environment is responsible for managing the environment. And I would say arguably responsible for doing that in a way that respects the public will and protects the public interest. But Alberta Environment is not capable of doing it.”

Tadzio Richards is associate editor of Alberta Views.

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The post After the Golden Era appeared first on Alberta Views.

Sergeant G. King, one of that party, later wrote: “When we… looked down upon the valley which is now the City of Calgary, it looked like a veritable paradise; large, leafy trees lined both sides of the Bow and Elbow rivers, there was a profusion of flowers, grass was knee deep, and from Mount Royal to what is now 13th Avenue was one huge lake. I thought, at the time, it was the most beautiful spot I had ever seen.”

Centuries of gravel and cobbles, deposited by that meeting of the rivers, had accumulated on a broad floodplain marked by abandoned stream channels, wetlands and brush thickets. King’s “lake” was an immense beaver pond. The rodents had dammed the Elbow River a little ways upstream from its confluence with the Bow. The dam soon blew out in a spring flood, but the pond must have been lovely while it lasted.

The Elbow River valley must have been lovely too. Parts still are. The river’s headwaters, in particular, retain much of their original beauty. The river rises from an idyllic mountain tarn, Elbow Lake, which is fed in part by meltwaters from Rae Glacier. Downstream from the lake, the newborn Elbow tumbles through willow flats and pine forests. As it follows its winding way through the Front Ranges of the Rockies it picks up tributary streams—the Little Elbow River, Cougar Creek, Ford, Prairie, Quirk, Canyon, Bragg and others.

“View from hill near Fort Calgary,” an illustration by the Marquess of Lorne (John Campbell), ca. 1882, in Picturesque Canada.

Each creek adds to the river’s volume, but most of its growth comes from what hydrologists call “base flow”—groundwater emerging into the riverbed itself. In fact, the largest part of the river is underground, in its alluvial aquifer, the hidden part of the river that connects to all the secret groundwater flows that seep through the mountain and foothills landscape.

By the time the river plunges over Elbow Falls, near Bragg Creek, it’s become a substantial stream, at least by Alberta standards, and its water is cold, clear and reliable. Calgary politicians, in the early years of the 20th century, briefly proposed running pipelines up to the headwaters to capture that good water.

Because the Bow and Elbow rivers are subject to spring floods, however, the young city was continually plagued with flooded streets and muddy water lines during spring and a shrunken stream by late summer and fall. Engineers chose to deal with the growing city’s water challenges by damming the river just outside Calgary’s boundaries. The Glenmore Dam, completed in late 1932, provided both a storage reservoir for the growing city and greater protection against flooding.

That latter was important, because Calgary built its city core and its earliest neighbourhoods right on the floodplain of the Bow and Elbow rivers. Sergeant King’s beaver pond should have given them a clue that this was a bad idea. Even so, one of the worst floods in the city’s history occurred that spring of 1932 when the dam was nearing completion, and it proved its worth by keeping many downstream streets from being drowned. And so the city continued to develop its floodplain.

The city grew outwards, too. It soon surrounded and, by the 1980s, extended well west of the Glenmore reservoir. Much of the new development was on the alluvial aquifer and the floodplain—essentially in the river, just like the oldest Calgary neighbourhoods. As the river’s valley and watershed changed, more mud and pollutants flowed to the river and its groundwater feeds became increasingly disrupted. But shrunken and degraded though it might be, the Elbow’s diminished waters still flow through Calgary’s shade-dappled floodplain neighbourhoods and so its slow death goes largely unremarked—except during floods.

Flora Giesbrecht is the Coordinator for the Elbow River Watershed Partnership, one of several watershed councils in Alberta established to bring stakeholders and communities together in studying and conserving their water supplies. The undertaking demands a lot of diplomacy, because many of the partners in those groups are heavily invested in the very land uses and industries that put the most strain on water resources.

“The river is a reflection of our landscape,” says Giesbrecht, when asked what’s needed to restore and sustain the health of the Elbow. “People need to acknowledge that land uses can affect water, both its quantity and its quality. Most of us don’t see the connection between land and water. At the least, we need to minimize whenever possible any new development in the alluvial aquifer.”

Alluvial aquifers generally lie beneath the floodplains of gravel-bed rivers like the Elbow, although they can wander where buried river channels offer paths of low resistance. The river and its aquifer are intimately connected, which is why Giesbrecht’s organization is so concerned about development on that part of the landscape.

Giesbrecht points to research by Cathy Ryan, a hydrologist at the University of Calgary who has directed several studies of the Elbow watershed. “Due to rapid population growth and a desire from citizens to live close to the Elbow, the watershed has been subjected to substantial pressures for development, especially concentrating along the alluvial aquifer which surrounds the river,” according to one study completed by Ryan’s students. “The alluvial aquifer… is very permeable and hydraulically connected to the Elbow River and is characterized by significant groundwater to surface-water exchange.”

Rae Glacier, whose fate is both a metaphor for what’s happening to the Elbow River itself and a warning of worse things yet to come.

The part of the alluvial aquifer that lies under the modern river’s floodplain is where the river’s heart beats, but it’s a heartbeat so slow and secret that few of us perceive it. In spring, when snowmelt and rain in the upstream watershed exceeds the ability of the ground to soak it all up, the river floods and pushes water out across its floodplain, into the poplar and willow forests, grassy flats and wetlands. That water soaks into the gravel beneath. Then, in summer, when the river shrinks, the stored water drains slowly back into the channel, keeping the river filled. Like a slow annual heartbeat, it all happens out of sight, which is why developers and other land users have traditionally ignored it. But it’s a big part of what keeps rivers and their ecosystems healthy.

Along the Elbow—as along most Alberta rivers—development is slowly choking that heartbeat. And where such development takes place along the floodplain, flooding ceases to be a natural phenomenon we watch in awe from the valley rim and increasingly becomes a threat to the things we built. The response: flood protections such as bulldozed berms and bank armouring with boulders that further choke the river’s heartbeat and, ironically, drive even greater flood risk downstream. Upstream from Calgary, where the provincial government is now poised to build a massive Springbank dry reservoir in an effort to protect the city from floods, developers continue to squeeze the river between engineered flood-protection berms to keep new developments safe. More than 13 kilometres of Elbow river bank are now bermed or otherwise modified, stealing the ability of the floodplain to hold back spring flows and instead turning the river into a firehose pointing downstream towards Calgary.

Left: Elbow Lake. Local climate models project less winter snow and more rain, which runs off frozen ground instead of being stored as snowpack. Right: The upper Elbow River.

Ryan’s research teams studied land use trends to predict the future for the Elbow River, and the results are cause for concern. While 37 years ago only 16 per cent of the Elbow’s critically important aquifer had been developed for real estate, the study found that today almost a third of it has been developed. Real estate speculators now own half the land on the aquifer upstream of the city, a grim portent for its future.

Development on the aquifer creates a set of interrelated water risks for downstream ecosystems and communities. Septic fields, fertilizers, pesticides and livestock waste increasingly contaminate groundwater, which inevitably pollutes the river; it’s the same water, after all. And the pollution doesn’t just happen underground, either: buildings, roads and other hardened surfaces stop rainwater from soaking into the ground and instead send it down ditches and gullies to the river, carrying eroded mud, manure and other contaminants. The water that runs off rapidly during the spring rains also adds to downstream flooding risk.

A 2012 study published in the Journal of Hydrology projected a 65 per cent increase in developed areas over the Elbow watershed as a whole, slight increases in rangeland and parkland, and loss of up to a quarter of its forest cover by 2032. The authors project a 7 per cent increase in water runoff and a 13.2 per cent reduction in groundwater flow into the river, which they describe as a “…significant negative impact on the sustainability of ground/surface water supplies and groundwater storages in the future… in addition to an increased risk of flashy floods.”

The water in the river and its alluvial aquifer originates as winter snowpack and spring rains, so the health of the headwaters landscape is every bit as important to the river as the protection of its floodplain. Fortunately for the Elbow, real estate development poses little threat to its headwaters. Unfortunately, however, other problems arise there.

The river headwaters are public land, part of the popular Kananaskis Country. While some of the area—including Elbow Lake—is protected in wildland parks, most is in the Spray Lakes Sawmills forest management area, dedicated to commercial logging. Parts have been aggressively clear-cut in recent years, including the whole length of Quirk Creek, areas around Bragg Creek, and the McLean Creek drainage. Monitoring studies have shown that large-scale logging operations increase spring runoff and erosion by accumulating deeper snowpacks that, without shade from the missing canopy, melt rapidly in spring. That means more severe flooding and less base flow in the rivers later on.

The McLean Creek drainage, however, has bigger problems than just logging. It is designated a Public Land Use Zone, reserved for motorized off-road play. Entire hillsides are denuded of soil, once-vegetated seismic cutlines are deeply gullied, wetlands are churned to mud and the creek itself is silted and flood-prone because of the many hundreds of erosion channels draining into it. Some of the worst damage from Alberta’s 2013 flood originated there.

Climate change is a serious threat to rivers like the Elbow, because most climate models project less winter snow and more rain.

Giesbrecht says some improvements have been made since that flood; for example, recovery funding was directed towards trail improvements and better bridges. But she says the problem is ongoing because many users don’t know which trails are legitimate and what the rules are. “People see routes and follow them. There’s a lot of confusion. It just takes one vehicle track and people follow it, and accidental trails become permanent.”

All the silt and pollution flushed out of the McLean Creek “sacrifice area” and the increasing number of clear-cuts and roads in the upper Elbow watershed ends up in Calgary’s Glenmore reservoir, which supplies drinking water to more than a half million Calgarians. There, this gunk both shortens the life of the reservoir by filling it with sediment and increases the costs of water treatment. Rapid runoff from damaged land also increases the severity of spring floods.

The Elbow River in Calgary. Berms combined with excessive spring flows can turn the river into a firehose pointing downstream toward the city.

Nobody knows how much of the damage caused by the 2013 flood might have been avoided if the Elbow River’s watershed had been more intact. Nobody has studied that. Researchers look at discrete, measurable questions relating to one part of a landscape or another. Foresters point out that they only log part of the headwaters and that modern planning and forestry practices reduce the harm they cause, brushing aside valid criticism of the effects that their large clear-cuts and hardened forest roads continue to have on runoff patterns. Off-road recreation advocates bridle at any suggestion that their machines cause harm, insisting that most users are “responsible”—as if that makes any difference when the rains pound down on countless kilometres of hardened soil trails. Developers plant cattails around storm-sewer ponds and boast of green development, ignoring both the flood risk to which they are exposing their customers and the strain they add to the river’s alluvial heartbeat. Each sector of society carves up their part of the watershed and points fingers of blame at the others.

The Elbow River watershed partnership is one of the few organizations looking at the cumulative effects of all land uses. It recently completed the second “State of the Watershed” report for the Elbow, an objective but sobering assessment of the impacts of the many land use choices we make on the water we rely on. The report reminds us of one more reason why treating land use decisions as water management choices is critically important today: the climate crisis.

Towards the end of the hot, smoky 2021 summer my wife and I parked beside the Kananaskis highway and headed up a steep trail. We picked our way along the shore of Elbow Lake and continued up a side valley, climbing steadily, until a bend in the trail revealed our destination: Rae Glacier.

Few glaciers survive in the southern Rockies. The Rae, the source of the Elbow River, is one of the last. Since our most recent visit, three years ago, we could see where the tops, sides and bottom had melted away. The glacier is now so thin that a large rock face has emerged where before it was ice.

“Temperatures were about 2 to 4 degrees above normal in July [2021],” says John Pomeroy, a hydrologist specializing in the Eastern Slopes of the Rocky Mountains. “The glaciers have been melting at two-thirds of a metre per week where we’ve been monitoring them, which is the highest rate ever. That would lead to about seven metres of downward melting over the summer.”

Rae Glacier can’t spare that much ice; it is doomed. Its fate is both a metaphor for what is happening to the river itself and a warning of worse things yet to come.

Climate change is a serious threat to rivers like the Elbow, because most local climate models project less winter snow and more rain, which runs off the frozen ground instead of remaining stored in the snowpack. The models predict more intense summer evaporation and, worse, a greater frequency of intense weather events such as the June deluge that spawned the 2013 flood and the massive heat system that accelerated glacial retreat in 2021. While there are things we can, and should, be doing to reduce the threat of climate change, that horse is well out of the barn. Even with aggressive action—which the world has not yet proven ready to embrace—the climate crisis is going to intensify.

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But landscape changes can make everything worse yet. Eroding clear-cuts, gullied OHV trails, development-choked floodplains and rip-rapped river banks already send floodwaters coursing downstream too fast, while reducing the amount and quality of groundwater recharge. The damage will be significantly greater with more intense weather—as southwestern BC learned tragically this past winter. And when most of the water runs off in spring floods, the consequences during long, hotter summers become even more severe.

If water matters to our future, then river health matters. And if river health matters, then watersheds need better care. The Elbow simply cannot absorb any more development on its alluvial aquifer and floodplain; if anything, we need to start reducing development. Floodplains should be restored and then protected as natural parks. And clear-cutting and motorized abuse simply have no place in the forested headwaters of so important a river. The headwaters of vital rivers like the Elbow should probably be parks too.

The Blackfoot people know the Elbow River and the place where its waters join the Bow as Moh’kinstis. Those people had lived beside these waters, through the cycles of the seasons, amidst the beauty and abundance of this landscape, for many centuries before Sergeant King looked down from the flanks of Nose Hill and was struck by the beauty of the area. The newcomers whom King represented and the original people of this storied landscape would soon enter into a treaty relationship that set the stage for modern Alberta.

