DEP press release on exterior building cleanup, July 2002

NYC 9/11 Public Portal Document

^Kdghted drill bit suspended from a cable that is repeatedly turned and dropped — or, tnore frequently, a hydraulic rotary ham- jig to bore down into the earthdeeply When Water p^ugh to tap into an underground aquifer. ^^ut how does a driller know where to ■-

^.^Our industry is heavily populated by sec- Comes ^M-, third- and even fourth-generation drill- Mr. McCray said. “They know where water is from having sited a well on

^om a Well nearby properties or by looking over their well logs,’’ the detailed records document­ ing their wells. ^,J4r. McCray said that according to the census, the last census that asked about By JAY ROMANO private wells. New York had 842,342 private wells — the fourth highest number in the na- ■y OR city dwellers and most suburban tioh. New Jersey and Connecticut had 9b homeowners, it might come as a sur- 314,862 and 289,880 respectively. prise that there are more than 15 mil- * Len Assante, president of the N ational ■Ground Water Association and the owner of liion households across the country that rely oriprivate wells for their drinking water, ^Plainfield WeU Drilling in Martinsville, N.J., that New York, with more than 800,000 sard that in many cases, a well driller will be p^vate wells statewide, and as many as required by law to drill a certain distance ^jlPiOOO on Long Island, places fourth nation- inp3 bedrock and then install a “well casing” to at least that depth. (The casing — a four- ^^®ut the familiar image of a well — a large or six-inch steel or plastic tube inserted into .’ait - - - . . lisle dug into the earth and topped by a cir- the hole bored by the driller — is designed to ■ keep the sides of the well from falling into i^ar stone wall covered by a cute little ' the hole and to reduce the possibility that ^i^ed roof — is outdated. Modem wells, 1 surface water will seep into the well and ^perts say, are “engineered structures’’ j contaminate it.) l^ut the diameter of a paint can that are In northern New Jersey, the law requires ^bdlled rather than dug. i drillers to install at least 50 feet of weU cas- “Think of the earth as a big sponge,’’ said ' Revi,M-cCray;execu.,ved,™iora«,eN.- Sional Ground Water Association a trade gg below the surface, the driller Stroup in Westerville, Ohio. A well creates a ^,^5 install 70 feet of casing to get the bot- way to get access to the parts of the sponge nthat store large amounts of water. Continued on Page S sf'j “And drilling a well today takes advanced a«edmology and some fairly expensive equip- i-ment,” he said. Modem well drillers, he said, use either a a’fcable tool percussion drill” — which is a J?;-.

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• I Tom Bloom /i'A- ’-Wells for drinking water nowadays are narrow ‘^engineered structures’ JSrilled rather than dug.

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