Manitoba Breaches A Levee

Officials in Manitoba have had to breach a levee [dike] on the Assiniboine River to reduce the pressure on their flood control system that could result in a major failure. The CBC reports: Water flows through Manitoba dike breach

The intentional release of water through the Assiniboine River dikes at the Hoop and Holler Bend in Manitoba has begun.

The Manitoba government released a Twitter post saying the process began at 7 a.m. CT when two excavators made the first cut on the east and west sides of the release point, southeast of Portage la Prairie.

“We’ve never had to do anything like this in Manitoba flood-fighting history so this is certainly an unprecedented move that the province is engaging in,” Jay Doering, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Manitoba, said moments after the spill started.

Excavators initially created a 20-metre wide breach then began to remove rocks, bit by bit, from a makeshift dam built behind the dike.
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The controlled release will send water over a 225-square-kilometre rural area that contains about 150 homes, most of which have been protected by sandbags over the past week thanks to hundreds of army personnel.

“While it may be unprecedented, it’s certainly necessary,” Doering said, touring the site of the spill from a helicopter.

“It will work.”

They never thought that anything like this would be necessary, so they didn’t install flood gates or spillways. There were record snowfalls in Canada as well as the US, that were followed by record Spring rains. This pattern occurred in a north-south band from Louisiana to Manitoba, and affects the major rivers that drain the center of North America.