Analysis of Historical Northeastern US Water Well Completion Records to Identify Effects of Drought on Residential Wells
2022
Shaw, Stephen | Kroll, Charles
This report was prepared for the New York State Water Resources Institute (NYSWRI) and the Great Lakes Watershed Program of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation with support from the NYS Environmental Protection Fund.
Show more [+] Less [-]Many areas of the country are not covered by municipal water distribution systems, especially rural areas. When rural water districts do exist, they often lack funding and infrastructure and have gaps in their coverage. Compared to centralized water distribution systems, private domestic wells are less regulated, and they can be more vulnerable to both contamination and shortages. Estimating the frequency of domestic well failure is difficult because reporting is often inconsistent or nonexistent.This research explores the idea of tracking variations in the number of new wells completed over time while concurrently comparing these well completions to variations in housing starts. New wells may be drilled due to new home construction, but they may also be drilled to replace a well that has gone dry. By normalizing well completions by housing starts, one can potentially separate wells completed as part of new construction from wells completed to replace a dry well. To validate whether there is indeed a dry well signal in normalized well completions, this research assesses whether annual variations in normalized well completions relate to other measures of drought and water depths in U.S. Geological Survey monitoring wells. This method offers the potential to better understand the impact of droughts on domestic wells in the past and infer the potential impact of climate change on domestic wells in the Northeastern U.S. in the future.
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