8-25-09 The Deep Dark Hole

I know what you’re thinking… Prepper is already flying his “Drama Queen” flag and so early on in the blog.

Little Pipe Big Independence

No seriously, this IS a DEEP DARK HOLE. Not all that different than the proverbial “Money Pit”… All right, now I’m just wallowing in self pity! Really this little 8 inch pipe sticking up 18 inches from the ground is my very own water Well. Yes folks there are many like it but this one is mine! My Well is over 600 feet deep and every foot of it is steel cased. Now, I know somebody out there has me topped and I feel your pain. You might even say to yourself, “That’s not so deep”, and you’re right, there could always be something worse. However this isn’t the Gobi Desert, its Washington State. We have enough rain fall that 600 foot deep wells shouldn’t be necessary or so one would think. I have already drilled one well on a property very close to this one on a previous attempt to create the BOL of my dreams. That Well was locally considered to be deep at 320 feet. It cost me a pretty penny but was in hindsight a bargain. I had that one setup with a Grunfos low wattage dual electric pump. I could run it on AC at only about 1000 watts or even could have had it run on 12 volts. This was a relatively low flow pump and could put out roughly 5 gallons a minute, still more than adequate. This time around I was assuming I would see something similar because of the proximity and trying to be “Prepared for the worst”, you know how we preppers are! I got together with the driller and walked the area where we were thinking it should go. He helped me decide the final placement. I gave him the go ahead so he sets up and begins to drill. No issues right, well each afternoon the driller was to phone me and give me the update as to what footage we had reached. I’m kinda thinkin I’ll hear from him on the second day to let me know we hit but evening of the second day he calls to say 375 and still no water. He says, “Do you want me to keep going”? Well no, I kinda thought we’d stop here and call it good?? “Yes, keep drilling, I need this water!”  After that phone call my wallet never stopped talking to me, “This is going to use up all your money – you can’t afford this – is this guy taking ya to the cleaners?” You know the routine when the meters running… Well, the next afternoon he calls and he hit water. He says “We got water at 450 feet”, now that sounds alright, right! Not right!  He proceeds to explain that he doesn’t think there’s enough water to meet the minimum required GPM, gallons per minute. I can have him stop and pull the rig up and do a flow test to determine if it will make the cut. However, he thinks that it’ll be a marginal well at best. That doesn’t sound very encouraging to me so I discuss this with Mrs. Prepper and decide to go for broke! I say this hoping on hope that its just a figure of speech… So back to drilling and a couple more nail biter days go by. Finally, I get the long awaited phone call telling me we hit the wet stuff! This time we are at 615 feet and in a layer of sand. I’m initially thinking that this means more bad news but that’s just the pessimist side of me getting ahead of the story. Sand apparently is good, it acts as a filter. It does require that a “sand screen” be installed at a couple hundred bucks but at this point a small price to tack on to what could have been a very deep, very expensive hole in the ground with no water at the bottom. As if the depth wasn’t bad enough, my next decision was – do we put steel all the way down the hole or try to go with the marginal PVC liner?? At this point the PVC which normally is sufficient seemed to be the better option, even though steel is the preferred route. We went with PVC, knowing in the local soil it might not work and the driller would pull it out and go with steel. No harm no foul and worth a shot… I’m pretty sure you can all see where this is going? The driller and I had been getting very acquainted with the daily updates to me and I think he started to really dread the calls. As you thought, I get the phone call that he has another problem. He had gotten the liner almost to the bottom, like 550 feet, when one section of pipe somehow slipped inside another section. This caused the pipes to split, obviously they aren’t designed to work this way. He tells me that he needs to consider what to do next and would call me the next day. This leaves me and Mrs. Prepper to console each other for another evening. When I get the drillers call the next day he explained that he would have to pull as much PVC out as would come and then reinsert the drill rig and try to drill through the broken pieces and the sand screen that was on the very bottom. This would of course ruin the sand screen and waste all the PVC liner, making it unusable a second time. On top of all this, he explains that if he can’t get all the liner back out with the drill we would have to abandon the hole and START OVER… I just about couldn’t breath at this point. I am not made of money and this project was suppose to include an actual home of some sort for all this water to be flowing into. What can a guy do, sit down and cry? We moved forward and saved the crying for whatever might happen next. Fortunately, he was able to drill the hole clean again and proceeded to put in the steel liner. As much as I would love to tell you how much this all cost me, it would only make me sound bitter and its still hard to talk about… Lets just conclude this post with the facts. We have a 30+ GPM Well that’s filtered through a deep layer of sand. It is expected that this aquifer would be hard pressed to dry up anytime in my lifetime. Now you know the story of my DEEP DARK HOLE!

Prepper