Drilling the Well

We woke up this morning and called Alfalla's Well Drilling to see if they were coming today or tomorrow - we assumed tomorrow because of the rainy weather into the morning, but found out Tony was already out there drilling. At 56 ft they hit bedrock, and then put the casing in which protects the well from the surface down to the bedrock. This process took about three hours.

This is the drill rig. It is very loud. We picked this spot so that we wouldn't have to cut more trees to clear room for the trucks. This spot is about 100 ft from the workshop/studio and about 50 ft from the main house.

The three "smaller" pipes on the left side of the truck are the casing. All of those are now in the ground. You see Tony's son positioning one of them in the next picture trying to keep it from hitting the locust tree.

After the casing is in, they drill through the bedrock until they hit water. The rock itself then forms a casing for the well. Interestingly, Tony told us the bedrock here is Marcellus shale - for those who have been following the fracking debate in New York, this is the rock formation that has the natural gas.

This is an incredible machine - apparently a new one costs $850,000. This one is from 1979.

I'm not sure this looks okay to drink!

Tony told us that if they didn't hit water by 200 ft, they would stop for the day and determine if they needed to bring in another machine to open up the well (which would cost alot more money). I was getting very nervous that this would be the case, but then we hit water at 180 ft!

We hit enough water for 5 houses!

After they hit water, they pulled out the drill bits and capped the well - with a shovel?

Here's the drill at the end of the day.