Sustainable Wells: Maintenance, Problem Prevention, and Rehabilitation

No one has recorded when well digging started, but surely humans imitated elephants in digging holes in the sand to access cooler water that didn’t make the children sick. Eventually, humankind began to redesign, maintain, and repair the wells they constructed, but when wells became "commodities" in the twentieth century, this maintenance ethic was fogotten. Recapturing that ethic, Sustainable Wells: Maintenance, Problem Prevention, and Rehabilitation is a guide to keeping well systems operating at peak capacity. The book focuses on how to prevent and forestall problems, and manage the problems with wells as they age.

Examining the many challenges that come with maintaining well performance, the book provides a comprehensive yet readable state-of-the-art summary of performance maintenance, problem prevention, and rehabilitation or restoration practice with the goal of sustaining optimal performance over the long run. Rather than focusing on a certain aspect of well cleaning, or a particular technical approach, it covers the scope of maintenance and rehabilitation, from planning to evaluation testing. It also addresses the crucial subjects of preventive design, maintenance monitoring from electrical to biofouling, and evaluation testing.

An exploration of the subject without a vendor or strong regional bias, the book is based on the authors’ extensive hands-on experience serving well-operating clientele. In addition to water supply wells, it addresses the problems and maintenance issues of monitoring, plume control, and other "environmental" wells. Compiling information from existing literature into a single source, and combining that information with experience, the book provides recommendations based on historical performance. Copiously illustrated with approximately ninety black and white photographs, figures, and a color insert, the book reflects the changes in the profession that have occurred during the past decade or so. These features and more make this the first resource to turn to when devising solutions for maintaining and improving well performance.

Stuart A. Smith, Allen E. Comeskey