The Taber Irrigation District (TID) is returning to normal following the heavy precipitation events responsible for flooding and other water-related damages across southern Alberta in mid-June.
Kent Bullock, TID district manager, indicated reservoirs in the system are slowly dropping back to average, seasonal levels.
“We’re finally down to a situation where we’ve got our reservoirs back down where they should be. We ended up with them overfull in a couple of cases, from all of the runoff. I think we’re getting to the point where most of the farmers have been able to get most of the water off their land. I think there’s still a couple trying to pump some water off.”
Although water usage rates remain low, Bullock predicted this will start to change in the next few weeks.
“We are starting to get a bit of demand now. To start with, we had some demand here a week ago, when they didn’t really need the moisture, but they needed to put fertilizer on their crop, which they put on through their sprinkler system. So, they were actually putting water on that they didn’t really need yet, just so they could get fertilizer on. But now I think we’re getting to the point now where we’re going to start to see some demand because of some moisture requirement. Even that’s not too high yet.”
On a macro level, the system is in good shape, according to Bullock.
“As far as the overall system, all the way from the Alberta Environment headworks up in the Waterton/St. Mary’s Reservoir, Waterton/St. Mary’s, they are still spilling water to the river, because they still have fairly good river flows, and the reservoirs are pretty well full. There may be a little more room that they’ll finish up filling them in the next week here, but probably won’t get much more for this year, because there’s just not going to be the demand that we would have had some years. Even now there’s not bad moisture for a lot of things. People might have put a bit of water on some grain, but most of the grain didn’t really need any irrigation, because of all the rain we’ve had.”
The TID system performed with very few mishaps in relation to the large runoff amounts that surged into the system following the heavy rain.
“We didn’t have too much for erosion,” said Bullock. “We have been trying to spill water down through the system, to try to get the reservoirs down, and some of the water that was running into out canals. We did have one culvert crossing wash out that we had to put back in, but we were fortunate to really, relatively have not have much problem with damage. Further upstream, as you get into the upper part of the St. Mary’s project, and up in Raymond and Magrath area, they had more problems because the line gets deeper and deeper the closer you get to the mountains, and more runoff up in there, so they had more damage than probably we did. We were fairly fortunate.”
Average peak water demand in the area would have already passed by now in previous years, added Bullock.
“It’s usually in the first week or so of July, so we would be peaking usually right now, if not already peaked a few days ago. Our water demand is just way down — we’re not running very much water. I would say that we’re running 20-25 per cent of what we’re normally running this time of year.”
Bullock did not put his finger on when usage will peak, but it could be soon.
“Who knows when our peak will be? But it won’t be for at least another week or two. There’s people still trying to get hay off a little bit. Those that chopped hay, probably most of it’s off, those are trying to get dried off. I’m not sure if there’s people still trying to get hay bailed. Then we might see a little bit of water usage if it stays hot and dry here.”