Pond Silted In or Holding Less Water

What to do right now

1. 1Check the dam before anything else. Walk the downstream toe of the levee on a dry day and look for wet ground, seepage, a slump in the face, or water bubbling up below it. Any of those is a failing dam, not a silt problem, and it means keeping vehicles and equipment off the levee until it has been looked at. If a pipeline marker sits anywhere near the pond, the dam or the spillway, call 811 before a bucket goes in the ground.
2. 2Find the waterline the pond used to fill to. Old bank stains, a dock, a stock tank overflow or a fence post will show it. If the pond still reaches that line after a wet spell, the problem is silt. If it never gets there, the problem is a leak or a dam.
3. 3Probe the bottom from the bank or a boat with a length of pipe. The soft layer on top is silt and the hard layer under it is the original clay. The difference between the two is how much has to come out, and it is almost always more than it looks from the surface.
4. 4Walk the drainage area above the pond after a rain and look for the muddy water. A bare drive, a cut ditch, a plowed field or a cattle path is where the silt is coming from, and that is the part that has to change or the cleanout will not last.
5. 5Take photos when the pond is at its lowest and again when it is full. Both tell us things a single visit cannot, and the low-water pictures show where the excavator can work from.

Why this happens in Southeast Texas

Farm ponds are everywhere on the coastal prairie between the Neches and the Sabine because the Beaumont clay holds water without a liner, and for the same reason they silt in without ever flushing. Around Beaumont, Nederland and down toward Taylor Bayou the ground is flat, the drainage areas are broad and the silt is heavy clay that settles hard. North up Highway 69 and Highway 96 toward Lumberton, Silsbee and Kountze the country rises into the sandier ground along Pine Island Bayou, Village Creek and the edge of the Big Thicket, where the clay profile has to be confirmed before deepening a pond, because sand at depth does not hold water the way the clay downstream does. East of the river in Orange County, ponds near Cow Bayou and the Sabine sit low enough that the water table is part of the depth conversation. On any of that ground, Harvey in 2017 and Imelda in 2019 moved more sediment in a few days than years of ordinary rain do, and a lot of the ponds we are asked about lost a good part of their depth in those two storms.