Late February, 2022, there was a weather event like none we have ever witnessed.
Our little farm received over 26″ of rain in under 3 days.
Jody and Kallis were isolated on the farm for 5 days as the main bridge to the highway was closed.
Our animals poor were saturated & disorientated. We had to move them to more secure paddacks.
The extreme weather event caused mass erosion in the spillway of our dam, filled the dams with sand and debris, washed out two boundary fences and created a muddy mess for our animals.
With only centimetres of land preventing complete failure of our dam I knew I had to act fast. One more rain event would surely be enough to bust the wall.
After spending the best part of a day contemplating what I needed to do and liaising with friends I decided we needed to create emergency spillways at the top wall of our dam.
This allowed us to sandbag the eroded spillway to stop the water from continuing to overflow at that location.
It proved very difficult to stop the flow with one emergency spillway so we decided to make two emergency spillways.
With a bit of backing soil to help seal the sandbags and the two emergency spillways, we finally managed to stop the flow of water.
Then we had to create a break from the spillway dam by creating a mud weir break. This was done by hand. It was too boggy and wet to move any machinery around.
Now the situation was under control I was able to reflect the importance of this tree. Its root system is what potentially save the dam from failure.
We organised 2 truck loads of rocks to fill in the washout. This hopefully will prevent future washouts.
We also boxed up a concrete weir crossing which will assist with preventing washout in the future.
The paddocks were too wet to get the trucks unloaded any near the dam. So we got the big machinery in.
The excavator done an amazing job of filling in our hole with the rocks.
It sure did make a mess of our beautiful grass though and sank a long way in he soggy mud.
It was not long before our big hole was filled and relief was starting to settle in.
Then we compacted some top soil over the rocks and no-one would ever know we had a big there ever again.
We even decided to sneal a few more inches of water into the spillway for that little extra capacity.