By Pepper Fisher
SEQUIM — The City of Sequim has been getting by on 6 wells to supply their residents with drinking water, 3 at the Port Williams well field and 3 at Dr. Standard Park on Silberhorn Road. Last week, the drilling of a seventh well was completed at Standard Park, and it’s the deepest one yet.
There are 3 aquifers below the 10-acre park, one atop the other, at least that engineers know of, with the first sitting at about 200 feet down. That’s the one Sequim has been tapping into up until now.
City Engineer Nick Dostie says, for this new well, they went for the deepest one.
“The bid was put together to go a total of 600 feet below existing grade. We dug to about 575 feet, where we hit non-permeable or non-permissive material. Hit resistance. So, we’re going to be pulling back to about 525 feet, and that’s where we’re going to start our screen for our well.”
Why spend the money to go so deep when there are two others on top of the deep well? Dostie says, for starters, the new well is expected to have more capacity than the other 3 wells combined.
“So, we’re anticipating a capacity anywhere from 500 to 800 gallons a minute, just from the one well alone. The idea is, given how seasonal the first aquifer is, and people’s concerns with drought, and to be more drought resistant, the City has pursued this well to go deeper to a more reliable, less seasonal source, and also make it so that, should there be any sort of issues with the first aquifer, which feeds off of the Dungeness River, we can take those wells offline and use our new well and have no difference in capacity, when it comes to drawing water from the ground.”
No one will be drinking from the new well anytime soon. Drilling the well is only Phase 1 of the project. Now they’ll have to get approvals from several agencies before getting the well connected to the City’s reservoirs, which he thinks will be in the summer of 2026.