New Plan to Help Gull Lake
With the start of summer about two months away thoughts turn to spending time at the lake but one of Alberta's most popular places to visit has an on-going issue with shrinking water levels.
Gull Lake is at an all time low according to the president of the Gull Lake Watershed Society.
"It's a fairly shallow prairie lake to start with, only say 30 feet deep at the deepest and we've lost over something like a meter of level in the last five years. And up until sort of six years ago, we had a stabilization system that pumped water into the lake from the Blind Man River and that could maintain the lake, but an invasive species got into the Blind Man River, Prussian Carp. And so Alberta environment has not allowed pumping. because they're afraid of transferring them into the lake and we don't want them in the lake, that's for sure" said Norval Hunter.
Drought is one of the issues contributing to the problem explained Hunter who pointed out "several boat launches are no longer useful and a couple of marinas are no longer accessible just due to the low level of the water. And every time the water continues to drop, it just makes all those problems worse".
But the society hasn't given up hope and continues to look for solutions.
"The primary solution we're working on is to restore the stabilization, pumping out the Blind Man, by installing pressurized filtration downstream of the pumps so that the water is filtered to remove any carp or any carp eggs, before it actually gets transferred to the lake. And we had a two year research program testing various kinds of filters that involve both Alberta Environment and an engineering company. And we're satisfied that we have 100% reliable solution that would allow us to restore stabilization with this pressurized filtration".
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