© Reuters, The StarphoenixSandbags surround farm buildings as water from a deliberate breach of a dike on the Assiniboine River approaches near Newton, Man. Swollen with water from the Portage Diversion and driven by a gale, Lake Manitoba reared up on Monday and slammed against the shores in cabin country.
Thirty homes in Delta Beach were placed under voluntary evacuation, hours after a blustery north wind sent water crashing against homes, surging over some of the community's roads and swamping three cabins on its southern edge.
The Rural Municipality of Portage la Prairie was monitoring the situation "hour by hour," an official on the scene said, in case a mandatory evacuation order was needed.
But while some cottagers and full-time residents were spotted driving away, cars packed with clothes, other residents along a mucky stretch road stayed, betting that the roads out would stay passable.
With most sandbags in place, all they could do was watch the waves break and wonder what might happen next to the lake that is, suddenly, a threat.
"We've never seen the lake like this, ever," Jody Fletcher said. "It's looking as angry as it is, because it's so high."
Lake Manitoba sat at 815.12 feet above sea level on Monday, more than two feet higher than the province's preferred level but still below its predicted crest, which is due in mid-June.
Fletcher and her husband, Andy, live year-round on the parcel of lakefront land that has been in her family for over a century. She remembers childhood summers spent on the beach, when the edge of the lake was a long walk away and children played softball on the sand.
But since the Portage Diversion was built to prevent flooding in the Red River Valley, the water has crept - and sometimes leaped - closer and closer.
Now, it laps against the rocks the Fletchers laid against their stretch of the bank last year to protect it from storms like the devastating "weather bomb" that blasted both Lake Manitoba and Lake Winnipeg last October.
That bastion is keeping the Fletchers' worries in check - but next door, the lake surged within about eight feet of a neighbor's property.
"It's just so sad," Fletcher said. "This is our year-round home, but we wouldn't have built a home on a lake that looked like this."
As the lake continues to rise, many in Delta Beach worried that if stronger winds arrived - winds closer to the 70-kilometre gales that hammered the lakes last October - properties along the shore could be wrecked.
By Monday afternoon, the banks of Delta Beach were already littered in places by boards that used to belong to lakeside decks, now dashed against the rocks. On the west side of the community, one group of neighbors banded together to harpoon big chunks of a wooden seawall that had broken free from somewhere and battered the bank.
"This is the worst I've ever seen it," said Bruce Towle, standing near the pile of soggy logs the crew had hauled out of the water. "If we get a big wind, yeah, we are (in trouble)."
While the province prepares to announce its compensation package for the flood of 2011 on Tuesday, some Delta Beach residents hoped the government would include a plan to help ease the burden - and prepare for the future of Lake Manitoba communities.
"This is not Mother Nature. The level of this lake is government," Fletcher said, noting that about a dozen families live year-round in Delta Beach. "I leave it to the powers that be to make the right decisions - but then help us secure our homes."
I realise that for all intents and purposes Canada is just another client state of the US (especially under Harper), but technically we're still a separate, independent, country. So please, why is this story under the US rubric? Yes, Lake Manitoba is in the Province of Manitoba, not the State of Manitoba.