Around here, if you do work that interferes with the natural flow of runoff from your property without a permit. engineering plans, etc., you get your pee-pee slapped (along with your wallet).
It's the same in this neck of the woods. Gotta have a grading permit to do anything that substantially alters the grade, and absolutely cannot let water leave any faster than it would naturally.
OK,… at the risk of politics, which I don't even want to do, other than to clarify:
The Fed gov't has the EPA, and it has enacted the Clean Water Act, which governs any and all actions to riparian, and wetlands, rivers, etc.
At any rate,…. lots of uproar lately about the Clean Water Act. If the neighbor above me acts at all counter to what I've done, something like that is a trump card to hold.
All I can say is, it looks great. :thmbsp:
I'll second a previous posters wish to see how it functions when faced with some rain. :thmbsp:
Many thanks.
As I stated in a previous reply in this post; The concept is to keep water moving through a maze, to diffuse it and aerate it. This takes the eroding scouring away. The dry creeks are a lot of facade with most of what happens in the average rains going on somewhat out of view (except exceptional flows). It would take a major rain to actually get the thing flowing like a creek. For the most part, I don't expect to see water flowing through it all that often.
As far as if it will work:
I have quite a bit of experience in rain water runoff drainage, and snow melt runoff drainage. I've also built multiple koi/goldfish ponds filter return flows, and waterfalls.
The rain runoff drainage experience came during the '97/'98 El Nino winter rains.
In '97, a golf course developer started grading for a 36 hole golf course on what had to have been at least 200 acres that was in a valley in a different local hillside valley drainage. Part of their grading plan opened that large acreage onto our community via a keyway notch cut, where they removed an entire hillside that divided our community from a whole other canyons drainage. They didn't have a single sandbag in place, and our community got smacked. We were hit especially hard where my house was, in that the silt flows took out a hill top drain, that removed a v-ditch flow, and piped it down off the hill. The golf course flows totally plugged the drain,and we had a 50' tall waterfall going over a 50' tall engineered crib-wall.
Our community rejected my drainage plan, and opted for that from a civil engineer. They built his plan, and it failed in the first slight misting of rain, with hundreds of feet of black plastic sheeting blowing in the wind, over the same crib-wall.
So, with storms stacked up all the way over to Japan, I had a week to secure materials for, and assemble a crew to assemble a hillside drain that would have to last us a winter. This consisted of thousands of sandbags, chicken wire to make gab ion cages and debris filters.
I was told by everyone that my temporary design wouldn't work.
Not only did it work, it worked flawlessly for a whole winter, and in particular, a month where we got two years worth of rain in a month, something like 35" in that month, with some storms registering extended periods of rates of 9" per hour (in bursts). I was up and out working in every rain, for that winter/spring, cleaning filters and making sure that the design wasn't compromised.
In the early 80's I worked at a ski resort in Utah, during its heaviest snowfall records ever.
We were tasked with getting snowmelt runoff water off the slopes, while protecting a stream that ran across the bottom of the slopes, which held a protected species of trout. So we had to get the water down, without adding silt, and, removing silt prior to its confluence with the stream.
I learned a lot about drainage doing that; damn muddy and messy though. And I've shoveled more snow than can ever be imagined by anyone, especially for a SoCal born-and-raised surfer kid.
At any rate,…. blabbering.
This is the community hillside drain that I designed; that also got f'd with by the same civil engineer whose plastic flags flew in the breeze of failure. I asked for solid, tall sidewalls, and he changed my design to having short sidewalls, which I had to fix after the first storms blasted over the shortened sidewalls.
My drain in action. This is a steep 2:1 slope that is 85' long:
The Moke Memorial Hillside Drainage Channel, in action and dry:
3' v-ditch load breaching the ditch:
At top of hillside drain. My house was the last one upstream in the image, on the right; a fantastic view, toenailed to a hillside:
3' v-ditch flow hitting the head of the drain:
dry:
I asked for tall sidewalls on both sides, like the one on the right. The engineer spec'd the short wall that you see. I added the two top courses of cinder block myself.