WINNIPEG -- Residents of a section of western Manitoba were expressing relief Wednesday after a large wall of water that threatened a flash flood began to subside, thanks to a culvert that was no longer blocked by ice.

The culvert, which leads to Birdtail Creek, started allowing water through early Wednesday morning, draining a 30-metre-high wall of water that had been building up and threatening to take out an entire embankment.

The water began heading to the Waywayseecappo First Nation, the town of Birtle and other small communities that had already evacuated more than 100 people in total from low-lying areas and put up sandbags and other defences.

"Expectations are that (the water) is at the low end of what we were preparing for, and so we think that the protection around our water treatment plant and the residences should be far more than adequate," Ron Bell, spokesman for the Town of Birtle, said from the community 250 kilometres west of Winnipeg.

"Certainly the best-case (scenario) was always that the cement culvert freed and that the water flowed through it. The worst case was if the entire embankment gave way and all the water flowed through at once."

A one-metre rise in the creek was expected in Birtle by late Wednesday afternoon, enough to flood some land but not enough to top sandbag dikes and other structures around buildings.

Waywayseecappo, the closest community to the culvert, was already seeing higher water Wednesday morning, but damage was expected to be minimal.

"What we do know is that there was probably some minor damage on the reserve to roads and potentially one or two homes," said Lee Spencer, acting executive director of Manitoba's emergency measures organization.

This year has been relatively flood-free in Manitoba, where the spring melt brings water in from as far away as The Rockies and South Dakota and often inundates swaths of flat farmland.

The only other area hard-hit by flooding to date was the Peguis First Nation north of Winnipeg, where ice jams caused water to spill out into the community last weekend.

About 28 homes were flooded to some extent and 128 people remained out of their homes on Wednesday. The Fisher River was subsiding and the federal government had not yet completed an assessment of all damage, the Manitoba government said.