I want to create a habitat for brook trout in North Georgia. I own property that has a falling creek that is about 12 feet wide.

The creek is very shallow but I've already built one dam of concrete and rock that is about 20 inches high and that dam has created one pool that is 62 feet long.

The most difficult part of building the dam was controlling the flow of water when I wanted to close the dam and raise the water level.

I solved the problem by building a dam with a culvert through it. When I was ready to close the dam, I plugged the culvert and from the downstream side of the dam, I filled the culvert with concrete.

Is there an easier way to do this?

I want to make several more dams and home to have about 1000 feet of the creek converted to trout habitat.

Any suggestions will be appreciated.

Welcome aboard, Tahuaya.

I'm certain you will get more answers to your questions, but please be patient. The forum has been running slow for a while, and a lot of our membership have not been able to efficiently log on.

Hang in there.

Thanks Sunil:

I have time and can wait for responses.

The past eight days, my wife and I built our dam. We ran into some problems.

When we closed the dam and the water rose, we had water running out of the left bank below the dam.

I had to dig into the bank and find the under ground channels. We found three channels and blocked them.

This seemed to solve the problem but I guess time will tell if the fix was permanent.

Now I want to build some lower dams. The idea is to have a series of pools along the creek and enough water in the rapids to allow fish to travel up and down the rapids.

I do not want the dams to be too high to prevent fish from jumping over the dams but I want them to be high enough to create pools along the creek.

I guess, to some extent, this is guess work.

Any suggestions will be appreciated.

Since this is an English site, I will refrain from using Spanish.

Tahuaya

When you first posted about your situation, I hadn't really considered my own situation as relevant. But after you've added more details, I see my situation is not that far off.

The main source of water for my pond is a horizontal inlet pipe in the upward pool side of a dam on a medium sized creek; the inlet pipe is perpendicular to the dam. The creek varies from 15-25' in width, 4' to less than a foot depth. The dam is made of sandbags, rubber & plastic sheets, and 2'x4' concrete patio slabs. Rebar is used for reinforcement.

The level of my pond is directly related to my creek dam holding water. The dam is basically 2.5' high meaning that if I had a total breach of my dam, I would loose 2.5" of water in my pond. When the dam is good, that's basically full pool for me, except in super high water situations; in these cases, when the creek runs high, it can run 4-5' above my dam. At those times, my pond will be 4-5' high above normal.

At any rate, many times a year, my dam gets breached, but not the full height. Bur more important, the water always finds a way under, and we haven't found a way to fix that. When we find an underwater leak, we try and plug it up with sandbags, or rock-filled bags, and rubber sheeting. That holds for a while, but then ends up leaking around all the blockage we crammed in. Sometimes it holds for days or weeks if there's no heavy downpours.

We do fill sandbags and re-do parts of the dam every year, sometimes twice a year. It's always the same parts of the dam that go, even when high water situations have water raging 4-5' high over the dam, and it's usually only a section of the top row of sandbags that get's pushed out.

The good part for me is that even with total breach of my dam, my pond still would have a max depth of 12' feet or so. So if I choose to neglect the dam for a season, it's not a huge loss.

When I was a kid, if there was a creek, I'd be damming it up. I guess I'm still doing that.

I'm also looking for any input on DIY creek damming technique.

A few more thoughts about the situation in general.

I think the creek dams will always leak to some extent. But mostly, the dam will hold more than the leak creating a "full" pool except in very dry situations.

My dam has zero chance of ever sealing with what knowledge I have at this point in time.

I recently walked a property that had a creek on it. The creek ranged from 10-20' in width. They had a series of small dams creating pools. The method of dam they used resembled a cable foot bridge (planks held together with two cables), which at first was placed across the creek perpendicular to the creek bottom, and eventually leaned over down stream. After time, a lot of small rock and silt had built up against the dam on the upsteam side. There was overlap in the planks.

Sunil can you share pics? How do you control the silt buld up when damming a creek?

RT, no silt control for my set up. That's not to say that I don't need something like that, but I currently don't have anything like it. The silt is built up heavily on the upstream side of the damn, and I believe this is what enables this dam to be almost permanent, making any breach occur on the very top level of sandbags.

I'll need to take some pics of the set up. I realized when I was typing all of the descriptions, that it would be confusing and hard to follow.

Sunil, I have pictures of the dam I built but do not know how to post them.

Any suggestions?

I have several sites I plan to build what I call shoulder or coffer dams. They will be low level and made of concrete and rock.

With my first dam, I am conforted to know that you have seepage problems too. I guess, alone a creek, there will always be some water leaking around, or under the dam.

I did my best to dig down to bed rock but I'm sure, I only dug down to rock.

There is probably a better rock bed below where I was able to dig.

I'm also concerned about establishing a fish population in my pools.

Any ideas?

Tahuaya Armijo

Rockytopper, I think I know how to handle the silt problem.

When necessary, I'm going to rent a pump and pump silt and water out of the pools like they do when the get sand out of rivers.

It ought to work.

What I will do with the silt, I will figure out when I have the silt to worry about.

Sunil, have you considered using bags of Quickrete, instead of sand bags and then driving rebar through the bags before they harden.

That might stop high water pushing your top bags off the dam.

Just a thought.

Tahuaya

Sunil, coffer dam in Spanish is dique de cofre.

Since Sunil does not sound American, I thought I'd provide some multi cultural exchange.

Tahuaya

For clarification purposes, Tahuaya, Sunil sounds like he is from Pittsburgh, not at all like an American.

Sunil is multi cultural. Ask him to say something in Scotch. Any brand of scotch will do.

Single malt, double malt, chocolate malt, ...

I have some pictures of the dam I built. How did you post your picture?

While building my dam, I went to the Soil and Conservation office and was given a booklet about dam building to create habitat.

The dams in that book are making of logs and rock. The dam I built is made of concrete and rock. I want mine dam to last longer than I do.

But, both the soil and conservation booklet and the dam I built have the water flowing over the top of the dams.

Now I've gotten literature from the local Extension office. That literature has water flowing through pipes and taking water from below the surface. They say that most of the nutrients in the water are within two feet of the surface and so if having fish is the goal, water should come from below the surface when released through the dam.

Well, my creek is shallow and I only have over two feet of water in a few places. I think having the water go over the dam is my only option.

Do any of you have dams along a shallow creek, have dams with water flowing over the top, and also have an active fish population?

I want to build from four to six more dams and I want to do this right if possible.

Tahuaya

See the Archive thread on posting photos (and all the other interesting stuff there). Then ask if you need more help.

_________________________

Posting photos - so easy 5 out of 6 moderators can do it!

Hopefully, Theo's post will help you get some pictures up.

I never thought of using quickcrete in the bags. Good idea.

I think that when damning up a creek, you have to figure on some amount of leakage around or through the dam.

Lusk once posted about using quikcrete to dam a creek (crick in some parts). He said to dig holes back into both sides of the embankment and start the bags there.