After two (very hot days) of drilling, the crew hit water this afternoon. While I was imagining some big underground lake, the reality is water filling cracks and spaces down in the shale. When you drill down to where it is… you have water. Or something like that.
Mike says we have standing water at 315 feet. The drilled well is approximately 586 feet deep. That gets lined with steel casing (see image below) to a depth of about 443 feet. This keeps the rock from caving in, a problem we had with the old well.
Inside the steel casing is the PVC pipe that brings up the water. It goes down the full 586 feet. A pump is dropped down into the PVC, approximately 400 feet down. (My somewhat fuzzy grasp of what this looks like is shown in the diagram at the bottom of this post. Wikipedia has a lengthy and fascinating page on the history of wells.)
The rock that was removed in the drilling process will eventually wash down into the woods. A few more zinnias and you’ll never notice the well head. Image below is Mike and his crew cleaning up.
Update 8/4/22: B & H came back this morning with a fiber optic camera they dropped down the new well to make sure there were no problems with the PVC pipe. Ii watched for a hundred feet or so but it was too much like seeing someone’s colonoscopy. A little goes a long way. We’re good to go. Next step is to drop the (very expensive) pump down about 400 feet and hook the new well into our existing pipes.
