Winnipeg Floodway Being Tested Diversion Channel Awaits Red River’s Continuing Rage

Dug deep in the flat Canadian plains, a 30-year-old engineering marvel is being tested as it has never been tested before - by the gathering force of the Red River, fresh from its conquest of the North Dakota town of Grand Forks and now bearing down on this prairie capital in a spreading column 20 miles wide.

What stands between Winnipeg’s 660,000 inhabitants and the watery devastation that rolled over Grand Forks is “the Floodway,” a massive diversion channel gouged into the earth along the city’s east side that is designed to funnel high water harmlessly away until it rejoins the river north of town.

On Thursday, as the relentless Red approached its crest - flowing in such gorged volume that the force of its current now outstrips the Mississippi - the river rose to a flood stage not witnessed here since fur trappers roamed this territory in the 1820s.

Yet the Floodway appeared to be working exactly as its builders said it would, carrying torrents of choppy river water past the city, performing “like a champ,” said Chris Colp, a Canadian government dam manager.

A plan to notify 10,000 residents of an imminent evacuation was scaled back at midday, even as thousands of volunteers and Canadian army troops continued bolstering the city’s river dike system.

“Without her,” said Colp, monitoring the Floodway from the waterlogged St. Andrew’s Dam lock house just north of the city, “we might as well wear our bathing trunks, eh?” Even with all their faith in the Floodway’s proven ability to spirit off the worst of the flood, the Red River’s inundation of Grand Forks two weeks ago left many here unnerved and feeling vulnerable. Manitoba’s provincial capital is 60 miles north of the North Dakota line, and news coverage of the calamity in Grand Forks has been extensive.

“We’re just like they were, flat as a board and wide open,” said Dick Bohay, whose riverfront house stands - still dry - several hundred yards from the Red River’s swollen edge. “A lot of people haven’t been sleeping too well since then.”

Not taking any chances, city and province officials ordered a series of hurried, last-minute public works projects last week to add to Winnipeg’s defenses. In five days, thousands of soldiers and volunteers built a new 25-mile line of clay and sandbag dikes south of the city to prevent the river from making an end run around an old flood wall.