Red River ice jams raise water levels and worry north of Winnipeg

Ice jams and high water on the Red River north of Winnipeg are creating heightened anxiety at a time of year when those conditions typically don't exist.

"This is totally unprecedented. We've never seen this before," saidJim Stinson,emergency measures co-ordinator for the rural municipality of St. Andrews.

"We have so much of this frazil ice coming down the river right now that it's packing up andbacking up."

Frazil ice is aslushie-like mixtureof crystals that can quickly increase in size as they clingto other objects in the water logs, branches, larger blocks of ice.

Earlier in the month, the ice backupcaused the water to rise and overflow the banks on either side in some places around Selkirk, about 35 kilometres north of Winnipeg,forcing a bridge to closefor a while.

So far no homes are threatenedbut crews are monitoring the situation closely.Several pumps are running along River Road to keep water away from homes, Stinson said.

The municipality also warns people not to use too much water because septic fields are saturated.

Excessive rain in September and October led towashed-out roads, flooded basements and localstates of emergency in southern Manitoba. That was then followed by an early October snowstorm thatmelted away and created more runoff.

It allprompted the province to operate Winnipeg's Red River Floodway in October, the first-ever time it was used in fall.

Water levels hadslowly recededsouth of Winnipeg and inside the city since then, butareas to the north remained high because of the jams damming up the water.

On Wednesday, the backup was being felt all the way in Winnipeg, where river levels began rising again. A provincial government spokesperson said that wasdue to ice jamming nearLockport,and that "the risk of ice jam-related levels" will stay high until the river is fully covered by normal winter ice.

Typically, the water surface slowly freezes and becomes a solid layer, while the current continues to flow underneath. Instead, this year there has been a thaw-and-freeze pattern, which is more common in spring.

Daytime high temperatures in Winnipegin the past five days have ranged between2 C and 5 C. The normal daytime high for this time of year is4C, according to Environment Canada.

CBCmeteorologist John Sauder is forecasting a high of7C on Thursday and then back to melting conditions on Friday and through the weekend.

Frazil ice isextremely unusual in November, Stinson said.

It's not very buoyantso it also gets carried below the surface, clumping and restricting the waterflow and sometimes anchoring to the bottom of the riverbed.

It is often a springtime problem in the RM of St. Andrews as the water and ice push through narrow bends of the river on the way to Lake Winnipeg.

Worried about ice jams

5 years ago

Duration 2:13

People living along the Red River in the RM of St. Andrews are nervously watching water levels.

Normally, the fall is a drier time of year and river levels are low, ready to take in the spring melt.

"I've lived here for over 30 years and I've talked to people who've lived here up to60-70 years, and they have never seen it like this. So we're learning as we go," Stinson said.

He's concerned about what will happen in spring.

"We don't know what's going to happen down the road."