Is Our DAM SAFE??? What Happened After a BIG RAIN 🌧!!!

so this morning i was laying in bed and i could hear this roar just continual and i was like that sounds like a lot of water well we've been getting a lot of rain here in southern missouri for the past 24 hours and i peek out the window and i look out back and i can see our little water back here like the little dry creek that runs down and it had some water going to it and i was like that surely isn't where all the sound's coming from and i walked to the front of the house and here's what i see so if you watched our build of this cabin last spring you've seen me shoot some of our uh spring and it running because we had we had quite a bit of rain last year whenever we were building the cabin but i never seen it like this i mean it is thumping it is pumping out some water right now i could definitely be producing some hydroelectricity right now if it was working so i'm going to bring you down to show you guys the dam because it's uh it's got a lot of water in it make a guess so she's to the max obviously i mean it's the porn over right now so it's up so high it's also a little bit a little bit is starting to come around and wash around here i'm going to remove some of this dirt maybe relieve a little bit of pressure and let the water come let a lot of water start flying out of the plumes i don't know we need some of this water a little faster not have so much built up over the dam core now so over there is the dam the water will this is where i had the other pipe that was coming out i was going to build a pond over here so here's this other dry creek that i've got there is a spring up there but it produces very minimal amount of water and when it reaches this point it it's pretty much underground anyway but it's rolling pretty good too so i'll show you where these two meet actually i got i got three little dry creeks i got to spring and then two little dry creeks and there's a spot down here where they all meet up together and there's a little waterfall and i bet it's really pretty today let's go down look at it so here's water coming from the spring and this got some parrots yes so i crossed the fence i'm on government land now here's this other dry creek and they're all just about i don't know not very far i mean here's the government dry creek right over there those pipes are and this side of them is my spring water and then on the other side of them is that other dry creek that's on my property so here's our little waterfall this actually isn't on our piece of property this is on the government land but my my fence is pretty much right there where these downed trees are up here and then there's uh the land or the water continuing on across the government land and it goes it stays on the government land for the remaining journey until it reaches a much larger creek or river however you want to call it and that's probably about a mile away the water is running everywhere it can today it's everywhere lots and lots of water it's pretty i love it being down here love being at a place where you just have access to lots of water and there's just springtime and you get lots of rain another thing about the ozarks that i love is you know we get i think 46 inches 48 inches of rain annually however i would say that's historically but i would say in the last 10 years you might add 10 inches to that and that's probably more accurate gus and i are kind of having a hard time we're trying to figure out how deep this is that's pretty deep buddy i want to cross but i don't want to get it over my muck boots actually i'm sorry these aren't looks anymore i traded dry shod see right here is the point where my dry creek and my spring water come into play right in here i'd love to get this area cleaned up some more and make this a sitting area i don't know if somebody has some ideas shoot them at me of what what i could do in this little spot it's just a little peninsula between the two waters and i'd like to do something here but i got to get it cleaned up first but if you have any ideas on what i could do here let me know i'm back up here at the water wheel and damn now since i opened the flume i've noticed that the water level has dropped on the dam which is good what concerns me is get because we're supposed to get more rain like i looked at the radar and we it's supposed to rain all day today supposed to rain tomorrow so i would say a possibility of another two or three inches is very likely i don't want it filling up so much that it's going over the top of the van so i'm a little bit concerned about that right now my goal is to get it lowered as quickly as i can it is dropping i would say since i pulled the flame and walked down there and show you guys the other parts of the creek i'd say it's probably dropped an inch i'm gonna go over to the other side and see if it's still kind of coming around grady came to tell me my coffee coffee water was whistling at me i gotta get my coffee made so that's something that i've really got to figure out maybe a better solution but we are pulling our water for the cabin from the spring i've got a pump inside the spring head which right now is a brown murky mess so i know if we try to pull water right now the water in the tank's fresh and clear but the more we use that water it's going to pull this brown murky water into it so i don't i don't know i don't have no solutions for that yet so anyway we'll see how that goes a lot of water huh i mean all this debris was up on top because i mean the water had come all the way up to this edge which jerry had this idea after we built the dam he said you know you might want to go get you some blocks but you can see our dam and then we put another concrete block up on top of that i don't know i think those are maybe four inches and so we laid that across the top to give it a little bit more height and i'm glad he did because we needed it otherwise all this rain would have been spilling over the top all the way across here it has gone down some more i don't have the water running around like i did so that's good yeah i can tell just by this area right here i wish this wasn't happening because i know it's washing out that right there but it's not as severe as what it was when i first pulled it the water wheel's not spinning as fast as what it was when jerry first installed it it's definitely not going as fast could be those bearings somebody did tell me you know you're going to have a lot of maintenance with trying to produce electricity from the water wheel or wagon wheel like this so it's been a few weeks now