A team of U.S. engineers toured the East Kootenay on Wednesday to update residents on Koocanusa reservoir.

BC Hydro brought several people from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) to Cranbrook to talk about water levels in Koocanusa this summer.

Causing concern this year is the high level snowpack in the catchment area for the Kootenay River. It's currently 40 per cent above average.

"If we get four or five days at 80 degrees (Farenheit) we could definitely see the snow pack come off pretty fast," said Joel Fenolio, Upper Columbia Senior Water Manager with the USACE.

Popular with recreational boaters, Lake Koocanusa feeds the Kootenay River into the Libby Dam in Montana. The dam controls flood risk downstream on the Kootenay River as it passes through Bonners Ferry, Idaho and into the West Kootenay.

To reduce the risk of flood downstream due to the record snowpack, the USACE has been releasing water from Libby Dam over the past few weeks. As a result, Koocanusa is very low at the moment.

"It is much emptier right now than it was last year at this time," said Kelvin Ketchum, BC Hydro's Generation System Optimization Portfolio Manager.

"That's because there is a lot of snow on the hills. It's over 120 feet below full pool. You don't even see it in Canada right now. It's well down into the US. So there is a lot of empty space so we can protect Kootenay Lake and Bonners Ferry."

Dropping the level this drastically is necessary, Fenolio said, because when the snow melts, it will bring a lot of water into the reservoir. The Libby Dam releases have so far freed up 4 million acre feet of space to hold that water, but forecasters are predicting 8.2 million acre feet of water will hit the reservoir in the coming months.

"Basically what we're trying to do is balance the storage available in Koocanusa and also trying to safely keep the river levels downstream at Bonners Ferry to a safe level as well," said Fenolio.

The good news is that all that water should create a stellar year for recreation on Koocanusa. The USACE is expecting the reservoir will be within five feet of full from late July through to mid September. That's much higher than in recent years: in 2010, for example, Koocanusa was 16 feet below full.

And there's more good news - potentially - for the sturgeon population. Tests by the US Fish and Wildlife Service have so far been unsuccessful in encouraging the endangered Kootenay white sturgeon to reproduce downstream of the dam.

Jason Flory, the service's White Sturgeon Recovery Team Lead, hopes the predicted river levels this year could change that.

"If it ends up being as the Corps is predicting, this could be about as good a test for sturgeon level response to additional flows as we could hope for," he said.

The sturgeon are laying their eggs, but not in an appropriate place, Flory continued.

"The sturgeon are still not reproducing successfully. They are spawning but we don't get any survival out of it. Their eggs go down into the sand and silt and they get suffocated. We are trying to coax them to migrate upstream and spawn over rocky, gravelly cobbled beds."

Because of the high water levels, this year the service won't need to spill water over Libby Dam to create the downstream effects their fish tests need.

Still, the engineers warn that if weather this month and into June is too dry, the snowpack won't run into the Kootenay River basin, and the height of Koocanusa won't near fill this summer.

"It's worth noting that a lot of the potential refill depends on June and early July rain storms. Those have to come in. There is the potential that those don't come in and then the reservoir is not at five feet from full," said Fenolio.