Behind The Scenes Estimating A Big Pond Job

we're off on a mission i guess i'm now your blasting and hydrox and surveying helper so this is our access and we're going to do a behind the scenes today video on estimating a big project so i was contacted about two weeks ago to uh fix this pond dam right here that is failing and i'm just gonna do kind of a walk through of uh after i've already met the owner out here of uh kind of my steps on what i do to figure it out and come up with the solution for the repair and kind of a timeline of how long i think it would take so let's uh let's get started i'll show you the main problem somebody's put in a well the original overflow is out there it's a old 8-inch pipe for some reason it's like 50 feet out in the pond let's go over here and check it out so venturing out here on the pond dam as you can tell there was a previous beaver problem i think those have been eliminated not sure though um the old pipe is right there and what has happened is over time it has rusted down and the water is now about two and a half feet lower than where it needs to be so what we want to do is abandon that uh from a maintenance standpoint the owner wants to remove all the trees this pond was built in the late 60s early 70s from what he said and what we're doing today we're we're going to shoot some elevations to see how tall the pond dam is now if a uh pond dam is less than 25 feet tall the state does not have to get involved in because it's not posing a hazard for backing up so much water so what the plan is we're going to try to set the laser up and shoot some elevations from top of dam to down there and see kind of what i have but he wants to remove all the trees as you can see the pine trees right here are starting to die and as they die they fall over and for example right here this is a prime example so wind has blown this tree over right here this is what a pro this is what a lot of dams fail from is say we have a big hurricane we're getting 10 12 inches of rain that night winds blowing 70 miles an hour all these trees start falling down well this this blows over or if we come over here say this group of trees blow over this blows over well next thing you know you've lost the top of your dam so the pond's already at max pool it's full it's flowing over everywhere and now it has a new channel through the center because after these trees fall over it has loosened up about four feet of dirt and now this whole entire ten and a half acre pond is draining through this little ditch and that little ditch doesn't stay a little long when that much water is flowing through here and the next thing you know your whole dam has blown off so that's kind of the reasoning for taking all the trees off of pond dam plus you can keep it maintained a whole lot better so i've got to figure out how long it's going to take to clear all these trees off he's got a hundred acres over here that i can haul it all over here too and burn it so overflow pipe abandon it and we were thinking about doing a new overflow through the dam but let me take you down here and show you what we have over here so kyle's gonna hold the camera for me because this i took some pictures of it and this does not pictures do not do this justice no it's not even close so this overflow right here is what somebody else put in here it appears to be a that's about a four foot diameter riser pipe i would say almost might be 36 so it's like a four foot riser and i think it's a 30 inch pipe going out it is a 30 inch pipe going out so this was originally the spillway i guess and then somebody was like that pipe can't handle the amount of flow let's put this in here so that's fine that's like your normal overflow everything's peachy let's go back here this is where the problem starts right here so this is what happens when you discharge a 30 inch pipe uh i'll get a good view over here yeah this is what happens when you discharge now this is undermined so let's not walk down there so you have a 30 inch pipe now probably when they put this in it wasn't you know obviously it wasn't born down this far but uh when you put it on a slope of a pond dam and you get a big rain and it flows and flows and flows you end up with a hole my tape measure will not even go down that far but we're at we're at 12 feet and we're eight feet from the bottom little hole so there is a stay right here i'm gonna walk over here this hole does that put it into perspective and i'm still like six feet away from the hole [Applause] so what's happening now is it has created this humongous grand canyon as you can see we'll get this perspective from right here the grand canyon has formed right here and now every time it rains all this is pouring down and just completely undermining you can see the trees are falling over it's probably about to the point where it's not really going to do a whole lot more but we are now compromised of 50 of the pond dam is missing now so the pond is actually in danger of if there's a problem right here this would be where it's going to bust so what i've come up with a solution is to rip all this out and the new overflow's going to go right here and i'll have to explain it but instead of completely draining the pond down we'll walk back up here instead of completely draining the pond down and doing it normally normal i would put my overflow in the center but to do so i would have to empty the pond it's been here since the 60s there's probably a lot of fish in it i don't want to have to deal with that this dam's a whole lot taller than normal uh that i do so what i'm thinking about doing right here is going lowering the pond down about another