Where does the water come from? How did people back in the day know there’s water there? How was it safe to drink if it was publicly accessible?
In: Engineering
When it rains, where does that water go? Certainly, you’ll see streams of it running along, but you’ll also see it soaking *into* the ground. Dirt is, after all, fairly absorbent.
Just like water outside of the ground, water in the ground flows down and downhill. The result is a “water level” under the ground, beneath which you’ll find water. Dig a hole down here, and that water will fill the bottom of it. That’s a well.
Don’t put something poisonous in the well, and it’s safe to drink. For a town well, that would be more or less an act of terrorism. Provided nobody does that, there’s nothing wrong with sharing a well.
Just like oil reserves under ground, there are also “tables” of naturally occurring ponds or even lakes under the surface. These water sources are naturally clean. Before modern times, and even today, theses reserves were found by using a dowsing rod
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowsing#:~:text=One%20rod%20is%20held%20in,cross%20over%20or%20swing%20apart.
It’s crazy how dowsing rods work and some people think they’re witchcraft. Lol.
In modern times companies have geologists/hydrologists who can scientifically figure out the best place to dig.
Next a drilling company comes to your property to locate how deep the reserve is. It can be several hundred feet deep and gets very expensive to get to the source. After that a pump is installed to bring it up to the surface and into your home.
Ever go to the beach and dig in the sand? The sand near the water, if you dig down even just a few inches, the hole will fill with water.
In a lot of the world, there is water if you did far enough downs. Rain water and other water seeps into the ground, flowing deeper, the same way that ocean/lake water is seeping into the ground near the body of water.
Sometimes it will stop and gather about larger rock slabs, or else under/between them.
Basically you’re digging a hole as deep as you need to, before the water down there starts to fill it up, and then you pump it out.
Search for “earth cross section for wells” and there’s a bunch of cool pictures showing it. Here’s one I found:
[https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Figure-A-2-Cross-section-sketch-of-a-typical-ground-water-flow-system-showing-the_fig1_255948122](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Figure-A-2-Cross-section-sketch-of-a-typical-ground-water-flow-system-showing-the_fig1_255948122)
Shows two types of wells. Onen that kind of digs until wet earth, the other down until it reaches an aquifer, essentially a giant pool/river of water running underground.
I am a third generation water well driller, or at least I was.
We would drill down into the rock. There are rivers of flowing water in the rock. Some wells drilled can be dry if no water is found. Other times, you may hit a small aquifer. Sometimes, you hit the jackpot and get a huge flow of water.
On land surface water, like lakes, ponds, and rivers are the exception.
The earth captures most of the water, and it becomes underground water. Large quantities of water are trapped this way (very large quantities, like 99% of liquid fresh water is underground)
Water remains a liquid though, it will sometimes flow over the ground, to form lakes and rivers, but we can also dig all the way down to the height of the underground water and it will naturaly overflow in the hole and be accessible.
Wells do dry up if more water is consummed than what fills the ground. Which either requires to dig deeper to the new height of the water or dig a new well where the water height is still high enough.
Underground hydrology is quite complex though.
There’s water in the ground. If you dig down far enough, you’ll hit a layer of water called the water table.
Making a well is that simple, and then you just need to get the water up somehow, usually with a pump.
As long as you don’t experience a drought or draw too much water from the well, the well won’t dry up, and if it does, you can just dig deeper.
Living near a body of water means the water table is higher and it’s easier to dig a well
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