Cleaning a pond

[papa15]

A little off topic, but please forgive me...just looking for help with my main project....

Attempting to clean out about a 1.5 acre pond. Pond is about 60 years old. We bought the place last year in March. By July the pond was covered with duck weed. Had a fella break the dam to drain the pond in October. He had estimated it would take 4-5 days to clean the pond once it dried, but after the water drained, he told me he grossly underestimated since the pond was full of sediment (multiple feet of it). I purchased my 455 E in June with the intent to clean the area around the pond (to prevent leaves and limbs and stuff from falling into the pond, and then once it dried to attempt to remove some/most of the dirt, leaving the operator a couple of days work to close the dam and finish the edges of the pond....

Anyway, I think I have come across a spring in the pond. It is near the standpipe. I have about 8-12 in of brown dirt, then reddish clay, and under that appears to be blue clay (about sky blue). In dry areas, the reddish clay is hard as a rock with no sponginess at all. Near the standpipe area, everything is spongy as can be. When I have gotten stuck has been in a wet area when I go to pick up a loaded bucket; the shift in weight as the bucket comes up makes the front of the tracks just sink, and in the spongy blue stuff, it seems to sink forever. I took a shovel into the lowest spot I hit today and I dug another 18 inches (well below the bottom of the standpipe) and the blue stuff is still wet....do I have to dig below the level of that blue stuff???

My intention is to work away from the standpipe area and remove the brown dirt as long as the underneath layer is firm....and just wait until next summer and hope it dries more.....unless anyone here has a better, more practical idea..

[hydrogeo]

Any pictures? From what you describe you have hit the water table in that area, and you are likely down to native soil. Unless you have a great deal of runoff washing silt into the pond the stuff that accumulates over time is usually the brown organic material. Muck that all out of there and you should be good to go.

I'd be awful careful in that mucky clay. Work in there too much and your crawler could get good and stuck, and the suction on that stuff is awful. My grandfather used to tell tales of machines the company he worked for just walked away from because it wasn't worth the effort and risk to recover them.

[papa15]

No photos as yet...will try to figure out how to post....

I have another thread about getting a loader unstuck....yeah, I have stuck this one in the pond....have had to call a wrecker to get it out....and have used a log chained to the tracks to unstick it also...hoping to improve my proficiency enough so I don't get stuck anymore....

[Tigerhaze]

I have a discussion with photos somewhere on here about getting stuck. It's usually better safe than sorry to avoid wet conditions and try to get more complete dewatering before you try to get a crawler in a soft spot. Having a winch or backhoe attachment can also help to extricate yourself from a bad spot.

[Tigerhaze]

FYI, blue clays (independent of mineralogy that causes that color) often turn that color due to anoxic (oxygen poor) conditions and high degree of saturation. Thus if you continue to see blue clays as you dig deeper it is also likely to be very wet and soft. it likely extends all the way to whatever bedrock or other rock layers or hardpan soils you have in that area.

Clays can be difficult to directly dewater with conventional methods due to the "slow" movement of water through them. If you need to dig them out it would be best to use a hydraulic excavator or something with "reach" or to mix in materials to give them more firmness before trying to scoop them out. They will also be pretty heavy so smaller bucket loads would also help to keep from getting stuck.

[Stan Disbrow]

Hi,

One sure fire way to dewater clay is to drive track pads back and forth across it. Squeezes the water from below to the top, makes clay soup, then clogs up the pads so they just slip. Then, more water pushes up, makes more soup, and the machine slowly sinks.

We had a guy that had four crawler loaders and there was always one in our shop being dewatered as it were. He generally had two on the job, one back home, and one in our shop. What he did? Dug ponds......

Just sayin'. Be very, very careful.

Stan

[papa15]

Hi,

One sure fire way to dewater clay is to drive track pads back and forth across it. Squeezes the water from below to the top, makes clay soup, then clogs up the pads so they just slip. Then, more water pushes up, makes more soup, and the machine slowly sinks.

We had a guy that had four crawler loaders and there was always one in our shop being dewatered as it were. He generally had two on the job, one back home, and one in our shop. What he did? Dug ponds......

Just sayin'. Be very, very careful.

Stan

Been seeing a lot of blue soup....that stuff is really HEAVY...probably twice the weight of dry brown dirt....

I am trying to work around it best I can....want to get rid of the grass/brown dirt and just let stuff dry some more...probably attack in early next summer....

[Paul Buhler]

Hi: Good luck getting your pond mucked out. Others have shared good observations and advice.
I've re-dug mine a few times, and from my experience, it's best to get an appropriately sized excavator or drag-line to get the muck onto high ground and let it set so it drains. The rough-in using these machines goes quite quickly, meaning less cost, and then your machine can level it out working on a firm foundation.
I saved my machine a lot of stress and my back a lot of work by using this approach, and if it took a week or a year to do the leveling, at least the pond was dug and useful, and I didn't get stuck with the water rising. JMHO. Paul

[MarkW]

Can you get electricity to the pond? If so, it might be practical to dig a sump or ditch and put a pump with a float switch in there and just let it run for a week or so.

Problem with this approach is when you get rain it resets the pump out back to almost zero, but if you can get the water down it really firms up the soil. I have both a pond and a creek and getting stuck always is a scary thought.