pond cleanout methods

Actually the wetter the mud the better. It slides a lot better and the machine doesn't get as bogged down with sticky mud. Seems they are never dry if they have had cattle running to them.

We cut the dam to drain the water then set the excavator where we want to throw most of the mud. I start on one side pushing to the excavator with a dozer. Generally takes two days to clean the mud and rebuild. We cut the dam where we will run the stock water pipe out and throw the mud on the other side.

JBGASH said:

Powerjoke & gwhammy, do you cut the dam and let it drain a while (week or two) first before getting in it with the loader? Or do you bail right in it?

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Just Jump in balls deep! A little water will help you more than hurt your, it keeps your tracks clean and helps keep the stuff sliding. And on a side note if your not going to wait 2-3yrs there is no since letting it drain....... Trust me a week or even a month or even 6months won't dry it enough to help you out at all.

Pj

Like powerjoke said waiting on a pond to dry is futile, the top few inches might dry out but it'll go to slime as soon as you break through that. Cleaned a lot of them out with a loader, and run a hoe if for some reason water is short and the property owner doesn't want to lose what little they have. Done that way you cant re seal the bottom or dam though. I do quite a bit of pond work and have a 953 with single bar lgp pads to wade in the slime. They don't bridge like a three bar will and they keep pullin. Cut it to good solid ground on your approach and keep it there, then its just a matter of stacking up the slime to dry for a year or so.

John

PJ, Bruce & JD88 - This will be the first pond cleanout for us, will bail the 953C in the slop and go for it. I think to be on the safe side I will have the winch truck handy and tied off to a big tree just in case the need arises. Prolly have an excavator close too. Because that slop / mud looks deep to me.

Yair . . . As an overload of information . . . In the "old days" on the stations dams and tanks were constructed with "pounds" in effect low levees to contain the slop when silt scooping so it didn't ooze out and bog up the area where the horse teams or tractors were working back and forth.

As mentioned up thread regular silt scooping was seen as normal maintenance. No longer the case. Modern folks seem to think the laws of gravity have changed and think they can build tanks and dams in awkward inaccessible places with no thought at all as to how to clean them out . . . in fact talking to some clients they don't even realise the dam is going to silt up.

Incidentally those pounds of mud once dried a bit were the most fertile soil in the paddock and traditionally they were fenced with netting and planted to pumpkins and particularly to water-melons for Christmas.

I can well remember we were walking three Twenty Ones backwards into a mongrel northerly, the dust was like you wouldn't believe. It was stinking hot and we happened across a dam with a crop of melons growing in the mud pound and I tell you never has a water-melon tasted so cool and sweet.

Cheers.

Lol scrub there is definatly a difference in our mucks, i have never seen pond muck in my area that would grow anything for.........well forever lol, it is normally discarded in a ditch. They grey nasty crap gets so hard you can't plant a tomato with a pick axe after it's dry..... Black as coal and looks like the best stuff in the world but it's not the case,

Reminds me of a funny story, one time back in the late70's the local town cleaned out the city lake and everyone came and got picup loads and dump truck loads of this stuff for the garden.....well the entire city of harrisonville about starved to death that winter because nobody had any vegetables haha

Btw, gash harrisonville isn't too far from where you plan on working so don't sell it to a little ole lady for her garden she's liable to beat ya to death with a broom when she figures out where you got it at lol


Edit: I should add what we end up doing with it most of the time is trying to stack it against pond slopes (it's like trying to stack flour) and then tend to it at least twice over a year or so and flip and fluff it, after a couple years push it upon the dam and cover with black dirt.

Just a word of advise to your customer, make sure he fences off the spoil because cows can get bogged down very badly and I have found them dead before in it no joke! I think mainly what happens is they'll get adventurous about the time there's a thin crust on it and fall through 3' and can't get out and end up freezing in it because we always clean out ponds in the summer time and by the time it's about 6mo later before it's solid enough for a person to walk on the top 4-6" layer.


Pj

It's a blue mud up here in north Missouri. Nasty crap. Like powerjoke said, we let it lay then push it back up into the back slope on the dam or into a gully behind. It takes forever to dry.

If you jump in balls deep it's going to be a long futile job. Keep solid footing, don't go in at hardly any angle on the slope. That's why I cut threw the dam to keep the machine flat. Been stuck several times not paying attention to what I'm doing. Six inches of the wrong move will hang you. So far I've been able to pull it out with the rubber tired backhoe, just don't keep trying if it won't move.

