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Lake Regina
Regina - Wednesday, July 6, 2011 by: Ken Jones

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Between June seventeen and June twenty-third Regina and the surrounding area had ten inches of rainfall. This of course after the very wet year of 2010 and heavy snowfall in the winter of 2010 - 2011. The Regina plain does have some drainage but for the most part it is just plain flat and it could very well be a couple of years before the forming lake begins to dry up and returns the southern part of Saskatchewan to it’s normally dry sort of place that we have experienced all of our lives.

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These images were taken from the window of a WestJet 737 on approach to Regina in mid June. As you can see they start out at over 6,000 feet. The picture above is looking south of Wolseley. Though there are green areas it seems that there is more water than farm land in this picture. The picture on the right is a telephoto with in the same area as seen above but this let’s us see the extent of flooding around a farm yard.

Below we are only a bit further west and looking south of Indian Head.

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The Image at the top of the page is a telephoto shot focusing on a farmyard where only a small portion of the home quarter is not submerged.

The farmyard on the right is close to the area seen above but in this case not only are the fields flooded by the farm yard itself looks to be mostly under water.

Below we are much closer to Regina as we look south of White City. In this picture notice how the rural access roads are interrupted and at this perspective only patches of farm land poke up through the flooded countryside.

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In the wide view below we are looking south of Regina. The shocking reality in this picture is that as you look out toward the southern horizon the situation seems to be about the same.

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With the aid of a telephoto lens we can see in the picture on the right the village of Rowatt almost completely surrounded in water with only the highway and the railway line crossing the water.

The picture below is just advanced a bit further west as we look back and south, Rowatt is visible in the picture south of Regina but between the city and Rowatt is a newly formed lake. Only a foot or so deep but miles and miles long.

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This image below is looking over highway #6 to Lewvan with full quarter sections of land under water. Unless these farmers can come up with enough heat to grow rice this is not going to be a crop year for this part of Saskatchewan.

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In this picture (right) we are looking west over the clover leaf on the South side of Regina with highway #1 heading toward Moose Jaw, flanked by a lake to the south. Highway #6 goes due south.

Below is this area as it was shown in Google Earth before this year’s flooding in 2006. This view is as things would look from close to eleven miles above the surface looking straight down. The gradual accumulation of surface water has been taking place all across southern Saskatchewan so that sloughs and ponds have just spread out. The Quill Lakes are no longer “lakes” but are now just one single lake.

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This spreading of surface water is less dramatic in some areas where the bodies of water have well developed shore lines like the Qu’ Appelle chain of lakes.

Last Mountain Lake which runs from north west of Regina up to just south of Watrous is an example of how much water we have this year in Saskatchewan.There are no towns or villages on the lake so we have not heard about flooding and damage. The Google Earth view below is of Regina Beach. In this 2002 image you can see beach. Notice the location of the trees on the beach in this image.

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This picture was taken Sunday of the area shown in the image above. The water in Last Mountain Lake is now nine and half feet above its level in May last year. The country side around “Long Lake” has simply been draining into the lake. It is not fed by any river systems but flows out into the Qu’ Appelle system which eventually dump into the Assiniboine River that flows into Winnipeg, the Red River and on into Lake Winnipeg then on to Hudson’s Bay.

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It was a little scary sitting on aluminum benches Sunday in Taylor Field during a hail storm, some of the hail stones were one inch or the diameter of a toonie across. I was hit on the left leg between hip and knee and it left a big bruise. Some stones came down and hit the benches like – boom and crack—these were rocks falling a great speed. You could see the hail hitting the field surface and bouncing. Some stones did not melt until thirty minutes later. After the hail storm was over the field was all white. (Leader Post image of Sunday’s hail)