And the Mopan is set to go up even more - with the water spilling over the dams upriver in the Maya Mountains.
Now, without the dams, the flooding could have been much worse.
That's because the three dams in the Macal River - the Mollejon, the Chalilo, and the Vaca - prevent water from rushing downstream, which slows the flooding process. And today - those dams reached their containment capacity as huge volumes of water could be seen rushing over the spillways.
The dams are owned and managed by BECOL and the Environment Health and Safety Officer, Oscar Alonzo, told us about the hydraulics at work in a flood event such as this.
Oscar Alonzo - Environmental Health & Safety Officer, BECOL "The first facility the Chalillo which is upstream near the head of the Macal River and that has the largest reservoir, so the water passes through Chalillo and generates power, same thing happens down Vaca which is the last facility along the river and then after it passed through Vaca then it heads down stream San Ignacio and other areas down the stream. So, in times like this when we have storms and extreme weather events, what the dams do is that they capture a lot of the water coming downstream and then it released in a controlled fashion while we generate power. So, if you look it historically, you might see that before the dams were there, the San Ignacio area would have gotten flooded maybe 2, 3 times for the year, we're talking water rising to the level of downtown. With the dams there now, these events are much more rare because the dams capture a lot of the water coming downstream and it only being spilling once it reach full supply level. In cases like this, the flood waters take a lot longer to reach downstream San Ignacio and then the rise is much more gradual as opposed to the flash flooding that we've seen in other areas of the country. The first one was commissioner in 1995, that was the Mollejon facility and Mollejon is actually one that is our workhouse that produced the most power of the 3. Then following that we had Chalillo built and the main purpose of building Chalillo was to have a water supply for the other facilities downstream. Chalillio came online in 2005 and later in 2010 the Vaca facility came online. So Chalillo was built after Mollejon to solve the problem of having a consistent water supply for the other 2 facilities downstream."
Now, there is some community concern about all that water tumbling over the spillways at the dams - and heading towards the western communities.
According to Alonzo, indeed the river is expected to rise faster around this time.
He confirms that all this water will eventually find its way to San Ignacio and Benque - which will have faster rising levels. He adds that BECOL already informed NEMO, who will be responsible for the evacuations if necessary.
