Best type of flood proof fencing for crossing a stream?

[dianneS]

We have split rail fencing all around our pasture. It stops on each side of a stream where a horse or goat could easily walk around the end and be free. A few months ago we ran woven wire across the stream. Yesterday we had torrential downpours and the stream and our road flooded. Debris, logs, railroad ties twigs, branches, you name it washed down and took out the entire woven wire fence and one section of split rail.

The only solution i can come up with that won't catch debris and tear the whole fence down would be individual strands of wire that would let the debris flow through it?

The pressure on the woven wire pulled out three fence posts! I don't think cementing them in would have done any good. I found huge rocks and cinder blocks washed down stream too.

 

[ksalvagno]

What about putting in posts to attach the wire that aren't connected with your other fence? Then if it happens again, it only affects those 2 posts and the fencing across the stream.

Not sure what to tell you on the fencing over the stream other than you will probably just have to try different things until you find something that works.

 

[lupinfarm]

What about... a cattle panel? Like the big metal heavy ones, or a gate? Hinged on your main fence...

 

[dianneS]

That's a good idea Karen. We should just attach it to independent posts, then we won't lose any more of our fence.

We have to find something sort of flexible, that will give to the pressure of the water and allow the debris to flow through it. The more ridgid it is, the faster it will collapse.

There is an old big sturdy cattle panel along the stream that was wiped out a few years ago. Luckily our horses never go down there, and don't test our fencing, and the goats aren't in that pasture at all, so we don't have to go nuts making it extremely animal tight.

We were told that the stream floods about six times a year, but its only flooded about three times in the past year, but I have to prepare for the worst.

 

[dianneS]

You know what, a tube gate might work. If we hinge it, we could open it when we're expecting a big storm!

 

[dianneS]

I still have not done much of anything to the fence across my stream. We had a lot of flooding this past fall and winter, so there was no point in even repairing the fence, it would just get washed away in the flood again!

My horses don't escape because the bank is too steep for them to get down into the stream bed and back up the bank on the wrong side of the fence.

There is a "one lane bridge" That consists of some concrete poured along the side of the road. I thought of taking the fence up to the concrete but not across the stream. If the animals get down in the stream bed, they can't get back out on the wrong side of the fence.

I'd like to goat proof that pasture, but that is going to be hard to do. The goats are much better climbers than the horses!

 

[patandchickens]

Shooting for floodPROOF is not usually the best plan. You end up with something that catches so much debris that a) it exacerbates flooding and b) ends up getting ripped apart anyhow, by all that extra debris and water.

In most circumstances, IMO, what you want is something that will be ok UNTIL a flood, and then can be very cheaply and easily fixed afterwards.

Just running a coupla lines of electric, lower down, across the stream gully is often the simplest and most effective solution. Whenever they get taken out, replace them. If you are living right, you can sometimes just reattach the existing wire. One downside is that this may ground out your whole fence for the duration of flooding, unless you manually detach those wires when the rain starts; this may (*may*) be tolerable if you have a plug-in charger but will KILL battery or solar chargers.

The other major option is to fill in that gap (or possibly the whole stream-to-top-of-fence panel) with a "disposable" piece of fencing, that you can live with replacing periodically. It should be separate from the rest of the fenceline material, so that when it rips off it will not take more of the fence with it.

There are a million various Clever Ideas that people've come up with to make gates that open or tilt up or float or whatever when there's a flood, and theoretically reset themselves automatically after the water goes down or are easy to manually reset... but my impression, from seeing some of them in use, is that they work a whole lot better on paper than in real life, and usually aren't worthwhile unless you just really love tinkering and building and rejiggering things.

Honestly though it is not great to let livestock have stream access. It messes water quality downstream up, not just in terms of drinkability but in terms of invertebrate communities and fish and all that. Really the BEST solution is to fence them out of the stream altogether, and provide a culvert or bridge for them to cross from the "this side" field to the "that side" one. Although, yes, I realize, ka-ching.

Good luck, have fun,

Pat

 

[twentynine]

I am in La. we know about floods and crossing canals, ditches, streams and bayous with fencing.

What we use is a tube gate. If I can I will describe to the best of my ability.

Large post one on each bank of the stream. Large beam or even a cable stretched tight betwext the post. Using the hinges supplied with the tube gate suspend the gate from the beam or cable. the gate should hang down to the level of where the bottom tube is in the water at low water level or barely off the ground in a normally dry ditch.

When it rains the water will either flow through the bottom tube or when the water gets high enough the current will then push the gate open. When the water receeds the gate would then fall back into it's original position.

Got two of them on my property, nothing but water goes through them, horse or cattle never have.

I promise you it works, and I ain't never had to tinker with it.

 

[TeamChaos]

Wow, tube gate sounds like the way to go. I'm having the same problem- we have a section of fence between our paddock and the neighbor's pasture and the floods have really made a mess of it this year. It was a cattle panel over a three strand fence and basically all of the wood, rocks and mud the flood brought down ended up damming up and tearing the whole works down and burying it! Right now it's patched with snow fencing to keep the cows out, but when we've got flood warnings, I end up loosening it so that if pressure builds up, it'll just let go on one side. I just make sure I'm up before the cows to fasten it again.

 

[aggieterpkatie]

Letting animals have pasture to streams isn't a good idea for water quality of the stream, and in some cases it can be bad for your animals. Animals go to the bathroom which mucks up the stream, and just think, do you want your animals to drink where other animals have gone to the bathroom?

I'm not sure about Canada, but here in the states we have cost-share programs to put up fencing to keep animals out of the stream, and they also provide cost-share to put in waterers if the stream is/was the sole source of water for the animals. Just go to your local Soil Conservation District or NRCS office and ask about programs. I know here in MD, our state cost shares on those types of Best Management Practices (BMPs) but we also have a federal program called EQIP (Environmental Quality Incentives Program) that cost-shares on it as well. EQIP cost-shares around 75% and our state cost shares 87.5%.