Manitoba floods farms to avoid "catastrophic" breach
The release will be initially "very gradual," a government spokesperson said, and is intended to fill fields and ditches behind roads with little wider damage.
Levels on the Assiniboine, which flows eastward out of Saskatchewan into Manitoba, are the highest on record.
About 1,500 Canadian soldiers arrived early in the week to fortify dikes and Manitoba also hastily expanded an engineered channel that diverts water off the Assiniboine into Lake Manitoba to prevent widespread flooding caused by heavy winter snowfall and spring rains.
Despite those efforts, the province has said it must ease pressure on the strained dikes with a controlled release of floodwaters that are flowing from rivers in Saskatchewan and the northern United States.
U.S. authorities fighting a swollen Mississippi River will start opening a key spillway later on Saturday, potentially flooding homes and crops to avoid flooding Louisiana's two largest cities.
Across Manitoba, 3,300 people have left their homes because of the threat of flooding, including 1,400 in Brandon, the province's second-largest city. About 100 homes are flooded, mostly on Indian reserves.
Residents in the area that will be flooded east of Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, shored up flood defenses this week as provincial officials repeatedly delayed the dike breach to give them more time.
It wasn't enough, said Doug Connery, whose family runs a large vegetable farm in the area.
"It all depends now on how fast this (water) is going to move," he said. "There's stuff out there that wasn't protected last night."
Manitoba Premier Greg Selinger made a rare televised address on Friday evening, promising extra compensation to property owners in the path of the deliberate flood.
"If we stood back and allowed nature to take its course, we would face an almost certain uncontrolled break of the dike," said Selinger, who faces an election this autumn. "This is a constant threat -- an uncontrolled break would be catastrophic and unpredictable."
Manitoba officials have aimed to pump about one-third more water than design capacity through the Portage Diversion, out of the Assiniboine and into Lake Manitoba. While that has taken some strain off dikes, it has added to flooding in a key cattle-producing region.
Farmers have moved thousands of cattle to higher ground and worry they might not be able to feed them this year.
