The mining company Nueva Unión SpA asked us for the implementation of a piezometer net (25 monitoring wells) in a variety of valley floors located near the mining project in order to monitor water levels and water quality from their feeder aquifer.

The implementation process took two different stages: drilling and installation.

Drilling: Definition and distribution of the net points at the valley floor. Then comes the recognition and prospection maneuvers of soil layers. At last, the drilling starts taking sediment samples every 10 cm.

Installation: Consist in an implementation of slotted and casing PVC tubs and then a purging process using a hydraulic pump. After that, physicochemical parameters are measured.

When both stages were done, a water level sensor was introduced inside the well.

The 25 well net to monitor groundwater levels in the valley floor of Nueva Union’s mining project was successfully implemented along with the gathering information about the aquifer geometry, saturated thickness and water quality.

Inside these wells were left transducers for the register of water level, temperature and electrical conductivity variations.