[white580]

I am building a house in lower Alabama. I have a wonderful 3 acre lot with a creek that runs on the back side. My problem is I have a small spring that runs about 20' from the back of my house to the creek. My lot slopes a pretty good bit and I need to build a retaining wall right in the middle of where the spring runs. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to either run the spring over the walls or under them or around them or ANYTHING!!!! I do not mind building multiple short walls. I have about 75-100' from the back of the house to where I want the first wall and its about a 9-10' slope to there. Any help is appreciated.

[4seasons]

Or a french drain ,reroute it around the wall. MAke sure when you build your wall you also put in drainage behind it.

Or turn it into a water feature.

[white580]

Not possible to reroute it. The wall is going between two hills on either side of the spring. I was hoping to workout some kind of water fall over each wall but not sure how to go about it. thanks for the reply.

[4seasons]

Can you post pics?
run your pipe under the footer.

[Fine Edge]

It would be hard to pinpoint the BEST application without seeing the terrain and also seeing how much water flows from the spring at different times of the year.
Whatever you do, you need to plan on preparing for the most extreme water flow possible.
There are several different methods you can use to catch and channel the water below the surface and help to send it towards its final destination. Again, without actually seeing the property, it's hard to recommend the best one.
It would be nice to have the spring go into a catch basin fairly early and hard pipe it through a wall to create some type of water feature sort of like you might find in the mountains where a pipe will be installed into the side of a mountain to catch drinkable water.

[NCSULandscaper]

call in an engineer to answer your questions

[white580]

Here is a rough sketch of what the issue is. The spring starting point is about 10-12' above the furthest wall the runs across where the walls need to be. I would like to be able to use it I'm just not sure how to get it in a pipe or onto a creek bed or something like that.

[dayhiker]

I'm a structural engineeer in AL. Never run a pipe under a footing. When you say spring, how big are you talking? Approx width and depth is what I'm talking. If small and the soil is good you can possibly reroute it while you build the wall then return the natural flow through a pipe. You'll need to rerout temporarily while under construction. You can step the footing under the flow and then pipe through the wall. How tall are you calling a small wall?

A photo would help too.

How are things in good old LA? I was down there myself a couple of weeks ago coming back from Mexico Beach.

[dayhiker]

I see your sketch now. A photo would be great because it'll show the grade, slow, and all that good stuff.

You could turn that into a series of wall where the spring spills over and make 3 very small waterfalls. Someone above mentioned the water feature possibility.