Once upon a time there was a farmer. The farmer thought it was a good idea to build a well to water his farm. He hooked it up to a generator to make sure he never stopped pumping groundwater from the well. One day, however, the farmer noticed that his plants were withering. “Was it something in the fertilizer? Is there not enough water? What’s going on?” He wondered. He called his fellow farmers to ask them what he was doing wrong. They didn’t know either. Eventually, he checked the well. There was no water. He called back the people who drilled it for him.
“What’s going on?” He asked them.
“We suspect it could be one of two things,” they told him. “One could be that one of your neighbors has a much larger well than yours and the cone of depression around their well could be draining your well. Two could be due to hydraulic conductivity. Since we measured your well to one nearby, that well we measured from could have been drawing ground water trapped above an aquitard, or a rock with very low permeability. We’ll do some more research and fix it up for you.”
“Please do so quickly. A lot depends on this,” the farmer declared.
A few days later they returned with a drill for the well.
“What took you so long?” The farmer enraged. “My plants can’t breathe!”
“Sorry, sir,” they apologized. “We had to talk with your neighbors and calculated the hydraulic gradient of the area to best determine how we can fix your well. No matter the problem, we’re going to have to dig deeper. We believe your neighbor’s wells were creating a cone of depression and draining your well.”
They dug and dug and made sure that, in the end, the farmer’s well was pumping plenty enough water for his farm. The farmer, unfortunately, lost most of his plants from that drought that year, but years to come his farm always thrived.
The end.