GREAT FALLS — The St. Mary River Canal siphon suffered a catastrophic failure on June 17, 2024, causing the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to take immediate action.
Ryan Newman, the Montana area office manager for the Bureau of Reclamation, said they aren’t expecting any negative impacts on the municipal water for 2024 or 2025.
“The municipal water supply is stored up. We do have that water held in Fresno Reservoir and we have that available for use; what comes into question is next year, 2025, we won't be able to move any water from the St.Mary over to Milk River in 2025, so the water budget within the Milk River will be 100% dependent upon the hydrology of the system,” Newman said.
However, this will still impact irrigators along the Hi-Line who rely on the Milk River for their water supply.
“The Milk River has a very unreliable water yield. We don't know what it's going to look like; there's years where there is a lot of water that's produced in that basin, and then there's years where there's very little, so hopefully we get a good shot of water over the winter as well as in the spring, but we don’t know,” said Newman.
“It is going to affect irrigated growers that draw from that Milk River diversion dam, all the way down into Hill County, Blaine County, you know, most of those areas are certainly dry land production areas, but along the river, there are certainly irrigated growers, and that's going to impact those growers if they don't have access to water,” explained Kent Kupfner, director of Montana Wheat & Barley Committee.
While the project is still in the design stage, the twin siphons are on track to be fully replaced and functional in the fall of 2025.
“The system is 110 years old; there's no reason to try to repair what's there, so that full replacement of both the St. Mary and Halls Coulee siphons is imperative, and I'm glad that the bureau has recognized that,” said Marko Manoukian, member of the St. Mary Rehabilitation Working Group.
“Our goal is to have a construction company on site yet this month, in July, cleaning up the site, pulling the pipeline off and taking the whole site to grade consistent with the design so it's prepped and ready to roll for the placement of pipe,” Newman added.
The target date for the completion of the project is August of 2025 to have a fully replaced and functional canal.
