Retention pond liner installation?

[245dlc]

Hi I'm going to be working on a retention pond with a group of older guys that have spent most of their adult lives building roads, landfills, lagoons, ponds, ditches, canals etc. Generally speaking most water retention structures we build we have ample heavy gumbo clay to build a good liner with. However this particular retention pond which is located in a swampy area full of silt, glacial till, and just plain lousy mud. So the engineers specced out some kind of liner that has a layer of bentonite clay in it and apparently is very heavy. The guys were talking about building something so the rolls could be suspended from an excavator and rolled out along the inside of the dike. I was wondering if something like a sideboom or a pipelayer would work better for this? And if there is anybody that builds a device for rolling out liners like this?

 

[Welder Dave]

I worked at a golf course that installed 2 custom liners in irrigation ponds. The heavy plastic type material was welded together and if more material had to be added required a special procedure. Everybody took about 12" piece of round dowel to wrap around the liner and we ran down the pond to lay the liner.

 

[245dlc]

I worked at a golf course that installed 2 custom liners in irrigation ponds. The heavy plastic type material was welded together and if more material had to be added required a special procedure. Everybody took about 12" piece of round dowel to wrap around the liner and we ran down the pond to lay the liner.

Yeah this isn't a little pond I think its something like a 1/4 mile wide by a 1/4mile long.

 

[Welder Dave]

Same idea but a smaller scale.

 

[Tinkerer]

I worked on a lot of garbage dump liners that used those heavy weldable plastic liners.
The rolls were rolled out manually by laborers.
I never saw one with the bentonite in it that you described.
If that is what you are dealing with that is whole different situation.
Do you know the width and length of the rolls ?
They may be to big and heavy to roll off of any type of axle inserted in the core. The center of the roll may be too tight to insert anything into it.
I mixed and spread many, many tons of bentonite with clay and it is time consuming process.
I had a phone call one time from a bentonite contractor that was in Australia offering me a job to do bentonite liner for him. I politely turned it down.

 

[cuttin edge]

worked around some decomissioned iron ore mines where they had a long tube through the center of the roll, and 2 three wheeled ATVs pulled the rolls across the lagoon bottom. They had done many like this and were really slick at it.

 

[aighead]

I plan to re-build a small yard pond at my house and I'm very interested in what this product is, if you could link to it? I've done a fair amount of research into building a swimming hole style pond but have never heard of a bentonite roll like you are speaking of, just the standard rubber liners (pvc, rpe, epdm...).

 

[Tinkerer]

Bentonite is clay.
It has unique way of swelling when it is mixed with water.
It is processed into a powder and transported with semi tractor trailers. It is unloaded with a blower just like bulk cement.
I have never heard of a roll of any kind with bentonite in it.
We dug pits and mixed the bentonite with water, and clay that was excavated locally. My job was to go into that mess with a dozer and create a very thick slurry that we then loaded into trucks with a track loader.
It was then transported to the area that was being sealed.

 

[DMiller]

Similar here, if had solid Clay to construct the retention levee and side walls not a problem but if leachable soil then the typical was to either use a spray truck with Bentonite slurry or apply Bentonite as a dry powder in lifts across the floor and side slopes until could water it into a cement-ish material that settled into the seeps.

 

[joe--h]

Engineers speced something, what is it & who makes it? The manufacturer should have the info you need.
Sounds like something that needs to be done right the first time or it's gonna be a real expensive screwup.
1/4 mile of anything is expensive.
Joe H

 

[Tinkerer]

If I remember correctly we had semi load of the powdered bentonite that paid for, and in transit when we finished one job.
I was told to take the truck somewhere out of sight and waste it to prevent the customer from seeing that they were charged for a load we didn't need.
At that time I was told it was valued at $10,000.00. That value may or may not have been true.

 

[Welder Dave]

They use bentonite for sealing holes after doing seismic testing.

 

[DMiller]

Use it as a pressure grout as well

 

[aighead]

In the context of small fishing or swimming ponds I've seen bentonite, as mentioned above, with the application of basically laying down a layer like 6" deep then sheepsfooting it in then adding more fill dirt on top and compacting that as well. I've also seen it just sprinkled over the top of the pond and it supposedly settles into the cracks.

At about $2k per ton (presumably a large bulk-but-still-consumer sized price) it's a bit pricey for how I'd use it, hoping that I got everything sealed up. It is pretty interesting stuff.

There is a similar material brand named SoilFloc (I believe) that if I understand it correctly behaves very similar to bentonite but is more similar to the junk in diapers that absorbs water, but will also find cracks and seal them up, supposedly really well, but it's also pretty expensive.

 

[TD24]

I plan to re-build a small yard pond at my house and I'm very interested in what this product is, if you could link to it? I've done a fair amount of research into building a swimming hole style pond but have never heard of a bentonite roll like you are speaking of, just the standard rubber liners (pvc, rpe, epdm...).

Google: American Colloid, Aberdeen, MS. Scroll down a bit to history of the company.
Fish around for the types of Bentonite. (It was hard to clean their forklifts to work on.)