With little to no rain over the last several months, it’s not only farmers who are concerned about drought conditions but homeowners concerned about water levels in wells too.

Hydrogeological Engineer at Friesen Drillers, Jeff Bell says our water levels aren’t the lowest the southeast has ever experienced.

‘Yes, it's dry. The water levels are definitely down right now, but the beauty of the carbon aquafer system that we have here is when we do have a massive rainfall event, we will see very rapid recovery.”

Bell describes the Carbonate Aquifer that we live on.

“The carbonate aquifer that extends through this area is one of the more well-known aquifers in this province. It extends all the way from the US border down into the States. It goes all the way through this area underneath Winnipeg, through the Interlake, and then it kind of curls up on the north side of our two lakes. So it's a very large regional aquifer system.”

Bell continues, “and it's quite complicated in how big it is really. A lot of people don't realize exactly the extent of what it is.

There are almost no two places the same in terms of their water quality on that aquifer, and they're all driven by the recharge and the discharge dynamics that are occurring on the aquifer.

For example, in the Southeast here, everything is largely driven by the recharge from the Sandilands complex that we have to the east. That's a glacial feature that discharged a bunch of sand and gravel on top of the exposed bedrock, and that provides a sort of recharge of fairly fresh water. What recharges that largely in our climate here is snowmelt. So, we like to have a nice thick volume of snowpack in the Sandilands because we know we're going to get a fairly large recharge event when that occurs, and that's what hasn't occurred here.”

So then, with the low levels of precipitation, nearly no rainfall and very little snow last winter, homeowners and farmers alike may be wondering "Can my well run dry?”

To which Bell replies, “What I often tell people is the carbonate aquifer system in itself is largely driving a lot of the surface sort of features that we kind of know and take for granted in this province. So, if the carbonate aquifer were to dry up, for example, or were to completely disappear, you and I would probably be able to walk from Gimli to Victoria Beach without getting our feet wet.”

“We often get people telling us that their well has dried up. And actually, that's not technically the case at all. For example, what we (Friesen Drillers) tend to see most often occurring with this situation is that people think their wells have dried up but really there’s about 100 feet of overburden material lying on top of the bedrock. There's no aquifer in that at all. It's just clay and till and stuff like that, and the aquifer is still further down, beneath that.”

Bell mentions that often people have not installed pumps in their system, or installed a system that had no draw pipe on it, which works great when the water levels are at grade or very close to grade. It’s easy to draw the water out of that well, just right off the top and there are no problems at all. It’s when the water level now drops 7-8 feet below grade that the system doesn't work anymore.

“So people will tell you my wells run dry. But no, if we actually put a submersible pump in that and we pump that, well, we could get probably 100 plus gallons a minute out of that well. It's just the pumping configuration that's been put into is not correct, or it doesn't handle the variability that we're now seeing in our climate.”

What we have seen in this dry spell is that if we take the situation in Mitchell or New Bothwell, where water levels were at grade and people became used to that and they just had straight suction pumps and no drop pipes and no suction intakes, now the water level drops 7-8 feet, the system can't handle it and then the well stops working and people think their well is dry.

Bell speaks personally, “For me as a professional engineer in the province of Manitoba with an engineering degree in Hydrogeology, I find it just very difficult to listen when people say “their wells have run dry in New Bothwell.” No, they did not run dry in New Bothwell, there's still 100 feet of available drawdown in that well. It's just the pumping configuration could not handle five or six or 10 feet of water level change that exist in the area. So, the pumping system couldn't handle it. It had nothing to do with the hydraulic capacity of the water well.”