Tag Archives: mitigation

Current Brush Dam Project

Posted on May 18, 2012 by | 2 comments

When I began this a person couldn’t tell there was an oak tree without standing off at a distance because it was so choked with cedars.

A gully was being cut down to bedrock in the swale.  I’ve got a lot more cedar in the immediate area I’ll be clearing, but I’m figuring before I put anymore on the dam I’ll stand atop what’s there and cross cut as deep as the chainsaw bar will reach to compact it as much as possible before adding more material.

Incidently, once I got most of the cedar cleared from around that oak I found this great, long, straight one.  It’s a keeper, though I don’t know what for.  Assuming I can get it loose and untangled from the upper parts of the oak without having to cut it.

There’s a watershed of maybe fifteen acres with a lot of slope draining into this spot.  My thought is I’ll bring the dam roughly six feet high after compacting, then thicken it with whatever cedar’s left in the immediate area.  Afterward I’ll move upgrade and create a series of brush berms across the grade to slow down concentration times.

Lots of work left to do on it, but watching that dam grow’s a smiler for me.  Someday I’m going to try to figure out what makes me tick.  This whole sudden new joy of doing all this came out of nowhere.  Gale’s up there laid up, doesn’t have a clue I’m doing most of it on his property, though I describe most of it to him.  He shrugs and tries to seem encouraging, but I doubt he can picture what’s going on here.

Meanwhile, me just down here working my arse off for the hell of doing it, not a clue why.

Old Jules

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Posted in 2012, Adventure, Country Life, Outdoors, Science, Texas

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First Observations – Brush Berms and Rock and Brush Dam

Posted on May 8, 2012 by | 1 comment

One of you expressed an interest when I was describing the project, so I’ll add a bit of detail on initial observations.

The effort appears to be doing exactly what it’s intended to do, the floating cedar leaves doing a better job than the Pinon I used in New Mexico.  The fresh cuts on the berms don’t appear to be doing much, but those where the leaves have dropped are blocking with dead leaves, slowing the water enough to cause it to release the silt.  And the dead leaves are sealing the parts of the berms where that’s far enough advanced to allow it.

Meanwhile, a rock and brush dam I constructed last week in the arroyo to the east is performing well, also.

The steel grille used to lie on the scoured bottom so’s to allow a truck to cross without blowing a tire on the rough bottom.  I stood it up and included it in the dam because earlier efforts have filled the bottom voids with silt enough to provide a comparatively smoother ride across, making the grille redundant as a bottom surface.

The brush and leaves on the right were what was left of the earlier effort, prior to the most recent rainfall.

Depending on the intensity of the coming runoff events, the grille might actually be knocked down and require some remedies if the water level goes high enough to put leverage on the top, but if it doesn’t I believe the bottom will catch enough to provide stability.  Those rocks are heavy enough to withstand water to a level of a couple of feet, catching more brush and dropping more silt.  Higher than that, they’ll probably wash downstream.

My thought is that the bottom might fill with enough siltation ahead of the dam to need that grille, again, to keep truck tires from going up to the hubs in mud, anyway.

Old Jules

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Posted in 2012, Science

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