# About wwc5 — scope, sources and limits

> How this site is built: what is loaded, what is deliberately left out, and what the register cannot say.

## How this site is built

An independent search layer over one public file. Not affiliated with the Kansas Geological Survey or the Kansas Department of Health and Environment.

### One file, 314,779 records

the Kansas Geological Survey compiles the WWC-5 water well completion records filed with
the Kansas Department of Health and Environment and publishes them as an open feature service. We take the whole
file — 314,779 records, no sampling — and our copy is from
**2026-08-21**. The most recent completion date in it is
2026-07-30.

### ⚠️ What is not downloaded

**The owner’s name.** The source file carries it beside
a legal description precise enough to find the parcel. These are rural
properties, which means homes. The question this site answers — is
there a well, how deep, was it plugged — does not need anybody’s
name, so the field is not requested at download and the loader stops if it
finds one.

The **drilling contractor** is kept. That is a business
holding a state licence and acting publicly, and « who drills in
this county, and how deep » is one of the questions people
actually ask.

### ⚠️ What no page here carries

**The legal description.** Township, range, section and
quarter calls locate a parcel precisely. They are on the individual record,
rendered from the URL fragment, and never on an indexable page. That record
has no address of its own, so a search engine cannot index it as a page about
somebody’s property.

### ⚠️ The line this site does not cross

No page says a well is **abandoned**. Kansas defines
abandonment by use — unused for two years — and this register
does not track use. What we publish is whether a plugging report exists, and
we say what that does and does not mean every time.
[The full explanation](/abandoned.md).

### ⚠️ A blank is not a zero

Depth is reported on 100% of records, static water level on
85%, yield on 34%. Every median on this site is computed
over reported values only, with the count it rests on printed beside it. No
page fills a blank with a nought, and no page treats an unreported well as a
dry one.

### Medians, never means

A handful of deep irrigation and oil-field wells reach well over a
thousand feet. A mean would follow them and say something false about an
ordinary domestic well. Every figure of depth, level or yield here is a
median, with its 90th percentile beside it.

### How the pages are chosen

A county gets a page at 300 records (100 of
105 qualify, covering 99.6%); a water use at
1,500; a contractor at 800. A county-and-use page
needs 150 records, must not cover more than
70% of its county — otherwise it is the county
page again — and must name at least 8 different
contractors, because that list is the only thing such a page carries that its
parent does not.

### Source and conditions

Water Wells WWC5, compiled by the Kansas Geological Survey from records filed with
the Kansas Department of Health and Environment. The Survey’s terms of use permit copying and redistribution
without fee, and require an attribution, quoted here word for word:

The source of this material is the Kansas Geological Survey website at http://www.kgs.ku.edu/. All Rights Reserved.

This is an independent copy, not the register. The Survey recommends that its data be taken directly from a KGS server rather than through another site that may have changed it — for anything a transaction depends on, use theirs.

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Página: https://wwc5.pages.dev/about/
Fonte: Water Wells WWC5 — Kansas Geological Survey, from records filed with the Kansas Department of Health and Environment
Recolha: 2026-08-21