Charlestown, Nevis
November 26, 2007
Junior Minister in the Nevis Island Administration (NIA) with responsibility for Public Utilities Hon. Carlisle Powell, announced Friday November 23, 2007, that he had received information that the water exploration team had found water during their drilling operations at 497 feet below the earth’s surface on the first drill site at Hamilton Estate one day before.
“On Thursday afternoon while we were in a Cabinet session, I received the kind of telephone call that we had been waiting on, that BEAD (Bedrock Exploration and Development Technologies) in their first drill site at Hamilton had found some water.
“While they had found a limited amount of water earlier during the week, this time they were seeing signs of more water being available and that is due to I would say the hard work of not only the exploration drilling team but of Dr Hoag as well, who has been here on island with us in Nevis, he has identified the site and has made it his business to be present here during the drilling to make sure that BEAD will be able to deliver on their promise of up to one million gallons of water per day,” he said in an interview with the Department of Information at the drill site.Mr. Powell said it was just the first sign of water and Dr. Hoag has advised him that they were hopeful that they would find more water. Notwithstanding, he said the news of the water was good news for Nevisians.
“The good news for the people of Nevis is that, even though they held us to the fact that we will find water, which we want to make clear that we [NIA] have every intention of delivering more water, that this is a new technology that is being brought to Nevis. Our [Nevis Water Department] deepest well is less than 300 feet in Nevis and to date we have gone past 500 feet at the drill site here in Hamilton and we are seeing signs of water which is a good sign.
“We [NIA] will continue to explore, to make sure we bring some ease to the people of Nevis”¦”We are happy to say that we have now started to see signs of water, and we are hopeful, I am very hopeful and the government is hopeful, that we will get greater signs of water and we will soon be able to harness whatever we are getting and put it into the system,” he said.
Meantime, Senior Scientist to the project, Geologist, Dr. Ronald B. Hoag Jr. of BEAD said he was pleased that they had seen success at the site and said the technique the company used was verified.
“I am very pleased that we have been successful hitting water at this site, this was not necessarily the best sight on the island but as one that we had access to early on we have about well over 50, 000 gallons per day at this current well but more importantly it verifies that our exploration technique is working. We located it by using a geophysical technique called CSAMT which profiles the sub surface and we pretty much picked up the water exactly where I thought we would. There are a number of dry fractures at the top that had the water table been higher, as it is quite low right now, we probably would have gotten a lot more water. So we will use this information and apply it to other sites and make some decisions on which sites to drill to next based on geological data that we collected on this well. The quality of the water is very good and the temperature of the water is quite low , those were two concerns I had initially because there are a number of wells on the island that are very hot,” he said.
Dr. Hoag said they had struck water at 497 feet though they had indications of fracturing at 340feet which were dry. He said they had expected to complete drilling at the site since they had already drilled to 560feet early Friday afternoon and intended to drill to 600 feet.
“We think we are pretty much through the zone where we anticipate picking up any more water. We are probably going to complete this well today and we hope to go to the well site we have near Barnes Ghaut starting tomorrow (Saturday).
Under the BEAD contract with the NIA, the company is expected to develop one million gallons of ground water daily to compliment the current supply now available to the island. Drilling operations at the Hamilton Estate site had commenced on November 13, 2007, when Hon. Carlisle Powell, flipped the lever to commence drilling operations.