Well Drilling & Repair in Columbia, SC

Columbia & Richland County Well Service

Columbia Sits on the Fall Line. That Changes What We Hit.

Austin Drilling has operated out of West Columbia since 1960. Columbia is not a market we drive to — it is where our rigs, our pipe and our crews are parked overnight. For most addresses in Richland County that means a service call is a short trip, not a scheduled expedition.

Columbia sits almost exactly on the Fall Line, the geological boundary where the hard crystalline rock of the Piedmont disappears beneath the sands and clays of the Coastal Plain. It runs roughly through the middle of the county. That single fact explains why two Richland County wells a few miles apart can behave nothing alike. Northwest of the line — toward Irmo, Ballentine and Blythewood — we are drilling granite and gneiss and chasing water-bearing fractures. Southeast of it, in Lower Richland toward Hopkins, Gadsden and Eastover, we are setting screen in water-bearing sand. Same county, two different jobs, two different rigs.

Most homes inside the Columbia city limits are on Columbia Water, so the calls we take in town are usually irrigation wells — property owners who would rather not water an acre of lawn on a metered municipal bill — plus treatment work for people who already have a well. Outside the city, in the unincorporated county, private wells are still the normal way a house gets water, and a failed pump means no water at all.

Hardness and iron are the routine complaints on the Piedmont side of the county, both of them a by-product of granite weathering. On the Coastal Plain side we see more iron and more sulfur smell. Neither is dangerous at the levels we typically find, but both are fixable, and we will tell you which one you actually have before selling you equipment. See our notes on hard water in South Carolina if you want the background first.