My parents have about 50 acres that had a large pond on it when they bought the land. The pond was built by the previous owner by widening out and damming up a wet-weather creek. The lake was long and maybe 200 feet across. It narrowed then split at the end opposite the dam where two dry creeks border a wedge-shaped island/peninsula. The land is mostly sand and the pond would shrink down to about half it's normal size in the summer if we were in drought conditions, but the deepest end never completely dried up.

About 5 years ago we had a very large rain storm that dumped nearly 15 inches in about an hour. The dam on a a neighbor's pond up one of the creeks collapsed and the resulting flood was enough to collapse our dam. As things settled down a bunch of sand was dumped into our pond. I'm currently in the process of pushing that accumulated sand out of the pond bottom. Once I've got the pond back to it's original depth then I'm going to start rebuilding the dam.

The old dam was definitely not wide enough to hold back the amount of water that the pond was capable of accumulating, and there was no spillway. The old dam was built along the edge of a seam of sandy red clay that crosses our property. The clay is not very high quality and probably 99% of the soil on the property is too sandy to use for building the dam. I'm planning on trying to get as much of the red clay as I can to use for the dam, but I'm not sure if it's pure enough to really hold up under stress.

I'm planning on building the dam back nearly twice as wide as it was previously. It was originally barely wide enough to drive a vehicle over. It had a 12" culvert that extended through the dam for runoff. The way water ran into the pond, if we got a large rain the dam always overflowed. I'm planning on making a spillway on the end with the gentlest slope. At present I'm not planning on running any pipe or culvert through the dam itself. I will try to get out and take some pics of the current state of things in the next couple of days.

Before I do any serious work on the dam I thought I'd come to the experts and see if anybody has any suggestions or comments.