The Parry Dam @ Kendall NSW. Completed 23 March 2020
Refurbishment is considered to be one of the most spread dam reconstruction methods and often used for dam repairs. This case study from our work routine is illustrating one example of applying this practice to save the dam.
The Parry Project was a dam refurbishment project for a 10-year-old leaky dam that refused to hold any water for longer than a few weeks. It’s essential to perform regular dam checks and maintenance to avoid such a situation. Still, it was possible to give a new life to this dam during this project.
Dam Refurbishment process:
The dam was cut into the side of a hill but was not originally sited properly into the surrounding topography, resulting in many steep angles that were visually unappealing and created a feeling of bad feng shui
After increasing the surface area significantly by moving the wall downhill and outward, we increased the volume of the dam from 1.5mgl to 3mgl by pulling out another 3 meters of depth from the dam base.
Then we used the fill that was extracted from the dam base to reduce the outside dam wall batter from 70 degrees to 30 degrees – which then enabled the manicuring of the surrounding landscape.
At the final stage of this dam refurbishment project, the leaky walls were stripped and ripped, and then repacked and re-compacted to give the dam a permanent non-porous seal.