Stories
My First Groundwater Detecting Experience
I was 15 years old when my cousin Morris asked if I would come by his place to help try to find water. It was a homestead that his dad bought, and the place was known to have very little water even though a 10 acre small lake was very close. A well digger had drilled three separate holes near his house and all of them ended up being dry holes. Even though I was inexperienced I somehow knew that it did not make any sense to look in the same area near the house. They owned a section of land 640 acres and turned me loose to find an area that I thought would work for a well.
So, I used a forked branch and started walking. My cousin planned to run a feed lot and have 300 cattle, as the price of beef was quite good at the time. It seemed like a large challenge for a location with hardly enough water for just a house over the last 40 years. I walked for several hours and found a stream about 200 yards from the house. It was probably about 50 feet wide. I had no idea how deep the stream was or how thick the aquifer was. But because of the stream width, the site of the selected stream was slightly uphill from the house, and looked like it could work.
The well digger moved to this site and started drilling a 24″ hole. About two or three days later I got a call to go back to my cousin’s house – he was coming unglued with excitement! As they were drilling about 50 feet down, they heard a noise like a train. Someone looked down the well and could see the water boiling in, and it was making a lot of noise! It rose within 15 feet to the top, and 64 years later it is still a good producing well.
For the next 30 years I doused for friends who wanted to drill a well and needed to find a spot to drill it. At some point during that time I was shown how to find depth, and have used it ever since.
Imagine This...
You spend a minimum of $15,000 to put a hole in the ground, only to have the well driller declare it a dry hole. Your heart sinks to the bottom of the hole with your money, leaving you devastated.
Don’t let it happen to you! Save your money and headaches by calling us before you drill.
A Tale From Northern B.C.
This story begins in Prince George, BC, as I had just moved from Saskatchewan for an apprentice job with Finning tractor. Over three years I completed my apprenticeship and three years later wrote for my master journeyman papers, and worked as a master journeyman in the shop. In my time there I was moved to field service trucks and later back to the shop as a change hand. After 10 years with Finning, working on caterpillar equipment, I got itchy feet and decided to strike out as a freelance mechanic to work for the same people that I knew and who knew my work. So, I formed my own company. When I worked for Finning I was getting about nine dollars per hour, but when I started invoicing through my own company I could get just under 25 dollars per hour. With my tools loaded in a pick up with a canopy, I was off on a new adventure.
In less than a year we had to rent a bay with an overhead crane in a shop and hire help because I had too much work. In that short time I added an apprentice to help with the workload. We were busy working for loggers, sawmills, and pulp mills. Owners with a few pieces of equipment were also part of the customer mix. We continued to add people and after five years we started planning a large shop with an overhead crane.
In the early 1980s it came to pass, a new shop in a beautiful building with about 12,000 square feet of space. It took a lot of equipment repairs to keep up with the expenses for our new building. A couple of years later our interest rates went from 9-10% all the way up to 23% (and we were on a variable rate mortgage). Boy did the banks drain our account fast!
As a company working from a new shop, we survived and continued to grow. We grew in the number of people we employed, and in the size of jobs we took on.
At this time feller buncher saw heads were just starting to become popular as a tree falling device. We met with a logger who designed and built a prototype saw head and was looking for someone to manufacture it.
The most significant difference between a continuous turning saw head and an intermittent saw head was the disc. The continuous turning saw disc, once started, weighed a half ton and could not be stopped and started in between trees, while the intermittent disc could be stopped and started with each tree. The continuous turning saw head needed to keep the disc speed at about 1000 RPM and used a great deal of engine horsepower to do so. It also heated the hydraulic system oil to near boiling. These machines needed an extra radiator with a fan just to cool this hydraulic oil.
The intermittent saw head only turns the outer teeth of the saw head, and little extra heat is generated – which means no need for an extra cooling system. Many continuously turning saw discs burned the machines up in a fire due to a burst hose or leaking o-ring that sprayed on the engine turbo, where the hot oil would explode instantly and ignite the rest of the oil and the machine itself. Meanwhile, there would be lots of twigs on the machine to help the fire burn. The saw head that the logger brought to us was an intermittent turning disc design. He bragged about all the advantages of this design, and after a great deal of negotiating he convinced me to manufacture his design by copying his prototype.
To try and keep the story short, it became a four year project and cost an investment of over $1 million. We had to start making CAD drawings and then manufacturing the head itself. We eventually got it up and running to a fully computerized push button operation. Our prototype ran for more than four years before it wore out, all improvements were incorporated in the subsequent saw head which we sold from the manufacturing facility.
Finding a Well at Williston Lake, B.C.
One saw head was sold to a 60 truckload a day logger who had it mounted on one of his excavators armoured up for bush work. After it was up and running he moved it by barge 100 miles up Williston Lake. This is the lake behind the Bennett Dam, hydroelectric power project phase 1, and 100 miles north of MacKenzie BC. The logger needed some service work done to the head, and so I became a field service man again. To get to the machine I had to fly in the loggers airplane to an airstrip on the side of Williston lake. After I completed the work on the saw head, which we called the Rimmer Saw Head, I went back to camp.
At the camp Joe, the owner of this logging company, told me his well drilling story. His plan was to move a 60 man camp 40 miles south along the lake near the forestry office. Joe had the camp about 3/4 of the way finished and was moving trailers by barge to the new campsite. He had spent nearly 3/4 of $1 million setting up the camp. But, he had a major problem. No water to run the camp. He had a well driller on site who had already dug four different 400 foot dry wells. Joe told me that without water he could not move his men to the new camp, and the well drilling cost up at that point was over $45,000 (in the mid-1980s).
The airstrip ran parallel to the inlet called Ospika Arm, that went to the dam, and because it was on the north side, there was no road access to his camp. About 50 yards from the east end of the runway was a steep bank, and during the time of the dam construction BC Hydro had the airstrip, a camp, and a source of water running out the side of the bank into the lake.
Joe had found out that the cost to drill a well at the other end of the runway and trench it back to the camp with a generator would cost over $1 million a year, and so he was looking for alternatives. After I told him I could find water he refused to fly me out (just joking), even after my servicing work was finished. He had some excuse about his plane being busy and the weather being poor – and so I started looking for water.
In walking about 10 to 15 acres around the camp, I could only find two streams. As I followed the streams towards the camp I found they crossed at a very convenient location close to the camp. The forestry building was on one side of a road that went by the camp into the bush. I followed the streams until I found the spot where they crossed – under the road beside the camp. The streams run at 90 degrees to each other and formed a cross. I picked the middle where the streams crossed for a drill site and marked it. The bottom of the top aquifer was at 60 feet deep and the bottom of the second one was at 120 feet.
The driller moved his rig and started making a hole. At the end of the first day Joe asked him how he had made out. The driller said that there was some water, but that he didn’t think there was very much. Joe asked him how many gallons per minute he thought was there, and the Driller said he wasn’t sure how much but he had bailed some water and needed a pump to find out more. Joe was furious. The driller did not have a pump to check the flow in gallons per minute (GPM). Joe’s instructions to the driller was that he was to drill to 120 feet and stop! He needed to pump the well and find out the flow rate, as he needed about 40 gallons per minute for the camp. Joe had to fly his airplane back to Prince George, get a pump, hoses and whatever else fittings etc. to rig up the pump and test the well water flow.
In the end, the well we dug was successful. Joe got his 40 gallons per minute, and I finally got an airplane ride back to Prince George.