Well, well, well...how should modern water wells be tagged?

Sometimes, I find myself mapping small-town or suburban waterworks facilities, or industrial areas, where one or more water wells are present. However, all the examples in the Wiki (save for perhaps one) are of dug or otherwise manually operated wells, not of modern public or industrial wells with their steel casings, downhole submersible pumps, and oft-associated storage and treatment facilities.

Obviously, we should still use man_made=water_well for these creations, but the associated tags are less clear:

  • My understanding is that the fact a well is supplying a public waterworks is insufficient to tag drinking_water=yes on it – this would only be used if the containing waterworks had a public fountain/bubbler/hydrant facility available. Is that correct?
  • Likewise – the fact that the well supplies water to a public waterworks system will generally mean that the well is contained within a fenced-off compound to protect the water supply. This I tag as access=no, but is that a correct conclusion to draw?
  • Is there a schema for tagging other useful information about the well that may be available from the driller’s sheets? (Such as depth to water table, aquifer, and yield/capacity data?)
  • Should wells used for groundwater monitoring be mapped/tagged using man_made=water_well? Also, is there a tag I can put on wells that are deliberately accessing non-potable water (for monitoring or pump-and-treat of groundwater contamination) beyond drinking_water=no to denote that what’s coming out of the well shouldn’t be treated as a usable water supply, even for more typical non-potable purposes? (In many cases, the output of pump-and-treat wells is legally considered to be a hazardous waste, even!)
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yes, I would see it like this (water is available to the public at the place), although I wouldn’t bet the tag is only used like this

there is man_made=monitoring_station with subtags that is preferable IMHO.

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I don’t think so. A man made well feeding public water supply net with drinking water qualifies for the tag drinking_water=yes. No further installments required. For the supply of drinking water “on the spot” there is amenity=drinking_water, amenity=water_point + additional tags.

I have been using access=private for these fenced compounds but access=no fits as well imo. Both tags imply that this place is not open to the public.

There is a key depth=* and another one capacity=* although this on is used in OSM in another context (see the wiki page).

Groundwater monitoring see

Pumping stations see man_made=pumping_station.

Yes you are correct. That is not just for anything related to drinking water.

(Or at least add access=private)

Yes, when I am thirsty and looking for water, I type drinking water into my favourite OSM app, and the app shows me all the places that have been tagged drinking_water=yes and all places tagged amenity=drinking_water (and possibly a few others too, not sure).

If we use drinking_water=yes for facilities that somehow process drinking water, but where a thirsty hiker can’t actually find drinking water, then we break those data consumers.

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A well for drinking water is a well for drinking water and according to the wiki should get the tag drinking_water=yes. If it is not accessible for a thirsty hiker or biker because the water is fed into a distribution network only the additional tag access=no/private should help to avoid misunderstandings.

If we want to reserve “drinking_water” to those places exclusively where an outlet is accessible for everyone this should be documented in the wiki and another tag for drinking_water wells without public access would have to be created.

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Fair enough, I suppose data consumers should be looking at access too. I am not familiar enough with these sort of “industrial” wells (or boreholes?) that are being discussed here to comment any further, I just wanted to point out that apps rely on the tag for showing drinking water sources to hikers.

I would not tag the well as drinking_water=yes if there is no drinking water available on the spot.
Can we be sure that it is drinking water right from the well? In most cases the water is treated in one or another way before it is declared to be safe drinking water.

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Which wiki page claims this?

man_made=water_well …

drinking water - yes/no - Indication whether a feature provides drinking water

If noone will protest and there is no real common mapping doing this, then I would clarify it by mentioning that it is about providing to general public.

I expect that it was meant and understood by people.

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I do not have any problem with that but should we not have another tag then for those thousands of man made wells providing drinking water for the water distribution networks to distinguish them from wells providing water for irrigation or industrial use?

A couple of people have already touched on this, but I’ll add my bit. A well, or any other water abstraction source, rarely produces water that is safe to drink. Most of the developed world treats the water first before it goes into the distribution network. I’d not tag any part of the water abstraction and treatment process with drinking_water=yes unless it’s a tap that operatives themselves use for drinking water. You’re not going to see that in many cases as access is not usually public.

Unfortunately untreated water used for drinking is still common in parts of the world, with all the problems that go with it. We’ve just had a large drinking water failure in the UK and it made people ill from cryptosporidium, a common tiny critter in the environment. Clear water is not a good indicator that water is safe to drink either.

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Based on what people tag things as in OSM (in UK and IE) I ended up with this list to decide “something you can walk up to and get a drink from”.

I noticed that nobody seems to have picked up on this question. Is an explicit drinking_water=no considered sufficient for a pump-and-treat well, or is there a better way to mark the well as “do not use this even for non-culinary purposes because there’s industrial junk in the water that comes out?” (i.e. a well that’s tapping a shallow aquifer that’s got a bunch of residual perc in it, thanks to the neighborhood drycleaners)

If noone will protest and there is no real common mapping doing this, then I would clarify it by mentioning that it is about providing to general public.

actually I do protest, while drinking_water=* is a helpful tag when looking for drinking water, it is also used to specify the water of privately accessible wells, so access tags should be taken into account for more reliable results (btw., I recently learned some people are using “locked=yes” to specify a the water at a source like a spring or a well is not accessible)

If it is a facility not only pumping but also treating the polluted water there is the tag man_made=wastewater_plant for it. If it is only a pumping station I would go for man_made=pumping_station + wastewater=yes.

I noticed that nobody seems to have picked up on this question. Is an explicit drinking_water=no considered sufficient for a pump-and-treat well, or is there a better way to mark the well as “do not use this even for non-culinary purposes because there’s industrial junk in the water that comes out?”

there is also the hazard tag that could maybe be useful then

Come to think of it, would using that on man_made=water_well be what I’m after? (The corresponding man_made=wastewater_plant is usually located near, but not at, the well, as it’ll be treating the effluent from multiple wells on the site.)

I know some places where polluted groundwater is collected by several pumps, treated in a central wastewater treatment plant and then pumped back into the aquifer. I would not define those places where the polluted groundwater is collected as “well” but as “pumping station” and tag them as such.

Besides that these installations in those places I know are of temporary duration only as this way of treatment is very expensive. Usually the target is to eliminate the cause of the pollution and rehabilitate the affected area so that after some time the pollution is gone and no further treatment necessary.