Broken dam!!

[Drycreek3189]

A spillway should always be built in natural ground with a berm that keeps the runoff from washing any part of the dam out from below. Having said that, sandy land can be a real challenge because natural ground washes as much as man-made fill does. Not everyone can afford to pour concrete in a spillway. I would be one of them, I’m lucky mine is in clay. Hate that you lost your fish. I lost mine in 2011 because of the drought and the limited runoff that goes into my pond.

[Take Dead Aim]

We had a hydro seeding company that was going to spray after the rain. Whoops!!

Spend the money and do it right. Concrete spillway. Have engineer run calcs on water flow so you build it big enough. Should some issue of washout.

[Big pig]

Sorry to lose your fish. We are trying to grow some now too
I might look at a pipe overflow and concrete emergency spillway.
My hindsight is close to 20/20.

[.243 WSSM]

The spillway was/is at the end of the dam and there was an emergency spillway at the other end as well. I do not believe the failure was the fault of the contractor. There were a couple of ponds in the same area that were decades old and they lost their dams as well. One of those being salmon lake Park built in the 60’s. 11 inches of rain in a few hours is going to cause flooding and I didn’t have the funds to build a Hoover type dam. Things happen and we just have to regroup and rebuild.

That really sux about your fish. You have a good attitude to start over and try again. Good luck with the redo and I hope it never happens again. 11" at once is a ton of water.

[EastTexun]

Sorry to hear about your dam and your lost fish! Those pictures are bad deja vu for me as we lost our lake in Grapeland (twice) due to big rains like that. I heard from one of my neighbors that nearly everyone that had a tank, pond or lake lost part or all of their dams after that rain.

As a suggestion for the new build, reach out to the NRCS/Soil Conservation folks in Crockett and get them to do a watershed study to see how much watershed is actually feeding into your pond so you can size the overflow properly. After we lost the second dam, I had them out and eventually had to make the hard decision to not rebuild. We purchased the property with the dam already built, but even when we replaced the existing drains with a full railcar for a drain it overtopped the dam and blew it out.

[dclifton]

I know concrete is obviously not cost effective. I would suggest a pond liner type material and just run it length ways over the spill way. Over into pond a ways then down the back of the spill way. Then cover it with dirt and a few loads of cheap rock. Poor mans spill way but it works. It will keep it from washing out again. If it ever get down to the liner atleast that will stop it.

[TxDispatcher]

Just giving our experience from May 2016 and last month in Austin County. We have a 10' wide by 3' deep overflow spillway built into the dam at the farm, dam is approximately 100 yards long. We are maybe 900-100 yards from the peak of the hill, so we aren't getting crazy amounts of runoff coming down the hill to us. In both 2016 and last month, we had water flowing straight across the dam and across the pasture at the peak of the dam roughly 20 yards up the hill towards the house, maybe 12"-14" in elevation. It doesn't seem possible unless you are sitting in the truck watching it, I've even had folks tell me that I was exaggerating when I posted about the water level and what was going on. When you have that much water drop in that short of a time period, Mother Nature will surprise you

That being said, if you can afford it, a concrete spillway cut into the dam is a good idea. We had to seriously shore up the backside of the dam where it flows into the creek after the 2016 flood, it had undercut the spillway quite a bit. Spent more than we desired, but drove metal pilings down and poured the concrete to it held up beautifully this go round, and its seen some water over the last few years. None quite like last months deluge, but other than a few small areas down close to the creek where the trees were causing the water to swirl, we didn't have any damage to speak of. And the dam has been there for at least 28 years, not sure how long it had been there before my in-law's purchased the place. So the grass definitely helps keep the erosion at bay, I'd hate to think of what would have happened had this been a new dam, I'm sure we would have had a breach somewhere and lost more than we did...somewhere down stream there are more than a few Florida/Texas strain hybrids that look like footballs swimming around I hope they survived and made their way into the Brazos River system

[unclefish]

Wow....sorry about losing your lake and fish. I know the effort that goes into it. Good luck on repair and re-stocking.

[GS91]

The Farm and Ranch store here in Grapeland was keeping a list of all the reported lakes that were busted. Last I heard, the count was up in the mid 30's, just in the immediate Grapeland area.
The amount of rain that fell was unreal. We did record right at 12" in about 8 hours, but most of it came within a 4 to 5 hour time frame. A lot of roads were lost too. Was a real mess for a few days.

[3ChordTruth]

We have looked at it as an opportunity to clean some of the brush out that we left in the first time. There is plenty of natural structure ( flooded timber ). Lake/ pond is about 4 acres in size and half of that is/was flooded timber.

What a shame, sorry you lost that nice lake and the fish population you were working on. Good luck rebuilding.

[IvoryRoot]

Dam shame.

[Pineywoods]

The spillway was/is at the end of the dam and there was an emergency spillway at the other end as well. I do not believe the failure was the fault of the contractor. There were a couple of ponds in the same area that were decades old and they lost their dams as well. One of those being salmon lake Park built in the 60’s. 11 inches of rain in a few hours is going to cause flooding and I didn’t have the funds to build a Hoover type dam. Things happen and we just have to regroup and rebuild.

Yep. We have family land in Grapeland and they had a ton of rain in a very very short amount of time. I saw pictures of Salmon Lake and it is gone. It has been there a very long time, was built correctly, and has weathered many floods until that rain. Sorry to see you lost yours OP... you weren't alone in that area.

[db@100]

Well, their should be some great fishing in all the creeks around Grapeland.

[Hix]

Same thing happened to us in 2016, emergency spillway couldn’t keep up and lost a 13 acre lake that was full of fish we built in the 90’s
It’s rebuilt now and has handled the crazy rainfall good so far.








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[PeePaw on Fork]

When you get the new dam built take a ditch witch and cut a trench from one end to the other and fill the trench with sakrete.