Red River Basin Commission focuses on water storage

GRAND FORKS – How much is water is 885,000 acre feet?

That’s been the question since a Red River Basin Commission study was released last month.

It indicated that if someone could have found a way to hold back 20 percent of the water in the Red River during the Flood of 1997, Grand Forks and East Grand Forks could have been spared the devastation.

That 20 percent amounts to about 885,000 acre feet of water.

One of the RRBC’s next tasks is to work with local and regional watershed districts and water resource districts in North Dakota and Minnesota to see how we could temporarily store that amount of water during the peak spring flood season.

Some possible storage methods include on-channel or off-channel impoundments, wetland restoration or land-use changes, or the Waffle Plan, a project advanced by the Energy and Environmental Research Center at UND to use the region’s grid of raised rural roads and culverts to hold water, paying landowners for the storage to offset short-term agricultural losses.

Still, it’s difficult to visualize that amount of water. A look at Devils Lake helps to make some comparisons.

It turns out that the Main Bay of Devils Lake, at its present approximate elevation of 1,450 feet, holds 890,782 acre feet of water.

That 885,000 acre feet roughly equals Main Bay’s volume when the lake elevation was 1,849.5 to 1,849.6 feet above sea level, which the lake reached in the spring of 2009.

At its present elevation of 1,450 feet above sea level, Devils Lake covers about 146,835 acres and holds about 2,833,735 acre feet of water.

Devils Lake has tripled in size since 1993, when that six- or seven-year mini-drought broke with a record summer rainfall. That summer rain started a wet cycle that continues today. The lake rose more than 3 feet in elevation in 2009.

The National Weather Service now forecasts a 60 percent chance the lake will reach a record 1,452.2 feet – 1½ feet higher than the 2009 high-water mark – this year.

Devils Lake nearing Top 20

In 1993, when the present wet cycle began, Devils Lake was at 1,423 feet in elevation, covering a total of 45,169 acres and holding a total volume of 583,786 acre feet.

That 885,000 acre feet is roughly the same volume of water that the entire Devils Lake system – not counting Stump Lake – held when the lake was at an elevation of about 1,428.9 feet above sea level.

Back then, in 1994, Stump Lake was not connected with Devils Lake. It was so low that it was in danger of losing its fishery.

In 1993, Devils Lake covered about 85 square miles. The U.S. Geological Survey says that at its current approximate elevation of 1,450 feet above sea level, it covers about 255 square miles.

Since 1993, it has surpassed scores of lakes in terms of size, including these well-known bodies of water: