'A race against time': Alberta community chasing solutions after months of hauling water

Not far from the town of Pincher Creek, resting in the eastern shadow of the Canadian Rockies, two men wearing coveralls are in the midst of a task that, by now, they've done hundreds of times.

The pair have parked their tanker trucks full of water next to each other at an unassuming plant north of Cowley, Alta.

They curl long green and yellow hoses out and up a hillside and raise the covering of a nearby treated water tank.

The trucks roar to life, and soon, a steady flow of water gushes through the hoses and pours into the cavernous space. Peering into the darkness, one can see the reserves slowly begin to pool.

It's now April 9. But this is how things have started here, every day, since last August, as the Municipal District of Pincher Creek — home to just more than 3,000 people — has been grappling with an ongoing water crisis brought on by low levels in a nearby reservoir. 

Multiple truckloads of water, just like these two, are brought in daily by third-party contractors from Pincher Creek. 

Tomorrow, workers will be back to do it all over again. At the peak of the crisis, this arrangement was costing the M.D. roughly $7,500 a day. Since August, the total price tag has added up to more than $1 million — no small change for a municipality this size.

As the duo continues their work, a pickup truck rounds a nearby road the M.D. was recently required to build — at a cost of another $100,000 — to allow water tankers to access and leave the site.

In the truck is David Desabrais, who manages utilities and infrastructure with the M.D. of Pincher Creek. He parks and exits the vehicle, wearing a yellow construction vest.

The community's water challenges are clearly so familiar and front of mind to Desabrais that they need no introduction. He starts talking about them simply by referencing "the crisis."

"It's certainly a challenge for our water operations, when we run this way," he said.

It's all been a pricey solution to a complicated problem for the municipal district, which provides water to the nearby communities of Cowley, Beaver Mines, Lundbreck and the Castle Mountain ski resort.

The Oldman Dam was authorized in the 1980s by former premier Peter Lougheed to mitigate the impacts of droughts experienced in southern Alberta. It was constructed in the early 1990s.

In recent years, low streams have been more common in the south than some people realize, said Shannon Frank, executive director of the Oldman Watershed Council.