The Elbow River flows through the heart of this treaty place, but just as failure to honour that treaty relationship has created a need and a duty for reconciliation among peoples, we urgently need to reconcile our failures with the river and the lands it drains from.

Our ability to influence climate policy, at least at a global scale, is limited. But we are completely in control of land-use decisions here at home; we elect and influence the governments who make them. It’s long past time to start getting those decisions right instead of adding to the litany of cumulative effects that threaten the heartbeat and health of the Elbow and other Alberta rivers—streams that not only will determine our society’s future but amplify its failures.

Kevin Van Tighem is the author of 14 books on wildlife and conservation, including Wild Roses Are Worth It (RMB, 2021).

The post Requiem for a River appeared first on Alberta Views.

These pipelines, unlike Trans Mountain or the thankfully dead Northern Gateway, should be less controversial. As water pipelines, they shouldn’t require environmental double-speak and weird rationalizations about “ethical oil” and how pumping more bitumen will reduce greenhouse emissions. If one leaks, that’s just a duck pond. People like ducks, at least live ones.

One of my proposed pipelines would draw water from the delta of the Peace and Athabasca rivers in Wood Buffalo National Park. Its purpose: to provide drinking water to towns and cities from, say, Red Deer northward. The other would draw water from the South Saskatchewan River near Empress, downstream of Medicine Hat, to serve southern Alberta communities. Both pipelines would replace existing water sources.

The farther downstream one goes, the bigger the river, right So these two pipelines should deliver more than enough water for the future needs of our province.

Well, maybe not that southern pipeline. The South Saskatchewan carries the combined flows of the Bow and Oldman rivers. But a 2009 government study found that before the river crosses into Saskatchewan, more than half of its summer flow is sucked out to irrigate crops. The World Wildlife Fund says that up to 90 per cent of the Bow’s flow goes to farms some years. At times it’s possible to walk across the river near Bassano and barely wet your knees—try that in Calgary.

That water grows potatoes for potato chips, beets for sugar and forage crops for cattle. Irrigation proponents often insist their crops are feeding a hungry world. But irrigation agriculture, like any other industry, is driven by profit margins. The hungry people of the world can’t afford most irrigation crops.

If the people of Edmonton and other large communities got their drinking water from the Peace-Athabasca delta, you can bet we’d keep it clean.

Replacing existing wells and dams with a pipeline from the downstream limit of the South Saskatchewan River would force us to rethink how generously we subsidize the fattening of our nation with river water. Irrigation makes sense in that drought-prone region, but only for growing food that’s actually needed. A more conservative approach—irrigating for food and not for fat—would leave more water in the rivers. More water in the rivers would also improve water quality. A 2009 Alberta Agriculture study found that the lower Bow and Oldman rivers have the worst riparian health values possible, and that pesticide loads exceed levels harmful to fish and invertebrates.

But there is big money in irrigation; I expect stiff opposition to my pipeline proposal. The northern pipeline proposal will face resistance too. It would draw water from the heart of Wood Buffalo National Park, which is recognized by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Educational Commission (UNESCO) as a World Heritage Site. We don’t want to ruin world heritage, do we?

Actually, we’re already ruining it. The BC government permanently impaired the Peace River’s flow when it built the W.A.C. Bennett dam in 1968. The Peace–Athabasca delta promptly began to dry out. Engineers tried building weirs in the park to replace the flood flows but the deterioration continues. BC’s Site C dam, now under construction, will make things even worse. Most Albertans live upstream of Wood Buffalo, which is probably why they aren’t kicking up a fuss about the price that muskrats, moose, wood bison and small Cree communities will all pay.

They’re already paying another price: The Athabasca River is chronically polluted with chemical residues from oil sands mining in Alberta. Fish have tumours, cancer rates are high and the people whose families trusted the river for generations no longer consider its water safe.

A 2017 UNESCO study found that nearly every indicator of well-being for this World Heritage Site is degraded, mostly because upstream abuse sends sick rivers into the delta.

That’s why we need the pipeline. If the people of Edmonton and other large communities had to drink that water, you can bet we’d keep it clean. We’d fight hard to keep both those rivers healthy. For now, however, we happily pocket our profits from river abuse, ignoring the plight of the park and its politically powerless Indigenous communities.

Good neighbours don’t hog water and flush their problems down the river for the ecosystem and the next guy to cope with. But we do. We divert pristine waters to our towns and cities, and send shrunken, polluted rivers out of the province. If our drinking water came from the downstream ends of those rivers, we’d be more motivated to keep them well watered and clean. That would make us better neighbours. Actually, it might make us better people. It’s time to lay some pipe.

Kevin Van Tighem’s latest book, Our Place: Changing the Nature of Alberta, was released in spring 2017 by RMB.

The post The Pipelines We Need appeared first on Alberta Views.

The calm turned into the storm by the next morning when there were “literally rivers going down the street” and one of his neighbours had to be rescued in a boat. Morris got back in the car and drove to a ridge where he could see his family’s home. Like many others, it was partway submerged.

The flooding led to the evacuation of about 100,000 people, spread destruction across southern Alberta and left a mess. Brown, muddy water filled backyards and basements. Entire homes were destroyed. Communities were cleaning up for weeks, months, even years. The disaster cost approximately $6-billion.

As the cleanup began in the days after the flood, Ryan Robinson was at his family’s home on his ranch near Springbank, some 15 kilometres west of the city. He saw the destruction on the TV news and decided he had to help. He drove to Red Deer and Edmonton, where he bought all the sump pumps and giant fans he could fit in his half-tonne truck. He loaded up and hauled it all to communities along the Elbow River.

“We believe in being good neighbours,” Robinson says. He, his family and his ranchhands “spent two days in those areas, pumping out basements and giving away the fans and pumps, working like dogs to help people we didn’t know.”

It’s unlikely Robinson ever crossed paths with Morris during the cleanup, but the fates of the city and country dwellers are now intertwined in disaster preparation. Springbank ranchers, including Robinson, are again helping Calgarians—only this time not by choice. They’re being told they will have to leave their century-old ranches on nearly 7,000 acres of land so the province can build a 3,610-acre dry dam (also called an off-stream storage reservoir) as flood mitigation for Calgary.

By pitting the 22 landowners against thousands of city residents along the Elbow River, the project—intended to help Calgary better withstand a future flood—has stalled. The battle over the dry dam exemplifies the inevitable conflicts society faces in dealing with natural disasters.

“We can’t encourage development in floodways. It’s too dangerous.” —Then-minister Doug Griffiths

Natural disasters have become a trend on the prairies—a 2016 report shows the cost of federal assistance is rising fast in the two westernmost Prairie provinces, mostly due to floods in areas where floodplain regulations aren’t as strict as in Ontario and Manitoba.

Flood zones in Toronto were mapped to a one-in-100-year flood standard after Hurricane Hazel caused major damage and 81 deaths in 1954. In Manitoba the Red River’s overflowing in 1950 led to a massive engineering project, the Red River Floodway. After the river rose precipitously again in 1997, the floodway was expanded to withstand a 1-in-700-year flood. The project originally cost $63-million but is estimated to have prevented $40-billion in damage. Both provinces have strictly enforced building regulations in flood plains.

This hasn’t happened in Alberta even though flooding on the prairies is only expected to get worse due to climate change. “The extremes we’ve seen recently probably would’ve been considered low likelihood with all of the climate models of the past decade or so. We’re seeing things worse than that,” says John Pomeroy, a hydrologist and director of Global Water Futures, a University of Saskatchewan research program exploring water issues. “We’re not done with flooding at all. So, expect more flooding, more fires, more severe droughts—sometimes in the same year.”

As an example, a record-high snowpack in parts of the Canadian Rockies in 2017 was followed by a record hot, dry summer—both extremes within just a few months. The past three summers have seen unprecedented glacier melt in the Rockies, with the Athabasca Glacier alone losing up to five metres from its surface each year.

“In just a few years since 2013, we’ve seen every record broken,” says Pomeroy. “It’s terrifying. We’re into extremes now.”

The 2013 flood in southern Alberta was the result of a convergence of two unusually large weather systems over the Rockies, from Jasper National Park to the US border and from the Elk Valley in BC to Calgary. Three days of rain fell on a late-season snowpack, and most of it—a total of 345 millimetres—fell in an area surrounding Burns Creek, which provides the source water for the Highwood, Elbow and Kananaskis rivers. It was the eye of the storm. The Kananaskis flows into the Bow, which meets the Elbow in Calgary.

The City of Calgary takes the likelihood of more flooding seriously. Its officials have met with Pomeroy and other scientists, crunched numbers from organizations such as the Prairie Climate Centre and NASA, and come up with a risk and environmental impact assessment to see how weather-related changes could affect the city and its residents.

“We look at heat waves, multi-year droughts, winter storms and short-duration, high-intensity storms,” says Dick Ebersohn, manager of climate change and environment for the City. Some people might be happy to hear it could get hotter in Calgary, but Ebersohn notes that a heat wave combined with drought could also lead to more flooding. “As soon as you get that high-intensity rainstorm, it just thrashes down and it flows away,” he explains. “This is the big challenge we have: People see these as individual pieces but we have to start understanding them together.”

The 2013 flood required some big decisions. Within a month of the disaster, the province declared that it wanted to move some residents out of floodplains to avoid similar damage in the future. “We simply cannot encourage development in floodways,” said Doug Griffiths, at the time Minister of Municipal Affairs. “It is just too dangerous and represents an ongoing risk to all taxpayers.”

The government made relocating voluntary, however, and offered only to buy out the 250 homes most affected by flooding in High River, Calgary, Medicine Hat, Bragg Creek, Black Diamond and Turner Valley. Officials added that anyone not taking the buyout wouldn’t be eligible for provincial disaster relief in the future. Some residents, including the entire community of Wallaceville in High River, took the province up on its offer.

But Calgarians were less interested in the deal, with many suggesting it had come too late. “They were completely missing the mark, in our view,” says Morris, who notes that only 17 of 50 homeowners eligible for the buyout in Calgary took it. “The fact is, Calgary was built at the confluence of the Bow and the Elbow, so all of downtown is at risk. Thirty-two separate communities were impacted by the floods along both watersheds, so the decision to build in these areas was made a long, long, long time ago.”

After the flood, Morris became co-president of the newly formed Calgary River Communities Action Group, whose members were determined to stay in their homes. They started pushing the province on upstream mitigation options.

The government appointed a panel to provide advice. The head of Alberta’s Flood Recovery Task Force, Andre Corbould, was joined by engineer and past chairman of Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. Allan Markin, architect Richard Lindseth, and Tino DiManno, a civil engineer and VP at Stantec. The panel went on to recommend $830-million in mitigation projects for southern Alberta. (Markin himself, probably in recognition of how long such projects take, has already built a three-metre-high floodproof wall around his Elbow Park home, which was deluged in 2013.)

The proposed projects included a dry dam at the Kananaskis Country confluence of McLean Creek and the Elbow River to protect Bragg Creek, Redwood Meadows and Calgary; a diversion channel around the town of High River; and money to study the feasibility of a tunnel to divert some of the Elbow River’s flow under Calgary’s 58th Avenue from the Glenmore Reservoir to the Bow River.

“Calgarians are not open to having these communities completely relocated.” —City of Calgary Hydrologist Frank Frigo

The province ultimately rejected the McLean Creek and tunnel projects. On the advice of a Dutch water-research firm, it decided to proceed with the Springbank storage reservoir, which was determined to have less environmental impact, less risk of “catastrophic failure,” and a lower cost, and whose proximity to Calgary meant more runoff would be caught and better protection provided. It could also be built more quickly. The cost of the project, initially pegged around $200-million, has since grown to at least $372-million. The final cost could be higher still, although some money might be recovered by reselling unused land.

The Springbank project was initially scheduled to be complete by 2019, but it was delayed after a federal court sided with landowners in an application that argued Ottawa must make the final decision on the environmental review. This is expected to take until the fall of 2018, meaning construction wouldn’t get started until later this year (if the projected is approved at all) and the dry dam wouldn’t be useful until at least the spring 2021 flood season.

In the meantime, the City of Calgary has started to increase the capacity of the Glenmore Reservoir to protect properties along the Elbow River. This effort will, however, only account for a fifth of the storage required to “have even a fighting chance” to prevent the damage experienced during the 2013 flood. “The lion’s share of the storage is proposed in the upstream reservoir at Springbank, which is being pursued by the province,” says Frank Frigo, a hydrologist and the leader of watershed analysis with the City of Calgary. “We’ve worked together to provide an amount of storage that would allow the overall river system to be managed.”

According to the province, the Springbank off-stream reservoir would store an estimated 70 million m3 of water temporarily during a flood. Combined with the increased storage capacity in the Glenmore Reservoir (10 million m3 in total), it would ideally prevent a flood similar to the one in 2013.

Experts admit that even these projects combined might not be enough. “It may well not be,” says Frigo. “We expect that… the two pieces of infrastructure functioning together would get us somewhere in the order of the 200-year return period—but there’s nothing stopping nature from producing something larger.”

As Robinson looks over his land in Springbank, he watches ranchworkers sort about 600 head of cattle in the pens below—the same area where the reservoir would be built—and wonders why the province would bother to build a storage facility that may not even be big enough to protect the city from future flooding.

“They want to forcibly move us, bulldoze everything, turn it into a big mud pit,” says Robinson, referring to the 3,600-acre reservoir. “It’s half the size of the entire area just for water storage, and not very deep storage. It’s a pretty shallow valley, so to fill it all up would be a large amount of shallow, muddy, debris-filled water.”

