Dam Building

We've built over 100 dams — from farm dams to lakes, so our knowledge of clays and soils is extensive, ensuring no leaks in our dams. We also offer dam repair services, ensuring your investment is kept secure.

Building a farm dam is not a case of simply digging a hole and waiting for it to fill with water. Many farm dams fail because they were not planned or built properly. Our extensive knowledge of dam building ensures the site is properly prepared and our dams do not leak.

As with most construction project, building a farm dam or lake begins with selecting the right site. A poorly located dam can lead to degredation of the surrounding land and can be expensive to maintain. Our experienced contractors will assist in the planning process, ensuring a site if properly selected and prepared.

Once your chosen site has been deemed suitable, more requirements need to be confronted — dam depth and shape, standpipe and overflow construction, habitat, access, bank stability and more.

A correctly built dam is a well-compacted dam. To create an impervious levee, appropriate soils must be tightly compaced in thin layers or "lifts". These lifts should begin several feet below the finished grade of the proposed pond bottom to form a key-way or "core". The core normally consists of clayey materials obtained locally to the damsite.

The core is essential to the dam's strength and sealing ability. Once water finds its way through or beneath a dam, major mitigation costs are soon to follow.

The dam must also be wider at the bottom than the top. The generally accepted slope standards for both the front and back of a dam are 3:1.

To ensure you get your dam constructed the right way from the start, make sure you hire a professional earth moving contractor and avoid hassles in the future.

An earthfill dam is an embankment dam, constructed primarily of compated earth. Required properties include:

• It must be sufficiently imperveous to prevent excess loss of water through the dam
• The soil should develop a maximum practical shear strength under compaction and maintain most of it after the filling of the reservoir
• It must not consolidate, soften or liquify upon saturation

Without correct clay composition and preparation, dams usually devolve into expensive dry holes.