The reservoir

Where this comes from. This page summarises two sets of engineering documents written in 2018, for other people: Associated Engineering's valuation of the plant and reservoir, prepared for Fish Creek Ranch, and MPE Engineering's North Distribution Assessment, prepared for the M.D. of Foothills. The co-op commissioned neither and has not had either re-checked. Every figure below is footnoted to the document it came from, and the MPE reports are published in full by West Foothills Water if you would rather read the originals. None of this is a commitment to a route, a cost, a water rate or a date.

The Fish Creek Ranch reservoir is an off stream raw water reservoir on Fish Creek, west of Highway 762 and about ten minutes south of the Hamlet of Bragg Creek. It is the thing that makes year round treated water possible here at all: it is filled from an intake on the creek when the creek can spare the water, and drawn down through the rest of the year to feed the treatment plant (Figure 1).

What is there

The reservoir was built in 2004, over eight months from April to November [1]. Fish Creek Ranch bought or leased the equipment and acted as its own general contractor [1]. It is an excavated basin rather than a dammed creek: roughly 56,700 m² of glacial till was taken out to a depth of 4 m and used to build the dyke along the highway, the dam and the berms, and blue clay was then removed to another 3 m and used to line the floor and the walls [1]. Table 1 sets out what was built.

Table 1 - The reservoir as built, from the 2018 valuation report.

Measure	Detail
Built	April to November 2004 [1]
Surface area	about 51,000 m² [1]
Estimated storage	263,000 m³, quoted elsewhere in the same report as 210 acre feet [1]
Liner	solid blue clay [1]
Intake	irrigation weir off Fish Creek [1]
Feeds	a well pump at the reservoir which pumps raw water 92 m to the treatment plant [1]

The outflow is designed so that stored water circulates rather than stagnating or short circuiting [1]. Diversion from the creek is shut off during spring runoff and at times of low flow, when turbidity in Fish Creek is high [1]. That is what the storage is for: the plant is fed from the reservoir, not from the creek, so the creek's bad weeks do not become the plant's bad weeks. Figure 2 shows the basin in its setting, west of the highway.

Storage is not supply

This is the single most misread point in the whole file, so it is worth stating plainly. A reservoir holds water. It does not create it. A 263,000 m³ basin refilled under a 23,660 m³ per year licence is still a 23,660 m³ per year system. Storage buys the ability to take water when the creek is high and use it when the creek is low. The annual volume the co op could ever supply is set by the water licences, not by the size of the pond.

The water licences, and why two different numbers appear

Two of the documents give different figures, and both are printed here rather than one being quietly preferred.

The 2018 engineering assessment lists three licences held between Foothills County and Fish Creek Ranch, tied to specific service areas under the Water Act (Table 2) [2].

Table 2 - The three water licences held at the plant, from the 2018 engineering assessment.

Licence	Annual diversion	Maximum rate
00321775-00-00	10,120 m³	1 L/s
00321780-00-00	10,235 m³	1 L/s
00220297-00-00	3,305 m³	1 L/s
Total	23,660 m³ (19 acre feet)	3 L/s

The valuation report, written four months later, instead lists a 265,720 m³ per year diversion from Fish Creek alongside the 10,120 m³ and 3,305 m³ licences [1]. Its own appendix explains where the large figure comes from: a letter from Alberta Environmental Protection dated 11 August 1998 approving Fish Creek Ranch to divert 216 acre feet of water a year from the creek [3]. 216 acre feet is about 266,000 m³, so the two large numbers are the same approval.

The most likely reading, and it is a reading rather than a fact, is that the large figure is permission to divert water into storage, while the 23,660 m³ is what the current licences permit to be supplied to customers, each licence tied to its own service area. The co-op has not confirmed which is in force today, and the distinction decides how many households the system could ever serve. It is the first thing on the list of what still has to be established.

One piece of history matters here. The 23,660 m³ per year allocation was among the last diversion licences of its type granted before the 2006 moratorium on new allocations in the Bow River basin [1]. Licences of this kind cannot simply be applied for now. They have to be bought from somebody who already holds one.

What is not settled

• Which licence figures are current. See above. Nothing about the project's eventual size can be stated until this is answered by the county and by Alberta Environment and Protected Areas.
• The usable volume. The valuation report gives 263,000 m³ of storage [1]. The engineering assessment, four months earlier, worked on the assumption that "the existing raw water reservoir capacity (± 130,000 m³) is sufficient" and said that this too would have to be confirmed [2]. The co-op does not know whether the difference is total volume against usable volume, or an error in one of the two.
• Whether the creek can give up more. The engineers noted that further discussion with the province would be needed on whether the larger volumes could be diverted at the existing point of diversion at all, given established in stream objectives [4].

None of that takes away from what is already there. Figure 3 is the basin being dug, in the summer of 2004.

Related: The water treatment plant and Engineering work to date.

Sources

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1. Associated Engineering Alberta Ltd., Fish Creek Ranch Water Treatment Plant Valuation, report prepared for Fish Creek Ranch (September 2018), secs. 1.1, 1.2, 3.2, and 3.5. Unpublished; a copy is held in the co-op's records.

2. MPE Engineering Ltd., "Fish Creek Ranch: North Distribution Assessment (Task 1)," letter report prepared for the M.D. of Foothills No. 31, job 2210-051-01 (May 24, 2018), table 1. West Foothills Water, accessed August 8, 2026, https://westfoothillswater.ca/.

3. Associated Engineering Alberta Ltd., "Strategic Value of Fish Creek Ranch Water Treatment Plant," app. F to Fish Creek Ranch Water Treatment Plant Valuation (September 2018), citing Alberta Environmental Protection, Natural Resources Service, to Fish Creek Ranch, August 11, 1998.

4. MPE Engineering Ltd., "Fish Creek Ranch: North Distribution Assessment (Task 2)," draft letter report prepared for the M.D. of Foothills No. 31, job 2210-051-01 (May 24, 2018). West Foothills Water, accessed August 8, 2026, https://westfoothillswater.ca/.