The 2003 drought that gripped the B.C. Interior still haunts officials with the District of Lake Country, a Central Okanagan farming community of 9,600 people.
"We were to the point, if it hadn't have rained, we were going to have to sit down with growers and say, 'How many acres do you have? Okay, if you have to pick what dies and what lives on your orchard, what are you going to pick?' " said Michael Mercer, Lake Country's director of engineering.
As a result of that experience, Lake Country has asked the province for permission to raise the level of three reservoir lakes by up to 1.8 metres. But the plan is opposed by lakeside cottage owners, who say it will harm the environment. They also fear the proposal will hurt their attempts to buy their lots, which they currently lease from the province.
Lake Country Mayor James Baker says global warming is causing snowpacks to melt earlier in the year, while the loss of trees to the pine beetle means the resulting runoff reaches the lakes more quickly. Once the reservoirs fill, excess water is lost over the sides and is unavailable during the dog days of summer.
"There's no other way to store more water except in our upland reservoirs," he said, noting the lakes were originally created in the 1920s when agriculturalists built a series of dams. Their levels were raised in the 1940s and again in the 1960s.
Today, about 80 per cent of the water continues to service agriculture.
But raising the lakes again will destroy a vibrant recreational fishery, flood wetlands and threaten a delicate ecosystem, according to the president of the Okanagan Cottage Owners Association, Lloyd Manchester, who is also the founder of the EarthCare Society, a non-profit environmental organization. His cottage on Beaver Lake has been in his family for 50 years.
"It has the potential of basically crippling fish populations," he said, adding that several animals on the province's red list of endangered species live in wetlands next to the lakes, including the tiger salamander and the northern leopard frog.
The cottage owners have some support from the Freshwater Fisheries Society of B.C., which runs the province's fish stocking program. It gathers one million trout eggs annually from two collection stations near the lakes. They are among the eight million eggs used to stock 800 lakes throughout B.C.
The society doesn't know yet what effects Lake Country's plan will have, but it is concerned about the effects on both the fish habitat and its collection facilities.
"Until we can get those answers, we're probably not supportive of the project," said the organization's vice-president, Tim Yesaki.
The Ministry of the Environment says Lake Country will be made to provide those answers. In an e-mail, the ministry said the district is required to conduct an environmental assessment before it gets the go-ahead, which could take up to two years.
Complicating matters is a proposal floated by the province in 2008, which would allow 165 Central Okanagan cottage owners like Mr. Manchester to buy their lakeside lots. At the moment, they own their buildings but hold 15-year leases on the land.
Outcry from communities like Lake Country forced the province to slap a two-year moratorium on the sales, which expires in August. Mr. Manchester sees Lake Country's current plan as a ploy to further delay the sales, since raising the water level could flood some of the properties.
"Where we believe Lake Country is coming from is that they're using this as a tactic to stop the sale of the lots," he said.
But the way Mr. Baker sees it, his government is just trying to protect his community's water source. "The question of private interests trumping public interests seems strange to us," he said.
A spokesperson for Forests and Range Minister Pat Bell, who is responsible for overseeing Crown land, said any decisions about selling the lots "would take into account the ability and practicality of raising the dams."
Special to The Globe and Mail