Jennifer Patrick and Marko Manoukian: Successful Emergency Repairs on the Milk River Project
Drop 5 after its catastrophic failure on May 17, 2020.
Drop 5 on October 8, 2020, when water began to run again.
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Irrigation Leader: Please tell us about the drop 5 failure that occurred in May 2020. Jennifer Patrick: At approximately 3:00 p.m. on Sunday, May 17, the concrete drop structure on the St. Mary Canal known as drop 5 failed. Drop 5 is located northwest of the town of Cut Bank on the Blackfeet Reservation. The failure of drop 5 left the entire Milk River basin without supplemental water for the rest of the irrigation season.
8 | IRRIGATION LEADER | January 2021
We do not know what happened in technical terms. To me, it looked like a bomb had been placed under the middle section of the drop structure. More than half the structure was gone, and there was a large hole where water washed a significant amount of material downstream. We discussed temporary fixes to the structure and other interim measures, but by the time they would have been implemented, the costs would have outweighed the benefits. Irrigation Leader: How did you decide what action to take at that point? Jennifer Patrick: Reclamation had people on the ground on Monday morning. We sent personnel from HDR Engineering, including Stan Schweissing, who eventually took lead on the project, to assess the structure the next day. Then the MRJBOC, Reclamation, and the State of Montana held a conference call to discuss our next steps. We started talking to contractors about the time frame for a partial or full replacement of the structure. Reclamation started running the numbers on the possibility of piping water around the collapsed structure. It’s right next to a wetland, so we had to take that into consideration. Reclamation’s technical service compiled information on all these interim options. We looked at both rehabilitation and replacement. On June 4, the MRJBOC made the decision to assume operations and irrigationleadermagazine.com
PHOTOS COURTESY OF JENN PATRICK AND THE BUREAU OF RECLAMATION.
n May 17, 2020, a drop structure on the Milk River Project, which conveys water to the Milk River in Montana’s Hi-Line Region, failed catastrophically, eliminating or significantly reducing irrigation water flows across the Milk River basin. The Milk River Joint Board of Control (MRJBOC), the State of Montana, the Bureau of Reclamation, and other stakeholders immediately sprang into action, assessing the site, modifying existing plans, and beginning construction in August. By early October, water was flowing through the project’s infrastructure once again. In this interview, MRJBOC Program Manager Jennifer Patrick and Marko Manoukian, the Montana State University extension agent in Phillips County and the local chairperson for the St. Mary’s Rehabilitation Working Group, tell Irrigation Leader about how they addressed this emergency situation and their outlook for the future.
