Were the wells at Kitchen Creek Golf Course pumped for an hour, a day, or more? And were any of them hydrofracted?
Depending on who you ask, you might get a different answer.
Brent Holmstrom, with the Ministry of Environment, said the wells at Kitchen Creek were pumped for about 24 hours on advice of the MoE’s technical support branch to see what kind of flow they could sustain.
Even though this violates the 10,000 gallon per day limit that can be taken from a well by law for irrigation use, Holmstrom said it was done as part of the ministry’s permit approval process.
“What they have to do is test the yield of the wells to make sure they can handle that without affecting any of their neighbours,” he noted. “They haven’t pumped since.”
But at the public meeting held by the golf course two weeks ago, the information given out there stated the wells were pumped for less than a day.
Meanwhile, Mel Jack, of Mel’s Well Drilling in Emo, was the one who put in the golf courses new wells. His version states they were on-site pumping for two or three days.
“We pumped them down to know what their capacity was,” he said, noting the pumps ran constantly.
There’s also some discrepancy about what well drilling methods were used. The golf course said at the information meeting two weeks ago that both wells were drilled straight.
Jack said one of the two wells was hydrofractured–something the golf course said it didn’t use.
But he stressed there was “no chance of anything ever hurting things” from the hydrofracting. “It can only help the neighbour’s well,” he noted. “It’s not like dynamite where it would ruin everything.”
Jack also was fairly adamant the drilling and pumping of the new wells at the golf course could not be the cause of other wells going dry. He said the two wells drilled on the golf course go 280-300 feet deep–right into the rock bed.
The wells that went dry did not.
“There’s a couple of other wells close by that were in the rock that would have been affected instead of those above the rock,” Jack said, including the well at the clubhouse which did not experience any fluctuation.
“It’s never our intention to drill a well in just any place [and] to pump so much water that we’re going to bugger up the neighbour,” he stressed.