The Latest on the Campaign I would like to invite you to join an E-mail list I created for the Harmful Hydro Campaign. And the problem is about to get worse. As a result, the north-flowing Churchill River now flows south, and Lake Winnipeg is now a reservoir with controlled water levels.
Water is impounded in the summer, creating droughts, and released in the winter, causing floods.
These changes have destroyed wildlife habitat, driving away mammal and bird populations and decimating aquatic plant and animal species. Flooding has also caused permafrost to thaw, which has increased shoreline erosion and siltation in the region s lakes and rivers. Higher water levels have submerged vegetation, which then decomposes and produces methane a powerful greenhouse gas in amounts rivaling that produced by fossil fuels. The decomposition process also has caused mercury, which had existed in an inactive form in local rocks and soil, to transform into the highly toxic organic methyl mercury. The 50,000 square miles of land re-engineered by Manitoba Hydro covers an area the size of the state of Wisconsin.