09/16/2025
"HOW I TURNED A $40,000 FAILED WATER WELL → 150 GPM GUSHER (Just Feet Away!)" Who would be CRAZY enough to do this? I WAS!
The drilled well in the foreground is a deep silted in non-producer, drilled just a couple years ago in Langley by another local water well drilling contractor.
The property owner did everything right (except hire the wrong drilling contractor), he paid every single invoice along the way, including the cost of this $40,000.+ dead hole, it all went sideways on him.
Always remember when you bring a drilling contractor onto your land you're not paying for water (I know you think you are) but you're not, you are paying to drill a hole, a very expensive hole and you are paying by the foot. It's essentially a calculated gamble with roughly 50/50 odds in many areas. (Who's the crazy one?)
So, if your driller does not know where to drill for water on your property and he has to ask you where he should be drilling, then this would suggest to me that we have two of you onsite who really has no idea what's going on, I think that's a big problem... especially for the person who's going to be paying the invoice, right?
I bet if I priced out this nightmare of a failed water system on this Langley property, I would say we are looking at $70,000 of just totally wasted money, and it was 100% preventable.
The drilling of the failed well, the water pumping system fully installed down the hole, then the owner discovered he has another problem, not enough water to water his small trees so in goes the inground water storage tanks, then let's not forget the costly high maintenance water treatment system to handle the silt and on and on it goes!
I told the property owner a year ago when I first did a site visit that he had a crap well and should't do anything except replace it, there's no point in throwing good money after bad. The well should have never been drilled in the first place.
The previous driller caught the very outside edge of the aquifer, not only was there only a small flow of water but the narrow sand and gravel seam that the driller did manage to locate was co-mingled with all the silt, on top and below the shallow seam.
A well like that will never clean-up and all it's going to do is pack up the screen and pump silt into the system. But still, the drillers proceeded to dropped a screen down the hole anyway, then off they went leaving the owner with an unusable water well.
Finally a year later, I get the call again. "Ok Colleen, I have to trust you, I don't know where to turn." This poor guy was backed right into a corner the situation had increasingly worsened and he was getting desperate.
I head over to his property to meet him again, you can imagine what he's thinking when I walked across the driveway from the dead well and sunk my pin for a new well into the ground just a few feet away.
I get it... for most people this is hard to get your head around. But, when it comes to money, I have a deep respect for my property owners, I always want the water worse than they do, it's in my blood and I am highly driven. I was not interested in rebuilding his entire existing underground infrastructure, this man has already been skinned, his money matters.
"A dry hole doesn't mean a lot to me... success can only come when drilling where the water is as opposed to where it isn't, so who cares if that's just 25 feet away?"
So here I am prepared to drill a new well so close to the failed well, the property owner has to have a lot of trust when you put him in a situation like this. I've done thousands of well, I dont really feel the pressure, just a knowing in my ability to read the ground.
I had a lot going against me here on this Langley site, a very nervous property owner, a serious drilling failure staring me in the eye (that never bothers me much), my pin is now sitting near the edge of a very deep ravine, maybe a couple hundred feet deep (I know I'm going to be chasing water, it's going to go vertical on me for sure), a few hundred feet of drilling silt, like what the heck could possibly go wrong here?😂
BUT here's the thing, I also knew that I had a massive gravel deposit at 400' I could see it roughly 800 acres away heading our direction and moving right down under that ravine, I had the rig centered right on top of it.
It was a tough drill, real hard on the owner and the drillers but they stuck with me. Image after image sent from the driller asking me if I ready to abandon hole, it was not looking good. I kept watching my depths and finally text them at 10 pm, "we need to go one more rod in the morning, let's get it down there."
And sure enough in the morning with that one rod we nailed it! We tagged 150 gallons-per-minute open bottom @ 400'.
What a GREAT day for the owner and the family, these are the days I live for. By that evening I went over to take a look at the project, as we often work till dark. I have to tell you... that awesome property owner looked 20 years younger! No more water worries for him.😀
If you are drilling for water and a well driller asks you where YOU want to drill your well, REMEMBER this story, please reconsider, then give me a call. I have managed thousands of drilling sites over 34 years, I have never once asked a property owner where I should be drilling their well! 🤣
Where you end up locating your well is everything, the value of your property depends on it.
I am called to many dry hole drilling sites around the province, I do manage rigs steady in the Fraser Valley, Sea-to-Sky etc., but I try to fly to other communities when time permits.
MORAL OF THE STORY: An expert site assessments could have save this propety owner $70,000 and years of stress too.
Don't let anyone drill blind on your property.
Fraser Valley Well Drilling
Office: 604-670-3033
P.S. - That other driller? Well. they are still out there asking homeowners where they'd like to drill their expensive hole.
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