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Dave Anderson
05-29-2007 17:14:24
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Re: Cleaning out well in reply to Eddie Jones, 05-28-2007 18:34:24
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The thing to look for in these old wells is evidence of imminent collapse. How are the walls lined? If with brick or tile, are the courses running straight and true? Any evidence of slippage? By slippage I mean does it look like the walls go all the way to the top of the well? The reasoning behind these questions is that frequently old wells were lined at the bottom with wood pilings driven into the soft mud. With time the wood rots out, allowing the walls to slide down, sometimes collapsing. If the well looks sound, you then have 2 choices as to how to clean it. 1. Tripod over the top, lower a man down with a scoop and a couple of buckets, (After having pumped the well as dry as you can get it). 2. We used a different method with some good results. What you need to find is a sewer cleaning contractor who has one of those enormous vacum trucks that sucks clogs out of stopped up sewers. How its done, is you pump the well dry as above, then lower the 6" vac hose down the well, and suck out the accumulated mud at the bottom of the well. Then they lower a high pressure water hose down and wash it, then they suck out the water and mud, and repeat the process as often as they need to to get the well to the original depth. They can actually dig the well deeper, and lower concrete rings down to line the new deeper bottom. The only problem we ran into was the local authorities, and regulators, who don't know how to classify this line of work, and who don't like dug wells anyway, so my advice to you is to do the work, and don't ask if you need a permit, cause if your local gov't is like ours, once you ask, you will pull a s**t avalanche down on yourself!
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