St. Mary Diversion working group sets Havre meeting

Staff and wire report

The St. Mary Rehabilitation Working Group will meet in Havre Sept. 15 from 10 a.m. to noon in the Havre City Hall meeting room. 

The public is invited to attend the meeting of the group, which is pushing to find a way to rehabilitate the St. Mary Diversion and Conveyance Works.

The project, which diverts water from the St. Mary River into the North Fork of the Milk River, was one of the first projects authorized for the Bureau of Reclamation to construct after the bureau was created in 1902. It is part of the Milk River Project, an irrigation project that also includes Fresno Reservoir west of Havre and Nelson Reservoir near Malta.

The diversion and storage system, which starts with Sherburne Reservoir on the edge of Glacier National Park and stretches for 29 miles of dams, dikes and siphons across the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, diverts water from St. Mary River into the North Fork of the Milk River. It then runs through Canada before re-entering Montana.

The system was built as a single-use system, to provide irrigation water, although it has since provided water for municipalities — Havre, Chinook and Harlem — as well as recreation opportunities.

The funding for the system, including repairs, is billed to the users each year, primarily paid for by the irrigators. The diversion, some of which is more than 100 years old, has been “Band-Aided” together through the years, and a grassroots effort started about 2000 to find ways to fund a major rehabilitation before a catastrophic failure occurred.