Okanagan Lake continues its steady rise, up just under two centimetres overnight.
With billions of litres of snowmelt flowing into the lake every day, the Okanagan River dam in Penticton is the only release valve for all that pressure.
If no new water was entering the lake, the dam and channel would have the ability to take about 1.5 cm of water out of the lake each day.
“People often ask us, ‘are the gates wide open?’” said Brian Symonds with the Ministry of Forests Lands and Natural Resources.
“They are not wide open in terms of out of the water, but they are as wide open as the channel is designed to handle, plus some,” he added. “It’s not just in Penticton, it’s what does it mean if we dump too much water further down the system.”
The province says the other major control point is the Okanagan River through Oliver, where they are running well above capacity.
The dams below Skaha and Vaseux Lakes are completely wide open, and Osoyoos Lake rose 25 cm last week, driven in part by back pressure from a high-running Similkameen River.
The engineer in charge of the final design of the Penticton channel over 50 years ago says there is already an unnatural amount of water heading south.
Jimmy Hamilton says the limit at design was 3,250 cubic feet per second, “and the difference, with the old river, was somewhere around 400.”
“It was a very slow and meandering thing, so it’s like a big shotgun pointing at the people down south,” he said.
The province says they are monitoring the flows of the other tributaries into the South Okanagan lakes and bumping up the flow of the channel even further when those subside.