Devil’s Lake lies dormant in North Dakota near the Canadian border: land-locked, trapped, stagnant, and reviled. Nothing flows out of Devil’s Lake and hasn’t for centuries; but lots of things flow into it. Most notable is the run-off from the surrounding agricultural activity and chemical fertilizers.
Fish and other aquatic species have been added to the mix. Unfortunately, these have tended to be species foreign to the ecological character of that part of the U.S. and Canada and often cause severe environmental damage.
Devil’s Lake is North Dakota’s largest natural lake. In 10,000 years, it has overflown naturally into the nearby Sheyenne River only a couple of times. The Sheyenne then flows into the Red River and over the border to Lake Winnipeg in Manitoba, the tenth-largest freshwater lake in the world. However, Devil’s Lake has been cut off from the Sheyenne for many centuries, long before human settlement of the area began to take its toll.
The runoff into Devil’s Lake has caused sulfate concentrations in the lake to reach up to 2,780 mg/L and dissolved salts to reach up to 5,450 mg/L. To put this into context, consider that above 1,000 mg/L of dissolved salts, a body of water is no longer considered fresh. As well, the lake battles foreign, accidentally introduced species.
Over the past twelve years, heavy rains have caused the lake’s water level to rise by eight metres, flooding more than 12,000 hectares of surrounding land and causing $450 million worth of damage to homes, farms, and infrastructure. The North Dakota solution? Build a US$28-million outlet on the west side of Devil’s Lake that would transfer the water into the Sheyenne.
This outlet, which can discharge water at a rate of 8,500 litres per second, caused very vocal outcries from people concerned that the Sheyenne River and its tributaries would suffer environmental damage from the release of pollutants, invasive species, and dissolved salts. This fear was increased substantially when the outlet was opened for only 11 days in August and was shut down after so short a time because of huge, unacceptable increases in sulfate levels in the Sheyenne River.
Avoiding an international dispute, the United States and Canada reached a tentative agreement in August. Dwight Williamson, director of the Manitoba Water Stewardship told The Varsity that “in the August agreement, one of the major elements was recognition that a treatment system would need to be put in place before water would be moved out of Devil’s Lake into the Sheyenne River.” Part of such a treatment system would be a sand filter that would, however, have no control on levels of dissolved salts. A four-day survey of Devil’s Lake in July eased some concerns about invasive species but Williamson said that, “We [found] four types of algae that potentially represent a concern to us…[they] are capable of forming quite potent toxins.”
Since then, winter has frozen over the lake, the matter has fallen silent, and the media has forgotten for the moment. But what of the outlet?
The North Dakota government has said unequivocally that it will proceed. Draining will begin on the first of May this year and will continue until the first of November, without any reference to the governments of the United States or Canada. A spokeman for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said that “the state of North Dakota has chosen not to participate in a federal outlet…one that [would be] constructed and implemented by the federal government.”
Interestingly, a more environmental but expensive (estimated at US$100 million) outlet at Pelican Lake proposed by the U.S. federal government was not constructed because no department in North Dakota would sponsor the government and pay towards the cost.
The Manitoban and Canadian governments have serious water quality concerns that relate to the increased loading of nitrogen and phosphorus in an already eutrophically stressed Lake Winnipeg and the difficulty of controlling the level of sulfates in the water, which can only be controlled by decreasing the amount of water released by the outlet.
University of Toronto professor Anne Zimmerman, a lake ecologist, remains critical of the North Dakota outlet due to the lack of scientific data available to assess the environmental impact. “When we’re faced with an environmental problem,” Zimmerman said, “there’s a lack of [environmental] assessment … we base our decisions on imperfect data.”
She said that alternative environmentally sound options were not considered. One is the restoration of the wetlands surrounding Devil’s Lake. Some have suggested that the restoration would reduce Devil’s Lake water more than the outlet could. “The wetlands were a missed opportunity,” Zimmerman remarked.
How the situation will play out no one can say. But as Zimmerman suggested, it may well be water-related issues, rather than softwood lumber or mad cows, that will cause continued friction between Canada and the United States.
