We knew it was coming. The sunny day darkened. The calm was followed by the breeze
twittering around us. We weren’t really
surprised.
Once we got
started, it was hard to stop. The pile
of pipes lying on the ground was steadily disappearing. The end was in sight. If we stopped, then we would have to start
again, and starting is always the most difficult step in any project.
This project
began earlier in the spring. In March the
trees ordered last winter began to arrive.
Spring break also arrived and promised the time to plant those trees,
when there wasn’t something more pressing, like a trip to Cancun or to Tuscan
to take in a little baseball.
The Kansas house had its own well dedicated to
tree watering. It was instrumental in
establishing the windbreak that surrounds that house on three sides. Some time every year, usually in June, I
would go out, uncoil the electric cord hanging around the pressure tank and
plug into the exterior outlet on the house’s west side. I would be rewarded by the musical hum of the
submersible pump reverberating through the nearly 200 feet of pipe and the
pressure tank. The tone would change
after about 30 seconds as the water finally made it to the surface and with an
audible splash began to fill the tank.
Originally, the
well was intended to be the house’s main source of water, but yielding only
about three gallons a minute, it was deemed inadequate. The driller had already cased the well before
he informed the property owner of its poor production, so rather than plugging
the well and abandoning it, the previous owners went ahead and equipped the
well with submersible pump, piping and wiring.
Instead of being plumbed into the house, it was connected to a drip
system dedicated to watering trees.
When we first
moved there, a few cedars and many Ponderosas still needed the irrigation. When we bought the place after renting for a
couple of years, I put in two more rows of Ponderosas, all of which depended on
the well for life.
Meanwhile, the
main well was located a hundred yards to the north, in the neighbor’s
pasture. It was a much better well, but
it took a small fortune to pipe and power it with heavy copper cables running from house to well.
This particular
June, when I plugged in the tree well, I was not rewarded with a musical
hum. Instead, deadly silence hung in the
air. This had happened before. I unplugged the pump and let it rest a
minute. I tried it again. Same result.
A series of plugging and unplugging failed to jar the pump loose.
I put in a call
to the local well man who came out one day when we were gone. He left me a message on the telephone
answering machine (cellphones were still science fiction). The pump was locked up and was no longer any
good. A trip to the well site revealed a
bunch of lengths of pipe lying in the grass along with a coil of electric wire
and the no good shiny chrome pump.
I called the
well man and he said it would be X number of dollars for a new pump plus
installation. I declined the offer and
asked for my bill for pulling the pump out of the well.
On a trip to
Limon, I took the no good pump to the local well man’s shop. He took the pump and tapped it a few times
here and there with a rubber hammer. He
took a big pair of pliers and grabbed the drive shaft with them. He worked the pump’s drive shaft back and
forth until the impeller moved a wee bit.
He then dropped the pump into his sump tank, hooked it to power and
flipped the switch. It struggled
momentarily, then took off. It was
pumping again. He said it wouldn’t pump
quite as well as it used to because when it jammed like that, it usually broke
an impeller blade getting unstuck.
By the time we
returned to Kansas, grass had grown up all around the pipe lengths lying beside
the well. There were nine sections of
inch-and-a-quarter pipe lying there. I
had come prepared to put the pump back down into the well. I had a pipe dog and a couple of heavy pipe
wrenches with me. But that was a two-man
job.
Lucky Uncle
Bill. I called him and up he came. I had screwed the stub pipe into the bottom of
the pump, and I had rewired it and taped the wire joints hoping they would be
waterproof. Now came the two-man part of
the job.
We set the pipe
dog beside the well mouth and lowered the pump tailpiece down into the
well. One man held the pump in this
position, being very careful not to drop it (or down the well it goes!). The other held the pipe dog movable jaw open
while sliding the dog over the well mouth and positioning the stub pipe between
the pipe dog’s jaws. With everything in place,
the pump holder released his grip, and as the pipe tried to slide down, the
pipe dog’s movable jaw dropprd down and clamped the pipe so it couldn’t move.
Next, we had to
stand one of the lengths of pipe up vertically, pick it up and thread it into
the top of the pump. We tightened the
pipe-pump connection with the pipe wrenches.
Then came a dangerous maneuver.
In order to get the pump down into the well, the pipe dog had to come
off the pipe and be shoved aside far enough to allow the pump to pass into the
well. During this move, there is nothing
save human hands to hang onto the pipe sticking 20+ feet into the air.
To get the pipe
dog to release its bite on the pipe, lift the pipe up. One person has to hold the movable jaw open
once it has released and move the dog to the side. The pipe is lowered until the pump is below
surface level. Then the pipe dog has to
be repositioned over the well and on the pipe, all while one person is holding
the assembled apparatus.
The pipe wrenches
come into play again. They are used to
grip the pipe while lowering it. Starting with the pipe wrenches about chest
high, both men lift enough to release the pipe dog jaws. One man has to step on the movable jaw of the
pipe dog to hold it open while the pipe is being lowered. When the pipe wrenches are a few inches above
the dog, the guy steps off the jaw and the dog clamps the pipe, keeping it from
going lower. Then the workers repeat the
process, getting a chest-high grip on the pipe with the wrenches, releasing the
pipe dog and lowering the pipe. It takes
six or seven bites to get the length of pipe down into the well.
If the pipe has
been disassembled correctly, each length of pipe will have a coupling on
top. The coupling acts as a safety
collar. If for some reason the pipe dog
allows the pipe to slip, the coupling won’t be able to get through the dog
jaws.
Once the joint of
pipe is down the well, it’s time to grab another section of pipe, stand it
vertically, place it on top of the pipe in the dog, get it started into the
threads properly, and tighten with the pipe wrenches. Of course the assembly gets heavier with
every added joint of pipe. And at this
point, you have over twenty feet of pipe sticking up in the air, again.
So Bill and I had
two or three lengths of pipe left lying in the grass. We were being careful, concentrating on our
job. The assembly was getting quite
heavy. We weren’t really paying
attention to the weather.
The Goodwife
stepped out and yelled something about better quit and get out of the storm. We looked around. The clouds weren’t that threatening, it wasn’t
raining yet. True, we could see flashes
of lightning in the distance. The
thunder was grumbling but not that close.
She warned us another time or two.
By the time the
last pipe joint was made, the collar screwed on, the pipe dog removed with
difficulty because it took both of us to lift the assembled pipe with pump on
one end and collar on the other, with not a hand or foot to spare to drag or
kick the dog off the well mouth, the storm had nearly passed us by. Just a gust front we agreed, calling on the meteorology
we had both learned getting pilot licenses.
The real storm
hit when we entered the house. We got to
hear how deficient our intelligence was, neither of us having the sense to come
in out of the rain. Every summer idiots
like us died from lightning strikes, etc., etc.
But, we protested,
it didn’t really rain. Lightning bolts
had much higher targets than us. The
metal roof of the nearby house stood above us, even when we had 20 feet of pipe
sticking up in the air. Nearby trees
were higher than we were. We were
well-grounded, pun intended.
Our attempts to
make light of the situation only served to turn up the vitriol. Word got around the neighborhood. We weren’t allowed to forget what we had done.
When our neighbor
and former owner of our place next saw me, he said, “Gosh! Why didn’t you say something? You could have used the little Ford
tractor. I have a pipe clamp that hooks
to the scoop on the front end loader.”
That smarted a little. Still, there was a pride in having done a difficult
job, having completed it successfully, even if it could have been done in a
much easier fashion. A little lightning added glamor to the job, maybe.
The no good well
pump was still functioning when we sold the place.
No comments:
Post a Comment