Residents of Gull Lake, Alta., are concerned about drastically receding water levels and are trying to come up with creative solutions to refill the popular lake.
Keith Nesbitt has lived in Gull Lake since 2007 but has been coming to the lake recreationally since the ’80s. As a director with the lake’s watershed society, he’s concerned about how much the water levels have dropped this year.
“You can look at the beach here and you can see what’s happened to it. The boats are out even further. It’s getting critical, we have to do something with the lake,” he said.
Water levels have dropped a metre since 2014, which is a significant drop for a five-and-a-half-metre lake, said Greg Goss, a biological sciences professor at the University of Alberta.
This trend of rising and dropping water levels in Alberta lakes isn’t new, Goss said.
“We go through cycles in Alberta — wet and dry,” he said. “People think the high level is where we’re supposed to be … but, in fact, (cycles) are the natural process and I think we should let the natural process play itself out.”
Norval Horner, the Gull Lake Watershed Society president, said when the surface elevation was measured in 1924, it was two and a half metres higher than it is today.
He said, historically, due to evaporation, the water levels have fallen an average of two inches every year until the 1970s.
It was then that the Lougheed government decided to try and stabilize the lake by pumping water in from the Blindman River.
Decades later, that came to an abrupt halt with the proliferation of an invasive aquatic species in Alberta.
“These Prussian carp were now in the Red Deer River and the Blindman River, and the Blindman River is the source of our stabilization water. So unfortunately Alberta Environment decided to shut down the stabilization system in 2018 and they put a five-year moratorium on,” said Horner.
With the moratorium up in August, the society doesn’t want the province to extend it — arguing the lake needs more water, urgently.
Instead, it’s hoping to convince Alberta Environment that a pressurized water filtration system can solve the concerns about the carp, preventing both the fish and their eggs from moving into the lake.
The watershed society hired the engineering company Stantec to test the theory and says it gave its stamp of approval, agreeing that filtering would block out the invasive species.
Horner said getting a water licence for the aquifer will be difficult, and therefore is a more long-term solution.
For now, the society is focusing its efforts on the filtration system, which would take only months to set up.
“We’re trying to get Alberta Environment to agree to restart stabilization with pressurized filtration,” Horner said.
It’s a solution Goss does not recommend. He said there is risk involved in mixing water chemistries, ultimately altering the lake’s ecology.
Craig MacLeod, whose family has owned a cabin on the shore of Gull Lake for a century, says the pumping solution doesn’t work well in years of drought because of restrictions imposed about when water can be taken from the river.
“So long as the Blindman River is above a certain flow rate, it works. If it’s not, it’s not even a viable solution. Up until two to three weeks ago, there wasn’t enough water in the Blindman,” he said.
He supports another option: pulling water from an underground aquifer, the Paskapoo Formation.
“It’s an aquifer 85 per cent (of) the size of Lake Superior that’s recharged every year,” he said.
It exists underneath Gull Lake and the water it holds is clean and clear, recharged by the mountains.
“You dig a well, you get pumps that are able to pump it, you get electricity and then you pump it into the lake,” MacLeod said.
He says industry has already been granted water licences to the aquifer for fracking.
MacLeod sees it as a more permanent solution to maintain the water levels, but Goss doesn’t support that idea, either.
“I’m not sure a groundwater extraction regime, which would use a lot of groundwater and potentially threaten wetlands, potentially threaten the lake-water quality and the animals that are in there through either invasive species or other methods, these are all problems that could arise,” Goss said.
In a statement to Global News, the province said Gull Lake is a “treasure” and its intentions are to protect the waters.
“Gull Lake’s water levels are controlled almost exclusively by the variability of natural precipitation in the watershed. In general, central Alberta lakes’ water elevations have a natural fluctuation,” said Tom McMillan, a spokesperson for Alberta Environment.
Goss said water levels in the lake were higher in 2014 during the last El Niño southern oscillation. With another El Niño happening, he said it’s likely if nothing is done, the water levels will once again increase.
“We expect a little wetter, hotter environment for the next few years and we’ll probably see a rise in water levels in some of the small Prairie potable lakes,” he said.
Goss says society shouldn’t be trying to engineer itself out of every problem.
“I think we have to accept that climate change is happening. We have these oscillations that we’re aware of … and they all affect our water quality and our water quantity and we have to understand a little more and learn to adapt,” he said.
The Gull Lake Watershed Society said is encouraging Albertans to get involved and join the discussion.
They want people to write their MLAs and the counties surrounding Gull Lake.
Its membership has also jumped to nearly 1,200 in the last month — a big increase.
“It’s almost as though as the lake’s been doing down, membership has been going up exponentially,” MacLeod said.
“People are realizing this is an important issue.”
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