He and the other affected landowners, as well as the nearby Tsuut’ina Nation, would prefer to see the province build the larger, in-stream dam at McLean Creek. “The (Springbank) project is located squarely within our traditional territory, in an area where our citizens exercise their Aboriginal, treaty and inherent rights,” said Tsuut’ina Chief Roy Whitney in a letter to the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency. “As such, we stand to be directly and adversely affected by the project, which could permanently change the course of the Elbow River, result in flooding of areas of our traditional territory and potentially portions of our reserve lands, and alter surrounding ecosystems.”

Residents of Springbank don’t accept the province’s conclusion about the relative merits of the dry dam. “Ever since day one,” says Robinson, “we’ve been beating the drum that the alternative at McLean Creek is doable and protects more communities, like Bragg Creek and Redwood and the (Tsuut’ina) Nation. The Nation favours it; Redwood and Bragg Creek are in favour; it requires no dollars of private land to be bought. No one gets their house bulldozed.”

The McLean Creek option, however, was rejected by the province in part because it’s expected to cost $34-million more than the Springbank dam, to say nothing of the environmental impact, higher risk of failure and longer timeline.

The provincial government also says dry dams are just the start, and that many new approaches must be taken to manage flood risk. On the Bow River, for example, the province made a five-year deal with TransAlta to reduce the volume of reservoirs upstream of Calgary (e.g., at Ghost, Barrier and Upper Kananaskis lakes) to deal with potential flooding. The arrangement could cost the province $5.5-million annually to compensate the company for reduced power generation, but less water will flow into the city all at once. “It means a reduction of about a fifth,” explains Frigo. “It’s a great step forward. What it really means is dealing with intermediate flood events. It’s not enough.”

The province’s Bow River working group, which has looked at other mitigation options, has recommended 14 additional measures—including more dams upstream of Calgary.

Others echo Springbank residents’ concerns about the dry dam but would prefer the province avoid large infrastructure projects such as dams and storage reservoirs entirely, in favour of more-natural solutions. “Climate change changes everything,” says Kevin van Tighem, a conservationist and author of Heart Waters, a book about the province’s headwaters regions. “We can’t just go throwing money at individual problems and think that fixes them. We really need to look at integrated approaches.… Building a flood-control system like we’re planning to do in Springbank (is) like applying bandages to somebody who’s suffered a major traumatic vehicle accident.”

He notes the project only addresses flooding on the Elbow River. “The Bow watershed is much larger,” says Van Tighem. “We’re going to have flood events concentrated at different parts of the watershed at different times.” And both are gravel-bed rivers, he says, meaning that their course changes. “It’s not just the water that moves, it’s the entire riverbed. Everything moves,” he explains. “These systems [e.g., dams] that modify the behaviour of a dynamic system rarely deal with all the variables that come at you. We’re going to have bigger bed movements in the future because we’re going to have bigger floods. So, even just in the context of the Elbow, it’s a short-term fix for a very specific range of potential risks.”

He says the city and the province should start focusing on the condition of the headwaters landscape. “If we’re going to invest vast amounts of public money or create vast amounts of public debt, we should look at what would actually turn around [the damage] we’ve done,” he says. Our forests, for example, have been managed for timber production rather than watershed health, and wildfires have thus been suppressed. Strategically thinning out these “unnatural” forests, he argues, would address flooding and wildfire risk alike, with more snowpack collecting on the ground instead of in treetops, with the snow shaded and released into waterways more gradually.

“They want to forcibly move us, bulldoze everything, turn it into a big mud pit.” —Springbank rancher Ryan Robinson

Van Tighem also says the province should remove linear disturbances such as off-road vehicle trails and roads built for industry. “Not just reduce them, but remediate them,” he says. “We need to create forest soils where they are currently compacted, and vegetate surfaces that are currently unvegetated, so that when we do get water, it is saved in the soil.” In other words, water should be absorbed rather than quickly funnelling off the land and becoming a flood.

The City of Calgary’s Frigo agrees that headwaters protection is one component, but suggests it’s part of a much larger solution that includes major infrastructure and other policy options such as land-use management and education to help citizens understand the risks. “It’s unfortunate that 2013 has evoked a lot of man-versus-man conflict,” he says. “I love the beautiful Bow and Elbow rivers and I love the beautiful mountain terrain that supports them, but in reality our wild natural system is prone to natural changes and we have to learn to adapt—the fact that nature itself is changing makes it more complex.”

Some say that’s precisely why the City of Calgary and the province need to take stronger measures to buy out homeowners and move them away from the rivers. Frigo notes the city has acquired other land for flood protection, such as the Bowmont Park area near the northwest community of Bowness. “The city turned the entire area into park and it has used the land to build two major stormwater ponds, benefitting water quality for an urbanized area and preventing more development from coming closer to the river,” he says.

But he sides with Morris, saying it’s simply not practical to get every development off the floodplain in a city like Calgary. “Wholesale community land-use redesignation from a water perspective doesn’t make a lot of sense from a policy perspective,” he says. “Most people would accept that London is on the Thames, Paris is on the Seine. Virtually every major city everywhere throughout the world is close to water and sees some degree of risk.”

“It’s a really difficult and intractable discussion where you’ve got densely developed communities: Mission, the downtown, Kensington, Sunnyside. The value of the infrastructure that’s in place and the cultural and historical resources there are really irreplaceable,” Frigo says. “In the work we’ve done with Calgarians, they are not open to having these communities completely relocated. They are comfortable with modifications to how they look.”

Others in the Calgary area, however, will need to become less comfortable. Back on his ranch, Robinson says he wishes the residents of communities along the Elbow River would at least consider other options, giving rural landowners enough respect to listen to their concerns about losing their livelihoods as well as their homes. He hopes the province’s decision to build the dry dam is thwarted by the federal review scheduled to be completed this year.

“Who doesn’t want to protect the city Of course we all do,” says the rancher. But he feels he and his neighbours will make a sacrifice with no guarantee of a greater public benefit. “Nobody predicted the 2013 flood. The next flood will concentrate rain somewhere else in the valley, so the concerning part for the public is that we’re addressing this with an unproven, untested concept.”

Furthermore, he agrees it’s been an extremely divisive process: “The government’s actions pit community against community.” He claims no one from the province or the city has come to see what will be lost by Springbank ranchers to (maybe) protect homeowners downstream along the Elbow. He mimics what he perceives is the city’s attitude: “We want to save our community, so we need you people to get out of the way.”

Morris says he sympathizes with the ranchers but suggests it’s about numbers—the protection of thousands of Calgarians, as well as the Stampede grounds, the Saddledome and much of downtown. He adds that a storage facility near Springbank would only be the first step in a longer process.

Frigo says there’s no simple solution. “Anybody who thinks it’s just a dam, or it’s just education… or it’s just ‘buy out these properties,’ is probably not looking at this in a holistic manner,” he says. “If a solution were easy, it probably would have been done already.”

Colette Derworiz is journalist with Canadian Press based in Edmonton. She was a long-time reporter at the Calgary Herald.

The post Deliverance from Flood appeared first on Alberta Views.

“Where’s that water coming from?” I asked. I was thinking about Yellowstone and geysers. “The seismic crew must have opened up an artesian spring,” Dad replied. “It’s underground water coming up.”

By the following summer our cutline was blocked by a small lake full of dead trees.
Dad couldn’t tell me where that newly freed groundwater originated. He didn’t know. The drilling crew didn’t know either. The government didn’t know. It’s entirely possible we still don’t know.

We should. Groundwater is going to be a lot more important in our future than it was in my childhood. Out of sight and too often out of mind, underground aquifers keep rivers flowing, provide drinkable water, irrigate farm gardens and feedlots and provide injection water for extracting oil and natural gas. Almost a quarter of Alberta’s population relies on wells for their drinking water, including up to 90 per cent of rural residents. We treat this hidden supply as if it will always be abundant, pure and available.

It may not be. As Alberta begins to depend more and more on groundwater, we need to keep better track of how much we’re using, how well the supply is being renewed, and the extent to which leaking oil and gas wells, fracking and surface pollution are depleting and contaminating this vital resource down below. We know far less about Alberta’s groundwater than we need to, even though almost everything we do affects its abundance, quality and availability.

Compared to most other Canadian provinces, Alberta is water-scarce, especially in the southern half, where most of us live. River flows have been declining—the combined natural flow of the Bow and Oldman rivers has diminished to about 90 per cent of what it was half a century ago—even as the region’s population has tripled. Two-thirds of Canada’s irrigated agriculture, a major water consumer, is in the Bow and Oldman basins. Farther north, oil sands extraction has become a major water consumer; it may eventually permanently remove more than a tenth of the Athabasca River’s annual flow.

Water security may be Alberta’s biggest long-term challenge—economic, social and environmental. In 2003, after many years of reacting to various challenges as they arose, the Alberta government moved to a more proactive stance with its Water for Life strategy, which aims to provide Albertans with a safe, secure drinking water supply and healthy aquatic ecosystems while ensuring that scarcity of this precious resource doesn’t limit our economic well-being.

Most of Alberta’s water has traditionally been drawn from streams and lakes. The stuff on the surface is easy to find and develop. It’s also well mapped and easily measured. It’s only in recent decades that wells have become an important part of our water supply. Groundwater records, consequently, rarely extend back beyond the 1960s.

University of Saskatchewan researcher Cesar Perez-Valdivia found a way to extend the local record farther into the past. He analyzed 33 groundwater wells across the prairie provinces and then cross-correlated their records with tree-ring chronologies to trace changes over 300 years. He found that Alberta’s groundwater levels have been stable or gradually declining in most regions.

A model developed for Alberta Environment and Parks estimates that, in an average year, almost six million Olympic-sized swimming pools of water drain into Alberta’s aquifers and the equivalent amount drains out of them into rivers and lakes. That’s a simplified picture; the amount varies each year with precipitation and evaporation rates, which are not the same from one part of the province to another.

As our province’s surface water supplies are increasingly taxed, we’re making bigger withdrawals from our groundwater.

Along the gravel-bed rivers that drain the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains, groundwater is constantly welling up to become river water, and river water draining through the streambed to become groundwater. Calgary researchers Leanne Cantafio and Cathryn Ryan studied the Elbow River in Calgary and found that every second of the day, 20 litres of water per kilometre moves from the river into the ground or back again.

Deeper bedrock aquifers are the most abundant, and least understood, of Alberta’s groundwater resource. The artesian spring that the seismic crew released near our secret trout stream all those years ago was likely from a confined bedrock aquifer.

In 2006, to put more meat on the bones of its Water for Life strategy, Alberta Environment asked The Rosenberg International Forum on Water Policy for advice. Based at the University of California, the biennial forum brings scientists and policymakers together to create smart guidelines. The Rosenberg Forum assembled an expert panel to review Alberta’s water management, identify weaknesses and make recommendations to strengthen it. Government officials specifically asked the panel to review Alberta’s groundwater management and suggest improvements.

Their 2007 report recommended that surface watersheds and aquifer systems be considered together when managing either, because of the intimate connections between water recharge from the land and water transfer through aquifers. It also identified a critical weakness: a lack of good monitoring programs and inventories of groundwater aquifers and the demands being placed on them. “Previous practices of groundwater monitoring and management,” the Rosenberg report’s authors wrote, “were appropriate to an era in which groundwater was a relatively minor source of supply in most areas. These practices will not be adequate in an era of intensifying pressure to develop groundwater resources.”

A year later Alberta launched its first Provincial Groundwater Inventory Program. Coordinated jointly by Alberta Environment and Parks and the Alberta Geological Survey, the program aims to map and measure fresh groundwater supplies across the province.

The only such inventory completed to date is the Edmonton–Calgary Corridor Groundwater Atlas (2011), which describes all the usable groundwater resources in a 49,500 km2 area centred on the Highway 2 corridor between Calgary and Edmonton. As other regional inventories are completed, the government will finally be able to identify critical recharge areas that need to be protected and can predict how much water can safely be withdrawn from various aquifers.

As Alberta plays catch-up with inventory and analysis, our ability to anticipate and avoid water security challenges will improve. In some cases, though, the horse is already out of the barn. We are already dealing with serious challenges—depletion of local aquifers, loss of groundwater recharge and contamination of those precious hidden reservoirs.

Big cities such as Edmonton, Red Deer, Calgary and Lethbridge quench their thirst by drawing from rivers, but many smaller communities rely on wells. Banff, Canmore and Okotoks pump groundwater from wells drilled into alluvial aquifers beneath their local rivers. Other towns, such as St. Albert, Stony Plain, Bon Accord, Westlock and Vermilion, draw from aquifers that originate largely as rain and snowmelt draining into local hill systems and wetlands.

Even where a town’s supply is closely tied to a river, it can be limited. The entire surface water supply of the Bow and Oldman drainages has already been allocated to current and future uses; as a result, the province has had a moratorium on new water licences in the basin since 2006. It’s not just the rivers that are tapped out; the surface zones of their associated alluvial aquifers are too. That’s why Okotoks was caught in a region-wide freeze on new water licences; any further pumping would actually start drawing down the Sheep River. The town plans to pipe water in from Calgary for future needs.

Even where groundwater supplies are recharged only by a region’s precipitation and don’t affect the flow of nearby streams, aquifers can get badly depleted. The town of Irricana got a licence in the early 1980s to draw from an aquifer that regulators assumed would easily meet a growing population’s needs. By 2005 the level in the town well had dropped 12 metres; the aquifer was sucked nearly dry. The town ceased pumping and instead built a pipeline to bring treated river water in from Drumheller. A decade later, Irricana’s groundwater well is still more than four metres below its original level.

