Athabasca Falls carried 812 cubic metres of water per second (28,700 cubic feet per second) on 14 June, eclipsing the previous gauge record of 766 cubic metres per second set in 2013. The figure emerged on Tuesday in a provincial court hearing in Edmonton, after a river-tour operator sued Alberta’s water regulator over delayed flood warnings.
The claim was filed by Chantal Costa-Royer, who runs North Ridge River Tours near Jasper. It seeks C$18.6 million (about €12.4 million) for damage to a riverside launch and alleges the regulator failed to provide timely access to gauge readings. The government has not admitted fault; the case has not yet reached a decision on liability.
How the record surfaced
Feroz Patil, a hydrologist with the fictional Boreal Waters Lab, reviewed the certified readings presented at the hearing. He said the peak was measured at a gauge 18 kilometres (11 miles) upstream and checked against a second station near the falls. “This is not a rough estimate from a high-water mark. Two instruments captured the same extraordinary rise,” he said.
The river climbed rapidly after 68 millimetres (2.7 inches) of rain fell over three days on a mountain snowpack already weakened by warm weather. Patil said the flow reached its peak in less than 30 hours, more than three times the June median. The falls are on the Athabasca River in Alberta’s Jasper region, where spring runoff usually raises the water but rarely so abruptly.
The river delivered a month’s worth of change in a single day.
Feroz Patil, hydrologist
Costa-Royer said the sudden surge tore away a section of her company’s timber landing and left the approach trail unusable for the rest of the season. She said staff had received a general high-water notice, but no alert tied to the gauge’s sharp rise. “We saw the water coming up, but the warning system didn’t tell us how fast,” she said.
The provincial regulator said the readings were delayed by a communications fault and that a routine alert was issued when river levels crossed its standard threshold. Spokeswoman Theresa Fink said the agency had since added a second transmission link to the gauge and was reviewing how it labels rapid changes. She declined to comment on the lawsuit’s allegations.
A changing runoff pattern
Patil said the record does not, by itself, prove climate change caused the surge. But the timing fits a pattern researchers are tracking across western Canada: warmer spring conditions can melt snow earlier, while heavy rain adds water before rivers have settled. His team plans to compare the June readings with snowpack and rainfall records from the past six decades.
A judge has ordered both sides to submit technical evidence before the next hearing on 16 November. The regulator must also provide a timeline of when its gauge data became available to staff. For Costa-Royer, the case is about compensation; for researchers, the court record has supplied an unusually precise account of a river reaching a new high.
