Beaver Pond Spillway Repair

and on today's project we have a uh pond with beaver problems i know everybody's been uh excited for some beaver dam busting but we've already had to drain the water down uh this is actually the overflow pipe they have got it plugged up so much you can't even see the two ends of these well these 18 inch pipes that shouldn't be like that but uh it's still working so not too worried about that right now so trying to get that unclogged and uh i'll show you the the worst part of this project is the spillway over here that the beavers have completely made a dam across the owner has been working over the years pulling all the sticks out and piling them up uh just huge mountains of sticks and mud that they've smeared in there but we're going to take and cut all this out remove all this mess uh dig a hole bury it and get the good dirt to build the spillway back in and put a permanent matting in here to hold grade so that is the project for today but first i'm going to get these uh pipes unplugged uh so i can determine the grade so i know where to set the water level at because what's happened is the pipes have been plugged up and the pond's been over full and running out the spillway causing that to erode and fail like it has so [Music] so so [Music] so so [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] so so so it always amazes me how much stuff a beaver can bring up i mean these pipes evidently that was extended that's why it was loose or maybe it's already broke i have no idea but you can tell that they the beavers have brought up almost entire dump truck load of mud and sticks to block these pipes off it's crazy [Music] so so [Music] so [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so so so [Music] [Music] [Music] so so [Music] so so so now he is bringing dirt over here we're digging a borrowed pit cutting inside the hill to get the good clay to fill this and regrade the channel and then taking all this junk and putting it back into the pit [Music] so my so [Music] so so we found some pretty good red clay in that hillside he brings it over and i kind of put it in it was kind of too wet for the sketchier to get down in here to start with you can see a little bit of mud trying to squirt through there but this will bridge across it and make a nice compacted spillway when i get done just gonna keep tracking it in that's actually out in the pond so that doesn't really matter but uh key parts right here get it tracked in and packed in there real nice and tight and uh it'll be fine and dandy i gotta dig all that mess out too i don't know what was going on they had all sorts of stuff rigged in here big hole dug over there got all the clay to regrade this spillway i just actually put a little bit of topsoil in there so the grass seed will have something to uh kind of bed down into versus that hard packed clay just put the up bucket on now i'm going to come down these edges and pull those back and get it where you can actually drive a ride and mower through here so they can get to the other side and keep everything maintained around here so i've got the spillway graded out i got to drive across it and finish grading that out uh come a pretty good little rain shower so i didn't get any uh outdoor video of grading that as all the cameras would have got wet so all i got to do now is finish slicking this up as i drive out and uh go ahead and we'll put all our matting down got all the uh debris that was right here shoved up there and kind of just spread out in the woods so now all that beaver debris is removed uh trimmed the pipes back there was no need for them to stick out uh six feet because they were trying to float and that's why all that crap was on it trying to hold them down so uh the beavers have been removed so that shouldn't be a problem now now the pond can actually drain out of that um a little bit of straw what's left this bale right there and the spillway is now filled back in graded and permanent matting installed on top of that so as you remember this where is where the pipes were clogged up causing order to run through here all the time which in return eroded it out and caused the pond to stay low uh because the spillway had been eroded down two or three feet lower than normal level so now the water should come up to probably about the base of those rocks maybe a little bit higher up on them and um the pipes will take care of the normal rains and then when it's obviously too much it will flow through here so we put i don't know how many hundreds of staples in here and got everything shingled so that as that water comes across it will run over the matting all the way down here and it just kind of goes into the abyss of everything and i got the hole filled in with all the junk that we accumulated out of these um ditches and the beaver debris there in front of that pipe so yeah there it is all graded out and complete took about six hours six and a half hours ahead in it i just laid the rocks on there just as a little extra protection to hold that matting down once the grass comes through it won't it won't go anywhere that's the permanent matting so it will always be here we'll never i mean in 50 years it'll probably gone but i've been on jobs ten years later and uh it was still there so nice even transition down to the uh tree line down there you

Channel: letsdig18

Views: 282,582

Rating: 4.9463215 out of 5

Keywords: mini, excavator, trackhoe, track, hoe, digger, bagger, yanmar, takeuchi, skid, stter, compact, loader, beaver, dam, busting, breaking, pond, overflow, drain, pipe, fail, failure, spillway, grading, building, heavy, construction, equipment

Id: iqzW5quVjJo

Length: 25min 44sec (1544 seconds)

Published: Tue May 04 2021