Masaki Hayashi likens groundwater to a chequing account. A physical hydrologist at the University of Calgary, Hayashi says that as surface water supplies become increasingly taxed, Alberta is going to start making bigger withdrawals from its aquifers. If we take water out faster than the aquifer refills, the balance drops and eventually we end up overdrawn. Unlike a real bank, however, aquifers don’t offer overdraft protection.

There are two possible reasons for a shrinking bank account: too many withdrawals or not enough deposits. Where groundwater is concerned, depositing less is clearly a bad idea. But that is what is happening with some of Alberta’s aquifers.

Groundwater originates as snowmelt and rain. It gets recharged pretty much anywhere that surface water goes into the ground, but areas of lush vegetation and porous soils are particularly important for moving surface water into aquifers. Land uses that increase runoff—such as compacting the soil under roads and urban development or breaking up vegetation cover with clear-cut logging, off-road recreation or heavy livestock grazing—reduces the amount of water deposited into Alberta’s underground accounts each year.

University of Calgary geohydrologist Cathy Ryan has taken a special interest in the Elbow River, which she describes as the only river in the world whose primary end use is to provide municipal water for a large city. Her research program has shown that almost all the flow in the Elbow originates in the Rocky Mountains. The entire alluvial aquifer under that river, and other connected aquifers, depends on a porous, well-vegetated landscape upstream from Bragg Creek. Industrial-scale logging and a network of hardened roads and off-highway vehicle trails, however, divert much of the potential groundwater recharge overland into the river each spring. Instead of replenishing aquifers, the lost runoff feeds increasingly severe river floods.

Farther north, in a 2009 report for the North Saskatchewan Watershed Alliance, Morris Maccagno and João Küpper came to a similar conclusion. They believe that land use decisions that reduce groundwater recharge could diminish the North Saskatchewan drainage’s most important alluvial and bedrock aquifers. “The dynamics of regional groundwater recharge in the Rocky Mountains and Foothills,” they wrote, “should be characterized in terms of contributions to baseflow in the headwaters and to regional flow in the Paskapoo aquifer system, as well as the sensitivities of regional groundwater flow to the effects of forestry practices, land-use change and climate change in the headwaters.”

Hayashi stresses, however, that land use in the forested headwaters of Alberta’s major rivers has little impact on most Alberta water wells. Most farm and town wells across central and eastern Alberta draw from shallow aquifers whose recharge areas are less than 100 km away. Mapping, and then protecting, those critical recharge areas is essential because these small, localized aquifers have little ability to buffer any loss in supply. They are also more vulnerable to pollution.

When most Albertans hear about water pollution, we tend to think of the oilsands region northeast of Edmonton. Groundwater pollution is indeed a growing problem there. The water table is very near the surface across much of the Athabasca drainage; it’s difficult to dig a pit without encountering water that connects underground to nearby lakes, rivers, wetlands and aquifers. Toxic wastes abound in the region’s nearly 200 km2 of tailings ponds. Modelling studies have estimated that as much as 6.5 million litres can leak daily from some of those ponds. While most contamination studies have focused on the Athabasca River, the polluted flow moves continually in and out of adjacent aquifers.

We’re dealing with serious challenges: aquifer depletion, loss of groundwater recharge and contamination of the resource.

But groundwater contamination from the petroleum industry is a far bigger problem than keeping toxic oil sands extraction by-products out of boreal rivers. That artesian spring that Dad and we kids stumbled across five decades ago was merely the tip of the iceberg; groundwater damage may be widespread. If so, we won’t necessarily hear about it from industry, government regulators or even the private citizens whose wells have been contaminated.

Alberta has been drilling holes through its aquifers for over a century. Over 400,000 oil and natural gas wells spike the landscape now, according to records maintained by the Alberta Energy Regulator, a government body funded entirely by the oil and gas industry it was set up to regulate. About a third no longer produce oil or gas. When a well becomes inactive, the company is supposed to “abandon” it (i.e., decommission it) according to strict industry protocols.

Well operators have to submit an abandonment plan and check on the condition of any cement in the well. They then clean petroleum residues from the pipe, block any escaping methane gas, seal off groundwater zones with cement and cap the well. The theory is that the metal pipe, filled with cement down to below any potable groundwater, protects aquifers. In reality, even if the original well didn’t contaminate an aquifer with drilling or fracking fluids or through methane leakage along the well bore, abandoned wells can be plagued by pipe corrosion, cement failure or damage from industry’s increasingly common practice of inducing subterranean earthquakes to release oil and gas trapped in relatively impermeable rock formations. Fracking, as it’s called, deliberately shatters underground rock. Although most fracking is done far beneath freshwater aquifers, it’s still risky, considering that aquifers are best protected by intact rock layers.

The Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) has a history of downplaying the risks associated with oil and gas extraction and well abandonment. The agency stubbornly insists that no drinking water well has ever been contaminated by a petroleum well in Alberta, but concedes on its website: “While abandoned wells do not place the environment or public at significant risk, small leaks are possible. A well leak can be caused by many things, including corrosion, improper abandonment and damage incurred during excavation.” Research has shown that fracking can cause leaks in nearby wells too.

Once AER approves a well remediation plan, the company has to repair any ensuing leaks. That’s the theory. But when companies get into financial trouble, the orderly well-abandonment process can fall apart. Many companies simply walk away from unreclaimed or leaking wells. When that happens, AER requires Alberta’s industry-funded Orphan Well Association to shut the wells in. The association, however, has a backlog of more than 700 unreclaimed wells, any or all of which could be contaminating groundwater. It can cost millions of dollars to reclaim one well; that’s partly why the association has reclaimed fewer than 50 a year since its inception in 2002.

According to one recent summary, Alberta has about 80,000 inactive wells outside the orphan well program. While most of those have been decommissioned according to the prescribed protocol, about 37,000 are out of compliance with AER requirements. In addition, at least 3,300 are ticking time bombs with known wellbore integrity problems that have yet to be properly remediated.

Some landowners and politicians have called for the Alberta government to use public money to remediate orphaned wells during the current economic recession, arguing that, among other things, such a program would keep drilling contractors working until demand for new oil and gas wells picks up again. The government has resisted that idea, citing Alberta’s long-standing polluter-pay principle and the risks of allowing industry to transfer its environmental liabilities onto taxpayers. Even if the government were willing to entertain the idea, little public money is available due to the practice in Alberta, over the past two decades, of charging bargain-basement royalties in order to keep those now-failing companies in business.

Without a greater sense of urgency and more aggressive levies on industry, there is little prospect that many of Alberta’s abandoned wells will ever be properly sealed. Once the consequences of that failure turn up in our drinking water wells, it will be too late. It is far easier to pollute groundwater than to clean it up again.

However, it’s not just energy wells that expose groundwater to the risk of contamination. Alberta is littered with tens of thousands of abandoned water wells—potentially an even bigger threat, since they can channel surface contaminants such as septic waste, cattle manure or pesticides directly into aquifers. Some have been safely plugged and capped; others haven’t. No regulatory agency checks on this.

Once negative consequences turn up in our water wells, it’s too late. It’s far easier to pollute groundwater than to clean it up.

Adèle Hurley directs the water issues program for the Munk School of Global Affairs. In a recent Globe and Mail editorial she decried the degree to which groundwater contamination is hidden behind the legal “non-disclosure” agreements that landowners are forced to sign before oil and gas drilling companies will replace contaminated water wells. Even without such agreements, she says, the public is told next to nothing about contamination of our hidden drinking water supplies by an industry based on punching holes through them.

“To date, no regulatory body in Canada has set up a rigorous program to track methane and other contaminants… in areas of intense hydrocarbon drilling,” she writes. “Yet science shows us that all oil and gas well casings leak over time and… serve as pathways for contaminants that can put groundwater at risk for thousands of years.”

Hurley supports a call by David McLaughlin, former head of the National Roundtable on the Environment and Economy, for provincial governments to charge a royalty or fee for groundwater use and allocate the revenues to independent groundwater authorities for mapping and monitoring programs. “Investment in the protection of groundwater,” argues Hurley, “is a form of national security.”

Alberta will survive when the oil and gas run out. But nothing can survive without water. It’s time we defend our groundwater as aggressively as we have become accustomed to protecting those land uses and industries that put our aquifers most at risk.

Kevin Van Tighem is a columnist for Alberta Views and author of Heart Waters: Sources of the Bow River (RMB, 2015).

The post In Decline appeared first on Alberta Views.

Yup.

Only here can certain kinds of research be conducted under those rarest of conditions: a natural setting completely controlled to the minutest detail by scientists. For the quest being undertaken here, new tools are imperative. To the scientists who spent the summer of 2014 inaugurating this unobtrusive facility, it may even be a breakthrough weapon in a two-decade-long pursuit of a will-o’-the-wisp guerrilla army that many hold responsible for a global epidemic of foreboding reproductive weirdness. Welcome to a world of deformed penises, hermaphrodite bears, intersex fish and missing boys.

Something strange has been happening to the male of the species—ours and others—and suspicion centres on the vast spectrum of chemicals that leak into the environment from a million points across the 21st century economy. But the suspect molecules operate in concentrations of one in a million or more other molecules. “Smoking gun” scientific proof of any one compound’s direct impact on a human life is proving elusive. And here is where this out-of-the-way hillside shines.

Those “toboggan runs” are, in fact, the centrepiece of a $38.5-million laboratory, a joint initiative between the City and the University of Calgary. Its grammatically awkward name is “Advancing Canadian Wastewater Assets,” which sounds better spoken aloud as an acronym: ACWA, an obvious play on “aqua.” Twelve 350 m artificial streams, in which riffles alternate with quieter pools, lie in two sets of facing J-shaped pairs. They are home to an expanding community of insect, plant and algal life, and are fed from large pipes emerging from one of the two utilitarian buildings at the top of the constructed hill. The water from these pipes can be doctored to precisely calibrated mixtures of almost anything. Every inch of the streams is accessible to researchers. For the biologists and other specialists trying to discern how a minute trace of the wrong chemical in the water can totally mess up a young minnow’s sex life—and may be doing the same to human boys—acquiring ACWA is a bit like getting their own Large Hadron Collider, that vastly expensive installation beneath the French–Swiss border built to sniff out the semi-mythical subatomic Higgs boson.

Welcome to a world of deformed penises, hermaphrodite bears, intersex fish and missing boys.

Admittedly, the targets they’re chasing here are larger, relatively speaking, than the boson, but they are equally invisible and a lot more frightening. They run a chemical gamut from incidental residues from petroleum production to highly evolved pesticides and even the supposedly benign ingredients in skin cream. They also include perfectly natural chemicals. What they all have in common is the ability to trigger the endocrine system, that finely tuned chemical network that organizes the development and ongoing bodily functions of every form of complex life.

Natural hormones—estrogen, testosterone, androgen—are examples. But the human body continuously secretes scores of others as well, to control every aspect of life, from organizing fetal cells to timing the onset of puberty. It is an artifact of evolution that the chemical codes in this signalling system are largely the same among all vertebrates, that is, all animals with spines: frogs, minnows, us. But in the last few decades, hundreds of thousands of new chemicals have been invented and put to use that closely mimic that natural signalling code. When those chemicals enter a body, its processes easily mistake the stray synthetic signal for the real thing, setting off biological mayhem. For that reason, these contaminants are known collectively as EDCs, for “endocrine disrupting chemicals.”

A startling number of these escape into the environment wherever humans or their livestock congregate. Birth-control pills are concentrated hormones; not all of their active EDCs are metabolized on use. They, other pharmaceuticals, and cosmetics washed off in the shower collect in municipal wastewater streams. Sewage treatment removes many, but not all of them. Some of the most potent EDCs are literally spread over the ground: Herbicides in wide farm and home use rely on endocrine disruption for their effect. More EDCs reach Alberta’s rivers, especially in the south, from animal feedlots. Cattle (as well as pigs and chickens) not only release natural hormones of their own but often receive additional EDCs in growth stimulants or veterinary drugs. Residual amounts pass through into their manure, which is usually disposed of on nearby fields. It is the equivalent of the entire population of Canada living in this province—without benefit of sewage treatment.

Some EDCs, like polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), can persist in the environment for decades. Most begin to break down quickly. Even so, enough hang around to turn up in virtually every Alberta waterway tested—as well as in most other lakes and rivers across the country. And even their breakdown may not entirely end their threat. Fragments of decayed EDCs have been found to reassemble in the wild, raising the unsettling prospect of the unscripted mixing and matching of powerful molecular snippets into entirely new compounds. Familiar or novel, they’re believed to be responsible for some decidedly strange stuff.

Around the world, wildlife biologists have been disturbed by parallel trends toward gender confusion in scores of species. Nearly half of Florida’s cane toads studied turned out to be hermaphrodites; so did a smaller but still unexpected percentage of Canadian polar bears (in a study one imagines was undertaken with extreme caution). One British summary reported abnormal testes in fish, turtles, bears, sea lions, whales and panthers. Otherwise-male fish, birds and amphibians were producing proteins that normally precede egg-laying in females.

That has been the case in Alberta among long-nosed dace, a kind of minnow that lives in the Bow, Oldman and Red Deer rivers. Downstream from where treated municipal waste enters the river, or from concentrated livestock feeding operations, not only have “male” fish shown signs of preparing for ovulation, they are hard to find at all. In some river pools, female minnows outnumber males by about 10 to 1. Populations upstream of the waste releases show the normal, roughly 1:1, sex ratio.

A similarly global, if much less dramatic, shift in the traditional human birth ratio of roughly 105 baby boys to every 100 girls, is a sign to many researchers that EDCs are messing with human reproductive norms as well. Examining records back to the 1930s, researchers Theo Colborn and Lynne Carroll concluded in 2007 that human “fertility, reproductive success and male/female live birth ratio are declining” all across the industrialized world. In Canada, they reported that “[a] clear shift…began to appear in 1970.” By the mid-1990s that drift had cut the male edge in birth numbers by nearly half, from five extra boys per 100 girls, to only two to three.

