These people’s lives are coming to an end in slow motion, and there’s nothing they can do about it and there’s no help.

People living near the Quill Lakes are fed up.

The lakes, 150 kilometres north of Regina, have flooded 29,000 acres of their farmland and 56,000 acres of pasture land.

Earlier this week, the road travelling between the lakes was closed — again — due to water levels, creating a lengthy detour.

And no one, residents say, is helping them.

“I don’t think (the government is) working very hard at it, myself. I’m getting more upset every year about it,” said farmer Darrel Allen, who has watched more than 500 of his acres wash away.

The Quill Lakes peaked from spring runoff in late April, seven centimetres higher than the record level last year.

They’re saline, meaning even if flooded land were to dry up, it would take decades for the alkaline earth to recover.

“It gets pretty depressing,” Allen said. In a few years, he said he’ll probably walk away from his land. It won’t be worth much.

Faye Ingram has watched the lake consume her family’s multigenerational farming history. She has lost 300 acres, and estimates she is out $40,000 annually because of it.

“It’s heartbreaking,” she said of watching her retirement — and her son’s livelihood — drowning.

She finds the provincial government’s action on the Quill Lakes “pretty slow.”

The lakes have risen 6.5 metres in 10 years. If they rise another metre, their saline contents will spill south to the freshwater Last Mountain Lake.

Last year, the Water Security Agency (WSA) proposed to divert inflow from Kutawagan Creek to Last Mountain Lake, but stakeholders rejected the idea. So, the government went back to the drawing board.

“It’s still an incredibly difficult situation,” said WSA spokesman Patrick Boyle.

The agency is exploring a handful of other options, such as increasing water storage in the basin, deepwell injection, and making the Quill Lakes a priority for the province’s new drainage regulations.

Boyle said any solution requires extensive technical and engineering reviews, “so they don’t just happen overnight.” The last proposed solution, for instance, took a year to develop. It’s hard to say if the WSA will shop around a new solution this year, Boyle said.

That’s why, for now, he said Mother Nature — warm weather, wind and evaporation — is probably the lakes’ best bet.

But Rural Municipality of Lakeside deputy reeve Kerry Holderness thinks “they’re waiting too long, and every time they wait, every rainstorm we get, we lose more.”

He added: “These people’s lives are coming to an end in slow motion, and there’s nothing they can do about it and there’s no help.”

The Saskatchewan Crop Insurance Corporation provides a onetime payout for acres that can’t be seeded because they’re under water. Producers don’t pay premium on wet land, and if the land dries up, it can be insured again.

But the corporation’s CEO Shawn Jaques clarified, “We aren’t going to be covering land that remains flooded for multiple years.”

Its AgriStability program also helps farmers who are facing large margin declines, and some farmers have received government funding to build dykes around their homesteads.

Still, Holderness sees the situation as “the producers are being left to hang.”

He said, “What we need is an exit strategy for the people in the Quill Lakes to be able to get out.”

It’s still an incredibly difficult situation.