A trio of University of Winnipeg researchers are using $330,000 in grant money to study flooding along Northern Manitoba’s Hudson Bay Railway.
Dr. Christopher Henry, Dr. Christopher Storie and Dr. Joni Storie are working with Grant Barkman of DecisionWorks and two master’s degree students to create software that measures water levels near the railway and could be used as an early warning system.
Flooding of the rail line in 2017 cut Churchill’s only land transportation connection to the rest of the province for more than a year while former owner OmniTrax refused to repair the rail bed. After the Arctic Gateway Group took over the rail line with support from the federal government, one employee was killed in a September 2018 derailment near Ponton that the Transportation Safety Board of Canada found was caused by a washout created by a beaver dam near the tracks.
“We are developing technologies that they can integrate into their operations to monitor their lines on a daily basis. This will save them money and improve safety, which is at the end of the day one of the most important things,” said Henry. “We are hoping that once this solution is up and running it can also be used for other northern rail lines across Canada.”
The grants supporting the project include a $225,000 Research Manitoba Innovation Proof-of-Concept grant that enables the team to examine high-resolution drone imagery, track geometry and mapping of localized hydrologic impacts on the rail line. The information they learn from this will be applied to larger-scale satellite data being collected in a concurrent project supported by a $105,000 Mitacs Accelerate grant.
“With a drone, you can image an area the size of Polo Park mall at high resolution which provides very fine detail of what’s going on,” said Dr. Cristopher Storie, an associate professor of geography who has hosted numerous summer field schools n Churchill. “The satellites can’t do it at that level, but with a couple of satellite images we see all of Northern Manitoba. If satellite imagery detects something, we can deploy a high-resolution drone scan to see what’s going on. Or if the drone picks up something we can target a satellite analysis to look at the larger geographic area. The ultimate goal is to provide this kind of information on an ongoing basis that they can use to ensure the rail line never gets knocked out of commission again. We’d like to give them as early a warning as possible so that a crew can get out and open up a section of beaver dam to keep that water moving or check a culvert before it backs up, or look at infrastructure upgrading, such as putting in more culverts and creating different hydrological structures that protect vulnerable parts of the track.”
While research monitoring surface water in flood-prone southern Manitoba informs the project, permafrost creates a unique challenge when it comes to predicting what could happen.
“Northern Manitoba is a permafrost region and we don’t always know where surface water is going to go because it changes year to year,” says Dr. Jori Stone, with other factors playing a role in the flooding risk level including beaver dams, hydro generation and climate change. “If a body of water reaches a certain size it will go into an early warning system. That’s the type of information we would share with the Arctic Gateway Group to let them know that this is one of those events in proximity of the rail lines that they should be aware of, because it could lead to flooding of the rail line.”