six feet and putting a new riser right here stack two eight foot boxes right here run my pipe down so that'll be eight feet below water level and then when i get to back here i'll come in here clear all this out rebuild all this back i'll tie it into two more boxes and it'll stair step down another eight feet so that'll be 16 feet total of controlled uh elevation change of the water and then i can run the pipe i can slope it and run it out so uh yeah that's what we're that's what we're figuring out today is how many boxes need to be installed so that i can price all that out and come up with a total price right here but the overflow itself is going to be a very expensive overflow but there's really there's no good way of doing this because if i had to do it in the center it would cost more because i've got to drain the whole pond down and then i've got to manage you know the water during the process you get a rain six inch rain this thing fills back up i have more control doing it right here i can leave that old pipe over there and that'll act as the control level plus my siphons and i can build a nice berm right here so that if we do get a big flood this will not it will not come through here i would honestly almost rather go over the dam than to come through here and then i can get all this fixed back so we're gonna set the laser up see how good of elevations we can shoot and uh go from there colleges kyle just couldn't couldn't stand not going down there could you imagine the force coming out of that pipe how tall are you six two six four it's clay but that shows you the power of water as it's coming out of that pipe and free falling i bet that is an impressive sight even with that pipe half full i was gonna take a couple thousand yards of dirt estimate the power of water but water built the grand canyon i mean yeah and this is a mini grand canyon right here so all right well we're coming up with solutions yeah other than that's going to take a lot of dirt to fill that hole back you know what the you know what nobody's thinking about all this dirt went somewhere and it went that way let's go down here and check out where it went so i'm down here at the toe of the slope and there is the old eight inch ductile iron pipe and it looks about there's about an inch of water in the bottom of it coming out and it just kind of goes out into the wet area down here so what i've got to do is shoot my elevations from about right here and see exactly how tall that dam is but it's it's pretty tall it's going to be pushing the 25 feet we're about to find out all right so lasers set up we're checking grades right here on top of dam i'm getting getting my elevation five six it ain't rocket science you just need to write the numbers down 5.6 is elevation to right there so that's height of top of dam so i'm pretty sure this is a 25 foot stick lasers about five and a half feet off the ground so i'm not gonna be able to get a it's not gonna be tall enough so what i'll have to do is i'll go down here about halfway and get a grade write that down and then i'll calculate the difference from here make the mark down there and set the laser up down there and re-shoot it that way i don't have the stick out 25 feet and it's all all over the place so let's go down here and see where we can get an elevation oh we pulled up the wrong so new laser stick likes to get hung up and that'll happen there we go now we're good so what we got to do drop our sunglasses i'll get those in a minute is try to avoid the tree branches and get our elevation as we go up into the air here where did it go i heard it babe most likely there's a branch or something in the way where did it go so that's what happens when you're 17 feet in the air if you hit the uh the leaves get in the way so let's try to find it maybe over here a little bit all right so right here is 17.6 so i'll mark that as my spot write that number down calculate the difference we'll set the laser down here and check from here to the pipe down there so make sure we uh lock the leg in this thing right uh that's i think that's in the instruction manual that was in the blooper reel wasn't it the unseen footage we weren't filming and somebody forgot to lock the leg in and who was it who was that who was that somebody who also caught it as it was falling over you did with one hand who was standing there watching it you you're like we should have really filmed that that would have been great i don't think i set the laser up high enough we're about to find out though start spinning baby yeah i did put it on the hillside and it's not exactly i like it it's figuring out the levelness that's why we like top combos topcon has been good to my family good to you all right so that's saying we've uh we've maxed it out we've got to get it a little more level so it it auto levels itself and everything you can hear it sitting there moving around and it gets everything 100 level each direction see i wanted to do this old school but you're teaching me new things see i like to do everything where it's i can do it all myself so let's see it's ready to go now it was a little bit off that's what it took for me to figure that out but here we go 6.6 so that's get your little trusty dusty book here so 15 let's turn that around so we'll have to listen to that so 15 6 to 17 6 is going to be our elevation drop from the first stand and then we'll calculate 6.6 to whatever this is down here and we'll add those numbers together and those numbers together and that'll give us the grand total of how tall this dam is i'm sweating because it is 105 heated index out here you got to get out of air conditioning more i am out of