I could use some of that excess lake water on my lawn

My lawn is going brown. Just a short while ago, I was having trouble keeping up with its growth. Abundant rain nourished the grass so much that my 17-horsepower ride-on mower bogged down in places. I was glad I wasn’t depending on human muscle power.

Of course, that same rain had other consequences. Between rain and snow melt, Okanagan Lake rose to flood levels, and beyond.

At its highest, Okanagan Lake rose to 343.25 metres above sea level. Generally, “full pool,” the lake’s normal high level, is considered to be 342.5 metres above sea level. The highest previous level was 343 metres, back in 1948, a year that saw most of the Fraser Valley underwater because of flooding.

A recent news story documented the costs of high lake levels. Two million sandbags. Over 39 kilometres of sandbag barriers. Some 40,000 hours of labour by 160 provincial staff, to say nothing of municipal employees. About $12 million in unplanned expenses. And at least as much again to remove and dispose of the sandbags, to clean up the debris left by the flooding along the high water line.

I can attest to some of that damage personally. I walk our dog along the waterfront below our home in Okanagan Centre every morning. Or rather, I used to walk our dog along the waterfront. Then rising lake levels inundated parts of the trail. I wore gumboots. The lake kept rising. I quit using the trail.

Now that the lake has started to decline again, I have gone back to the trail. Some of it has gone completely, sucked out into the depths of the lake by crashing waves. Some of it is buried under piles of gravel thrown up by those same waves. Tangled root systems lie exposed to the air. Logs 12 inches in diameter (30 cm, for consistency of measurement) have been tossed into the bushes well back from the waterline. Debris litters the ground.

And some parts of the trail are still navigable only by kayak.

Let’s put that amount of water into perspective. Okanagan Lake has a surface area of 348 square kilometres. A square kilometre is a million square metres. The lake normally has a seasonal rise and fall of a little more than a metre; this year it rose more than two metres above winter levels. That’s close to 700 million cubic metres of surplus water.

My calculations say that’s equivalent to 28,000 Olympic-size swimming pools. Or enough water to cover Canada’s biggest city, Toronto, with one metre of water. And my lawn is still going brown. It would seem to me that I would be helping to alleviate the flooding crisis by irrigating my parched lawn 24 hours a day. I’d be taking water out of the lake, wouldn’t I? I’d be putting that water to good use, wouldn’t I?

After all, this region is — in climatic terms — a semi-desert. It became an agricultural oasis only because early settlers tapped the streams high up in the surrounding hills.

They couldn’t pump water up from the lake, because they didn’t have the power to do it.

So they trapped the water before it got to the lake. They built dams and storage ponds. They engineered miles of flumes and pipelines to carry that precious water to their farms and orchards on the terraces and benchlands left behind by receding glacial lakes. They turned an arid valley into lush agricultural land.

Yet we have a paradox. We have too much water in the lake. And we have watering restrictions. Residential irrigation systems are limited to alternate days.

They’re further restricted by water metering.

During most of the year, my house and lot consume about $50 worth of water a month. During the dry months, keeping my lawn as green as Ireland can send my water bill shooting up to over $300 a month. I don’t want to pay that much. So I’m stuck. Don’t get me wrong. As the population of the Okanagan Valley soars, we need water controls. We need to pay for the infrastructure that provides water — pure, clean, safe, drinkable water.

And we have a moral and legal obligation to the communities downriver from Okanagan Lake not to drown them during high water levels, or to leave them parched during low water levels. But it still seems incongruous somehow. For a variety of reasons, the valley has too much water. And I have too little. My lawn is going brown.