River Pump Up and Running!

Here we are in early April trying desperately to get water out of the Red River to pump into our irrigation reservoir.  Last year at this time, there was flood water 10 feet over the top of the irrigation reservoir, we would have loved to have taken some water out of the pond! 

We did the setup work last week by installing the 6" PVC mainline to connect down by the river, as well as getting the actual pump and hoses hooked up to our river float.  We received some much needed assistance again from Florian and Sons Excavating with a JD 120 excavator that gave us the necessary boom reach to set the pump out in the river without any of us risking our lives. 

After about 2 hours of work this morning we had the pump up and running and getting our pond filled up!  I greatly question the quality of our irrigation water....but I guess we don't really have a lot of options.

Lifting our floating river pump contraption out into the water.

River pump hooked up and ready to go.  I think they used to use the old
steel culvert pipe as a pump wet well back a few decades ago...

Success!