The Municipality of Rhineland is moving ahead with another of its strategic priorities - developing a master water drainage plan.
Council has hired Northern Plains Drainage Systems on a one-year trial to conduct a survey of all local ditches.
"This is kind of a new thing for us," explained Reeve Don Wiebe. "We've had some information; other municipalities have done some work in this area."
According to Wiebe, the company uses a combination of physical surveys and LiDAR technology to gather detailed information about ditch profiles, depths and culvert sizes. From this, a database will be created that he believes will offer several key advantages when it comes to future planning in the municipality.
"This will be very helpful in the provincial licensing process and, of course, we can also look at drain maintenance and begin to take an asset management approach to that so we know what the existing level of drainage is and, maybe, then we can make sure we maintain it at that level."
Because the project is getting a later start, surveyors will initially zero-in on a few critical areas in the municipality.
Eventually, Wiebe hopes Rhineland's entire drainage system will be covered.
"So that we know exactly what we've got, engineers can use that to help us project any changes to drainage and, we can also use that as information to get the province to support their provincial drains."
Overall, should his hope of having the entire network surveyed come to fruition, Wiebe says the process would take several years to complete.