Saw this while going through Greeley. What is it? It almost looked like a park with grass and landscaped and all. If it weren’t less than 2 acres I could almost say a private lake.
But there is a creek next to it so maybe flood control except there is water in it even when the creek is dry.
Maybe water for neighboring houses? It is privately owned but that’s not unusual in Colorado when the owner of a housing tract creates an HOA and sells water to houses he sells. What if I bought the “lake”? Could I sell the water off?
I’ve been watching Dirty Jobs reruns and that looks a lot like a wastewater facility they featured in Rifle CO. All the sewers drained into the building where a screening system separated out the solids which were compressed into “muffins” that were hauled to a landfill. The water drained into a retention pond and then to a treatment facility.
Unfortunately I can’t find the facility using maps on my phone.
I’m wondering if the gas wells on the other side of the ditch might have something to do with it. It’s a multi-well pad with seven (horizontal) wells lined up next to each other, so it must be fairly new. It could be that the thingee in question is an unusually beefy retention pond system designed to keep contamination from the gas well location from getting over to the houses in the event of the irrigation ditch flooding.
Those are very common where I am and looks like a groundwater recharge basin for storm runoff. These are commonly built to offset the loss of rain recharge due to development (roofs, pavement, etc)
It’s zoned light commercial, which seems to make sense for that use. If you really want to know for sure, you can call the owner and ask them about that particular parcel.
It looks like a storm water retention basin to me, as opposed to detention basin or infiltration basin, since the intent appears to be a permanent water body. From here Retention basin - Wikipedia :
[QUOTE=wiki]
A retention basin is used to manage stormwater runoff to prevent flooding and downstream erosion, and improve water quality in an adjacent river, stream, lake or bay. Sometimes called a wet pond or wet detention basin, it is an artificial lake with vegetation around the perimeter, and includes a permanent pool of water in its design.
It is distinguished from a detention basin, sometimes called a “dry pond,” which temporarily stores water after a storm, but eventually empties out at a controlled rate to a downstream water body. It also differs from an infiltration basin which is designed to direct stormwater to groundwater through permeable soils.
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Also, I would describe the pipe as coming out of the basin, through the pump house and then into the drainage channel. The basin is situated in a low spot and is gravity fed storm water. The pump is needed to remove water from the basin as necessary. This may have been what you meant, but the way you worded it seemed to imply the opposite.
^The advantage is in being allowed (by city or county planning authorities, and possibly by the Army Corps of Engineers) to develop the rest of your property. Often planning authorities determine that building something like a new building or parking lot will exacerbate the amount of runoff into local streams or groundwater, and will require a retention or detention pond as a condition of allowing the development of the property.
There is an awesome dog park in Roseville, CA that is also a flood basin. There are warnings on the gates and on the giant discharge pipes along an inaccessible edge (small brushy stream and trees in the way) that it’s inadvisable to exercise Woofer there in stormy weather.
I don’t recall it ever flooding in the 5-6 years it existed while I lived nearby. But.
