Drilling and drinking advice from East Coast experts BY PHILIP MOSCOVITCH
I
n the 1948 film Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, Jim Blandings (Cary Grant) checks in to see what kind of progress the well-digger is making. “How far down are you?” Blandings asks. “Oh, about 130 feet,” replies Mr. Casander, the well-digger. Blandings wonders if he’s had any sign of water at all. “Hit some limestone yesterday,” Casander says, before adding that he’s “coming into some shale. Of course, it might turn out to be sandstone.” Meanwhile, across the property, water is so close to the surface the house’s foundation is flooding. Wells are complicated, and sometimes unpredictable. But a lot of us rely on them. About 50 per cent of P.E.I. residents get their water from residential wells. The figure for Nova Scotia is only slightly lower, and on the island of Newfoundland, it’s about 30 per cent. New Brunswick
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has 100,000 private wells. And since there is no municipal water system sampling the water, well owners need to get it tested themselves. “You can have arsenic, uranium, bacteria, nitrates — you run into it all the time on P.E.I.,” says Eustace Reeves, whose company, Reeves Water Treatment Systems has been in business since 1977. There is no simple answer for what kind of well is best, says recently retired professional engineer Dan Moscovitch, who has consulted for homeowners with both dug and drilled wells. (Note: Moscovitch is the brother of this article’s writer.) With an increase in hotter, drier weather and drought conditions, dug wells may run low or dry. And they are at risk for bacterial contamination. Digging a well also requires paying close attention to siting, since it can’t be too close to a septic tank or field.
