Author Archives: Steve Mays

New well: Cleaning up

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The new well is in and today was devoted to decommissioning the old well. The Missouri Department of Natural Resources has guidelines on this but the goal seems to be preventing contamination.

This involved pouring twenty bags of something called Envrioplug down the well. Moisture (and a little time) turns this into a hard clay-like substance that plugs the well until the end of time. After that it was Bobcat work, filling in the trench that held the pipes feeding water from the new well to a pressure tank in our basement…

…and tidying up the surrounding area.

Sol Astrachan 1929-2022

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Sol Astrachan, long time business owner and resident of Kennett, Missouri, passed away this morning at his home in Kennett. Sol Astrachan was born in Poland in 1929, and later moved with his family to Russia. When he was nine his family immigrated to the United States. After a short stay in St. Louis, Mr. Astrachan went to Kennett, Missouri, where he has lived ever since. Mr. Astrachan served a term on the Kennett city council (1961-1963) and two terms as mayor (1963-1971) of Kennett. (Obituary)

Sol was a good friend to my father and a good (and courageous) mayor. Sol graduated from Kennett High School in 1947. Photo below of senior class. Sol was interviewed by Will Sarvis for the Missouri State Historical Society on October 28, 1998 at his home in Kennett.

 

Broseley, Missouri High School Senior Class (1943)

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Broseley, Missouri High School Senior Class of 1943. My mom (not in this photo) would have been 18 in 1945. She had a sweater like the one the young man on the left is wearing. I had (and wore) it for a while. Major news events of 1943:

  • Allied forces take back North Africa
  • Italy Surrenders to Allied Forces
  • Dambuster Raids on German dams
  • Warsaw Jewish Ghetto Uprising
  • Due to shortages America sees it’s first rationing
  • The Glenn Miller Orchestra provided the most popular music of the time.
  • The Pentagon, considered to be the world’s largest office building is completed

Pleasant Hill School (Lineville, IA)

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(Wikipedia) “The Pleasant Hill School, also known as the Little Red School House, is a historic building located north of Lineville in rural Wayne County, Iowa, United States. It was built in 1881 on land that had been purchased for educational purposes in 1873, and it housed a one-room school until 1958. The Grand River Independent School District donated the school building to the Wayne County Historical Society. They maintain it as it was when it served as a schoolhouse. The interior furnishings are authentic, if not original to the building. The school yard is maintained as a roadside park along U.S. 65. The building follows a rectangular plan that is three bays long and two bays wide. It is capped with a gable roof. A small entryway is located on the south side of the structure. The school building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975.”

Took these photos one a road trip in 2013.

Grayson “The Professor” Boucher

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(Wikipedia) “Grayson “The Professor” Scott Boucher (born June 10, 1984) is an American streetball player, actor, and former professional basketball player. He is most known for playing on the highly stylized, international AND1 Mixtape Tour; he has also appeared in several movies, most notably Ball Don’t Lie. Boucher is 5’10” and weighs 145 pounds (178 cm, 66 kg) and his jersey number is 12.”

I’ve watched a couple of his YouTube videos and was moved by this one:
This one is a bit more light-hearted:

According to his YouTube page, his videos have been viewed 1,168,739,158 times. If I’m reading that correctly, that’s one trillion, 168 billion, 739 million, 158 thousand. Assuming most of those are sponsored or have ads, how much is this guy worth? According to a website called Nailbuzz (as of March 2022), just north of $4 million.

The channel has over 7 million subscribers as of 2022 and has accumulated over 950 million views so far. It is able to get an average of 450,000 views per day from different sources. This should generate an estimated revenue of around $3,600 per day ($1.3 million a year) from the ads that appear on the videos.

New well operational

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I don’t recall being around when our old well was dug, almost 30 years ago. So I had no idea what the pump looked like until this morning. This is called a “submersible pump” and it seems pretty amazing something could work under wafter that long with very few problems. Lots of videos on this topic.

In the images below Joe Greene, one of our well guys, is wiring the pump to our electric. The red faucet is what Barb uses to water her flower beds in that part of the property.


The PVC pipe on the ground in the image below is what brings the water up and into the pressure tank in our basement. I counted 19 twenty-one foot sections which gets our pump down 400 feet.

Drilling new well – Day 2

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After two (very hot days) of drilling, the crew hit water this afternoon. While I was imagining some big underground lake, the reality is water filling cracks and spaces down in the shale. When you drill down to where it is… you have water. Or something like that.

Mike says we have standing water at 315 feet. The drilled well is approximately 586 feet deep. That gets lined with steel casing (see image below) to a depth of about 443 feet. This keeps the rock from caving in, a problem we had with the old well.

Inside the steel casing is the PVC pipe that brings up the water. It goes down the full 586 feet. A pump is dropped down into the PVC, approximately 400 feet down. (My somewhat fuzzy grasp of what this looks like is shown in the diagram at the bottom of this post. Wikipedia has a lengthy and fascinating page on the history of wells.)


The rock that was removed in the drilling process will eventually wash down into the woods. A few more zinnias and you’ll never notice the well head. Image below is Mike and his crew cleaning up.

Update 8/4/22: B & H came back this morning with a fiber optic camera they dropped down the new well to make sure there were no problems with the PVC pipe. Ii watched for  a hundred feet or so but it was too much like seeing someone’s colonoscopy. A little goes a long way. We’re good to go. Next step is to drop the (very expensive) pump down about 400 feet and hook the new well into our existing pipes.

Day 1 – Day 3