On this count Alberta may have dodged a chemical bullet: Birth ratios have remained stable here, at about the traditional 105 boys to 100 girls, since 1989. Across Canada, however, the male share of births has continued to fall. The implication: Hundreds of Canadian infants who might once have been born as boys are entering life as girls. On a global basis, the number of “missing” boys is believed to have surpassed a quarter million per year.

That’s not the end of unsettling parallels between what’s being seen in the wild and what’s turning up in delivery rooms. Researchers in several countries have documented an increase in cases of undescended testicles and of hypospadias—a defect in which the opening of the urethra is located not at the tip of the penis but partway down or even at the base of the shaft. Hypospadias occurs in some 110 births a year in Alberta, a number that’s up by 20 per cent since 1997 (the condition is correctable by outpatient surgery, usually before the age of two). Sperm production has also dropped off by more than a third (41 per cent) in the last half century among men in industrial countries. Testicular and prostate cancer rates, on the other hand, have doubled since the 1970s. “The basic male toolkit,” as one researcher quipped, “is under threat.”

Research at Advancing Canadian Whitewater Assets (ACWA). The lab is unique for the size of its experimental streams, its construction with natural materials, its ability to allow fish to survive the winter, and the flexibility it affords researchers. (Riley Brandt/ University of Calgary)

The weirdness also extends to those with XX chromosomes. The World Health Organization in 2012 drew suspected links between EDCs in the environment and rising world rates of “endocrine-related” cancers of the breast, the endometrium (lining of the womb) and ovaries; earlier onset of breast development; difficulties conceiving; and “adverse pregnancy outcomes.”

In the US, controversy has swirled around the outsize figure of California biologist Tyrone Hayes. Hayes brought attention to himself when, at the request of the manufacturer of a product called atrazine, he began exploring its influence on his specialty, the health of frogs. Atrazine is one of the most widely used agricultural herbicides in the US and has long been approved; Hayes expected simply to confirm its clean bill of safety. What he discovered shocked him: As many as 20 per cent of tadpoles exposed to atrazine at levels well below US guidelines developed into frogs with multiple gonads (as many as six sets in one frog) or were hermaphrodites with both testes and ovaries. Subsequent research by others confirmed those effects, and similar ones on salmon, caiman alligators and rats. Then Hayes drew a provocative conclusion. In a paper co-written with more than a score of other scientists, Hayes presented evidence that “the effects of atrazine… are consistent across all vertebrate classes… Atrazine demasculinizes male gonads… in… fish, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals… These effects are strong (statistically significant), consistent across vertebrate classes, and specific.”

And mammals. In other words, the gender-bending seen in frogs probably occurs in humans too. There is some evidence to back up the proposition. Missouri men who lived in rural areas where atrazine was heavily used had poorer sperm quality than men in urban areas. French babies exposed to atrazine weighed on average five ounces less than babies not exposed. Boys born in parts of Texas where atrazine is present showed a “modest but consistent” higher likelihood of genital defects. Hayes’s claims set off a race among laboratories to test his findings. It also attracted a coordinated effort by atrazine’s maker—Swiss-based Syngenta—to discredit him. Cut from different cloth than the average lab rat—he wears a diamond ear stud and for public appearances affects a style reminiscent of soul singer James Brown—Hayes responded in part by firing back at the company in rhyming, rap-style emails. When these became public in 2010, his campaigning suffered a setback.

But the Albertan who’s best qualified to judge Hayes’s science, newly retired University of Calgary herpetologist Anthony Russell (he literally wrote the book: The Amphibians and Reptiles of Alberta, published in 2000), finds nothing to fault in Hayes’s basic findings. “Tyrone is a very flamboyant figure” who makes tamer scientists uncomfortable, Russell says. But when it comes to frogs, Hayes “knows his stuff. The controversy comes because he’s projected it [atrazine’s gender-bending effects] to human populations.”

Which raises the big question hovering over the science of EDCs, the one Calgary’s new multi-million dollar experimental streams were built to help answer: Are EDCs putting human sexuality in the blender along with that of frogs and minnows?

Here is what we know. That certain molecules interfere with the human endocrine system is beyond scientific dispute. Imagine that system as like the modern communications web that connects and coordinates every part of a community or business. Because it operates by making molecule-to-molecule bonds with cell receptors, it takes only a relative handful of such molecules to complete their signal. When nearly identical molecules—natural or man-made—enter the body, they result in the biological equivalent of a plague of dropped calls and wrong connections. With the normal hormonal command structure disrupted, bodily processes turn on or off at the wrong time, organs get confused about what they’re meant to do. Laboratory frogs develop both testes and ovaries.

In the last few decades, hundreds of thousands of chemicals have been invented. When they enter a body, they can set off biological mayhem.

We know as well that many EDCs are present in what we naively still call “nature.” Atrazine is effectively ubiquitous in US groundwater. In 25 of 28 US cities tested, tap water contained pharmaceuticals from mood stabilizers to anticonvulsants. Philadelphia’s taps flowed a virtual cocktail of more than 50 drug traces.

And here Alberta Environment has sampled water from several spots along the North Saskatchewan and Bow rivers in alternating years for a decade (a task now transferred to the new Alberta Environmental Monitoring, Evaluation and Reporting Agency). The sampled water has revealed everything from the familiar—acetaminophen (Tylenol) and ibuprofen (Advil)—to compounds largely unknown beyond specialist circles. Among those that have turned up repeatedly:
– Nonylphenol tetraethoxylate: used in dish detergents, paints and lube oils, packaging and personal care products.
– Sulfamethoxazole: a “sulfa drug” antibiotic often used to treat urinary tract infections.
– Gemfibrozil: prescribed to raise “good” cholesterol in blood and lower “bad.”
– Galoxolide: a synthetic musk used in colognes and perfumes for its “clean, sweet, musky, flowery, woody odour.”
– Benzoylecgonine: a primary metabolite from cocaine use.

Separately, Environment Canada found pesticide or herbicide residues in wetlands, rivers and reservoirs across the prairies. Four compounds appeared in more than 80 per cent of samples: 2,4-D, MCPA (2-methyl-4-chlorophenoxyacetic acid), clopyralid and dicamba. All combat various broadleaf weeds using endocrine-like chemicals that speed up or otherwise disrupt growth until the plants die. The first two chemicals appeared in every wetland and 99 per cent of reservoir water tested. The survey also looked for atrazine, finding it in none of the wetlands but more than a quarter of prairie water reservoirs.

“Stream dressing,” or the placing of rocks in the riffles of ACWA’s experimental streams. Water from Calgary’s wastewater treatment plant is pumped to a building (top right) to dose the streams with emerging compounds of concern (e.g. a new chemotherapy drug). (Riley Brandt/ University of Calgary)

We also know that EDCs are affecting wildlife. Research in Alberta and beyond has clearly associated gender defects and skewed sex ratios in aquatic or amphibian species with a heightened presence of EDCs. The feminizing effect in long-nosed dace has been found as well in fathead minnows downstream from Lethbridge. Similar effects were found in a Saskatchewan creek whose flow in winter is mainly treated wastewater from the city of Regina.

One of the clearest demonstrations that EDCs from pharmaceuticals can impact aquatic life occurred in the early 2000s at the country’s closest equivalent to ACWA’s experimental streams: the Experimental Lakes Area of northern Ontario. There, scientists manipulated conditions in entire lakes. At Lake 260, Karen Kidd and her associates monitored the population of fathead minnows while injecting EE2 (17α-ethynylestradiol), a synthetic hormone used in birth-control pills, into its water until concentrations reached those typically found downstream from waste treatment plants. They did this for three years. In year one, male fathead minnows began showing signs of feminization. In year two, the fathead minnow population collapsed. By year three, Kidd says, the disruption of male function “basically resulted in the near extinction of a fish species in the lake.”

After the experimenters stopped adding EE2 to Lake 260’s water, its fathead minnows rebounded. To Kidd, that is further evidence, along with similar accounts of species that have recovered after toxins were removed from their environment, that endocrine contaminants are affecting wildlife.

Could the EDCs turning frog princes into princesses be doing the same thing to human males?

The endocrine system’s hormonal codes date from early in life’s evolution. As a result, “all vertebrates have similar sex hormone receptors,” observes Gwynne Lyons, who summarized the literature on EDC effects for CHEM Trust, a UK non-profit. In other words, the chemical codes that provide the prenatal blueprint for building a proper penis, or that signal a girl’s breasts to begin swelling at puberty, are pretty much the same ones that every other critter with a backbone uses, from frogs to fathead minnows to, yes, polar bears.

It seems plausible. And yet, unequivocal proof that nonylphenol tetraethoxylate, or 2,4-D, or anything else left over in the water, produced this stillbirth or that deformed genitalia or the cluster over there of breast or testes cancers is frustratingly elusive.

“Because wildlife species and humans share some similarities in their endocrine system, there is potential for chemicals to impact humans as they do for wildlife,” says Kidd, who was a lead editor of the 2012 WHO study. “There’s all the evidence of increases in endocrine cancers and diseases of the endocrine system or disorders as well. But linking that to a specific chemical exposure, knowing what their contribution is to human diseases, is really difficult.”

It’s not for lack of trying. Hundreds of thousands of potentially disruptive molecules out there, some known, others unimagined, all invisible, occur in vanishingly tiny amounts in water.
Galoxolide, the synthetic musk perfume, has been found in the Bow River in concentrations as high as 0.19 micrograms per litre—roughly the equivalent of a teaspoon in a municipal water tower. Most contaminants clock in at even less. Then again, if the foreign molecule bonds to a human cell’s receptors at just the right time, it takes only a little to create “a non-linear response,” as the researchers say. Of course, scientists can’t just subject people to suspect compounds at critical moments such as conception or puberty and monitor their response in the lab. Instead they have to infer causal connections from studying events in the outside world. And that world is, in scientific terms, a “noisy” place. Isolating one influence from among the unfathomable variety of others, and proving its presence at a time and place when its effect may have occurred, makes needles in haystacks look like child’s play.

Dr. R. Brian Lowry should know. Nearing retirement, the Calgary epidemiologist made his own contribution to Alberta’s science assets: a central record of birth defects extending back to the 1980s. To that record we owe the knowledge that Alberta’s boys share in the global epidemic of hypospadias, and that compared to other places, more Alberta infants are born missing parts of limbs. We also know that certain birth defects have turned up in clusters, suggesting perhaps an environmental influence. Lowry has spent much of his otherwise illustrious 50-year career in a generally fruitless search for an explanation for these clusters.

His voice betrays a certain wistfulness as he describes another one that got away: microtia, a deformity in which the outer ear fails to develop. “We had an interesting cluster a few years back. Four cases, all born in the same month, in the same hospital, [delivered] by the same obstetrician. I investigated them all and examined the parents and looked into their occupations and their risk factors and found nothing to correlate these four. And then the numbers fell away again.” Evidence of a correlation has slipped through his fingers repeatedly.

And here, finally, is where ACWA’s research director, U of C biologist Leland Jackson, has high hopes for his unprepossessing “toboggan runs” in southeast Calgary. Each of its dozen streambeds can be fed independently with water from a selection of sources. Early in 2014 they were gurgling with water straight from the Bow River. But they can also be fed in whole or part from the treated effluent released by the neighbouring Pine Creek Wastewater Treatment plant (a gold-plated facility commissioned in 2010), or from a second, small-city-size treatment plant that is part of ACWA’s laboratory and which is designed to test next-generation approaches to sanitizing sewage, or with some combination of these laced with any contaminant of interest to researchers. The facility can host up to two experiments at a time, each running in three “control” and three “test” channels for greater reliability. EDCs aren’t the only interest. ACWA has a lineup of researchers also interested in whether trace antibiotics in municipal sewage are breeding new drug-resistant “superbugs,” as well as engineers eager to test ideas for addressing those and other problems.

But the prospect of bringing new scientific insight to the elusive mechanisms that give EDCs their power keeps Jackson excited to come to work. His lab conducted the early research that associated municipal and feedlot effluent with girls-only schools of long-nosed dace. Now he wants to close that last step in the logic chain, to get to “understanding how to translate what’s happening to long-nosed dace, to people.” ACWA’s streams will let him probe for cause-and-effect connections between precisely known contaminants and sex biases, feminization and other effects in test fish. Once those are established, anatomical and cellular examinations may at last reveal, down to the precise molecular address or genetic switch, just what is going on.

Until then, Jackson says, Albertans “should continue to question what’s in the water, what fish like long-nosed dace are telling us about effects on people.” But they needn’t stay awake nights worrying about what’s coming out of their tap. Not yet, anyway. “I drink City of Calgary water,” he laughs. “I drink it and I like it and I don’t worry about what’s going to happen.”

Chris Wood is co-author of Down the Drain: How We Are Failing to Protect Our Water Resources (Greystone)

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It’s a scene Pearce could view with pride—the future he once imagined. Pearce knew that Alberta’s prosperity would depend on the living waters that drain from Alberta’s foothills and Rocky Mountains—that’s why he fought for watershed conservation all his life. But today his pride would likely be leavened by disappointment: our rivers bring less water now than they did in his day, even as demand for water grows.

Shortage of water means Alberta’s ambitions may soon exceed its grasp. It’s not like Pearce didn’t warn us.

