Two Countries FOUGHT Over Which Way This Lake Drains

Devils Lake is a closed basin with no natural outlet: it rose for two decades, and draining it north toward Canada triggered a fight under the 1909 Boundary Waters Treaty. Devils Lake in North Dakota is not fed by a river and drained by another. Water flows in, and the only way it leaves is by evaporating off the surface. So when a run of wet years began in 1993, the lake had nowhere to put the extra water except up. It climbed more than thirty feet over the next twenty years, grew from around 44,000 acres to more than 210,000, swallowed farmland, drowned highways, and emptied out a small town called Churchs Ferry. The obvious fix, the one every viewer wants to shout, is to just drain it. The trouble is where the water would go. Devils Lake sits on the wrong side of a drainage divide, and its only natural exit runs north, through the Sheyenne and Red Rivers, across the border into Canada and Lake Winnipeg. The water is also brackish and full of sulfate, a sealed-off basin that has been concentrating salt since the last ice age. That is why Manitoba objected, and why the United States and Canada ended up arguing over the Boundary Waters Treaty of 1909 about which direction the water was legally allowed to go. This video follows that mechanism from the closed basin to the international outlet fight and where the lake stands today, using public data from the U.S. Geological Survey and the North Dakota Department of Water Resources on the Devils Lake basin, the Devils Lake Basin Joint Water Resources Board timeline, the National Weather Service lake-level outlook, and the International Joint Commission record on the Boundary Waters Treaty. If your part of the country would take every drop of water North Dakota did not want, tell us where you are in the comments. It is one of the arguments this story starts every time. Chapters: 00:00 A Lake With No Way Out 01:04 The Bowl That Cannot Drain Itself 02:33 The Wet Years That Would Not Stop 03:35 Roads to Nowhere and a Town That Emptied 04:39 Why You Cannot Just Drain It 07:34 The Salt That Made Canada Nervous 09:18 A Fight Under a Treaty From 1909 10:51 Building the Outlet and the Border Checkpoint 11:44 What the Joint Study Turned Up 13:46 Where the Lake Stands Today 14:43 The Water the Thirsty West Would Take #DevilsLake #Geography #WhyTheMap