Thanks guys, yes we are set up to rebuild as soon as conditions permit.

The watershed is approx 532 acres.

There is an emergency spillway.

The breach happened on the opposite end of the dam from the spillway.

Sort of a long story:

I acquired the property 10 years ago, the pond was existing, probably about ~25 years old at that time. However, the original stand pipe had corroded and broke off at the base, draining the lake. The pond had basically reverted to a 10 acre swamp with brush, trees, wild animals...ect.

We hired a dirt guy & cleaned up the lake, removed the broken stand pipe and repaired the dam where the stand pipe had been. We added an emergency spillway and added a 12" siphon drain pipe to deal with normal rain events. So thinking we were all set.

When we cut in the emergency spillway & took free board measurements on that side of the dam (the dam is about 600' long). Everything looked fine and we had close to 3 feet of free board. (what we didn't realize) is that the dam had a gentle slope beginning about halfway across & sloped to the other side of the embankment. The slope is so slight that it was not visible to the eye. AKA the dam "looks" level & we didn't measure the entire perimeter when cutting in the spillway.

We did a lot of things right - but ultimately the dirt guy we hired didn't have the right experience although he had built a lot of ponds. Big difference between a dirt guy and a pond builder...

This time I hired Mike Otto to get us back on the right track...

- Smoke 'em if you got 'em

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