Severe drought hits Upper Valley

ROYALTON — By midday Monday, Josh Beliveau had already received 10 to 15 calls from customers inquiring about new wells.

In the next week or two, Beliveau, who works for Ascutney-based Wragg Brothers Well Drilling, has jobs to dig new wells for properties that have run completely or nearly dry across the Upper Valley. He has work scheduled in Woodstock, Charlestown, Enfield and several locations in Royalton, where he was inspecting a property on Monday that is scheduled to have a new well drilled.

“I struggle, I can’t keep up,” Beliveau said of the demand for service.

Most of the properties where wells are drying up are older and have more shallow dug or spring-fed wells. The new wells are drilled around 500-feet deep, Beliveau said.

“They’ve worked for hundreds of years like that, but with the climate today it’s just not feasible,” Beliveau said.

While good for people in the well drilling business, the demand for new wells has a sinister cause: one of the most acute ground and surface water droughts on scientific record in Vermont and New Hampshire.

Hydrologic drought

The Twin States are experiencing an extremely dry summer in terms of precipitation and one of the worst reductions of ground and surface water — knowns as a hydrologic drought — on record.

In August, most of Vermont and New Hampshire had less than 2 inches of precipitation, which is about half the normal totals. And there were above normal temperatures which exacerbated the drought, according to the National Weather Service in Burlington.

As of last week, about half of New Hampshire, including essentially all of Grafton County, was experiencing severe drought, the third step in a five-level drought scale according to the federally managed U.S. Drought Monitor.

In Vermont, about one-third of the state is in severe drought, including the eastern portion of Orange County and a small section of Windsor County. The rest of the Upper Valley is, for now, experiencing moderate drought, one step lower on the scale.

Meanwhile, stream and groundwater flow monitoring gauges maintained by the U.S. Geological Survey, or USGS, around the Twin States are registering record low flow levels.

The situation in the Upper Valley is “really severe,” Lesley-Ann Dupigny-Giroux, Vermont state climatologist and head of the state’s drought task force, said last week.

While the rainfall drought began in the beginning of August, according to reports from the National Weather Service, the hydrologic drought has been ongoing since last summer, Dupigny-Giroux said.

As of the beginning of the month, data from the USGS indicates it would have taken 7 inches of rain reaching the groundwater table (without being used along the way) to get out of the drought, Dupigny-Giroux said.

“It’s going to take us a while to come out of the hydrologic drought because it took us a while to get in,” said Dupigny-Giroux.

Dupigny-Giroux has been tracking droughts in Vermont since 1997 and has seen around eight to 10 droughts in that time. Vermont recently activated its drought task force for the first time since 2022.

“What’s concerning for me this time around is that those record low values are being observed in places where we have very, very long-term records,” Dupigny-Giroux said.

The Ottauquechee River in Hartland, for example, recently set a new record low flow based on 93 years of data, according to the USGS.

Municipal restrictions

As drought conditions continue to worsen, towns are asking residents to conserve water.

One of the earliest to adopt restrictions, Newbury, Vt., has been on a conserve water notice since mid-August.

On Friday, following the Thursday declaration of severe drought, Lebanon issued a conserve water notice with guidelines for restricted water usage.

The drinking supply in Lebanon is fed by Mascoma Lake, where the water level has been gradually declining since at least early August.

To ensure the lake continues to provide enough water to Lebanon, the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services, or DES, began releasing water from Grafton Pond through Crystal Lake and into Mascoma Lake at the beginning of September, NH DES Dam Bureau Chief Operations and Maintenance Engineer Dan Mattaini said.

It is “very rare” for lakes across New Hampshire to be as low as they are this time of year, Mattaini said.

Claremont has also issued a conserve water notice, effective Wednesday.

Claremont residents are being asked to “voluntarily refrain” from watering lawns, washing cars and concrete surfaces, filling pools and other “non-essential water usage,” according to a notice from the Department of Public Works.

‘Camping indoors’

Compared to past years, substantially more customers have called Wragg Brothers this summer and last summer to have new wells drilled because theirs have run dry, Beliveau said. Typically 80% of the company’s projects are for new construction and 20% are replacement wells, but the ratio has recently flipped with 80% of customers needing replacements.

“I try to make my priority the people that are out of water,” Beliveau said of the high demand.

One such customer is Paul Robinson, who has been without running water for three weeks.

Robinson, of South Ryegate, Vt., has been hauling two-gallon buckets from a creek up to his house about 10 times a day to meet basic needs like washing dishes, flushing the toilet and watering his garden after the spring-fed well that has served the property for about 150 years dried up last month.

Robinson and his wife moved to Vermont from San Diego in 2022, where they were “used to going through drought situations.” While the Robinson’s always had water when they were connected to city utilities in San Diego, they often had to monitor their usage and the water itself was very expensive.

“We call it camping,” Robinson said Tuesday. “We’re camping indoors.”

Until the well dried up, Robinson said, their home “always had really good water pressure” and the cistern storage tank “wasn’t something that we had really ever checked” other than to test the water every few years.

Though he won’t know the exact cost of the new well being drilled on his property until it is complete Wednesday, Robinson said the estimate is about $15,000 for a 300-foot well.

“We’re looking forward to getting water turned back on inside the house and hopefully that will happen pretty soon.”

‘Just crunchy grass’

The impact of the ongoing drought is also apparent above ground. Streams are running dry, leaves are dropping off of trees early, burn bans are in place and farmers are struggling to get through the busy summer and fall seasons.

At Berway Farm Creamery in Lyme, the herd of 150 cattle are already eating their way through the farm’s first crop of hay as their pastures bake in the sun, Shirley Tullar, the farm’s co-owner, said Monday.

“We do rotational grazing and the drought has turned the pastures into just crunchy grass.”

Typically, the grass-fed cows at Berway Farm would not get hay until much later in the fall. Still, Tullar is hoping to make a second cutting of hay.

In an average year, Tullar said the crew harvests enough hay to feed the cattle through the winter and if “everything goes right, we don’t buy anything.” This year, she has already bought three round bales of hay at $75 a piece.

While she said the financial impact of the drought is not yet clear, Tullar is not optimistic.

“It’s already affected our production and I don’t know how it’s going to end out,” Tullar said. “I think a miracle needs to happen.”

Though dealing with a herd one-tenth of the size of that at Berway Farm, fifth-generation Hartford farmer Aidan Saturley is also struggling with hay production.

Saturley has 15 angus cows at Home Acres Farm in Hartford and is actively working on growing the herd.

Last year, Saturley produced 300 round bales of hay. This year, after abandoning the second cutting in favor of using the fields for pasture, he has netted 162.

While Saturley said the bales will get the farm’s small herd through the winter, they will have very little surplus to sell. In a typical year, Saturley would have about 180 bales for sale, while this year he has about 40 to spare.

Saturley said he also expects to put out silage for the cows about a month and a half early.

Tracking the drought

As the Upper Valley continues to struggle, there does not seem to be an end to the drought in the forecast. The National Weather Service predicts that it will continue through September.

Scientists like Dupigny-Giroux are actively tracking the drought and building a response plan, but in some areas, like the Upper Valley, tracking is more difficult and scientists can fund themselves “playing catch-up.”

“Drought is not stopping at the borders, so we need to get that full extent of how severe this is so that we can deploy the resources needed,” Dupigny-Giroux said.

To assist in drought monitoring and response, people can submit drought-related conditions and impacts through the online Condition Monitoring Observer Report system at https://tinyurl.com/38fc8wc9. The system is managed by federal agencies and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.