the air conditioner oh not from what i see up she goes up she goes we're pretty tall grade rod doesn't get pulled out that far very often [Music] oh you start to look like you work on a utility crew without the tall things gotten 19-4 wow so now we write that number down and we calculate those distances and we'll know exactly how tall this pond dam is from slope from bottom of slope to top of dam so we've done our calculations from where we started at to midway was 12 feet of elevation change down when we reset the laser up to where it's at now that grade to where we ended up down here at toe of slope was 12 feet 8 tenths which comes up to 24 feet 8 tenths which is just barely under the 25 feet range that we have to stay under so ideally we're perfectly good to work on this pond um if we were too close i could literally shave the top of that dam down about six inches and that would give me the extra buffer that i need to be able to do this project so i'm happy with it now i can tell the customer that and he can make decision on whether he wants to handle this himself or get the state involved you know chris utility guys carry like a 300 foot tape on the truck that's one of those in the uh other truck but uh guess what we did not forgot that yeah i mean it's just minor minor things you know the good thing is this will do the same thing actually it won't be that bad going two pulls you good how much is it about 46 for the pipe i feel like we're going to need about a hundred and at least a hundred probably 120. so to build this slope back all right to build this slope back i've got to fill all this back into probably 20 feet past that tree right there so if you want to hold that somewhere right there let me get over there [Music] i think it's measuring right here hey it works that's 100 120 will do it that'll get my pipe that would get my pipes about where this tree is in the bottom right there and if it's just a channel after that we're good because really the toe of our slope ends right there so if we can get all that built back the structure of the dam is put back and this would just be what it is i mean it is what it is at this point i mean it's it can't get but so much worse and it's not like it's really affecting anything once you get that problem away from the dam it's not going to plus that pipe will be down there grade so it can't it can't wash out any lower because when you dump it out on grade it can't go any lower than what the water back there is it's not going to wash it out 10 feet deep and then come back up the water level it just kind of neutralizes what it is i mean the power of the equalizer equalizes it yeah exactly that's a good term equalizes the flow that's what we got yeah that's a mess right there that is what's really gonna be cool i mean i gotta take all these trees out right here yeah that's gonna be impressive when i get that clear and i parked that 220 right there in the bottom yeah at the bottom that's gonna look awesome pipe pretty crazy what the power of water can do amazing so that kind of gives you an idea of what all kind of goes behind the scenes on looking at a project like this so let's sum it up again abandon the old eight inch overflow that's out there in the pond we'll end up filling that with concrete wants to clear all the trees off the pond dam so what i've got to do is figure out how long it's going to take me to do that and then haul it out here he owns 100 acres right here of clear cut that i can get all my dirt from i can go out there but i've also got to factor in you know if i need two acres to get dirt from i've got to figure in stumping and clearing all that as well then i can burn everything uh up there get my dirt break down here fix all this you saw we kind of calculated elevation so i know how tall the pond dam actually is and we kind of measured for the new pipe right here with those elevations and what i measured off of that pipe i know that two boxes here slope on the pipe two boxes there and then slope on the pipe going out will make that transition that i need to make so what i'll do i'll calculate all that i have to go get price quotes for all that for the boxes for the pipe and then i know it's going to take me x amount of days to be able to dig this out install the new pipe get my dirt bring down here fix all that back and all that so that's pretty much the grand scheme of this project's pretty good project but uh it's really not not that over complicated and then at the end bring some dirt down here and regrade the pond dam so that he can keep it maintained i'm gonna keep the slope like it is i you can definitely mow that with like a skid steer and a brush cutter and or a tractor you'll just have to go up and down but that is the whole grand scheme is to uh get it where it is maintainable when i am done and then at the end we'll end up seeding and straw and everything to stabilize it and for some reason the elevation becomes an issue or something we always have the option of cutting down the top of the dam uh it will lower the pond some but you gotta gotta find a happy medium if we can lower it upon down a foot and cut the dam down a foot to get within the threshold we need uh that is a totally doable option but from what i could calculate right now we are within our limits to be able to work on this

Channel: letsdig18

Views: 149,525

Keywords: pond, lake, fail, failure, dam, spillway, overflow, repair, work, estimating, drain, washout, danger, tree, removal, grading, land, clearing, water, flood, survey, heavy, construction, equipment

Id: _k5JwZLlF4o

Length: 23min 25sec (1405 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 10 2022