Pond overflow! What happens when it rains too much? FarmCraft101

I'm all decked out in my rain gear. We've had some interesting weather lately. It rained, I don't know how much, many inches overnight. And I'm going down to the pond because I think you guys might find this interesting. And the cows think they're coming too. This one behind me here we call Big Mama. She's the tame one of the bunch. Hey Big Mama. This is the view that I took in the pond video over and over again when it was filling. And you can see there is the island. We put a little pink flamingo on the island and that's about the only thing you can see of it right now. So the top of the island is just below the water there. Now we're looking at the spillway. This actually doubles as my shooting range. But the water level, typically the water level is down here and this is just ground. And the the top of the drain pipe, which is totally submerged over there, you can't see it. So we are more than 18 inches above regular water level. So what's the deal with this spillway? Well this spillway was cut from virgin ground. So this was not filled or anything. This is ground that's been here forever. And it is going to be much more erosion resistant. Totally erosion resistant in fact compared to the dam. The dam was built. This is a bunch of clay that was stacked up and compacted. But if this water here was flowing on top of the dam, it would take it out. It would get through the little bit of grass sod that's on it and it would just wash it away. So the spillway is here to protect the dam when we get too much rain like we have right now. So here you can kind of see the whole thing. Here's the pond. There's the spillway bypassing because it's overflowing. That water comes down through the woods and rejoins the creek. And that's actually the discharge pipe from the pond as well. And then the creek goes on that direction. So we're looking at two or three inches of water on the spillway. I've seen about six inches of water in the past. And the spillway then drains down here into the woods. So here you can see the discharge pipe. That's a 12 inch pipe and it's full of water. And it's shooting out a good four feet or so. And then all this water coming from this direction is what's coming over the spillway. Now that that pipe when it's full like that flowing laminar flow is about 10,000 gallons a minute. When you add to it all the water coming off the spillway, I don't know how much water there is. I'd say there's a good bit more water coming off the spillway than there is going through that pipe. So we're probably looking at 30,000 gallons a minute of water here. And right there you can see the top of the intake pipe. That's a 16 inch vertical that then tees into a 12 inch horizontal. The reason for that is because the vertical pipe won't fill completely. It's going to have lots of turbulence and air and everything. So you actually want or you don't need a 16 inch horizontal because the vertical is not going to be able to fill that much water. So a 16 inch vertical fills a 12 inch horizontal pretty well. Here's something I find interesting to think about. If you raise the water level one inch over one acre that equals 27,000 gallons. My pond is four and a half acres so that's 122,000 gallons of water per inch of rise in the pond. Now as the pond gets higher it actually gets wider so this is a very conservative estimate and very likely low. So the top of the spillway is 18 inches above the regular water level. We have about three inches of water on the spillway so that means we've increased the water level of the pond by 21 inches. If you do the math that comes out to 2.5 million gallons of water. Now to make this even more impressive remember we have a discharge pipe capable of running 10,000 gallons per minute. Of course once the water is also spilling off the spillway we are discharging much more than 10,000 gallons per minute. So again this is a very conservative estimate but if we assume 10,000 gallons per minute and that this happened over a 12 hour period which I've seen it do even faster in the past. 12 hours at 10,000 gallons a minute is 7.2 million gallons. So if you add that to the two and a half million gallons we're somewhere just shy of 10 million gallons of water that we have added to the pond in 12 hours. Again this is a conservative estimate is actually probably much higher. Well 9.5 million gallons of water weighs 79 million pounds or 39,600 tons. For you metric guys out there that's 36 million kilograms or 36,000 metric tons. And just think about it yesterday all that water was floating up in the sky above our heads. Hope you enjoyed the video. I'll see you next time.