10/06/2026
One day it’s a farmhouse, a barn and an old irrigation field. Not long after, the house is gone, the barn is demolished and excavators are moving dirt for apartments, townhomes, retail space and new roads.
That transformation is happening rapidly across the Treasure Valley.
But when an old farm disappears, not everything disappears with it.
Underground, there’s often an original well—sometimes decades old—sitting directly beneath what will soon become a parking lot, a commercial building or a multilevel housing development.
You can demolish the buildings. You can clear the land. But you can’t just bury an old well and build over it.
Before the site is graded, paved or built over, that well needs to be properly abandoned.
In Idaho, well abandonment must be performed by a licensed Idaho well driller.
For many of the wells we abandon in the Treasure Valley, that means perforating the casing every five feet and pressure grouting the well with a cement-bentonite grout mix made with Type II Portland cement and Wyo-Ben Grout-Well.
The perforations allow the cement-bentonite grout mix to be pumped under pressure through the casing and into voids outside of it, helping create a more complete seal and protect the groundwater formations the well passes through.
The easiest time to abandon an old well is BEFORE the big equipment moves in, the site gets crowded and development starts going vertical.
If there’s an old well in the path of your next project, call Hydro early. Our dedicated well abandonment team works with developers, general contractors, excavators, demolition contractors and sitework crews to get old wells properly abandoned and KEEP YOUR PROJECT MOVING FORWARD.
Treasure Valley’s Well Abandonment Kings!
