BONNYVILLE – The MD of Bonnyville is working to address major flooding issues in the municipality.
A map showing areas of concern was presented to council during their July 22 meeting, outlining road flooding, agricultural flooding issues, and drainage ditches.
General manager of infrastructure services Abid Malik explained it was as up to date as possible to give council an idea of what they're dealing with.
“These are the significant ones,” Malik told council. “Some we have been dealing with on an ongoing basis and some we have dealt with already so they aren’t here.”
The next step is for administration to compile a priority list, outlining projects that should be considered to help resolve ongoing flooding issues, which will then be brought back to council.
Acting CAO Matt Janz noted that the agriculture flooding issues are “a work in progress.”
“Until we get some dry years, we’re not going to gain a lot of ground because of wetlands and there are a lot of beaver areas back there.”
Malik added, “The (agriculture flooding issues) are ongoing issues and every year the agricultural department goes and blasts the beaver dams. It’s there that these are ongoing issues in this area, even if we clean it up it will come up next year.”
Janz noted farmers inform the municipality of flooding around their property, and administration determines the best way to deal with it.
“If it’s not involving any of our road infrastructure, then it’s up to the agricultural producers to pay for the services for blasting for opening up those beaver dams to assist them in mitigating that water problem,” he detailed. “But, if it does involve our infrastructure that’s causing the problem or if we’re experiencing a problem with our infrastructure, then we will do it at our cost, not the producer's cost.”
If there's a provincially recognized water body involved, Reeve Greg Sawchuk said they're running into the issue of waiting for approval from Alberta Environment.
“Now you’ve got a slow-flowing creek that’s developing all of this vegetation that would require some sort of environmental approval before you could even go in there and do any cleaning,” he added.
According to Janz, the municipality only has a short window to complete projects because “we have to operate within the standards set out by the province.”
“That’s why we try to do most of our work in the summer months, because the fall months are when we encourage people to go trapping and try to reduce the beaver population,” he continued. “It helps and we do gain ground from year to year. The last two years we haven’t gained ground because it’s so saturated, there’s a lot of water back there and a lot of pastures have been lost over the years.”
Council will be revisiting projects that could help reduce the flooding issues in the MD during budget deliberations.
