Hi again! Some of you will remember my posts from the late summer and fall fo 2010 when I was trying to fix a leaky lake. I posted a lot of pictures on Flickr and I think we al believed that was a great chance I had solved the problem.
But the work didn't help anything. I filled the lake back up with the well, and it immediately started dropping an inch a day. Over the course of 2011 it dropped the usual 8 feet.
Last summer I hired a friend with a backhoe to dig into the levee. He hit sand and stayed in sand.
I got the contractor's crew back out there last week. The lake is at the low pool stage and safe to work on. We started digging in the levee and hit red sand immediately. We kept digging sand. We dug red sand for two days. His own crew was speechless. The best we can tell is that they've dug out around 10,000 yards of red sand and still have a little more to get. there are mountains of red sand, so tall we had to push them back down the back side of the levee so we would have room to dump MORE red sand.
I've never seen anything like this. No one has. They built my lake out of sand, but topped it with enough good clay that it appears to be built out of clay. I truly do not think they did this to deceive me because I watched a lot of the work when we did this back in the 1990s.
I haven't said a word to the construction owner, who has been a friend for 15 years. All communication has been through his crew and him. I'm assuming he is going to be there in the morning to see this mess for himself and offer to fix it for free. If not, we will have our next big problem.
I'll post some pictures and give the link here as soon as I do.
"Bill Lake"
