Sask. property owners around Lenore Lake at risk from record-breaking water levels

A rural community in eastern Saskatchewan is dealing with the fallout from a heavy spring melt. Jasmine Pelletier reports.

A community in eastern Saskatchewan is dealing with the fallout from a heavy spring melt. Flooding in the Lenore Lake area is putting a lot at risk for property owners.

Shelley Bettker has removed all furniture from the basement of her family’s cabin at Lenore Lake.

“The water table is four inches lower than our cabin floor, which now the water is seeping through,” said Bettker. “Our foundation is cracked. We’ve got a bow in our wall. We’ve got shifting all over the cabin.”

Her property is at the north end of the lake, near the town of St. Brieux. The basement is a walkout built into the side of a hill, and the water of Lenore Lake is now only feet away from the door.

Following a heavy spring melt, based on Water Security Agency (WSA) data, Lenore Lake is at its highest recorded level since monitoring began in 1995.

Bettker said that more is at stake than a summer cabin.

“We were planning on making this a retirement home,” she said. “We’ve been here for 20 years, 19 summers. So, this is where we wanted to be, and at this point, we really don’t know what that is going to look like.”

She said some of her neighbours already live on the block year-round.

Bettker and her neighbours have been sandbagging with assistance from the RM of Lake Lenore and the Saskatchewan Public Safety Agency (SPSA). Bettker has installed multiple sump pumps.

“I have talked to every level of government,” said Bettker. “That’s not me, I don’t know much about politics… I want to be able to say at the end of the day, I’ve done everything I can to help our community.”

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Stuck with an unmanageable volume of water, the reeve of Lake Lenore is calling on the WSA for a plan.

“The WSA needs to sit down with the municipalities, the landowners,” said Reeve of the RM of Lake Lenore Shawn Blandin. “They need to give us the plan so we can prepare and accept what this water is actually going to do to us in the end.”

So where is all this water coming from?

“We have an inflow of water into Lake Lenore that comes through managed conservation and development ditches,” said Blandin. “That inflow of water comes into our municipality from the south, then drains into Lenore, and it’s overfilled Lenore.”

He said the community is feeling helpless.

“This is taking a lot of government resources, money to fix infrastructure, and there’s more and more water coming every day… every bit of rain that falls, that adds to the height of the lake.”

The neighbouring RM of Three Lakes sits on the west shore of Lenore Lake.

Farmers from the RM of Three Lakes say they also have a flooding problem.

“I know for myself, I probably lost about 30 to 40 acres on one chunk,” said Darrell Nosbush, councillor for the RM of Three Lakes. “We had a call two days ago that a guy has a half section of his cattle pasture under water.”

The RM of Three Lakes manages the road and culverts at the outlet of Lenore Lake and Councillor Nosbush said the RM of Three Lakes checks them daily and clears them with a track hoe.

“They clear them as soon as it looks like there’s any kind of a blockage, they’re clearing them.”

He said the water at the culverts is four feet higher than it was at this time last year.

Nosbush told CTV even if the RM of Three Lakes were to cut the road and allow more of Lenore Lake to outflow west into the RM of Three Lakes, it would only lower Lenore four centimetres.

“Had [the WSA] on a Zoom meeting yesterday,” said Nosbush. “This road was cut in 2011, and he told us that a five-metre-wide cut in one month took this lake down four centimetres… If they cut this road, it would be four centimetres in a month.”

Nosbush said it’s a lose-lose situation.

“Everybody is losing,” said Nosbush. “We are putting the water down this system as fast as this system can take it, without it doing more damage to our ratepayers and taxpayers without it flooding more land.”

The WSA provided CTV News with a statement, saying “Lake Lenore is a semi-closed basin, meaning natural outflows are limited by the surrounding landscape.”

The WSA said it “is working with the RM of Three Lakes, the RM of Lake Lenore, and the Town of St. Brieux to monitor water levels and provide technical support,” and the Emergency Flood Damage Reduction Program “is available to support municipalities, residents, and businesses in implementing measures to prevent damage in the event of an imminent flood risk.”

Meanwhile, property owners in the area hope that water levels won’t continue to climb and cause further damage. There is water, water everywhere, but no easy solutions in sight.