This is the third or fourth time this year that I have overflowed the pond. I use well water in the pond and have to go to the pump room and flip up a breaker to turn on the well pump. I forget to turn it off if I don't hear water running. Today I put the hose in the pond to add a little water and then I got distracted and came inside without turning off the well. About an hour later when I looked out from the kitchen, I saw water covering much of the patio.
I went out and the Mollies and Guppies were swimming in my flower beds again. It's never easy to chase them back into the pond and until the water goes down you can't keep them in there. We hooked up the pool vacuum and covered the end with the skimmer net and started pumping the pond down. At the same time you have to beat the bushes and chase the fish back towards the pond.
(see the white Molly in the middle of the pic? That's a big one.)
It's like herding cats. We got some sand bags and tried to block them coming out of the pond and herd them through one opening. We got all the adults and most of the tiny babies but I'm sure we missed some of the eyelash sized ones.
They say that we can't hook a timer to the breaker. So, I need to find a manual timer that I can set and that will go off if I haven't shut down the pump. It's bad when I forget and the pond overflows, it is worse when I forget I'm adding water to the pool and it overflows into the pond, that happened a few weeks ago. I threw in a bunch of de-chlor and none of the fish died. Still... this is not good.