Anyone Out There Ever Bush Hog A Well?

[SnowRidge]

I have a damaged well casing.

Some idiot (no need to discuss the who ) backed his rotary mower into it. The cap was shattered, and the casing was bent and gashed. The highest undamaged spot on the casing is just five inches above the soil.

I have made temporary repairs to the severed wiring and have an inverted bucket over the well to keep stuff out for now, so it's not an emergency, but I do need to do a proper fix. Does anyone know how the pros go about dealing with something like this? Any idea what it might cost to get it repaired? I'd like a ball park before I call any drillers.

The well is six inch steel pipe with a pitless adapter and a one HP submersible pump at 400 foot. It was drilled 13 to 15 years ago, and the pump was replaced five years ago.

Any advice will be appreciated.

 

[randy41]

cut it off level and buy a new cap.

 

[dbdartman]

Although you can probably get by using a hubless connector (like a FernCo coupling) to extend the casing, there are bolt-on casing connectors available. The only reason I know this is because I watch all the "This Old House" variations & saw this piece in an episode of "Ask TOH" a year or two ago, where a casing was extended because it was too low & allowed ground water & trash in. A search of pbs.org may help.

 

[Highbeam]

Since it is a pitless system the only thing that sticks up is a casing, cap, and wires in a conduit. Is the casing steel or PVC? I like to see more than 5" of casing sticking up for the sake of keeping it obvious and to keep groundwater out. I actually stuck a T-bar fencepost in the ground beside mine.

 

[SnowRidge]

It is steel, and I am also concerned about only having five inches of casing above the ground.

The fact that there are ways to extend the casing is good news. I will be looking into that.

 

[SnowRidge]

I actually stuck a T-bar fencepost in the ground beside mine.

Oh, how I wish I had done that.

 

[mahlers]

Look at the bright side - at least you knew the well was there... I was doing bobcat work around my place one day a few years ago, and all of a sudden the earth opened up below me and almost swallowed up the whole bobcat (with me stuck inside). Some hundred or so years ago, previous owners capped a 6'x6'x50' hand-dug well with redwood planks and about two feet of soil. There was no record of the well being there - nor was there any sign of it at all. To put it mildly, it was a big surprise and I had to throw those shorts away.

At least I got a nice well out of the deal. After dredging all the muck and debris out, we inspected the well and it was in perfect shape. It had been completely full of ice-cold water for all those years, and the redwood planks they used to line the well are almost as good as the day they went in. I put a BIG 24 inch thick reinforced slab on top of it and built a wellhouse. That well has been producing great water ever since.

It's amazing what the old-timers did. I can't imagine the amount of work that would go into hand digging a perfectly square 6'x6' well 50' into the ground. And, how the heck did they do it without the thing filling up with water on them? I drained it, and it re-filled all the way to the top within 12 hours - and that was in the summer time. How the heck they managed to do that is beyond me. Why the decided to cap it and abandon it is a big mystery, too. When dredging it out, we figured we'd find a skeleton in there, but didn't see anything - although something could still be down there because we couldn't get the whole two feet of dirt and rock out with that trash pump and none of us had the guts to climb down in there to dig around at the bottom.

 

[SnowRidge]

I imagine you were quite glad you found the old well and not the old outhouse.

 

[mahlers]

After winching the little bobcat out, we initially thought that it was an old cesspool. Most of the places out here originally had old redwood lined cesspools that stated out as outhouses, but they're at most six or seven feet deep. It wasn't until we tried to figure out how deep this one was that I was really shocked - we kept nailing eight-foot lengths of 1x1 wood together and they just kept going down, and down, and down. When we finally hit bottom the reality of what almost happened was pretty scary. The bobcat got caught on the way down, but if it had been oriented slightly differently, I would have gone all the way to the bottom with it - and there would be no way to get out becase of the cage around the operator seat. Those little bobcats are real heavy and it would have sunk like a rock.

 

[AlanB]

Although you can probably get by using a hubless connector (like a FernCo coupling) to extend the casing, there are bolt-on casing connectors available. The only reason I know this is because I watch all the "This Old House" variations & saw this piece in an episode of "Ask TOH" a year or two ago, where a casing was extended because it was too low & allowed ground water & trash in. A search of pbs.org may help.

When I read the original post, the same ask TOH popped into my mind.

Apparently it is a pretty common thing for them (well guys) to do.