Purpose

Traditional hand pump.

The purpose of this website is not only to introduce you to Wilson Drilling Services but to also provide information about the tremendous groundwater resources we are blessed with in East Tennessee and Southwest Virginia. By sharing actual job site photos, videos, and links to groundwater related websites we hope you enjoy seeing a world most people never experience.

Everyone has a story about their project of their lifetime. Here is mine. I had an opportunity in 2001/2002 to drill three wells in Nicaragua. The first site has an orphanage complete with a medical facility staffed by medical students volunteering for 6 months terms just before they receive their MD from a University here in the states. There is also a guest house for short term mission teams of up to 40 people.. Some mission teams are there to spread the Gospel of Christ while others perform specific humanitarian relief works. We drilled two wells and installed two pump systems at this site to insure a more continuous water supply for the facility.


The second location was located on a 3 mile peninsula extending out into Lake Manauga in front of the international airport. Children carried water from a meat packing facility in town to their homes daily. It was heartbreaking to see children, mostly young girls, lined up before full daylight to carry water to their families while aircraft from around the world landed in sight.

We drilled a single well on a property where boys were taught to farm and raise fish in ponds as a food supply. This well was originally intended as a water supply for raising fish. When drilling and well development were completed we had a true artesian well with a production of around 100 gallons per minute. This means water flowed over the top of the well casing above the ground surface naturally. We installed a submersible pump and an elevated storage tank to create pressure in a 2.5 mile water line. The people dug a ditch to install a 4 “water main to all 213 families on the peninsula by hand. Now everyone has a spigot on their property with water available 24/7. The children can attend school instead of making multiple trips daily to the meat packing house miles away to carry water. This project opened my eyes to the fact that WATER IS LIFE and it changed those children’s lives forever !!!!

A third site we worked on in Nicaragua was developed as a housing site for the homeless. It isn’t unusual for a single mother to have several children and no husband so they wind up living on the streets. This site was a campaign promise from a presidential candidate to help the homeless of Managua. He purchased a 65 acre tract of land just outside of Managua and subdivided it into 30’x90’ lots. These lots, 5 sheets of tin and enough wooden poles were given to homeless families if they would live there and not on the streets.

The mission organization we had worked with earlier contacted us to ask if we could provide the water for this site. Thru an in country contact it was discovered this piece of land had been a farm previously. The obvious question then became what
supplied water for the farm? Herman our in country contact looked into this and found an existing water well on the property. This well had been branded by the company who developed the well. He contacted the drilling company and ask for information on the well and did they come thru for us. The well is 350’ deep 8” diameter and produced 1000 gallons per minute.

While we were experiencing such favor we ask the power company to provide three phase electrical power to the site, and they did just that. We installed a pump in the well just like we would do for a small utility here. Using an elevated storage tank to create water pressure and a water line hand dug and installed by the native people, water was provided to every lot. The last information I had on this site was there were over 13,000 people off the street being supplied by this well and 80% of them were children.