Water supply group slates Havre meeting

St. Mary

rehabilitation

meeting set for Tuesday

A meeting of a group working to find funds to rebuild the system that supplies much of the water in the Milk River each year is meeting in Havre next week, with an agenda that includes a moment of remembrance of one of the driving forces behind the group.

St. Mary Rehabilitation Working Group will meet in the basement meeting room of Havre City Hall Tuesday starting at 10 a.m.

The agenda lists a moment of remembrance for Blaine County agricultural producer Randy Reed, one of the forces behind the creation of the working group and its co-chair along with Montana’s lieutenant governor since its inception.

Reed died Oct. 24.

The grassroots coalition started early last decade working on finding ways to repair the aging structure, which starts with Sherburne Dam on the border of Glacier National Park and the Blackfeet Indian Reservation and then uses a diversion system built early last century to transfer water into the Milk River.

As an irrigation project, in its first hundred years, the funding to operate, maintain and repair the system had been provided solely by the irrigators using water from the project.

The system had seen minor repairs — characterized by supporters of the rehabilitation as band-aiding it together — but no major changes or rehabilitation since the initial construction was completed.

The diversion was one of the first projects the federal Bureau of Reclamation was authorized to build after it was created in 1902. Congress authorized the project to provide water for irrigation in the Milk River Valley.

Most of the diversion, which includes 29 miles of canals, two sets of metal siphons and concrete drop structures, was built between 1906 and 1921.

Since it began operation, the system in a typical year has provided about half of the water in the Milk River, which commonly dried up in the fall before the diversion started operating.

In dry years, much more of the Milk River’s flow comes from the St. Mary Diversion, including during the drought years early last decade when as much as 95 percent of the river’s water started at the diversion.

While the project — including the construction of Fresno Dam and Nelson Reservoir near Malta — was primarily intended to provide water for irrigation, the diversion also supplies waters to municipalities including Havre, Chinook and Harlem, and provides recreation opportunities in the region.