MD OF BIGHORN – A decision on whether to use automated or continue with manual data collection of groundwater in Exshaw and Dead Man’s Flats will return at MD of Bighorn’s council budget talks.
Bighorn’s governance and priorities committee pushed the discussion to budget later this year to debate the new potential costs.
A report from municipal staff estimated it would cost $5,000 a year to manually monitor groundwater in Exshaw when considering staff wages, benefits and mileage.
“This includes weekly readings around the non-peak times and more frequent readings taking place during the peak times typically occurring in June,” stated the report.
The report noted staff manually monitor groundwater in two Exshaw locations and three places in Dead Man’s Flats.
The cost to run the automated program would be $18,000 in its first year, with $6,000 of that as a one-time expense for the development and creation of a data management and flow system. Subsequent years would cost $12,000, covering project coordination, sensor set up and fieldwork.
It was also estimated about $600 each year would be needed to coordinate the telemetry program.
Kendra Tippe, Bighorn’s manager of operation services, said a benefit of the automated system is being able to collect more information and do so more often.
“We could collect information every hour. With a manual measuring, we’re measuring one per week or once per day, depending what the levels are at. … It would be an increased amount of data with the telemetry system,” she said.
She said with the telemetry system, the municipality could potentially monitor four wells whereas manual is two.
At its September governance and priorities committee meeting, Bighorn elected officials asked for additional information to be brought forward before council consider a decision to potentially automate real-time groundwater-level data collection.
If such collection were to take place, it could happen hourly, to allow for trend analysis but not make predictions of future water levels.
Municipal staff told the committee it would free up staff time compared to when manually monitoring such wells, which begins in April of each year and continues to winter.
Data collected on groundwater levels would instead be automatically collected and uploaded, and could be made publicly available at the MD’s discretion.
In Exshaw, the program recommends automatic monitoring of three existing separate well locations deemed by consultant Matrix Solutions Inc. to be “best suited to provide an accurate picture of the groundwater.”
“Along with spatial coverage, there are other considerations: well security, cell reception, other uses of the well, and location on public or private property. All of these are weighted similarly when considering suitability,” stated the September staff report to the committee.
Exshaw has experienced multiple flooding events over the years, including surface water flooding from Jura, Heart and Exshaw creeks in 2013 and a high groundwater flooding event in June 2020 that impacted the eastern portion of the hamlet, with reports of up to 50 centimetres of water swamping residences.
The automated monitoring program comes at the recommendation of Matrix – the consultant hired by the MD to conduct a groundwater study investigating potential causes of the 2020 flood.
The Matrix study assessed whether a sediment pond on Exshaw Creek – with the influence of storms, snowpacks, creeks and the Bow River – has exacerbated groundwater flooding in the community following flood mitigation work in response to the 2013 flood.
The study, completed in 2022, shows the water table in Exshaw is rising, but likely due to a naturally increasing seasonal water table within the entire alluvial fan aquifer from rain and snowmelt.
