Best way to protect a creek bed before my pondless waterfall

[Assaf Broitman]

Hi all,

New to the forum so hoping I'm posting in the right place.
I have a somewhat weird situation and need some creative help solving it.

My house is built on stilts and there is a creek running under it. The part under my house is cemented all the way from a small dam to to a storm drain (roughly 40 feet). The part before the dam is all regular soil / hillside and runs for about 70 feet starting at an open storm drain pipe on top of the hillside.

The creek flows beautifully during rainy days and my plan is to make it a year round river from the start of the dam to the storm drain. This project is planned for the summer.

However, before I can do that, I had to deal with the fact that when rain gets heavy, the creek is no longer a nice flowing creek but a serious river that flows so strong that it erodes massive amounts of earth and soil and brings it down the damn. This is of course something that would have destroyed any pump or system I would have put in place.
I have experimented with different filters trying to collect the debris and soil coming down but it was just too much. But last Friday I finally had a moment of clarity (obvious in hindsight), why not line the creek bed so the water don't flow on the earth and avoid the massive erosion.

I went to home depot, bought some cheap pond liners and placed them in the creek to get flawless results (there was a serious storm over the weekend to test things out). See image.

So after this long exposè, what I'm actually in need for is recommendation for the best way to make the river liner so it is:

1. Looks good and seamless (see image, the black just sticks out and destroys the nature feel of my backyard)
2. Durable
   1. There is massive amount of water in high velocity that will go through it
   2. Debris such as leafs, glass shards, soda cans, etc can flow as well as the water comes from higher streets storm drain system
3. Cost effective -
   1. The pond liner was $240 (4x 10 by 12 from home depot at $60 each) I'm sure I can get even cheaper basic version now that I know the prototype works
   2. I'm willing to pay more if durability and appearance are improved but want something reasonable

From doing some searches on this forum, seems like this community is the right one to find a good solution.
Thanks for reading and hope you have something great to suggest,

Assaf

 

[peter hillman]

Welcome, there are many ways to hide a liner, but your biggest problem is controlling mother nature. After last weeks weather it could've washed away any work you may have done. Maybe you could run an emergency runoff stream nearby and divert the flood water when it gets rough. I think a stone "bog" filter would be the best thing for normal conditions but when it's flooding there's not much you can do, it will bypass the filter. You've picked a beautiful spot.