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999 Carl Mount RECEIVED Division of Minerals & Geology 1313 sherman st. , Rm. z15 NOV 1 3 2000 Denver, CO 80203 November 10 , 2000 Division ci Minerals and Geology Dear Mr. Mount: This is in regard to the house water well at 104th Ave. and McKay Road in Adams County. CAMUS recently started digging gravel (permit no. M-99-034) within a quarter-mile of this ®ell, and I believe their initial, temporary lowering, and then perma- nent raising, of the shallow water level is i+that caused this well to completely cave in. I don't know what year this well was dug--between the turn of the last century and the 1930s at the latest, for our family knew the families who lived there since the 1930s. So it is an old well. The farm wells dug in those days, along the Platte from Welby to Brighton, were nearly all 300- to 400-foot artesian wells. This one was 400 feet. It had a steel casing down to 35 feet; below that there was ne casing, I'm quite sure. About 10 years ago it was 60 feet down to the water level. The pipe was down only a couple or so feet below that, and this gave us trouble because any extra use, such as flushing both toilets within a few minutes, would pull the water down below the end of the pipe so that the pump (which set in the cemented pump chamber gust underground.) had to be primed. My father Al Ford, now deceased, had a well man come out and extend the pipe. I'm not positive exactly how long the extension was, but I believe it was atleasf another 25 feet, meaning the pipe was close to 100 feet down since about 1990 until the recent (Oct. 2000) cave-in. The water level of course has been lowering gradually for decades, and there undoubtedly were some .small cave-ins over the course of time. Nonetheless we had no trouble other than having to extend the pipe once. Then, in the last three months or so, CAMUS began their gravel mine, and they eventually dug a big diversion ditch along the Public Service power lines, within a quarter-mile southeast; this ditch pulled the shallow water table down. Then when they got their retainer wall in, this backed the water table up to higher than it has been in at least 50 yearst Don DeWitt at 10230 McKay Road (just a city block's distance south from our well) has a small lake in his pasture now, where there'd been only seepage for the past 2$ years that he's lived there. So we have proof that CAMUS caused some abrupt changes in the shallow water table.