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When you spill coffee on yourself when driving to an event with political bigwigs
To clarify, the politicians are most definitely not in my car. They are at the event I'm going to
So where was I all day? One mile from Canada, at the site of the replaced Drop 5 of the St. Mary Canal, the tail end of a 29 mile long system that starts near Sherburne Reservoir near Glacier National Park and transfers water to the Milk River. This system was one of the...
first created by the Bureau of Reclamation. It is a century old and the Hi-Line relies on it. It was created because the Milk River naturally often has little to no flows in the summer. The system provides water for irrigation for 110,000 acres of land and many municipalities...
and the Fort Belknap Reservation. Drop 5 of the Canal collapsed in Mid-May, and the consequences were potentially devastating. But Montana's congressional delegation, the Milk River Joint Board of Control, and other agencies all stepped up to the plate & got Drop 5...
replaced, as well as Drop 2 (deemed extremely vulnerable) in just 22 weeks, somehow getting water to flow back down the system for a few weeks before they have to shut it off for the winter...
There is still a whole lot of work to be done, starting with the Diversion Dam at the start of the Canal. It will cost many millions of dollars and require a change in the cost-sharing agreement (can only be done by Congress) to lessen the financial burden on irrigators...
That will take years and even more cooperation from both parties and the US and Canadian Governments (part of the Milk River is in Canada). But today was a good day for those that rely on the Milk River, and for Project Manager Jennifer Patrick (referred to as Jenn in the vid)...
She's the Executive Director of the Milk River Joint Board of Control. She somehow balanced managing an extremely complex project where dozens of different stakeholders, politicians, government officials, and 2 Reservations are involved, all while being a parent in a pandemic.
That's the short and sweet version. It's even more complicated than that but I'd need another 50 tweets to explain. Your reward for making it through this thread is another cool video of water running down Drop 5 at a rate of 500 cubic feet per second
