I recently had a pond built in Southwest Mississippi, near Tylertown. The pond was dug by a local contractor using a bulldozer. Completely full the pond should be about 3/4 of an acre and water should be about 6-7 feet deep in at deepest spots. The pond was dug in May of last year (2022) and never filled up over summer due to dry conditions. In fact becoming 100% dry in October. Now we have finally got some good rain storms and cooler weather and pond is maybe 1 - 1 1/2 feet at deepest location, but never gets and deeper, even with a 1 inch rain. I am pretty certain that I am not getting enough runoff to support filling pond. I was thinking of drilling a well to fill pond, but don’t want to waste money if pond will not hold water. One more piece of info. When digging pond contractor scraped off topsoil and got down to “red” clay. He did not use a compactor, only bulldozer to compact soil. You guys are so smart and have seen it all. Do you think soul will eventually compact after enough water is on soil to hold water? And do you guys think a well is the best option to fill it?

I would give it some time before I started fixing. The soil can take quite awhile to fill, seal, and saturate adjacent soils. Dirt is porous. And, a lot of us will tell you that we all have a certain amount of leakage. Get to know it before lining it with $$$.

Keep track of the water level, if you can stick a yardstick out there on a piece of pipe to measure the vertical amount of water movement, do it. If you are still getting precipitation and the pond is still going down, then I'd be suspect of the pond not being compacted enough. Unless you have really , really good clay content, tracks on a dozer won't compact the soil. The tracks are there to prevent the dozer from sinking into the soft ground, so they typically don't compact the soil. Now, if he were to pull a sheepsfoot roller around those are used to compact the soil.

If the pond isn't compacted enough with good dirt to hold water, a well won't do you much good. Like Bob Lusk says a bathtub holds water great except when the plug isn't in place. Think of the pond like that, the porous areas are like having the plug out of the bathtub.