Gail Faveri, Canadian chair of the water levels committee of the International Rainy — Lake of the Woods Watershed Board, presents information at the 2015 forum about the performance of the 2000 rule curves.
Mark Edlund, senior scientist at the Science Museum of Minnesota’s St. Croix Watershed Research Station, presents information about historic phosphorus loads in Lake of Woods Wednesday at the forum.
Historically high water levels less than one year ago coinciding with a review due this year of the performance of rule curves set in 2000 have made for a lively and well-attended 12th Annual International Rainy - Lake of the Woods Watershed Forum.
The annual event attracts more than 100 leading scientists and decision makers to Rainy River Community college, where research is shared and contacts made for future projects.
This year’s special focus session is “Effects of Artificial Lake Level Management: Multidisciplinary Preparation for a Review of the IJC 2000 Rule Curves for Rainy Lake and Namakan Reservoir.” That focus brought more presentations this year and the event has been lengthened to accommodate them, said Todd Sellers, executive director of the Lake of the Woods Water Sustainability Foundation, a leader among the organizers.
When the International Joint Commission in 2000 revised the rule curve that sets levels on Rainy Lake and Namakan Reservoir, it scheduled a review of the effects of the change for 2015. As a result, a variety of studies intended to measure the effects of the rule curve change were set in motion. The forum featured 14 of those studies presented in the special focus session.
Gail Faveri, Canadian chair of the water levels committee of the International Rainy - Lake of the Woods Watershed Board, presented information to a packed RRCC theater considering the goals and performance of the 2000 rule curves Wednesday afternoon. The committee monitors the levels of Rainy and Namakan lakes and at times directs dam operators to go out of the curve range. Rule curves tell dam keepers how much water to release given the time of year, or conditions, to keep the levels within the curve to benefit the most people and the most interests, Faveri said.
Her talk included a comparison of the 1970 rule curves to the 2000 curves, concluding:
- Since 2000, high or low inflows have seen water levels violate the rule curve 12 times on Rainy Lake and nine times on the Namakan chain of lakes.
- If the 1970 rule curves had been followed the number of violations would have been the same during extremely high inflows and worse during extremely low inflows.
- When inflows are not extreme, the rule curves are meeting their objective, particularly during dry conditions.
Ryan Maki is leading the coordination of all the studies and works as an aquatic ecologist for Voyageurs National Park. Maki contributed to several projects and presentations, and served as emcee for some of the event.
Falls High class of 1972 graduate Jeffrey Kantor, who owns a Rainy Lake summer residence, presented an abstract, "Model Predictive Control Strategies for Implementing Rule Curves for the Namakan Reservoir/Rainy Lake Watershed."
Kantor is a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of Notre Dame.
"It's just natural for a guy like me to be interested in the science and engineering that's behind the lake, especially with flooding last summer, it just seemed like something of interest and maybe I could help out a little bit," he said.
Kantor said he was impressed by the attendance at the forum and interest in the watershed.
"It's a strongly interdisciplinary group which makes it interesting," he said.
The watershed is made up of near wilderness areas, as around Rainy Lake, as well as populated areas, such as Winnipeg, Kantor said.
"All these issues come to play: Do we regard lake level management a curse and return things to a wilderness state, or is it a blessing if your property and business is affected by that," Kantor said. "We're also at a boundary when it comes to the impact of climate change and all these things. What's the future of Rainy Lake and this area? It's going to depend on these water resources."
Mike Williams serves on the IJC's industry advisory group.
"I am here listening and learning," Williams said. "Some of the stuff is a little over my head, but interesting."
The forum presents trends about the watershed - "some positive, some negative, but it looks like we're moving in the right direction again," Williams said. "It's critical we learn about things and keep going in the right direction. I wish more people could experience this."
Koochiching County Commissioner Rob Ecklund attended representing the county board and said factors that influence changes in the huge 14,300 square miles of watershed need to be better understood.
"After the last year of the flood, I am trying to understand more about what the impact of the entire watershed means to us, to future development, future livability," Ecklund said. "Everything that comes through International Falls ends up in Lake of the Woods."
He said understanding the interconnectedness of the communities in the watershed helped him lobby for support in Washington D.C. recently for sewer projects east of International Falls that will benefit areas to the west, and represented by federal lawmakers who do not represent the Falls area.
Pam Tomevi, district coordinator for the Koochiching Soil and Water Conservation District, works with the watershed restoration plan directed by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency to monitor the health of the watershed and discuss with the public future projects. A poster presentation at the forum explains the Littlefork and Bigfork rivers public engagement process.
She said it's also a great place to network with scientists, and has evolved to include different levels of leadership and partners "to move things from 'here's what we know' to 'here's what we maybe can do on both sides of the border.'"
