lundi 24 février 2014

Where Does Your Drinking Water Come From?

By Jim Thorpe


Completing as ambitious of an undertaking as drilling your own water well seems like it would be too much for a lot of people. It comes down to one of two things: determining subsurface water flow and finishing the groundwater mapping process. Once you have finished these tasks, you can then move on to determining who you want to drill your well. The task is difficult, but it's something that the average person could complete with the use of the right tools and research into how it's done properly. Due to the potential for so many things to go wrong with the utilities that are lurking beneath the ground, it's important to have a policy of if you can't do it right the first time, you might as well forgo the project altogether.

Obtaining the Right Clearances

First, contamination can still happen when the water is pure as it hits the ground. Rainwater or faucet water can be perfectly fine as it enters the earth. The problems begin once it starts seeping into the ground. Pesticides and other chemicals don't just disappear because they've disappeared from the surface. They leave pieces of themselves in the soil that are soaked up by the water soaking through and taken down into the larger water reservoirs hidden below the surface. Once it's mixed into that water, it can travel and influence the underground water community. Worse still, if that ground water should find its way to a river, it can spread over long distances. The influence can spread for miles, depending on how many chemicals the water brought down through the soil. When the whole area is contaminated, it's hard to bring up fresh water for plant or human use in the future. It will be dirty for a long period of time.

One of the ways to protect our water is to know about it. Where does your water come from? Do you get your water from a river, lake, or reservoir? Do you get it from an underground aquifer? Is your water primarily supplied from rain, snow, or does it travel huge distances to reach you? Apparently, most of America doesn't know. Mine comes from the local river which replenishes from rain and melting mountain snow. There are sites online that track where water comes from. Sometimes that information is also available in the annual water quality report that is mailed to each person and business that receives their water from a public source. If not, you can request it.

Third and finally, is fracking. Fracking is a process of teasing out natural gas from layers of rock deep in the earth. High powered water is shot down into the rocks to create little fissures and fractures. Those fissures will allow natural gas to escape and be sucked up through high powered machines. Although the wells are cemented to protect against subsurface water contamination, it can't prevent against everything. Even the water used to "frack" can come out contaminated.

After you know the subsurface water flow and have groundwater mapping squared away, you can then move on to drilling the actual well. This process might take a little longer than you expected when you consider all the steps that you have to go through to complete it. As long as you have a plan in place, you should rest easy knowing that you will get it all done in a timely manner. You need to stick to the plan to ensure that you will finish everything when it needs to be finished. The speed and effectiveness with which you complete your project will determine whether you finish under budget or the project as a whole becomes entirely too bloated.




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