Overcoming well drilling woes

I read “Digging Deeper” (Starting From Scratch, EQUUS 478) with interest. We bought a property with a well. However, we didn’t know it was a 40-foot-deep sand pit well. We found out soon enough that you couldn’t water the garden and fill a horse trough without running it dry. Every time we used it, we would have to wait an hour before we could use it again.

So we drilled a new well. To get one that would provide sufficient water, we had to drill to 610 feet. And that was not all. At about 100 feet down we hit a mineshaft. Special casing and packing had to be used for an additional $3,000 on top of the per foot price of the well. Then the water was so rusty it came up visibly red. So $6,000 of water purification later, we actually had water to use. JoAnn Drinkwater Coal City, Illinois