Caught on Guard Thoughts on Well Protection, Social Media and the Future of Drilling By Jeremy Verdusco The design of Alucast’s well protection products draws on Jeff Garby’s years of experience drilling and serving the drilling industry. Source: Jeff Garby photos Jeff Garby has served the drilling and environmental indus-tries for years. Now, as president of Alucast Inc. in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, he works closely with drilling companies around the globe. His company designs and manufactures custom manholes and well covers, so he has a lot to say about safe-guarding the hard work of drillers. It’s a passion he’s turned to full time after years in the industry. “You know, people think it’s crazy. But it’s well protection. I have a story behind it, because every time I drilled a well — I drilled for 15 years and I can tell you 90% of the wells that I installed, I put a crappy manhole cover on top of it, and it bothered me every time.” THE DRILLERS ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE HOLES TODAY. IT’S YOUR RESPONSIBILITY AS A DRILLER TO PROTECT YOUR WELL CORRECTLY. … THAT’S BIG. He recalls a particularly tough drilling project, one he put “blood, sweat and tears” into. A year later, he returned to the site to see the well protection cracked and damaged. “It’s my hole. I want it to be well represented,” he says. “And it wasn’t, and that bothered me.” Garby says Alucast works to design durable well protection to help give drillers a sense of confidence in the finished work. 16 NATIONAL DRILLER | SEPTEMBER 2020 | NATIONALDRILLER.COM “Well protection will mitigate consequence,” Garby says. “So what it means is, you are working extremely hard mak-ing a great well — a water well, a monitoring well, a gas well, it doesn’t matter. … If you have a crappy manhole cover, sur-face contamination will roll in, come inside and contaminate your well, change the water levels, change the groundwater data that you’re receiving. It’s a huge problem. You have got to have great well protection today and, not only that, you got to install it correctly.” Garby graduated from Ontario’s Fleming College with two years of hands-on training in water well, geotechnical and environmental drilling. He spent about 15 years drill-ing, everything from environmental and geotechnical work for Boston’s Big Dig to large-diameter wells in Florida. He started a drilling supply company, grew it to a handful of lo-cations and sold it. Now, he’s focused all those experiences on Alucast. “I tried to build a manhole cover that drillers would be happy to install,” he says. Alucast also offers customization with logos or colors, so drillers can come back to a project weeks, months or even years later and easily pick out the wells they did. Ultimately, Garby adds, it’s not just about pride in a nicely punctuated project. Depending on local regulations, it could also be a legal issue.
NationalDriller September 2020: Page 16