William Pearce arrived in Calgary in 1884, determined to make sure Canada didn’t mess up its West. Farther south, waves of eager Americans were fighting over water holes, shooting at the indigenous people, laying waste to forests and overgrazing the plains. That kind of chaotic settlement was not, in Pearce’s opinion, an option for what was then Canada’s northwest.
His opinion mattered. As superintendent of mines for the CPR “Railway Belt,” Pearce controlled most land-use decisions in the region surrounding the new Canadian Pacific Railway. Appointed by the Deputy Minister of the Interior in faraway Ottawa, Pearce soon became known as the “Czar of the West.” He established new parks, settled land disputes, allocated mineral rights and recommended settlement and development policies.

Pearce had spent his youth in well-watered southern Ontario, so he was struck by the scarcity and small size of our prairie rivers, as well as their unfortunate habit of shrinking each summer just as water demand peaked. He knew that the West’s agricultural potential would be limited by available water. It didn’t help that the 1880s had been marked by drought; if the skies couldn’t always be relied upon for water, he reasoned, the rivers must provide it.

Pearce consequently became a keen champion of irrigation development. But even as he explored the potential for dams and canals to carry water to prairie farms, he looked west to the Rocky Mountains and foothills. That was where the water came from. Nothing, he decided, could be allowed to diminish or threaten the headwaters.

Pearce succeeded in getting the forests along the edge of the Rocky Mountains reserved as public land in 1898 to protect the watershed. Settlement and development were prohibited. He went on to persuade the Canadian government, in 1902, to enlarge adjacent Banff National Park to 12,691 km2, twice its modern size. When later governments shrank the park to exclude resource-rich areas, they redesignated the deleted land as an addition to the forest reserve.

The reserve included the forested headwaters of the Oldman, Bow, Red Deer, North Saskatchewan and Athabasca rivers. The Department of the Interior’s 1911 report described it as “a timbered area lying alongside of a prairie country hundreds of miles in extent… form[ing] the watershed for the river systems which water the great plains to the east, where water supply is practically the only limit to anticipated settlement and development.”

Real estate speculators, cattlemen and loggers had ambitions for reserve land. But Pearce’s vision won. The undisturbed forests, beaver meadows and relict glaciers were set aside to gather and store water from winter snows and spring rains. That way they could always be relied on to release water slowly, through soil seepage and deeper groundwater aquifers, to the cold springs and creeks that feed the downstream rivers. Watershed protection trumped all.

That’s been the rule—on paper—ever since. When the forest reserves became part of Alberta’s “Green Area” in 1948 and were put under joint federal–provincial administration, new legislation reiterated the primacy of water supply over other uses. In the 1970s Alberta resumed full responsibility for managing its headwaters; its policy for resource management of the Eastern Slopes again put watershed protection first.

With over a century of such enlightened public policy, one might expect the headwaters of our prairie rivers to be in good condition and our water future assured. One would be wrong.

John Pomeroy at the Marmot Creek research station in Kananaskis Country. (Kevin Van Tighem)

Marmot Creek, just north of Kananaskis Country’s Nakiska ski area, drains some of those headwater forests. Researchers have studied its watershed since 1943. I visited in 2012 with John Pomeroy, a hydrologist from the University of Saskatchewan.

Why would a Saskatchewan professor be interested in Alberta’s high mountain forests Almost all the water in the South Saskatchewan River, Pomeroy explained, comes from Alberta’s Rocky Mountains. In fact, more than 90 per cent of all western stream flows in North America come from the mountains west of the Mississippi River—mostly from melting snow. If you’re concerned about prairie water, you need to pay attention to what Pomeroy describes as the “snow forests.”

The population of Alberta and Saskatchewan has increased more than ninefold in the past century. Meanwhile, river flow in the South Saskatchewan has declined more than 40 per cent. Although irrigated farming and other human water uses explain some of the loss, about 30 per cent of the missing flow remained unaccounted for. That raised questions that led Pomeroy to his river’s headwaters, in Alberta.

Historically, the preferred solution to water supply problems was not to study the headwaters but to build dams—for example, the Gardiner Dam on the South Saskatchewan in 1967, the Dickson Dam on the Red Deer in 1975 and the Oldman Dam in 1989. But dams don’t make water; they simply store what is already available. At best they enable water engineers to hold some of the spring runoff until summer, when it’s needed. At worst, however, leakage and evaporation actually reduce the supply.

Diefenbaker Lake, behind the Gardiner Dam, is southern Saskatchewan’s biggest source of stored water—three-quarters of that province’s population relies on it. Even so, evaporation takes more water from the reservoir than all those human users. It’s the same in Alberta. Up to a metre of water evaporates from each of Alberta’s irrigation reservoirs each year. Monitoring of the Oldman reservoir has showed that it loses a litre of water to evaporation for every 100 L flowing into it. In short: Dams waste water.

Even so, in the mid-20th century the Alberta government’s water engineers came up with an ambitious solution for the thirsty south. The Prairie Rivers Improvement and Management Evaluation (PRIME) scheme proposed numerous dams and diversion canals to direct northern waters south. The bizarre scheme actually made a kind of sense; after all, 80 per cent of Alberta’s water is in the north, while 80 per cent of water demand is in the sunnier south. But, faced with widespread public outrage, successive Alberta governments have rejected interbasin water transfer.

In any case, diminished flows in the Athabasca and Peace rivers are now colliding with increased demand for water for bitumen mining and well-fracking. The North needs its water, not only to keep its rivers healthy but to meet its own future needs. Southern Alberta and Saskatchewan are going to have to solve their own water problems.

Pomeroy’s solution doesn’t involve dams. It involves finding the missing water. Based on forest hydrology research at Marmot Creek and other study sites, Pomeroy and his students have generated some likely ideas. (Kevin Van Tighem)

Part of the explanation goes to climate change. Alberta’s glaciers have shrunk by 25 per cent over the past quarter century. Glacial meltwaters can be particularly important in summer when rivers, deprived of spring runoff, would otherwise shrink. In fact, accelerated rates of glacier melt may be masking the effects of climate change by releasing stored glacier water faster than it’s replaced. Once the glaciers are gone—possibly by the end of this century—that subsidy will fizzle out.

Overall, though, glaciers contribute little to river flows. The Bow River gets only about 2 per cent of its annual flow from glacier melt. Less than 5 per cent of the North Saskatchewan is from glaciers.

Glacial ice retreat, however, is a proxy for what matters a lot more to river levels: snow accumulation. With warming temperatures, more winter precipitation falls as rain that runs off instead of being stored by mountain snowpacks until spring. Snow now melts out of the foothills up to two months earlier than it did in 1970—a startling change over so short a period.

Changes to Alberta’s forests provide another part of the explanation. Aggressive fire protection increased the amount of forest steadily through the 20th century. The amount of old forest in the headwaters today far exceeds the historic norm. Dense, continuous forests are neither natural nor good for water production.

To explain why, Pomeroy led us through a mossy glade into dark woods redolent with the scent of resin and hushed by the wistful whistles of varied thrushes. There he showed us a dead spruce tree hanging from a tower. Its sawed-off trunk ended just above the ground. Cables and posts held various instruments at different levels of the surrounding forest canopy as if a mad arborist were conducting bizarre experiments.

Pomeroy was quick to explain the tree-lynching. To determine how much snow the forest canopy intercepts each winter, the researchers fell a tree, hang it in its normal growth position and then weigh it periodically throughout the winter. The technique has yielded some startling findings. Thanks to chinook winds, it turns out, Alberta’s headwater forests lose more canopy snow to sublimation—the evaporation of water directly from solid snow to water vapour—than anywhere else in the world. Sublimation can remove as much as 60 per cent of the snow trapped on tree branches each winter. This is a big loss.

Thus, very little canopy snow becomes meltwater in the spring; it goes aloft again and vanishes into distant weather systems. The denser the forest, the more snow gets trapped in the branches of trees. Snow that accumulates on the ground, on the other hand, especially if protected from sun and wind, loses far less moisture to sublimation. Instead, the spring snowmelt feeds groundwater and streams. So the tree canopy is not all bad news—a good scattering of mature trees helps the underlying snowpack melt gradually in the spring rather than all at once.

Hydrologists have found that clear-cut logging can increase the winter snowpack as much as 40 per cent. The increased snowmelt yields up to a 12 per cent increase in stream flows. Unfortunately, since the unprotected snowpack melts quickly, that comes mostly as more-intense spring floods.

Research findings from Marmot Creek suggest that forest managers hoping to optimize the water supply from managed forests should thin the forest, not clear-cut it. The only place for clear-cuts, if water is the priority, is on steep slopes sheltered from direct sunshine or wind. Promoting deciduous regrowth instead of the more commercially valuable spruce and pine also would improve water yield. Aspen and poplar trunks reflect about 20 per cent of incoming sunlight. Conifers reflect 8 per cent at best. The rest becomes radiant heat that hastens the snowmelt.

But that’s not how foresters log. Even though the policy priority in our headwaters is watershed health, logging companies manage for wood, not water. You can’t blame them; it’s how they define their business, and it’s what the Alberta government insists on. They could log for water instead of wood fibre—but who would pay?

Gord Lehn doesn’t consider that question insurmountable. He’s director of communications and ecological goods and services for Spray Lakes Sawmills.

Many governments prohibit logging in the headwaters of major cities, but Spray Lakes holds cutting rights upstream from Calgary and in almost the entire Oldman drainage. I was curious about what Lehn’s company is doing to protect the water-holding capacity of so critical, and limited, a landscape. A few days after visiting Marmot Creek I called Lehn with an offer: I’d bring lunch if he’d show me what Spray Lakes was doing for the watershed.

On a golden September day, we headed out to look at old cutblocks and current logging operations in the Elbow River headwaters. I soon concluded that Spray Lakes could be proud of their practices. Commercial-scale logging is never pretty, but their work is exemplary compared to other companies that continue to degrade the headwaters farther north.

Even so, logging as it’s done in Alberta is not good for watersheds. Government regulations, and market imperatives, require companies to remove as much wood as possible before scarifying the logged-off areas and replanting them with new spruce or pine. They bulldoze haul roads across easily eroded slopes, force small creeks into culverts that block fish from spawning areas, and they clear-cut trees from large cutblocks.

Roads increase runoff and erosion both by stripping away the vegetation that intercepts rain and snowmelt and by creating new drainage routes where runoff erodes the exposed soil. Where logging roads cut into steep banks, they often bring shallow groundwater to the surface as new, temporary springs. As surface water, it drains out of the landscape faster than if left to seep slowly through undisturbed soil.

Lehn reassured me more than once during our day in the woods that logging increases water yield; lessons from Marmot Creek, however, have made it clear that it’s not that simple.
The snow in large clear-cuts melts quickly. The water all rushes off the landscape in early spring, eroding muddy gullies before hitting downstream creek channels with punishing floods that destabilize their floodplains. Then the water’s gone.

Where shady forests used to soak up snowmelt over weeks and gradually release shallow groundwater into springs and seeps through the summer, keeping creeks cool and well watered, the open clear-cuts bake in the summer sun, their soils now deprived of moisture that ran off too soon. Creeks become shallow and sun-warmed. Downstream water users complain of increasingly intense spring floods and more frequent summer droughts—signs of a sick watershed.

Some of what Spray Lakes Sawmills does helps reduce the risk to the headwaters. For example, I could find no culverts on any of their temporary roads. Lehn explained that, although Alberta’s forestry rules permit culverts on smaller channels, Spray Lakes’ own standards prescribe a bridged crossing over any stream channel, even if it only flows for part of each year. Bridges prevent damage to stream floodplains by keeping the water and streambed connected.

The logged areas we visited were too large and had been clear-cut, but they were well laid out, with uneven edges and patches of uncut trees. Spray Lakes processes each tree right where it’s cut, leaving the branches to help shelter the soil and contribute to vegetation regrowth. Once finished, the company pulls out the bridges and recontours most of the roads, reconnecting shallow groundwater flows rather than leaving them bleeding out of sidehill cuts.

But none of that seems to help Spray Lakes’ reputation. Operating in scenic areas that attract thousands of hikers, bicyclists, anglers and hunters every year, the company is under attack on all sides. Most controversial is their stubborn insistence on clear-cutting the headwaters of the Castle River—an area recognized for decades as worthy of protected park status, and one that yields almost a third of the Oldman River’s water. Public opposition is so fierce that in 2012 the Alberta government deferred further logging there pending completion of a South Saskatchewan regional land-use plan.

The company also faces opposition to its logging plans west of Bragg Creek and on the east flanks of the spectacular Livingstone Range, which extends from the Crowsnest to the Highwood River. Aesthetic, wildlife and water concerns continually eat away at the company’s social licence to operate. Lehn’s job title reflects Spray Lakes’ need for more friends: logging for “ecological goods and services” sounds more palatable than clear-cutting the headwaters.

Lehn agrees that Spray Lakes Sawmills could put watershed optimization ahead of wood supply in their planning, but not under traditional business models. Water shortages farther downstream might, however, offer new revenue options. Okotoks, for example, established a population growth cap in 1998 due to its limited water supply. The town recently set that cap aside when development outside the town boundaries rendered it moot. Removing the growth cap, however, doesn’t solve the water problem—it worsens it. Some town councillors want to dam the Sheep River.

Dams are massively expensive and massively destructive. They gradually become obsolete, too. Once built, their reservoirs begin to fill with silt, especially if the upstream watershed is unhealthy.

Lehn wonders why the provincial government couldn’t redirect the money it seems always able to find for dams to the kinds of forestry that increase the water supply. Reinventing forest management, based on lessons from Marmot Creek and other forest-hydrology research sites, could increase water yield and the timing of water flows in places like Okotoks at far lower costs—both economic and ecological.

