Damn the Dam

What does a good sized rock weigh? And with good size I mean something about the equivalent of between three to five footballs. Must be somewhere in the range of 25 to 80 kg each.

You may remember that in a previous post I said that I didn't want to become either a weightlifter or a body builder. Sadly, i think I may well be on the way to becoming one of those two.

You see, on our farm we have a dam that the previous owner built and it holds back a good bit of water. But it has a few design flaws in it and during the heavy rains we had recently the dam overflowed. That in itself isn't a problem really because small dams are supposed to do that. The problem is that as a result of the poor design/built the overflowing water was busy breaking large chunks of dam off. We lost nearly a third of the width of the dam as a result. In the photo below you can see how much overflow pipe is sticking out into, well ... nothing. The bath below the pipe is there to stop the falling water eroding more ground away and is positioned on top of a big(ish) pile of rocks.

You can also see some of the repair I am making. I'm still not quite used to recording things to use for a blog entry so I missed taking pictures of the dam in its diminished state. All that grass you can see below the repair is what slumped off the dam during the storm.

What I'm doing is driving steel posts into the ground to stabilise the slumped ground. Then there are more steel posts to support the old bulldozer track I found on the farm. I'm using the track to support the rocks I'm dropping down the dam to shore up the slump.

What you see in the picture is perhaps slightly less than one quarter of the repair completed and already my muscles are bulging out of my shirt!

We're lucky that we have a good supply of sizable rocks lying around on our property and I'm busy moving them from where they were to their new spot holding up the dam. Of course that means picking the rocks up, putting them on the transport tray of the tractor, taking half off again because I overloaded the tray and the tractor couldn't lift it off the ground, driving back to the dam and carefully and lovingly place each rock in its designated spot (well more like roll them down the bank and hope they land in a good spot and shifting them if they didn't).

Eagle eyed readers will notice that the dam is near the spot where I cut down a tree recently. Which brings me to why this job is so urgent. The firewood trees and the dam are higher than the house. That means that if the dam were to fail a whole lot of water will come rushing down the hill toward the house and, hopefully, miss it. I'm not keen to take that chance and will keep shifting rocks until I'm confident that the dam won't fail.

Of course in the meantime there are all sorts of other urgent matters to attend to and somehow we manage to strike a balance between doing those and fixing the dam. I haven't got a picture of the damn dam repair as at today but it's looking much safer now. Obviously I'm going to over-engineer my repair and I expect that I'm maybe one third of the way through the full repair job, but the pressure is off now. Once the full repair is done I'll report back with a picture of the very large pile of rocks that will be the downhill side of the dam.