HANOVER — Lower Grafton County is in extreme drought, but the dry conditions are having different effects on municipal water supplies depending on the type of source they rely on.
Lebanon has instituted mandatory water restrictions, while neighboring Hanover does not even have voluntary restrictions in place. Both municipalities sit within the area classified by the U.S. Drought Monitor as in “extreme drought.”
While Lebanon relies on the diminished flow of the Mascoma River, Hanover has three reservoirs that store water for the town’s users.
“We’re in excellent shape,” Hanover Public Works Director Peter Kulbacki said in a Tuesday phone interview.
One reservoir is full, another is down around 2½ feet and a third is down around 9 feet. Even with those decreases, “we’re about where we were this time last year,” Kulbacki said, when there wasn’t an extreme drought.
If the drought worsens, there’s a possibility voluntary restrictions could follow.
“We keep an eye on it,” Kulbacki said, adding that Public Works staff double checks the reservoirs’ water levels every week.
However, Hanover residents who are not on public water already are struggling this year. Public Works employees have been fielding calls from the 15% of Hanover’s households who rely on wells for water.
Plans are in the works to install a public faucet where people who have wells running dry can get water free of charge.
“It’s something we haven’t done before, but it’s something we will be doing as long as we can get all our equipment in place,” Kulbacki said.
Meanwhile, Lebanon is reliant on a system of lakes and dams for a consistent water supply.
New Hampshire’s Water Division/Dam Bureau has been monitoring water levels to make sure that the city has sufficient water. This month, the bureau started releasing more water from Grafton Pond in Grafton, which then travels to Crystal Lake in Enfield and then into Mascoma Lake, which straddles Enfield-Lebanon line. From there, water flows into the Mascoma River.
“The only difference is that Grafton Pond is getting so low it can no longer supply as much water,” Dam Bureau Chief Operations and Maintenance Engineer Dan Mattaini said in a Tuesday phone interview. “It means we’re running out of extra water so we can probably anticipate Mascoma Lake will start dropping again soon.”
He encouraged people to continue to conserve water.
Last week, Lebanon announced restrictions prohibiting those on city water from using automated sprinkler systems to water their lawns and from filling swimming pools.
People with odd-numbered addresses are allowed to water lawns, wash vehicles, or wash driveways or sidewalks on Mondays and Thursdays only, while people with even-numbered addresses can do the same on Tuesdays and Fridays only.
Meanwhile, Orange and Windsor counties in Vermont are under a “severe drought,” one step better than lower Grafton County, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.
Newbury, Vt., which gets it water through pipes laid in gravel, issued water use restrictions in August due to a lack of rain.
Water regulations in other Vermont communities in the Upper Valley remain largely unchanged.
Windsor’s water supply comes from a deep aquifer with a five-million-gallon-per-day recovery rate, Windsor Town Manager Tom Marsh said, adding that the town only uses up to 400,000 gallons of water a day.
“Fortunately, there is no chance of the town having a water supply problem,” Marsh wrote in an email.
Royalton residents who get their water from the White River are also in the clear for now.
While the river is low, the state is still allowing the district to pump water to customers, said Judy Hayward, administrative assistant/bookkeeper for Royalton Fire District #1, which oversees the water system.
“We have a large reservoir and a large water storage tank, so we have redundancy in our system if we can’t pump from the river,” Hayward wrote in an email. “The District has at least a couple of months water supply if needed.”
On Wednesday, Weathersfield advised residents to conserve water, according to an announcement on the town’s Facebook page.
Hanover is in better shape than it used to be, said Kulbacki, who has been with the department since 1997. The last time he can recall the town issuing water restrictions due to a drought was in 2003.
“That was actually a worse drought than we had right now,” he said. “It was regional and it lasted a few years.”
Over the years, improvements have been to the town’s water system that have helped increase its efficiency. One of the most notable is in 2006, when the water treatment plant was built.
“That gained us quite a bit more capacity,” he said.
He also credited Dartmouth College with taking efforts to reduce its water usage by upgrading its cooling systems, in addition to other renovations.
“They’ve essentially cut their consumption by almost 40%,” in the last 25 years, Kulbacki said. “They’ve done really yeoman’s work trying to reduce their consumption.”
Lebanon also has been making attempts to improve its water system so that it is less reliant on the Mascoma River.
A well has been proposed for around 400 feet south of Lebanon’s Waste Water Treatment Plant, which is located at 28 Market St. in West Lebanon, according to a note in the city manager’s August 2025 newsletter, which was published Sept. 16.
