Postmedia News and the Winnipeg Free Press

There was some good news Tuesday as communities in Manitoba and Saskatchewan continued to cope with massive spring flooding.

The Saskatchewan Watershed Authority said Tuesday that the Qu’Appelle River crested in Lumsden, 40 kilometres northwest of Regina, on the weekend at 300 cubic metres per second and is now on the decline, dropping to 240 cbs by Tuesday.

As warming temperatures start more water moving down Wascana Creek, levels will rise again, but aren’t expected to go beyond last week’s peak.

“When they can visually see that the water has receded — gone down a few inches or parts of the road that lead to their residences are starting to be more exposed — that certainly gives them a renewed optimism,” Sgt. Craig Cleary, of the Lumsden RCMP detachment, said Tuesday.

The day before, Mounties had used an RCMP boat normally used by its underwater recovery team to check on the welfare of families on two acreages surrounded by floodwaters.

“(We wanted) to ensure that everybody within is still doing OK, that their supplies are sufficient to carry on, and that in the event of an emergency, they have a means by which to get out,” explained

Still, 14 communities in Saskatchewan remained under local states of emergency.

Next door and downstream in Manitoba, 32 municipalities are under local states of emergency as flooding has hit wide portions of the province — from the Saskatchewan border 300 kilometres east to the Red River Valley and as far north the town of The Pas and as far south as the North Dakota border.

More than 75 people have been forced from their homes and some 600 roads are swamped.

In the southwest corner of the province, Melita was dealing with its state of emergency by topping up its clay dikes with large flood-tube barriers. Some 130 kilometres to the north of the fight raging there against the Souris River was St. Lazare’s battle against the Qu’Appelle River, which had efforts underway to add one foot to the community’s ring dike.

The rising Red and the end of safe road access forced the evacuation of 29 people in the Regional Municipality of Montcalm, which borders North Dakota and 21 from the RM of Ritchot, just south of Winnipeg.

Meanwhile north of Winnipeg, authorities warned Tuesday that cottage owners who thought they’d be spared the water’s wrath will be nervously watching what could hit properties along the shores of Lake Winnipeg and Lake Manitoba.

The emerging threat comes from higher water flows into the two lakes that raise the spectre of winter ice crashing into lakefront homes and cottages if wind conditions turn severe.

“We will be clearly looking at the impacts of this flood season well into May,” Emergency Measures Minister Steve Ashton warned. “There will be after-effects for some time to come.”

Manitoba’s senior flood fighter Steve Topping said the province is anticipating higher water levels for most if not all lakes well after the ice melts, raising the next threat of further erosion from what was seen last October, when an overland cyclone removed on average almost eight metres of shoreline in the south basin of Lake Winnipeg.

“After the ice moves off we’ll have to be very vigilant of the weather forecasts as to the prevailing winds and their strength and their speed to address the wind setup and the wave-action issues that can happen around those lakes,” Topping said.

In Saskatchewan, some residents are viewing vast stretches of flooded land as another “lake” for recreation, as people haul out jet skis, boats and kite boards. But Cleary urged people to be cautious.

“You don’t know what’s under that water line,” he said. “There are fences, there’s barbed wire, there are trees, there’s all sorts debris floating through the water.”