[Rockhounds] Big Dam Foolishness - really

[J. R. Hodel]

Hi:

I can't resist telling my own story about a dam that didn't work.  My subject line is a quote from my Granddad, who believed in little SCS (Soil Conservation Service) dams in the heads of watersheds, rather than Army Corps dams to control flooding.

Part of the mining program here in WV is a water/wetlands protection program called mitigation.  If a company plans to destroy a given number of acres of stream bed or wetlands, they have to do something to "mitigate" that damage.

One company offered to build a dam at a state park (Chief Logan State Park, actually) so that local residents and tourists would have a nice lake to recreate in.  Several hundreds of thousands of dollars (in not a couple of million) were invested.  Of course, Chief Logan park is located in mining country, where there is a lot of subsidence and underground tunnels etc.  

The new dam didn't hold water...at all.  The company said they had promised to build a dam, not a lake, so they were off the hook, mitigation-wise.  I still remember hearing one of DEP's lawyers shouting "But the definition of a dam is a stlructure that holds water!" in a hallway.

I don't remember if they ever got a lake out of it, but I wasn't surprised the dam didn't hold water, every inch of Logan county has been mined, underground mines always provide subsidence, which always leads to faulting, through which water seeps.

I have a friend with a farm-pond sized dam that only holds water in a rainstorm, not mining related, just loose sandstone, I think.  We spread a lot of bentonite around, but couldn't get it stopped up.

KOR!!

JR

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