The ones that are the most fun are those that have been fixed sometime. Work off of both sides down about eight feet to the waterline building up the dam. Makes the bottom look like a large M. We let the mud set at least three years before knocking down and smoothing up. Still find soft spots. I have found thet the bigger the dozer the less trouble. The 6H XL's we use now are far better than the old 10K's we had.

Balls Deep aint the place to be in pond slime!!! Keep solid ground under ya. Several years ago we had a 941 on the farm. My dad needed a pond cleaned out and I didn't have times to do it right then so he decided he would try it. My dad could drive the 41 but was no operator. I told him to start on one end and start working his way in. He decided the pond was "dry" so he could jut cut about 4" at a time out of it. He made it about twice the length of the machine and then it just sunk!!!! He came to the house that afternoon to get help and when I got down there the platform was even with the top of the mud. Thank heavens for 200 horses of JD green and all the chain I could muster around home we pulled it out. The next day I made time to clean out his pond.

Start on the side and keep clean ground under ya. Never run off in the goo and you'll be fine.

John

But just think of all the good memories from those days when you look back

I do it like powerjoke and gwhammy. Cut the dam and start crowding the mud. You'd be supprised at how much mud you can move in one pass if it all starts to slide. Sometime its only a one day job. Some ponds here are rooted out and the backside of the dam is higher than the core. These are a pita. You either cut a long channel to drain it or push up hill which is a loosing proposition.

I wish some of the ponds we have cleaned out were like what you guys deal with. There all in housing developments surrounded by houses with crappy access. Everything has to be hauled away and it is never done when it sould be. Mostly when the inflow is under a foot or two of silt and we get a bunch of crappy weather just to make it interesting.

Dickjr. said:

I do it like powerjoke and gwhammy. Cut the dam and start crowding the mud. You'd be supprised at how much mud you can move in one pass if it all starts to slide. Sometime its only a one day job. Some ponds here are rooted out and the backside of the dam is higher than the core. These are a pita. You either cut a long channel to drain it or push up hill which is a loosing proposition.

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Pushing mud below a dam would not fly here in California. Salmon lay eggs in streams and salmon are barely surviving compared to the good, old days. They'd fine you hefty for that technique. But I can see how it makes sense to cut open the dam. I hate pushing mud and I hate getting stuck even more. Most likely it'd start pouring rain after I got stuck.

Most excavators around here cut the dam and await a year of dry out prior to accessing the silt, they then use older large dozer to push the softer silt out to one side then a loader to either dump truck it or reposition it where the farmer can disperse the good soil elsewhere. Big mess cleaning one wet, saw a company with D10's pushing the slop out of a pond bottom, ate up the running gear and almost broke even doing it that way.

Yair . . . Desilting dams then and now.

I have been banging on about silt scoops on HEF for years. The first picture taken in 1938 shows eight feet of mud being taken out of a little stock tank . . . about 1500 cubic meters total at 500 meters per day with a horse-team for haul back and I believe a Fowler crawler (single cylinder, about twenty hp) in the distance hauling out. As you can see nothing got wet or muddy.

The second picture of course is the modern way to do it

As I have said old technology works and it beats me why anyone would put machinery into that muddy crap.

With you there. I bet there's a lot of outfits wish they'd kept a dragline at the back of the yard instead of going for the scrap money.

Yair . . . ih100

I bet there's a lot of outfits wish they'd kept a dragline at the back of the yard instead of going for the scrap money.

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That too. The problem with draglines though is they are a large and complex piece of kit and have to be transported to the site . . . the silt scoop being pulled back by that horse team would weigh maybe 300 kilograms plus a couple of rolls of rope.

There is a need and an untapped market for cleaning out dams in dry times.

The problem is that using "conventional" methods it's so expensive and, folks in general, don't know these old tried and proven methods exist.

Just to explain what I assume is going on in the old black and white photo. . . . The crawler has hauled the scoop of mud out, you can just make it out against the pile of mud in the windrow. He has been waved to a top by his off-sider and is waiting for the teamster to hook the horses to the return line which was dragging along behind . . . you can see the bloke bending over behind the team. There is a spare team for rotation.

Notice how tidy they have kept the site and how you can see the depth of mud and how it's slumping to the scoop . . . these days, with tractors or pickups and two way radio you would just run back and forth.

Cheers.

Scrub Puller do you have any close up pictures of that silt scoop?

Yair . . . 245dlc. I have been looking for better pictures of units in operation, no luck so far . . . this is what they look like from new . . . .

The second unit can be rigged to roll and scoop both directions, I always thought it better to make two units and work them back to back. Less things to go wrong and have worked all day and never stepped in mud . . . same too with the D4 it was going back and forth in dust. We pulled back with a Fordson.