Dealing With Our First Significant Incident

There are a lot of things on a hobby farm that could go wrong. This one really took us by surprise. We hadn't even considered the possibility of the dam failing, so when I saw a water spout along the bottom the dam wall, I wasn't even quite sure what I was looking at.

Our dam was built probably around the 70's, without the kind of regulation and scrutiny you would see today. The clay rich soil was shifted from the bottom of the valley and piled up into what now forms the dam wall. Two pipes had been installed into the wall, one at the surface for overflow, and another at the base of the wall to allow the dam to be drained. Not that we would have any reason to drain the dam, now home to fish, turtles and probably some other fun surprises. The dam is now the source of all outdoor water access, feeding the refillable animal troughs, raised bed irrigation, and all the outdoor taps.

As I walked along the dam wall, some movement caught my eye amongst the long grass. At that point, water was gurgling, but not spraying, so I wasn't sure what was causing it. I pulled away the long grass to reveal a device I didn't recognise, made of steel with a lever about 30 centimetres long. I recalled the previous owner telling us there was a drain valve, but that he hadn't been able to open it. And with that in mind, I thought, "I can do this" and pulled on the lever in the clockwise direction to close it, really putting my back into it.

And I made it worse. The gurgle became a spout.

Oops, maybe it should be anticlockwise. That's fine, I can still fix this.

And I made it worse, again.

As it turns out, this lever I was pulling, wasn't actually a lever, and all I was doing was worsening the rust-worn connection to the steel pipe. At this point I started to realise I couldn't actually fix this. I naively attempted to slow the flow, but there really wasn't much I could do against the force of that much water. So, as the neighbouring paddock continued to flood, we started making phone calls.

It was hard to know who to call in this situation. We called the neighbours, the owner of the paddock we were flooding into, local plumbers, and they all pretty much said the same thing.

Nothing can be done until the dam is drained

We really didn't want to lose all that water. We didn't know how long it would take to refill, and we didn't want to be left without water. Perhaps even more than that, we didn't want to disrupt the habitat of who knows how many creatures calling that dam home. So, we kept making phone calls until someone gave us a different answer. We found a plumber that does residential and civil projects in Gippsland, no job too big or too small.

After inspecting the site, they proposed a plan to not only fix the issue, but to minimise losing any more water from the dam. They suited up in scuba gear, somehow inserted an inflatable device into the drain from the inside, with zero visibility, and slowed the flow of water enough to be able to repair the valve.

By this point, we'd lost around 1.5 metres, but we'd managed to save it dropping below 4 metres. We opted to decommission the drain, getting it sealed and concreted in, to ensure this problem doesn't happen again.

Rapidly losing dam water felt like a ticking clock, not only for our outside water supply, but also for the wildlife living there. It was a bit scary knowing that every second we were losing so much precious water, and we didn't know how long it would take to recover. We were extremely lucky to find an excellent plumber that could help at short notice, with the resources to solve a problem when no other plumber had been able. With the underground springs, and the couple of days of decent rain, it didn't take long for the levels to return to normal. It had been a stressful week, but by the end, we had resolved our first disaster on our hobby farm.