The benefits of such an investment wouldn’t all flow down the rivers, either. Opening up the forest canopy, ensuring that no roads remain when cutting is completed and keeping the headwaters landscape moist well into the summer would also be good for grizzly bears, moose, trout and other species that thrive in sheltered green places. Healthy headwaters with thriving wildlife and clean creeks are the finest of places for human recreation too.

Grizzly bears, moose, trout and clean water, however, don’t thrive amid muddy, eroding trails. The last part of our tour took us into the McLean Creek watershed, a sad example of recreational mismanagement.

Forest managers hoping to optimize the water supply from managed headwaters should thin Alberta’s forests, not clear-cut them.

Dirt bikes, snowmobiles and all-terrain quads began to appear in Alberta’s headwaters country in the 1970s. Off-road vehicle (ORV) users quickly spread a web of eroding motor trails all through the landscape. Many of those trails cross streams repeatedly, muddying them with runoff. Worse, many ORV users are not content with easier access to fishing, hunting and scenery: they see the headwaters as a big playground. Mud-bogging has turned once-lush wetlands into muddy sumps. Some creeks have become de facto racetracks.

Faced with motorized anarchy in the woods, the Alberta government decided to try to regulate use by establishing some sacrifice areas. In 1979 the McLean Creek watershed, along with the Ghost–Waiparous farther north, were turned over to the ORV crowd as Forest Land-Use Zones (FLUZes). The idea was to provide a network of authorized woods trails for motorized vehicles. The rest of the landscape would be out of bounds. It didn’t work; anarchy prevails.

Lehn showed me logging haul roads that Spray Lakes Sawmills had recontoured and replanted only to see off-roaders develop new trails there. In one clear-cut, based on Alberta government guidelines, the company had to leave an unlogged buffer along a pre-existing ORV trail. The trail is a deeply eroded gully that funnels sediment and runoff directly into a once-healthy trout stream. Spray Lakes, whose operational guidelines try to minimize their impact on streams, was required to protect an ORV trail that functions as an open wound.

Out-of-control ORV use shreds watersheds all through Alberta’s headwaters. A 2006 Alberta Environment water quality study of Waiparous Creek, a tributary of the Ghost River, found that the Waiparous, which drains an ORV-riddled FLUZ, receives 10 times more sediment loading than the very similar Elbow River—the result of erosion from vehicle trails.

The Ghost River Watershed Alliance, a stewardship group of local ranchers and acreage owners, subsequently commissioned the consulting firm ALCES, led by noted landscape ecologist Brad Stelfox, to evaluate the entire Ghost drainage. Their 2010 report revealed that the Ghost watershed has 2,780 km of cutlines, roads and other linear features, of which 93 per cent are used by ORV riders. This is almost four times more than Alberta Environment and Sustainable Resource Development, which manages the area, had previously identified. In fact, only 189 km of trail is officially available for ORV use; all the rest is being used illegally. Riders disturb 14 times as much ground as they are allowed to.

The average ORV trail has an unvegetated surface up to three metres wide. Cumulatively, then, as much as 775 hectares of bare ground is exposed to erosion every time it rains in the Ghost drainage. If all the illegal trails were closed and revegetated and only the authorized trails left exposed, almost 720 hectares of new vegetation would hold snow and absorb rainfall. That would go a long way toward eliminating the erosion that turns the once-pristine Waiparous muddy brown after each foothills rainstorm. It would yield more, and better, summer water.

Given that the study area covered only a small part of Alberta’s trail-streaked headwaters, the potential for watershed restoration by closing ORV trails is enormous.

Turning illegal trails back to nature would also reduce Alberta’s carbon dioxide loading in the atmosphere. The US Environmental Protection Agency estimates that reforestation of bare land to conifers sequesters up to 2.1 tonnes of carbon per acre each year. Revegetating the Ghost watershed’s unauthorized ORV trails alone could pull more than 3,550 tonnes of carbon out of the atmosphere annually.

That might be a good use for some of the cash that oil companies pay for carbon credits. It might also help make up for all the carbon dioxide generated by OHV users continuing to enjoy access to authorized trails each weekend.

The Waiparous joins the Ghost River west of Cochrane and its muddy waters soon vanish into the reservoir behind TransAlta’s Ghost Lake Dam. There the silt settles to the bottom of the reservoir. The value of a reservoir is measured by how much water it stores, not how much silt; the Ghost Reservoir’s useful life is being dramatically shortened by ORV landscape abuse.

That’s too bad, because another part of the solution to southern Alberta’s water supply crisis may lie in hydropower reservoirs like the one behind the Ghost Dam. Those who persist in seeing dams, rather than healthy watersheds, as the answer to water shortages frequently point out that the Bow, unlike the Oldman and Red Deer rivers, has no large water storage impoundments. They are wrong. TransAlta manages almost a dozen dams upstream from Calgary, with a total storage capacity exceeding half a million acre-feet. That’s a lot of water storage, but it’s used to generate electricity during peak demand periods, mostly in the winter, rather than to sustain river flows and meet peak water demand in summer.

TransAlta is in the power business, not the water business. Electricity prices are highest in the dark and cold of winter; we need water most in summer. TransAlta could be in the water business, though. But as with Spray Lakes Sawmills, it would require a new business model with new revenue streams—either public investment or, possibly, some of that carbon cash. Healthy riparian systems, after all, sequester carbon.

A 1990s modelling study into how hydropower operations might be changed to restore the lakes and rivers they damage showed that “repurposing” just one dam, at Lower Kananaskis Lake, could triple the reservoir’s biological productivity, restore the Kananaskis River’s once-famous fishery, reduce winter ice jams and significantly increase summer water levels in the Bow through Calgary. TransAlta would still produce as much electricity, but not the most profitable peak-demand winter power. The change would cost the company close to a million dollars in forgone annual revenues.
Building the Oldman Dam cost almost $800-million in today’s dollars. Where water is concerned, money can be found, at least for non-solutions. The next dam, should there be one, will certainly cost in excess of a billion dollars. That’s 10 times what it would cost to compensate TransAlta for changing how it releases water from Lower Kananaskis Lake each summer, for the next century. Similar improvements in summer flows are possible from hydro dams on the Spray, Cascade and North Saskatchewan rivers.

There is at least one way to put a lot of dams into the headwaters at no cost to the public treasury. All that’s needed is a restricted quota or a total ban on the trapping of beavers in Fur Management Zone 6. Currently, licensed trappers there can kill all the beavers they want.

Beaver dams evaporate water too, but in the sheltered headwaters where air and water are cooler and the reach of the wind is limited by trees, the losses are much less than from vast sheets of reservoir water spread out beneath the sun and wind of the outer foothills. Besides, beaver dams store much of their water underground in riparian aquifers and wetland fens. The stored water drains from the landscape slowly, feeding cold water into streams well into summer or even into subsequent years. Research in the Beaver Hills near Edmonton shows that streams draining beaver-filled landscapes still had running water after several years of drought, long after nearby streams had gone bone-dry. If water matters, it makes little sense to continue trapping so valuable an animal—one that builds and maintains dams for free. Its ecosystem services are surely worth more than its fur.

Downstream water-users complain of increasingly intense spring floods and more frequent droughts—signs of a sick watershed.

The key to improving the water supply from Alberta’s foothills and mountainheadwaters is to capture as much of each winter’s snowfall as possible and to delay the release of snowmelt and rainwater from the high country until well into the summer. Current approaches to logging, off-road motorized recreation, hydropower production and trapping, however, do just the opposite. Ironically, those activities are all regulated by government agencies whose policy priority, for more than a century, has been to put watershed health above everything else. They’ve just failed to do so.

Logging for water would restrict clear-cuts to slopes sheltered from wind and direct sunlight. On more exposed slopes, loggers would thin the forest to reduce snow losses from canopy snow while retaining enough shade to protect the enhanced winter snowpacks. They would remove roads to eliminate the sidehill cuts that bring shallow groundwater to the surface. Where possible, they would promote regrowth of aspens and poplars rather than conifers.

The cost of this kind of logging would be higher and profits from wood production lower than from traditional forestry. If companies can’t make money, they won’t survive. Still, those companies have the skills, equipment and, in some cases, corporate cultures that suit them for the work. What they need is customers—for ecological goods and services, not for wood. Those customers are downstream, facing water shortages so severe that the government won’t issue new water licences. They’re just used to shopping for dams rather than for restored, healthy watersheds.

Those same customers could also pay companies like TransAlta to release more water from their upstream reservoirs in summer, which would provide improved flows, mitigate late summer droughts and help downstream rivers heal from decades of hydraulic abuse. In countless other valleys, beavers will do the same thing for free if we allow them to.

No amount of careful resource stewardship and business innovation, however, can restore Alberta’s headwaters to their full potential if every seismic cutline, cow trail or abandoned logging road is open to abuse by off-road vehicles. A limited number of off-road trails makes sense; allowing recreational anarchy to continue turning wetlands into mudbogs, eroding hillsides and choking streams and reservoirs with silt does not. Riding an off-road vehicle is fun for some; water is life for all.

William Pearce would have no illusions about which public value should trump the other, just as he would not dispute the value of investing public funds in enhanced watershed stewardship. At a time when a naturally water-scarce region, booming population growth and warming climate are converging to create a real-time water crisis for Alberta, neither should we.

Naturalist, hunter and former Banff National Park superintendent Kevin Van Tighem has studied Alberta wildlife for 40 years.

The post Safeguarding the Source appeared first on Alberta Views.

Canada may not bear much obvious resemblance to countries suffering from extreme water scarcity—think Israel, Australia and much of Africa—but a closer look at Alberta reveals a truly water-scarce region. The province has only 2.2 per cent of the country’s water, and its supply is shrinking. A booming economy, growing population and rising pollution are further limiting water availability. The changing global climate is also a concern. Albertans need not look far north or south for visible signs, including drastically lower river levels, unpredictable snow melts and longer droughts.

Despite these challenges, Albertans have a serious thirst. In 2009 Alberta’s water allocations totalled 9.89 billion m³. An Olympic-sized swimming pool is 2,500 m³, so Albertans can draw the equivalent of four million pools worth of water every year. Allocations, however, are different from water actually used. Based on 2005 data, Alberta’s licence holders (mainly municipalities, industry and agriculture) collectively used 34.5 per cent of what they were allocated. That is, they’ve typically used less than the amount they’re legally entitled to. That’s a good thing.

But as the province grows, so does demand. A 2007 Alberta Environment report predict water use will increase to almost 4 billion m³ by 2025. That’s a 21 per cent increase from use in 2005. Meanwhile, Alberta’s water supply is shrinking due to longer droughts, less snowpack and shrinking glaciers. The Athabasca glacier, for example—where the Athabasca and North Saskatchewan rivers originate—has retreated about 1.5 km and lost 1.5 times its total volume over the past century.

Effectively managing growing demand and shrinking supply will be no small feat, but the province is making strides. Through its Water for Life strategy—launched in 2003—the government has set three objectives: safe, secure drinking water; healthy aquatic ecosystems; and reliable, quality water supplies for a sustainable economy.

The pressing question is not whether these are good principles (they are admirable and articulate goals, and light-years ahead of some other provinces’); it’s whether they’re achievable. The demand on Alberta’s water comes from many quarters. Put a few farmers, oil and gas executives and city mayors in a room to discuss the issues, and you’ll soon realize their demands are not compatible. How do we balance competing priorities Can we agree on the definition of a “sustainable” economy Given Alberta’s desire for increased productivity, what would successful water conservation look like?

These questions baffle even the experts. What’s clear, however, is that continuing on the current trajectory isn’t an option. In the near future, demand and supply will not match up. Water conservation, then, can no longer constitute a polite suggestion to turn off the tap while brushing one’s teeth or to take a shorter shower. Alberta must define a conservation ethic—that is, decide how to manage its water.

Local water use is expected to rise 21 per cent by 2025. Meanwhile, Alberta’s water supply is shrinking.

Efforts such as the government’s recent Water Conversation campaign, to discuss Alberta’s growing water shortage, have met a mix of cautious optimism and outright skepticism. Of the experts I polled in recent months, many were glad to see the government reaching out and initiating tough conversations. Glenn Isaac, director of the preservationist group North Saskatchewan Riverkeeper, says the outreach component—discussions across the province—encourages him, but he cautions that public consultation is only useful if it results in workable policy.

Bob Sandford, on the other hand, doesn’t pull punches. The Canmore-based water expert and author of Cold Matters: The State and Fate of Canada’s Fresh Water, criticizes the effort, especially the campaign’s stated priority areas, which don’t explicitly integrate discussion about Alberta’s century-old licensing system (the one that determines how much water is allocated, and to whom). Sandford fears that Alberta’s water users will have to compete for a dwindling resource, and that industrial use will prevail over people. “Protecting individual or sectoral interests at the expense of the common good will create ineffective and unsupportable water policy,” he says. “Public dialogue is meaningless unless we realize this.”

But are actions speaking louder than words Water efficiency has been improving in Alberta’s cities. Calgary’s goal starting in 2003, for example, was to reduce consumption by 30 per cent over 30 years. Gross per capita demand averaged 550 L from 1995 to 2005, but demand was down to 428 L per person by 2011 (strictly residential use was even lower). The City says it achieved this reduction through a combination of mandating water meters, proactively repairing water mains, subsidizing low-flush toilets, and other initiatives. 

Touted for its environmental awareness, the Town of Okotoks recently achieved 295 L per person and is counting on further reductions. Facing greater pressure than most local municipalities, the town encourages xeriscaping, has enacted strict outdoor watering bylaws and mandates low-flow fixtures in new homes as well as water meters for every residence.

