When wind and drought collide with sheer stupidity

Photo; David McIntyre

The view looks west on the Crowsnest River arm of the nearly bone dry Oldman Reservoir in March of 2024 when the MD of Pincher Creek, at colossal expense, created a platform and well site (lower right) from which to supply its residents with drinking water. The Livingstone Range dominates the backdrop.

An open letter to Premier Danielle Smith by David McIntyre

When wind and drought collide with sheer stupidity

Premier Danielle Smith,

Here in the extreme upper headwaters of the Crowsnest River, on the downstream, downwind side of Grassy Mountain, the devastating impacts of protracted drought, water shortages, hurricane-force winds, sandblasting dust storms, and dry lake beds dominate discussion.

The mid-winter dust storms, widespread, are most apparent here within the stark expanse of blowing dirt that defines the dry, cracked, wind-whipped footprint of the Oldman Reservoir.

This basin of windblown silt holds the drought-stricken remnants of the Castle, Crowsnest, and Upper Oldman rivers.

The bony remains of these streams snake their way through collapsing walls of mud to converge in a treacherous expanse of boot-grabbing, leg-sucking muck. Within it are the bones of cattle and deer that, mired in the mud, have died there.

Last year the Municipal District of Pincher Creek, responding to residents’ critical need for drinking water, created a makeshift roadway onto this bed of windblown silt. At the road’s unstable “quicksandy” end, a platform was constructed, and from it a well was drilled. Water was subsequently pumped and trucked—at great expense—to area residents.

The same costly, herculean effort may be required again this year. The reservoir’s water level, falling, is critically low.

The Government of Alberta, aware of this year’s dire water supply crisis, has issued a “water shortage advisory” for the Crowsnest and Upper Oldman rivers. This was done at the same time the same government—incongruously!—exposed the same critical headwaters of these rivers to new and needless coal exploration, i.e., additional roads and other forms of intense, widespread, irreversible watershed destruction.

It appears the government’s focus is defined by a singular, shortsighted, short-term, myopic vision: mining mountains for thin seams of coal. Nothing else matters. Rendered meaningless and expendable are the land’s internationally acclaimed beauty, its ecological worth, and its ability to provide life-sustaining water to hundreds of thousands of Albertans living downstream.

Here in Alberta, where wind and drought now collide with what I see as wholesale land-use mismanagement, severe negligence, and sheer stupidity, a bleak “water shortage advisory” report is on the table. It demands immediate attention. But, instead of being addressed, it just sits there.

More important is the government’s absurd commitment to intensify industrialized large-scale headwaters annihilation in a blind quest to mine coal.

I see this as declaration of war against water—a covenant to kill it at its source.

What are you going to do, today, to save the spectacular headwaters of southwestern Alberta and the people of southern Alberta from the government you’ve been elected to lead?

What are you going to do to save the wounded Crowsnest River and the bleeding Oldman?

David McIntyre