Catchacoma Cottagers’ Association has had a number of members raise questions about the lower than normal water levels this spring. Your CCA has been following the situation closely and we would like to share what we have learned.
Our lake level is now still about 12 cms below the full level and 14 cms below the average for this date. There are now 9.5 logs out of a total of 10 in the Mississagua dam and the Trent Severn Waterway water management team is monitoring the situation and adjusting logs to balance raising the lake levels and maintaining a minimum flow in the River. The goal remains to bring the level up to full which is 2.44 metres as measured at the dam.
With the very early snow-melt the Trent Severn Waterway which manages our water levels at the Mississagua Dam faced some tricky choices as to when to fill the lakes. Their top priority in spring is always flood risk mitigation and then filling the reservoirs and canal lakes by the middle of May. Given the experience we have had with extreme spring rainfall events in several recent years leading to flooding downstream, including on the Mississagua River, it was decided to bring the reservoirs up to about 90% of full by mid April and then let them come up with rainfall in late April and May. Unfortunately the rains have not come. On several occasions when heavy rain was in the forecast, it bypassed the reservoir area. For example a few days before the recent holiday weekend the forecast was for up to 100mm of rain but the actual rainfall was close to 5mm. Again last weekend we saw heavy thunderstorms to the west and north but much less rain over our lakes. At this point several of the lakes including our Mississagua chain of lakes and nearby Crystal and Anstruther remain below normal levels as we wait for rainfall.
More information on local water levels is available here.
– TS