In the middle of September this year, Piglet and I traveled to the southwestern part of Virginia to assist some fellow water well drillers in obtaining their Virginia Master Drillers Licenses. The drilling company they work for has been in business since 1905.
The editor of The Driller, Mr. Jeremy Verdusco, gives us column writers wide latitude in choice of subjects. This article was going to be about the marriage of my granddaughter, Samantha, to a fellow named Trevor, a second lieutenant in the Army Reserve, the event to take place in four days.
I have stated that drilling is 80 percent knowledge and 20 percent luck. Bad luck happens when a driller encounters a loss zone, thus preventing the driller from finishing the hole.
For much of the drilling industry, continuing education is nothing more than a requirement that is more dreaded than anticipated and more boring than fun.
In my travels I find that many businesses today are owned by a person or persons that know nothing about the business they own. Some own several businesses and in many cases these people attempt to micromanage a business that they know nothing about.
Got a call from a driller I had met on Facebook, and we had discussed jobs for quite a while. He said he had an irrigation well that was pumping sand, and had been doing it for a while.
As I wrote in my last column, the pitless adapter is a rather simple but important device used to complete a modern well. All of these have a way of keeping pumped water below the freezing point or frost line.
Pumping professionals face the ever-growing daily challenge of recommending and installing the most efficient system for customers. Digging through the uncertainties of efficiency regulations, mandates and parameters is tough, especially when efficiencies alone don’t tell the whole story.
Bess, Piglet and I recently formed a non-profit business, Ground Water International Solutions, to generate funds to purchase equipment, refurbish it and send it with the expertise to teach people in developing countries to drill water wells properly.
