We need some rain here - my pond is about 3' low. Weird year. We have had enough rain to keep things fairly green but not enough to fill the pond. Bought this place in 2014 and this is the first time it has not hit full pool at least twice per year. Its tough when July, Aug and Sept hits and the pond is not at full pool in June. I have lots of clay on all of the land, once the ground saturates it all runs to the pond. If the ground is saturated my pond will fill up fast.

We had 29" during Harvey and was almost a major disaster. When I bought the place the old overflow on the pond was a sieve down to the mud line so about 2 months before Harvey I had filled it with cement, cut a ditch in the dam and installed 24" black culvert poly pipe - corrugated. My dad has a backhoe so we did it ourselves. I had set a couple of posts on each side of the culvert pipe - can't even remember why. because the old overflow had leaked down to the mud line the pond was really low - probably 6' at least. I was excited when Harvey started dumping rain until I looked out the window at the pond. The neighbor's upstream pond spills into a creek bed that flows into my pond and his pond is probably 10' - 15' higher elevation then mine so his spilling into my pond and the saturated ground causing complete run off on my land plus the rain - my pond filled really fast.

Instead of the water entering the culvert pipe the corrugated poly pipe was bending and the water was pushing the end of the pipe up. It was dangerously close to ripping out the pipe which would have been a disaster. Luckily the dam is tall and we had buried it pretty deep. If we hadn't buried it deep it would have ripped out. I had to call my dad and get him to come over with the hoe and push the pipe back down while I put a cross member between the posts I had set to keep it held down. He reminded me in not so repeatable language that we were in a #%$&% hurricane but he did it.

That poly culvert seems really stiff but it sure got flexible with the force of the water. I was really lucky that we had buried it deep, that I had set the posts and that the clay swells so much and doesn't wash out. Also, I didn't know but when the water gets high enough it breaches around the side of the dam that is the lowest. The water can never breach the top of the dam because it runs around the low side and into a pasture. Luckily it breached the low side before the culvert got ripped out. If the low side had probably been just one or two feet higher I probably would have lost the pond. My very poor planning was offset by very fortunate circumstances.