New Well Goes Live!

The WSWSC has completed the first new well for Whitewater Springs in 13 years. This new well is located at the corner of Whitewater and Edgewood Drive. The well was drilled last summer and it has taken 9 months to get all the infrastructure and regulatory approvals completed. The well is now the fourth production well we use for the community. Special thanks goes out to David Giles from the WSWSC, Don Rauschuber from Donald G. Rauschuber & Associates, Mark Labounty from PGMS, Rick Green from Green Construction, BBA Engineering out of Bertram and Centex Pump Supply out of Dripping Springs for their hard work on this project.

Some vital statistics for the new well:
Altitude: 1,400 feet
Depth: 685 feet
Aquifer: Trinity
Production capacity: 22 gpm
Tested capacity: 25 gpm

This new well will provide much needed capacity at a time when we have many new homes in all stages of planning and construction. As of the end of April Whitewater Springs has 135 active water connections and 47 inactive connections. Theoretically all the inactive connections will be homes within the next couple of years. More than 25 are actively under construction.

The other benefit of this well is to give us some capacity to weather large leaks. As many of you have experienced in the past, a large leak can cause our large storage tank to drop by a foot or more per day. This can be alarming if we have difficulty locating the source of the leak. A well that produces 20 gallons per minute can help keep our 100,000 gallon storage tank full, providing a much-needed buffer when we have an emergency situation.

What’s next? We plan to keep moving forward with improvements to increase capacity while making our water system more reliable. On the reliability front we have plans to implement a SCADA system later this year.

What is a SCADA system? SCADA stands for Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition. Basically, it’s an automated system to control functions of the water system, collect real-time data and store historical information.  This will help us run more efficiently. When we have a water leak we’ll notice it more quickly and be able to narrow down where it’s happening more quickly. We’ll also be able to rotate the load across our four wells for better efficiency. It will also allow PGMS to remotely operate our system speeding their reaction to issues that may crop up. We’ll share more information about this as we get closer to implementation.

Beyond that we have a new well on the corner of Murphy and Wagon Wheel that we plan to put into service in the next year or two. We’ve got preliminary plans and are working to find a solution that fits the community budget. We have several other drilling locations under consideration that we’ll look at in the five-year timeframe. This will be important as some of our wells are starting to get old. Our first well is registered with the state as having been drilled in 1998.

With these improvements we feel confident that we will continue to serve the community reliably in the future.