Pond Boss Forums INTRO New Forum Member Introduction Central Ohio Pond

Hi! I wish I'd known of this site years ago when we bought our property with our pond!

We live in central Ohio and bought property that had an existing 2.5 acre pond. It was created 30 years prior (we've been told) by damming up a creek that runs through the property. Approximately 235 acres of farmland feed into our pond. This is not ideal, to say the least. The pond is now mostly full of dirt and we started a few years ago looking for someone to fix it for us. This has been no easy feat. NO ONE wants to do this work. We had several people quote us and claim they wanted to do it, but they never showed up. We found someone last fall who says he wants to do it. He has gone so far as breaching the dam for us so that most of the water can drain and the dirt can dry out before he excavates this coming year, so he says. Fingers crossed he actually shows up to do the work, which includes:
* Removing all vegetation from all areas of the dam and surrounding banks (30+ years of trees, shrubs, etc)
* Removing all the excess dirt from the pond. He gave us an estimate of how much dirt he thought that was but I can't remember. A lot. Then more.
* Move all the dirt to other parts of our property
* Rebuilding/repairing the dam in some areas
* Fixing the overflow pipe (make it bigger)
* Create a way for us to manually control the depth of the pond
* Repair/improve the emergency spillway

I plan to spend a lot of time here in the coming weeks reading everything I can find that is similar to our situation. Hopefully this guy shows up and does the job. We're looking forward to having our pond restored mostly for swimming and fishing.

Welcome!

I'll keep my fingers crossed for you as well.

Welcome and good luck!!

235 acres of watershed in Ohio for a 2.5 acre pond is TOO MUCH!

Most of us worry about having too little water for our ponds. You have the opposite problem.

When you are removing fill from your pond, you might consider building a few berms to divert some of the surface runoff around your pond. If the topography allows, you should preferentially divert the water from the most frequently tilled land.

Another option is to add a settlement pond upstream of your main pond. You are going to have to utilize heavy equipment to accomplish your goals for the main pond. Once the pricey stuff is on site, adding another small pond should not add too much more to your total costs - and you will get a much longer productive life for your main pond.

Good luck on your project!

Welcome to the forum! You have a lot of watershed, you will need a big overflow pipe. To help adjust the level of water in the pond you could either use a siphon drain where you can manually start the siphon and stop it when you reach the level you want, or look into a Flashboard Riser system if you have water continually going into the pond - it will allow you to adjust the level of water by adding or removing boards.

Agri-Drain makes the Flashboard riser systems.

FishinRod has some good advice and forward thinking. . Think of ways to divert most of the water entering the pond. A small ditch or large catch basin will divert a lot of the bad water quality water of muddy and nutrient enriched. A lot of phosphorus attaches to silt. Someone creative could have a plan to implement a control of flow method for the pond. Maybe local Soil&Water Conservation Service could provide advice / ideas. This is part of their job description. Likely most of the water shed going into the pond is muddy runoff water that transports fertilizer enriched water and sediment into the pond. These things rapidly shorten the life of the pond and create way TOO much plant growth that may result in too much later chemicalization to kill way too many nuisance plants. A sediment catching pond could be useful but no doubt with that much water shed of 200 ac the sediment pond would just be a wide flow through, short time, retention ditch that does not trap very much sediment nor nutrients. The preliminary sediment wetland pond would be best used for a small water shed. For my pond with 50 ac watershed I built a large catch basin drain system to divert the water around the pond.

That's a big undertaking! My pond is also fed by irrigated farmland so it stays muddy a lot of the time too. I'd like to hear how the operation goes. Please keep us posted.

Removing the fill will be time consuming. That stuff can be the consistency of pudding. Until it dries out, not a whole lot can be done.

Thanks everyone. Yeah, we know 200+ acres is too much watershed. Not much we can do about it, we didn't plan it that way. We're pretty sure it's impossible to divert the water without going on someone else's land due to where the creek and pond are on our property in relation to property lines and topography, and asking for permission to do that isn't really an option we want to pursue. We thought of doing the sediment pond but Bill Cody has some interesting points that considering the amount of water that comes through here, it might not really do any good.

But maybe diverting the water deserves some more attention. Unfortunately the creek comes in at the base of a very large hill, so diverting it the closest/easiest direction means digging through the hill which isn't going to happen, plus that dumps the water out almost exactly on our property line. Not ideal. But we might want to re-examine diverting the water the "long way" around. Thanks for suggesting that and making me re-think it.

Esshup is correct that we plan on using one of those methods for manually controlling the water level. I think we're leaning more toward something like the riser system.

I added a photo that sort of shows our situation. The top of the photo is North, the creek lines are marked in red as to where they come in. The creeks flow through a valley. Big hill to the west and south where our house sits. The green line marks the original outline of the pond, looks like Google got a shot from when we had it drained down a few years ago. Maybe we could not extend the pond to its original outline and instead let the creek come in and flow directly to the overflow? Build another dam between the creek and the pond? What would we use for a spillway for the pond then? Hmmm. Interesting.

You are going to have lots of dirt (silt and muck) available if you are going to clean out the pond. Where are you going to spoil that fill? Might as well use it productively if you don't have good spots for it.

I like your idea of extending the creek a little farther. One option would be to then build two small creek diversion dams. You could put a small culvert (8"?) at a lower elevation in the dam where the creek diversion sends water to fill the pond. That dam should have lots of freeboard, so it is never over-topped in a flood. You could then put a large culvert (36"?) set with the bottom elevation just above the top of the small culvert. The idea would be that small rain events go through the small culvert and feed your pond with cleaner water. Large rain events would also feed your pond, but most of the flow would go around your pond through the "emergency spillway" (the large culvert) at your creek diversion dams.

How big is the existing outlet pipe for your pond?

You will have to adjust the sizing of any diversion project based on your actual experience with heavy rains running off of your watershed. For example, if the emergency spillway of your pond is utilized twice a year, for water flows that overwhelm your 24"(?) outlet pipe, then you will have to modify your stream diversion dam outlets accordingly. You might have to forgo the large 36" culvert and just build a designed hardscaped diversion spillway for big rain events if your flows are that high. (Or the large culvert is ugly, etc.)

Good luck, you definitely have lots of options to optimize the features of your pond. Judging by the satellite view, it should be a beautiful property with a vibrant pond if you can get everything balanced correctly!