Photo of the free-flowing ice on the North Saskatchewan River in Prince Albert Sunday evening. (Ian Gustafson/paNOW staff)

By Ian Gustafson

Ice break up

North Saskatchewan River sees ice break up, no risk of flooding

Apr 25, 2022 | 2:00 PM

Just as predicted by the Water Security Agency, the ice on the North Saskatchewan River officially broke on Sunday.

On Friday Communications manager Sean Osmar explained they expected it to break within a few days, and it did just that.

Andy Busse, manager of the water treatment plant for the City of Prince Albert told paNOW the last two weeks they’ve been watching the river levels and the city has been impacted with water quality changes.

“Over the past two weeks the river actually came up over two feet, which in that increased flow and everything causes turbidity and turbulence under the ice which stirs up the sediments and makes the treatment of the water a lot harder,” he explained.

Busse added despite the ice breaking there is no risk of flooding and has actually been a less high water year that he’s seen. The ice was actually very rotten and a lot of it seemed to sink rather than break up and cause ice jamming.

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“We typically do see a little increase as the river breaks but we’ve seen a level from our Environment Canada monitoring station up in the level of four metres and now we’re decreasing down into the level of 3.5 already this morning,” Busse said, adding if there was going to be any ice jamming along the river it typically happens within the first 12 to 14 hours.

Once the river seems to be free flowing, he said historically they haven’t seen issues with jamming but in the next week or so the public will continue to see ice break off until it’s warm enough there’s no more ice.

To predict when the ice is going to break, Busse said it’s very hard to do. What they usually do is watch the Environment Canada monitoring station that is upstream from the water treatment plant. They also watch the stations in Edmonton, Deer Creek, Sask., and the one near Borden, Sask. to see if there’s any increase in water levels or water flow. Any changes they see they know the water is changing and see what impact it will have.

“From there we can kind of base it on if the flows are going to be really high and the levels are going to be really high it has the potential to take the ice out,” he said. “This year it didn’t do that because we did see those increase in flows but the river ice was so thick it withstood that and just slowly melted itself so it was a pretty calm year in that respect.”

Busse added it’s important the public keeps some distance between themselves and the river as it can be a dangerous area with ice along the banks.

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Ian.Gustafson@pattisonmedia.com

On Twitter: @IanGustafson12