Nearing the End
Posted By The Miller on December 4, 2009
A rock got into the hose and plugged the end. Jimmy was knocked over backwards into the water. After that I tried to stay behind him. Notice my new higher boots. They weren’t high enough cause I got cement poisoning again. Jimmy had cement poisoning on his shoulder … but he kept at it. Also notice all the pipes. Some of the pipes don’t have water coming out of them. I would put in a pipe to divert the water and then Jimmy would plug the hole and force the water to another pipe. What a mess. The dam was starting to look like Fred Flintstone’s house.
It felt like I had sand in my boots. Charlie and Dave kept talking about sand in their boots. When the day was over and we took off our boots …. there was some skin missing. Jimmy told us it was cement poisoning. He told us to use white vinegar on it. Karen had some in the Snack Shop so I put it on. I’m not much of a dancer but I sure did some fancy foot work after that ! ! ! Charlie and Dave thought they would wait till they got home. The next day my feet were hurting so I took off my shoes. The left foot was kind of black looking on the top and the blood veins looked like red lightning bolts. It was Sat. afternoon and the Doc. was closed so I went to the emergency room. Charlie’s wife called that night and said his feet looked bad and we told her to take him to the emergency room. Dave managed to cure his feet on his own. I think I missed the part about soaking in white vinegar.
Here we are trying to fill one of the holes with concrete. I’m holding a piece of plywood so it will stay in the hole until it dries. The idea was to blow the concrete to the back of the hole and force the water out. The shotcrete has more cement in it and less aggregate. So, it dries quicker and is harder when it dries. A normal garage floor is 3000 to 4000 lb concrete … this is around 8500 lb concrete. The biggest hole took 4 yards of concrete to fill. At $125.00 per yard that was one expensive hole ! ! ! You can see Dave in the background wire tying the metal together.
Using my tractor to help them reach the top. That is Jimmy Nickles I’m talking to. He was the forman when Midwest pumped the concrete out to us in phase 2 of the dam work. He also pumped the concrete into the tunnel so I could fix the foundation. He suggested the shotcrete or gunite for phase 3 because it would have been very difficult to build forms in this area. Thanks Jimmy
Charlie is drilling holes for re-bar and Carl Redensky is cutting and hammering it in. Midwest Pumping is blowing the concrete onto the old dam. You can see pipes coming out of the dam. We couldn’t get the water completely stopped so I started sticking the pipes into the holes and putting handfuls of concrete around them. I would hold it there until it was solid enough and then I would grab another handful of concrete. They told me they couldn’t put concrete on top of moving water. I told em to keep spraying because one way or another I was going to stop or divert the water. Above the dam you can see metal and plastic. I hired a crew to stop the water from going through the dam. They slowed it down but could not stop it. The old dam sits on a sandstone shelf and water was coming through the sandstone.
We were getting the water lower and lower on the north side. So, we started pressure washing the old concrete and drilling holes for re-bar. Several folks helped with this. Here is a photo of Ethan pressure washing. You can see the old wood dam sticking out of the concrete. I cut most of this off with a chain saw.
It started raining. You can see the water moving on the upstream side of the dam (mill pond). And, you can see the temporary dam I built on the downstream side. The rain helped by flushing out a lot of lose dirt in the mill pond.
More and more water is coming through the gates. (Because we are moving it to the south side). So, I had to build a temporary dam on the downstream side to keep the water on the south side and going through the newly opened tail race.
The big plan was to open the south side of the mill pond and move the creek (water) to the south side. There was a large log jam up at the point (upstream end of the island). During the big flood of 2008 it was completely washed out. First time I ever saw it without a pile of trees. However, a large tree (about 100 ft. long) washed in and hundreds of logs piled up on it. The log jam was bigger than ever. I didn’t think it was possible to move this. So I tried to to move the creek a different way. It helped but there was still too much water on the north side.
I dug as far as I could with the tractor. The mud was sooo bad I kept getting hung up. So, Karen and Ethan came out to help me shovel it. You can see the water is starting to move.