After Years Of Warnings, Drought Wolf Finally Comes For Alberta; Govt. Response Team Has No Water Experts

St. Mary Reservoir, near Lethbridge, just 11 per cent full. Climate change is only part of the reason Alberta is reeling for lack of water. Photo via Alberta government.

“To a water expert, looking ahead is like the view from a locomotive, 10 seconds before the train wreck.” — The late scientist David Schindler on Alberta’s looming crisis. Alberta’s water reckoning has begun in earnest. Snowpack accumulations in the Oldman River basin, the Bow River basin and the North Saskatchewan River basin range from 33 to 62 per cent below normal. A reduced snowpack means less summer water for the fish and all water drinkers.

Ancient glaciers that feed and top up prairie rivers in the late summer melted at record speeds last year, the hottest on global records. Many indomitable ice packs, such as the well-studied Peyto Glacier, are disappearing altogether, wasted by the desiccating hand of climate disorder. Fifty-one river basins from Milk River to Hay River report critical water shortages due to low rainfall and high temperatures, according to the provincial government. Groundwater levels in parts of Alberta have reached record lows. Wells in Rocky View County just outside of Calgary, for example, show steady declines and the lowest levels ever measured. Some 600,000 rural Albertans depend on groundwater.

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The Crowsnest River arm of the Oldman Reservoir viewed from the air in December 2023. To deal with the crisis, Premier Danielle Smith’s UCP government has appointed an advisory body with no known water experts. Photo by Robert Costa.

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Yet the Alberta government has not declared an emergency. It says it is planning for extreme drought but hoping for snow and rain. Meanwhile Danielle Smith’s United Conservative Party government has appointed an advisory body with no known water experts. But it does include Ian Anderson, a promoter of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion that will transport bitumen from the oilsands to the Port of Vancouver, criss-crossing many dwindling rivers, creeks and streams as it does.

Alberta’s water emergency, which is also a fire emergency, was foretold by scores of water scientists. They predicted that prolonged water scarcity would hit southern Alberta hard for stubborn geographical reasons. No one sounded the alarm more persistently and urgently than the late David Schindler, one of the world’s great water ecologists. Schindler never tired of reminding Albertans that their province has only 2.2 per cent of Canada’s renewable fresh water. Meanwhile its industries, government and residents behaved as though water came from ever-flowing taps instead of dwindling glaciers, rivers, aquifers and snowpacks. There’s another ignored reality. Eighty per cent of Alberta’s water flows north while 80 per cent of the province’s growing population lives in the drier portion south of Edmonton.

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Oldman Reservoir near the Island View day use area. Boosters of industrial and population growth failed to heed researchers’ warnings that for previous centuries the region was far more arid, making recent decades an aberration. Photo via Alberta government.

https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2024/02/19/Alberta-Brutal-Water-Reckoning/