In the first two columns I wrote about this job, we attempted to spud down a 4-inch well on a piece of property where a customer was going to move his house. We locked up our casing at about 130 feet, having drilled through much fine sand. We broke this casing off below grade in an attempt to pull it and decided to try to use a mud rotary to complete a well. We contacted a firm from some distance away that had a good table-drive mud rotary rig. They proceeded to run a hole down rather deep — I don’t remember the exact footage but it was more than 130 feet. When they attempted to set 4-inch casing in this hole, it stopped dead right about where our casing had stopped.
At our request, they then brought in a spudder they owned, a heavy machine that was brand new and quite a bit bigger than the machine we used. They drove the casing a few feet and were getting nowhere fast, at which point they said we would have to forget a sand and gravel well and go to the bedrock. We were unable to get them to understand that the bedrock in our county is, by and large, not an aquifer. They wanted to run 3-inch steel pipe in the 4-inch casing down to rock. They provided the steel pipe and we provided the 3-inch turned couplings that would go inside the 4-inch casing that was locked up. This is where Chapter 3 begins.