SIDE STREETS: Backyard pond drained to appease water cops

Jacques Adnet used to enjoy a cool dip in his little pond on hot summer days.

He liked watching the wildlife it attracted and the fish that somehow found their way into the 5-foot-deep pond.

And he was proud of how, 30 years ago, he drained a rattlesnake-infested swamp — caused by a beaver  dam — and created the pond at his home near Monument.

So it was a sad day earlier this month when he drained the pond, paid a guy $1,700 to dump it full of dirt and gravel and seed it to grass.

“It’s done,” Adnet, 80, said after a bulldozer leveled the dirt. “The pond is no more. Hopefully we won’t have any more problems with the water commissioner.”

Adnet, a retired Air Force engineer, is trying to make the best of a bad situation. After all, he reasoned, it’s been a few years since he’s been able to take a dip. And the grass will make a nice picnic area for his home.

But I sensed he was a little frustrated that his pond on South Beaver Creek was declared illegal and, even worse, that he was accused of stealing water owed to historic water rights owners far downstream.

“I have restored the water I ‘stole’ when I filled the pond in 1979,” Adnet said. “I’m not going to fight it. We opened the dam so the water could escape.”

Adnet is realistic. He knows he was not singled out. Ponds like his are being drained across the state as water police enforce a court order to cap wells and breach dams deemed illegal.

Filling the pond wasn’t Adnet’s only option, actually. He could have filed a request for a water right and then paid a water company to pump into the watershed the same amount of water that was in his pond, plus the amount that evaporates annually.

As you might suspect, that would be a complicated and expensive ordeal. It was easier to simply drain it.

Adnet won’t even complain that some neighbors get to keep their ponds.

“One pond was declared a beaver dam but mine was not,” he said.

Adnet suggesting he’d erred 30 years ago when he added rock and dirt and a narrow concrete cap to his beaver dam to stabilize it.

But he knows water is not just something that trickles downhill or is pumped from a hole in the ground. It’s big business and the subject of multi-million-dollar lawsuits between neighbors and cities and states.

In fact, as Adnet was obliterating his pond, the nearby Woodmoor Water and Sanitation District was trumpeting the news that it had obtained contracts for water rights along the Lower Arkansas River. The rights will ensure future supply by “moving water upstream” via an elaborate network of water exchanges, reducing the district’s dependence on well water.

Still, it had to sting as Adnet watched his pond become a mudhole. But he remained upbeat.

“I just hope,” he said slyly, “that nobody comes after me now because I destroyed a beaver dam.”

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