The Brown County Water Improvement District #1 will soon be advertising for bids to drill a test well as they search for alternative sources of water for the area.
BCWID General Manager Dennis Spinks said that advertising for bids will begin this Sunday and the board anticipates selecting a drilling company by their meeting next month. Officials believe that the bid could be anywhere between $300,000 and $600,000 depending on the company. Spinks said that if the bids come in too high, the board might have to adjust the project to cut some costs.
The test well is being drilled to test water quality and production rate from aquifers about a quarter of a mile south of the original Hot Wells location in Brownwood. The 41 acre property is owned by Jeff Lemmons, and the district approved revised lease terms Tuesday evening with the property owner to move forward with the drill test project which could eventually turn into multiple production wells to use for municipal and irrigation purposes if the tests on the well show positive results.
“He (Lemmons) gets the benefit of the use of the water; we get no cost for a site for a test well,” Spinks said. “If we want to abandon it, we abandon it and he can take it over.”
DB Stephens and Associates has been hired to work on the project with the water district to not only perform analysis on the test well, but to create and implement a plan moving forward on production wells as a water source for the area if it can be justified after testing.
Stefan Schuster of DB Stephens outlined several funding options for the project through state programs. He said costs of building a well field could cost as much as $40 million.
Results from the test well will be a key component of the project moving forward and will be dependent on the flow rate of the well and the amount of dissolved solids and its sodium content. If the water quality is within acceptable levels to be piped to and treated at the district’s water treatment plant, the well field project would be feasible. Higher dissolved solids and sodium content in the water would mean making costly improvements to the water treatment plant if the project were to move forward at that point.
“You have to have an analysis, you have to have a sample to calculate is it going to be feasible to treat this water and what type of treatment is it going to take to bring this water to state standards,” Spinks said.
District officials are taking this project step by step, first seeing if there is usable underground water in the area. Implementing a production well field as another source of water for the area may not move forward until the lake level reaches a more critical point.
“If we have usable water, we may not need to continue on at this point, but we need to get everything in place and do as much as necessary so that it can be streamlined and accomplished as quickly as possible,” Spinks said. “As far as putting in a well field and a transmission line is not going to be cheap and is not going to be quick.”
