I bought this house about 2 months ago and have had a real run around about my water rights. I need to water a large pasture for livestock. Anyway, I hired someone to put in a water hydrant connected to my water from the house to the barn. While digging the trench he ran into a 4 inch green plastic water line at about 5 feet down and water began gushing up into the trench quite rapidly. There was no reason a water line should be in that location. We quickly dammed up the trench and when the water reached ground level it slowed down, which gave me the impression that it was artesian water, While the plumber called for a gas pump to get the water level down for repairs, I started calling all the well drillers in the area. This well was put in about 45-50 years ago, no one I talked to knew anything about it. The last well driller in the yellow pages told me that the person who drilled most of the wells in this area died a while back. I was informed one of the things he would do with artesian wells was to but a drain line in the casing. This was to prevent the water freezing in the well head above ground. At the back of my property is a small river, I went back and sighted to where the plumber was doing the repairs and found where the pipe exited down a very steep bank buried in thick brush gushing a surpising amount of clean clear water. The artesian pressure isn't much at about 2 ft above the ground but has an amazing flow from a 4 inch line 5 ft underground. The well itself is 220 ft deep. This has been flowing thousands of gallons of water into the river 24 hours a day. Anyway my queston is how do I go about using all this water for irrigating my pasture? I have a 1.5 hp ditch pump and have been trying to think of a way to redirect this water back onto my property. Now that I know this water has been here all along I can quit trying to talk to these uncooperative people in the irrigation dept. (the head-gate is over 2 miles away)
- posted
18 years ago