Funding for a connector road that may bypass this crossing may be approved in a special session of the Legislature.
Changes to the railroad crossing on Spruce Street in Ranier continue to move forward, a local official reports.
Ranier is currently seeing a spike in rail traffic at the crossing, Ranier City Administrator Sherill Gautreaux said. An email the city received from Canadian National Railway spokesman Patrick Waldron cited outside factors as to why more trains are using the crossing.
“Due to an incident in Ontario and the closure of a stretch of CN railroad north of the Great Lakes that carries train traffic between Winnipeg and Toronto, Ranier is experiencing a temporary increase in the number of trains coming though per day,” Waldron wrote. “This is due to re-routes of train traffic that would normally head east along a stretch of track that runs north of the Great Lakes. While these last few weeks have been busy generally for train traffic in Ranier and Fort Frances, it may be even more noticeable this week.”
Gautreaux said the crossing arms installed at the crossing are still being calibrated, and aren’t working as they should. In the meantime, stop signs have been put up on barricades on either side of the crossing, warning drivers to stop when a train is present.
Variances in the speeds of trains moving through the crossing has resulted in further calibration of the arms, Gautreaux said. Also, if trains stop at the nearby depot, she said the arms will be triggered even though there isn’t a train blocking the crossing.
The city of Ranier is working with Koochiching County, the Federal Railroad Administration and CN to implement the quiet zone for the crossing, Gautreaux said, which will eliminate many of the instances of train horns blowing.
Rep. David Dill
If Paul Revere filled in 50 acres of wetlands each year from the day he was born in 1734 to today, he would just now be reaching the point of filling 1 percent of Koochiching County's 1.4 million acres of wetland.
"Let Paul Revere ride," Minnesota Rep. David Dill said.
Dill has sponsored with Rep. David Hancock, who represents Lake of the Woods County and beyond, a bill for alternative wetland mitigation options to be established in counties that retain more than 80 percent of presettlement wetlands.
In arguing for the bill, Dill asked county Environmental Services Director Dale Olson to provide some facts about county wetlands.
According to Olson, total mitigation in the past seven years was 25 acres, with nearly 20 of those acres for one project.
"Those big projects don't happen very often but let's keep it in the picture," Olson said. "The seven-year average is 3.6 acres/year."
Other facts provided by Olson include:
- Koochiching County has 1.4 million acres of wetland. One percent of that is 14,000 acres.
- Continuing at at our current rate, it will take 3,889 years to impact 1 percent of the county's wetlands.
- Even if the impact went up to 50 acres per year, (14 times what it is now), it would take 280 years to impact 1 percent.
- Christopher Columbus wouldn't have to work as fast as Paul Revere. He would have only had to fill in 27 acres per year. He'd be 564 years old today.
"Impacting even 1 percent of Koochiching County's wetlands is beyond comprehension," Olson wrote to Dill. "It's literally impossible."
Current rules call for wetlands to be mitigated in the county where it has been disturbed.
Dill said the bill calls for the Minnesota Board of Water and Soil Resources to delineate areas of high priority for the creation of wetlands in the state. When someone proposes a project, an application process would site a wetland in a watershed where it would have the most value - not in the Rainy Lake-Lake of the Woods watershed, where Dill said there is no place to create new wetlands because so many presettlement wetlands still exist.
Wetlands could be created to mitigate loss in the counties with vast amounts in places like the Red River Valley, "where we're spending hundreds of millions of bonding money to create containment to mitigate flooding," Dill said. "One option is to build functional wetlands there to benefit the public that would store and hold water in high water events."
Current rules are, in the 80-percent counties, "killing economic development and killing counties as the costs rise," Dill said.
Dill noted Hennepin County retains less than half of one percent of its presettlement wetlands.
"You folks have destroyed all your wetlands and are looking to us to save your bacon," he said of counties with few wetland acres left.
Another provision of the bill calls for developers to "write a check and not have to mitigate a wetland at all on their own."
He said the money would go to a government unit, or a third party, which would establish wetlands and sell mitigation credits.
"Key is that wetlands would be established outside the watershed in high priority areas," he said.
The bill is now in committee where changes will be considered, based on conversations with people in the timber industry and county representatives, he said.
"My biggest fear is that it will pass, goes to a bureaucracy and they interpret wrongly the intent of the legislation," Dill said.
He pointed to the aquatic invasive species program approved a few years ago, after which the Department of Natural Resources imposed a sticker for all boat trailers to indicate owners have been trained in identifying AIS.
Dill said he hopes the legislation that passes looks like the bill he has sponsored or better.
"It's like making sausage," he said. "Everybody wants to shoot the deer, but not as many want to make the sausage."