Sandford says these small successes are “commendable,” but not much to celebrate when some European cities, such as Munich, use as little as 100 L per person per day. “Are we not deceiving ourselves when our best average municipal consumption is still 300 per cent more than a place where the standard of living is just as high?” he asks.

Fair enough. Goss agrees that municipalities can do a lot more to conserve, but he worries that prices are too low to make it a matter of much concern for citizens. “Water is nearly free [in municipalities],” he says. “There’s no incentive to spend money to use less of it.” Indeed, this is a national issue. As of 2001 Canada charges the least for water of any developed country: 40 cents per m³. Germany, at the other end of the table, charges citizens $1.91 for the same amount.

Conservation at the municipal level becomes more complicated when you combine the challenge of shifting public behaviours with the problem of limited revenue-generating ability and rampant growth. Still, municipalities in 2009 represented just 11.3 per cent of Alberta’s total water allocations—a significant withdrawal from rivers, but compared to other water users, a few drops in the bucket.

National media would have the world assume that blame for water scarcity in Alberta lies squarely on the shoulders of the oil and gas industry. Steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD), in particular, receives a lot of attention. SAGD uses steam in a horizontal-well system to recover bitumen. Producing one barrel of bitumen using this process requires about three barrels of water. What many may not know, however, is that the fresh water requirement in these operations is only about 0.5 barrels per barrel of bitumen produced. 

Indeed, while oil and gas produces just over one-quarter of Alberta’s GDP, almost 70 per cent of exports and 35 per cent of government revenues, the sector represents only 8.5 per cent of the province’s total water allocations. Oil sands projects recycle 80–95 per cent of the water they use. The majority of the water used in SAGD actually comes from groundwater, i.e., deep saline aquifers.

Regardless, industrial demand strains Alberta’s watersheds. While using saline water in SAGD operations saves precious river water, experts say we don’t know enough about Alberta’s groundwater supply—aquifers are deep underground, and to get there, water must move slowly between layers of rock. Groundwater is therefore tricky to measure and monitor. And as efficient as processes such as SAGD may be, the oil patch still draws heavily on rivers such as the Athabasca every year. The government now requires oil sands operators to limit withdrawals in times of low environmental flow.

Anything that slows production can increase costs and affect oil companies’ bottom lines. That might actually be good news. Pressure to produce and refine oil in an increasingly water-scarce environment encourages operators to invest in water-conservation research and provides a market for disruptive technologies that can be useful in other applications. 

For example, recycling and reuse technologies are lending themselves nicely to cross-sector cooperation. In 2010 Suncor’s Edmonton refinery drew 50 per cent of its water for operations from the City of Edmonton’s Gold Bar Wastewater Treatment Plant, significantly reducing the amount of fresh water it withdraws from the North Saskatchewan River. This innovative approach makes sense on several levels. When we treat wastewater to the standard required of a refinery, rather than of a river, we conserve energy and save money. Sharing (or “reusing”) water also addresses the challenge of increasing restrictions on industrial water use, and reduces the strain on rivers and municipal infrastructure.

Sounds like a win-win, right In fact, it’s a source of debate. Lorne Taylor, formerly Minister of Environment and now an adviser to Alberta WaterSmart, a water management company, agrees that reuse systems can have many benefits, including lower costs to municipalities and industry. But he says they ignore the value of “return flow”—i.e., water withdrawn from and returned to the same source. Assuring sufficient return flow is part of how we account for nature’s needs. “Because Alberta is water-short, [especially] in the south, people are looking at wastewater as a supply,” he says. “But if we send treated effluent to a refinery and that water doesn’t end up returning to a river, it puts more pressure on the source.” For example, water used this way can infiltrate into the ground and become part of an aquifer, or evaporate. “We don’t have enough information to guess what would happen if we [adopted reuse systems] across the province,” says Taylor.

The province’s other large industrial water user is coal-fired electricity. Alberta’s coal plants are built on rivers and lakes: Lake Wabamun, for example, supports several such facilities, including Transalta’s Sundance, the largest plant of its kind in western Canada. To turn coal into electricity, Sundance uses water to create steam for turning turbines and then cool and condense the discharged steam. The water is circulated through ponds before being released back into the lake. 

About one quarter of Alberta’s total water allocations are used this way—cycled through coal plants—which is three times the water used by all oil and gas operations combined. As with most oil and gas operations, almost all the water used in coal plants is eventually discharged back into the rivers and lakes it was drawn from. Still, when coal-fired plants withdraw massive volumes of water, even a small percentage lost to evaporation adds up. TransAlta estimates its net impact on Lake Wabamun is 9 million m³. Put another way, the power plant removes—and doesn’t return—the top 4.5 inches of the lake every year.

Some would like to see government take back licenses (or portions thereof) to keep water in the rivers.

But even after adding municipal water use to energy industry use, we’re still only talking about less than half of all water allocations in Alberta. Conservation’s big ticket, says Greg Goss, is irrigation. In 2009 a whopping 42.5 per cent of provincial water allocations were earmarked for irrigation. And since farmers tend to use a greater proportion of their allocations, says Alberta Environment, irrigated farming accounts for 60–65 per cent of all water actually consumed in the province. 

Another way farmers differ from other users is that most water doesn’t make it back to its source as return flow. Everything we export, including food, contains what industry terms “virtual” or “embedded” water. When crops are harvested, packaged and exported, they effectively transfer the water they contain to another watershed, probably in another part of the world. One could say that bulk water export is a hidden cost of the world’s food security. Water is also lost through evaporation and seepage.

For this reason, as well as due to shrinking river flows, Alberta’s irrigators are aiming for more crop per drop. As part of Water for Life, the province’s 13 irrigation districts along with six other major sectoral water users have agreed to aim for a 30 per cent increase in conservation, efficiency and productivity by 2015. “Even small gains in agricultural areas are big gains overall,” says Goss. 

But reducing irrigators’ water use will be tricky business. The world might function without oil, but it can’t continue without food. In the future, it’s possible that Alberta will be counted on to produce even more food for export if agricultural regions farther south suffer a loss of productivity due to a changing climate. Ron McMullin, executive director of the Alberta Irrigation Projects Association, says he expects the province’s farmers will increase their crop yields by 15 per cent by 2015. As long as food production remains a vital part of Alberta’s economy, the province seems unlikely to limit agricultural water withdrawals, adds Taylor. He says nothing in current legislation or conceptual frameworks would give credit to licence holders such as irrigation districts for simply leaving water in the rivers. And the Water for Life agreement is voluntary, he notes; there’s no legal recourse if its goals are not met. 

Alberta’s irrigators are, however, being proactive about water consumption. Brent Paterson, executive director of irrigation and farm water at Agriculture & Rural Development, says farmers have always adapted to a complex business, especially on the water side. “Growing products for the best return on investment is critical, and farmers understand that,” he says. 

Just getting water to the farm presents a number of challenges. In southern Alberta, for example, an 8,000-km canal system diverts water from rivers and conveys it to fields. Many sections of canal lose water due to seepage and evaporation; this accounts for some of agriculture’s low rate of return flow. To return more water to rivers and reduce evaporation and seepage, the government has converted almost 50 per cent of the system to closed pipelines. Paterson says this investment saved almost 50 million m³ of water from seepage between 1999 and 2008. Each year, a further 150 km of canal is converted to pipeline. Where it’s too expensive to turn canals into pipes, liners are added to prevent seepage and salinization. Automated controls and monitoring systems help manage supply and demand. The government provides irrigation districts with $24-million per year to improve infrastructure.

Once water gets to a farm, it must be distributed efficiently. Fields differ in size, slope and soil, each of which determines inputs such as fertilizer, pesticides and water. Understanding these variables more precisely has helped irrigators make strides in the past few decades. For instance, McMullin says, there’s been a shift from traditional flood irrigation to new measures, such as low-pressure pivots, which he says are 82–84 per cent efficient. Paterson’s ministry is working with the U of A and McGill University to improve variable-rate irrigation, which allows farmers to define custom zones by soil type, topography, crop type and field obstacles so as to better control the amount of water applied. 

Additionally, says Paterson, while Alberta livestock requires forage crops with high water demand, such as alfalfa and grasses, farmers and ranchers are beginning to select crops with higher yield and less thirst.

It all sounds like progress—but the danger of efficiency gains is that they increase the availability of consumable water. As part of the productivity mandate of Water for Life, irrigation districts are using those water savings to increase acreage. “Irrigation districts have to look at [climate change forecasting] at the same time to ensure they don’t expand potential so much that it takes [Alberta] into the danger zone,” says Paterson.

Efficiencies also bring us back to the problem of decreased return flow. Ensuring there’s enough water to sustain the economy fulfills one Water for Life goal at the expense of another: preserving healthy aquatic ecosystems. Henning Bjornlund, Canada Research Chair in water policy and management at the University of Lethbridge, points out in a 2010 C. D. Howe Institute paper that increased efficiency will increase productivity but not necessarily meet Water for Life’s conservation objectives.

And so we’re back to that nagging question: What do we mean by water conservation Dave McGee, senior water-policy and implementation manager at Alberta Environment, says it can be defined several ways. “When some people say ‘conservation,’ they mean using less water so the environment has more.” Others, he says, think of the impact on energy bills. Since electricity costs more than water, and we need it to pump water to our homes and businesses, many conservation campaigns are actually targeted to realize electricity savings. Still others equate water efficiency with increased productivity.

McGee says if one doesn’t properly track water use, any “conserved” water will likely be used to produce more widgets—that is, the more efficient we make our processes, the more products we can produce (recall “more crop per drop”). The government could require licence holders to conserve water at their own expense or it could use incentives, but, says McGee, whoever funds conservation efforts will expect something in return. If the government offers incentives, the public will need to know if it’s getting good value. This will require careful measurement of water use and possibly a reduction in the amount of water that licensees are currently allocated.

Right now, if a licence holder conserves water, they can use that water to increase their own productivity or transfer the conserved portion of their allocation to another user. Since Alberta no longer accepts water-allocation applications in the South Saskatchewan, Oldman and Bow River sub-basins, the transfer system has enabled licenced users in these areas to transfer “conserved” water. 

Critics worry the transfer system is evolving into an uncontrolled-market scenario. “Nobody wants to touch [the subject], but we need transparency,” says Bob Sandford. “International example suggests that if markets aren’t properly designed and lack appropriate and consistent oversight, the public may have to pay a ransom to get [their water] back.” He adds Alberta’s policymakers should re-examine their priorities. “I’d be a lot happier if measures that considered ecosystems, environmental flow, First Nations resolutions and conservation were implemented before Alberta finds itself in market circumstances hurried into existence by individual interests,” he says.

But McGee says the South Saskatchewan transfer system isn’t a market—yet. “We’ve set up the transfer system and are waiting to see how things move. If it works, government can participate.” Some experts monitoring Alberta’s emerging system would like to see government take back licences (or portions thereof), to keep more water in the most threatened rivers. For now, says McGee, the province will simply record the movement of conserved water.

Observers are also concerned that transfers may involve moving water from one basin to another, thus upsetting nature’s balance. Albertans may recall the 2007 uproar when contractors sought a water supply for CrossIron Mills, just north of Calgary. Amid much protest, Alberta Environment denied the mall’s application for water from the Red Deer River, but approved the daily transfer of 6,700 m³ from an allocation held by the Western Irrigation District, which draws water from the Bow.

Interbasin transfer, to be clear, is not a transferred allocation. Very few interbasin transfers have happened in Alberta, and each has required an act of the legislature. “The process is prohibitive,” McGee says. He stresses that a transfer is only approved if it won’t harm the environment. As an example, he cites an ongoing transfer of treated city water from Red Deer to Lacombe, which has had issues with groundwater quality. The two cities are actually in different basins, but only barely; Lacombe is just over the divide where surface runoff goes to the North Saskatchewan River. “Because it was treated water and there would be no issues of biota transfer from one basin to another, that transfer was approved,” McGee says. “We need mechanisms to support [these situations].” 

Suffice it to say, the interplay between allocations and conservation is complex. Part of moving forward on Alberta’s Water for Life strategy means accepting the province’s past decisions, says McGee. “We’re not starting with a clean slate,” he says. “To get to the next place, we have to be careful about not upsetting what we’ve got.” He says the idea is to set priorities before there’s a serious water shortage, so that a plan is ready when—or if—risk becomes reality. “It’s a process, not an exact science,” he says.

Water is not restricted by boundaries, of course; it flows freely between provinces and territories. This means Alberta’s decisions about how it manages water will impact shared watersheds such as the Mackenzie River basin. The province is negotiating bilateral agreements with each of Saskatchewan, BC and the Northwest Territories on responsibilities for the Mackenzie. Agreements may legally require Alberta to ensure that a certain amount of water flows north with the river’s current. The rules about water markets will need to take these agreements into account. Without proper oversight, Alberta could reduce water supply in other parts of Canada. Remember the disagreement between the farmers, executives and mayors Throw a few provinces and a territory in there, too.

Most people agree that water conservation is necessary for Alberta. The volume of water the province consumes is simply not sustainable, and growth under the same old system is impossible. But what will a new system look like This brings us back to priorities. After years of discussion and not much action, it’s apparent Alberta’s government is still conflicted about its conservation ethic.

Riverkeeper Glenn Isaac says leadership is the missing element. “Stakeholders and the public have stepped up,” he says, referring to the Water Conversation campaign. “We care about our water and we’ve lived up to our end of the bargain. The most important step is for Alberta Environment and the government to truly take this feedback to the next level: actionable policy. We need decision-makers that can actually make things happen.”

Without clear priorities, proper legislation and enforcement, and precise monitoring, the province is in real danger of running dry.

Kerry Freek is editor of Water Canada magazine. She writes about water in the context of economy, technology and the environment.

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