This story was originally produced by the Concord Monitor. NHPR is republishing it in partnership with the Granite State News Collaborative.
It’s easy to see how dry it is right now above ground.
“There are places on the Connecticut River you can walk across. I haven’t seen that in years,” commented John Swain, president of Capital Well of Dunbarton.
But it’s starting to get just as dry underground — as Swain knows, since people call his company for help when their well runs dry.
“We’re getting calls all over the state. We have three drill crews and every crew is out, six days a week,” said Swain, who has been at the company 28 years. “It has reached the point where you start receiving 15-20 calls a day from families that are out of water.”
Ted Diers, assistant director of the water division of the state Department of Environmental Services, pointed to data from dozens of groundwater monitoring wells in New Hampshire run by the U.S. Geological Survey. All of them north of the White Mountains are at levels that have only been seen in less than 5 percent of their history, including wells that have operated for more than half a century.
Many creeks and streams are running dry, he said.
“The surface waters all across the state are also extraordinarily low. There are lots of record lows for this time of year."Ted Diers, assistant director of the water division of the NH DES
Lakes are also low: “Winnipesaukee is down a couple of feet, Sunapee down more than two feet.”
The reason, of course, is lack of rain. Over the summer stretch of June, July and August, for example, Coos County regularly gets 9 inches of rain. This year it has gotten less than 4 inches.
Merrimack County is in better shape but is still well below average: The county’s 90-day average is 9.6 inches but it received slightly less 7 inches of rain over the summer.
Half of New Hampshire is now classified as being in serous drought, with a portion of the Upper Valley in extreme drought. No rain of any significant amount is forecast for at least two weeks.
The situation is ironic because the late winter and spring seemed wetter than normal due to a long string of rainy weekends. Despite that, Merrimack County has received almost 7 inches less precipitation than normal over the past 12 months, while Coos County is a full 13 inches below normal, a drop of one-third.
The effect of the dry spell on water supply is mostly seen in shallow, dug wells. Those are usually less than 20 feet deep and draw water out of surface soils as compared to wells drilled by a rig, which go down hundreds of feet into bedrock, sometimes 1,000 feet or more. But as the drought continues, it is affecting deeper wells.
“We’re also starting to see problems with shallow drilled wells, less than 200 feet, that were low producers to begin with,” Swain said. “Shallow upper fractured zones are being impacted.”
Swain has one piece of advice for people with dry wells who buy water from a tanker: Don’t try to store it in your well. “When you dump a load of water into a dug well, within 24 hours that water’s going to be gone. It’s going to (flow) down to meet the water table,” he said.