since i shot the video of the clips that you guys just seen and yeah we had a ton of water a lot of water over that period of time since then things have kind of gotten back to normal is the dam still here did it break did you lose all your water no we didn't so some of you may have been asking yourself or wondering is our damn safe because i've had people leave comments in previous videos telling me that we did not construct our damn right that we did not use enough rebar so on and so on as you know everybody is an expert when they're watching somebody else's life and everybody's got an opinion on how you can do things better and don't get me wrong i love when people give us opinions or their advice if it's helpful advice i don't like people being rude and i have a one strike rule for my youtube channel and that is if you are rude or say anything hateful about me or my family you're immediately blocked from our channel to where you can no longer leave comments ever again i don't have time to mess with replying back to stupidity so i just don't so about our dam now listen jerry as you guys know jerry was the builder of our cabin and our dam jerry has been in construction and building things his entire life he also built our water wheel and many of you sang jerry's praises when it came to his ideas and his just know how on how to do things when it comes to our damn i completely believe we did it correctly because i put my trust in what jerry knows how to do things so a couple of things i just want to point out to you guys some some people had this misconception that we didn't use enough rebar trust me we we put a lot of rebar in there maybe i didn't show it in the clips but i put enough rebar in there jerry wouldn't have let us build this dam if i didn't have enough rebar in it we used plenty of rebar we also went deep enough into the ground on our footings whenever we did it we also used the proper consistency of concrete jerry made sure that whenever we were pouring the dam so let's move on from that somebody also said that when you're building a dam you don't need to build it in a straight line and we didn't i'm going to show you an aerial clip right now okay scratch the drone idea i could not find my sd card for my drone a little frustrating so i'm just going to show you guys from this angle so you can see our dam is not in a straight line you can see it's it's at an angle then it comes this way there's a bend right here and then it comes this way in a somewhat straight line and then has another angle so not in a straight line folks not in a straight line so let's drop that as well as far as thickness of our dam we used eight inch walls on the sides and here in the middle we used 10 inch walls the other thing that i want to point out is just our dam size this is about the size of a very small pond it is i haven't like measured it but it's not big and also it's not very tall i'm about six foot tall i don't have my rubber boots on right now so i'm not going to get down in the water but even at right here probably a little over four foot right here at this spot where i'm standing so it's not holding a ton of water some of you have been so concerned about if the dam broke and the people below me there's a lot of people back there as i mentioned in this video from my property to where this goes to another creek is all government land there is no houses between here and there at all none whatsoever so we can drop that as well i can tell you what my biggest concern for safety with our dam is the trees mainly because i didn't realize that whenever we were building the dam that i was gonna have so many trees that were in the water especially this great big white oak now it is leaning that way it's not leaning towards the dam but i do have other trees around the dam so that's to me a bigger concern is let's say a windstorm comes through or these trees die and eventually will fall but my plan is with that is i'm going to drain our pond at some point and then i'm going to have these trees cut and removed so that i don't have to worry not all the trees but at least some of the ones i'm more concerned about so that we don't ever have to worry about an accident happening like that if falling on the dam so since we had the heavy rain we haven't had really any heavy rain like that again that was a that was the only time so far this spring where the dam has filled up quite like that now i could add some more block on the wall which might be a possibility to give me more height something i did not think about was my six inch pipe if i could have gotten to it which i'm not sure if i could have that day but if i could have gotten to it or had some sort of a valve on there that i could manually open it a little bit easier i could have opened that i let some of the water drain out that way jump across this okay something else i wanted to show you guys in the video i had a lot of water coming down right here what happened was was it was in this position like that and so the water was hitting it and just knocking it over but what i ended up doing was i had my flume board pulled i laid it across here and then i put it back into this position and when i did that it kind of opened the channel a little bit more to allow more water to flow through without hitting it and that stopped its spilling down there and while i'm here at the water wheel really quickly i'm just going to let you guys know kind of what's going on with that still haven't been messing with it at all i have been talking to spencer at langston alternative power he's in south carolina and we've been trying to come up with a solution for me to produce hydroelectricity another way so stay tuned for that i'm not quite sure exactly what it's going to be yet but we're going to come up with another thing instead of using the water wheel the water was not out of the question yet it's just that i'm gonna be doing something else right now that i think would be better and more efficient than the water wheel so guys thanks for checking out today's video i appreciate you guys always stopping by and see what's going on here at off-grid cabin called the moon shack and now that i've addressed some of the safety concerns with our dam hopefully we can move on to more important things thanks guys have a wonderful day and god bless you

Channel: Loftis Party of Six

Views: 187,234

Rating: 4.9013338 out of 5

Keywords: Dam, Building a dam, Off grid dam, Hydroelectric, Off grid hydro, How to build a dam

Id: Qbi5kjuaN30

Length: 17min 37sec (1057 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 11 2021