My pond is just around an acre of disturbed soil. Its an oval shape with the long end around 300 feet by 175 feet wide. All the springs are on the other side of the road from me but they collect through a 24" culvert. I collect the outlet of this culvert into a big box and run 4" pipe from the box to the pond. I am only running that pipe about 1/20th of what it can handle so if I got a good rain, I will send a lot of water to the pond. One of the reasons I still have some hope of this working is we haven't had more than 1/10th an inch of rain per week since I started filling the pond. Last weekend there was flash floods about 50 miles north of us with 7 inches of rain in 4 hours but we got around 1/10".
I think one of the issues I am having is compaction of the undisturbed side. We focused a lot of effort on removing dirt from the high side and building the berm on the low side. The berm is about 12 feet or so high. There was a 5 foot deep key way cut all the way around the low side. The berm was built about 12" at a time and then compacted with an excavator and dozer. After all completed we rolled it in with the big loader I have talked about but we really didn't do anything to the side we were removing the dirt from. The guy helping construct this wasn't worried about that part of the dam at all. He stated it will eventually saturate but the low side could leak and get worse fast.
I have no leaks on the low side that I can tell. I have an 8" overflow and drain that goes 40' through the berm and I can see no seepage through there either. Maybe a pic would help. I will see if I can find a few to post. Thanks again for your interest!
