“The water has never been so high…”

2019 is turning out to be another year of high spring water levels and widespread flooding in eastern Canada, similar to 2013 and 2017.

We have had, and are facing record rainfalls onto saturated and even frozen ground, with more snow in some areas. The rains have covered the whole Trent River Basin from Haliburton to Lake Ontario. Even though the reservoirs were kept quite low in anticipation of a late melt and possible rainfall events, as of the last week of April the lakes are full and being overfilled to try to reduce flooding in areas downstream.

At the Coalition, we often hear people say “the water level on my lake has never been so high” when in fact that may not be the case. To get a perspective this year’s water levels, it may be helpful to look at the charts for 2013 and 2017 which are available on the CEWF website. Look at the top right hand side of this CEWF home web page and click on the link for the year of interest.

The TSW has been providing regular water management updates and we encourage to keep reading these, but also to take a look back to get a better understanding of the similarities and differences in each of these high spring water level years.