Sharon McMillin, administrator, and Mark Corliss, chief operator for the Winnipesaukee River Basin Program, stand in front of a holding tank at the state-run waste treatment facility in Franklin. (Scott Merrill.)
Without much thought behind it, faucets get constantly turned on throughout the state, pouring out millions of gallons a day to fill glasses, kiddie pools and coffee pots and to wash the grime off us, our pets and our cars. Water is our literal lifeblood—making up over 50% of our bodies—and it has powered the economic engine of our state since the dawn of the industrial revolution.
It is a commodity flowing through thousands of miles of pipes in NH to form a matrix of interdependent systems requiring a healthy workforce and steady resources.
In NH, about 92 million gallons of water are withdrawn and delivered every day for domestic use, with the average NH resident using roughly 70 gallons per day in and around their home. For comparison, the U.S. uses about 322 billion gallons of water each day—about 82 gallons on average per person. It is the equivalent of emptying more than half the water from Lake Winnipesaukee each day. (See sidebar on seasonal usage.)
While NH is a “water rich” state, according to Donald Ware, chief operating officer of Pennichuck Water Works in Nashua, supplying it comes at an increasing price. Drinking water supply rates increased by 100% in 15 years, according to a report by NH Department of Environmental Services in 2015. And that cost will mount as the state’s water infrastructure is still severely underfunded, according to a 2019 report by NH Lives on Water, with an estimated 10-year investment of $857 million needed for drinking water services.
Ted Diers, assistant director of NH’s Water Division, says most people in NH don’t think about the multiple layers of protection and expense that go into supplying, maintaining and protecting the state’s drinking water supplies. “The fact that you can turn on the faucet and drink is kind of a miracle,” he says, adding that, in reality, providing water for residential and commercial users, as well as treating and reusing wastewater, require a “belt and suspenders approach, because these complex systems can fail.”
Water Workforce Drying Up
Larry Goodhue, Pennichuck’s CEO, says the water company has a low degree of turnover, but its workforce is aging, and retirements are occurring more quickly. While experiencing some of the same workforce challenges all companies are facing, parts of Pennichuck’s operations are more challenging than others. “It is much more challenging to attract employees on the construction side,” he says. “We’re competing with construction companies trying to fill their own workforce.”
At NHDES, Diers says the biggest concern is the state’s aging water infrastructure and attracting the workforce to operate it. “If you have something that’s 40 years old and you haven’t put money aside, that’s a problem,” Diers says, explaining much of the state’s infrastructure was built after the Clean Water and the Clean Drinking Water Acts passed in the early 1970s. “And those systems are now coming to the end of their life.”
For NHDES, finding engineers and construction workers to work on these systems is reaching crisis proportion. “We need engineers, and we need folks who can wield wrenches,” Diers says. “It’s a problem across all industries. Maintaining our systems requires plumbers, lab scientists and people who work on pumps. We need people who know their way around machines.”
The problem, Diers continues, is how to get young people to think about these trades as an appealing career. “Trade schools play a role, as well as reaching out to new Americans and people leaving military service,” he says, adding, “We’re all fighting for the same shrinking pool of workers. Running these systems all depends on some human turning a dial.”
Mark Corliss, chief operator of the Winnipesaukee River Basin Program (WRBP), a waste treatment facility in Franklin funded by the state and overseen by NHDES, agrees. Competing with other industries for workers is difficult, he says. This year’s state budget provides a 10% raise for all state employees this year and a 2% raise in 2024, but “unfortunately,” Corliss explains, “Waste treatment employment is often out of people’s minds.” That’s partly because the infrastructure itself is underground. “There is a lack of understanding when it comes to what people who run these facilities actually do. A lot of it is understanding that there is a skilled guy in here all night so you can go swimming.”
Clean Water Keeps Tourism Dollars Flowing
New Hampshire has more than 1,000 lakes and 10,000 miles of rivers and streams that are part of its “nature economy,” according to a report by the UNH Cooperative Extension. Visitors to NH spent over $5 billion dollars at NH destinations and contributed over $250 million while fishing and swimming in state parks in 2017.
Significant investments in protecting water resources have resulted not only in safe drinking water, but NH’s thriving tourism economy. Growing up in Franklin, Corliss recalls he wouldn’t eat the fish he and his friends caught in the Merrimack River due to pollution in the 1970s. Today, Franklin is part of NH’s nature economy as home to New England’s first whitewater park on the Winnipesaukee River due to years of investment in water and wastewater infrastructure.
Water and sewer systems are what make that project and the state’s tourism economy possible, “because without facilities like WRBP, there’s no economy,” Corliss says.
The WRBP—serving several Lakes Region communities, including the City of Laconia—emerged from an agreement between the state and those communities in the early 1970s following the Clean Water Act of 1972, which established regulations for the discharge of pollutants into water sources and regulated standards for surface waters. The Franklin facility, which went online in 1979, along with a maintenance facility in Laconia, requires $4.7 million dollars each year to remain operational, according to NHDES.
The Franklin facility has the capacity to release as much as 36 million gallons of disinfected water into the Merrimack River at peak times, such as Motorcycle Week in Laconia or during heavy rainfall, but averages 5.5 million gallons per day, according to WRBP spokesperson Sharon McMillin. Water that leaves the facility is monitored by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and NHDES. “From the standpoint of business and growth, if you don’t have water and sewer, you’re not going to be able to attract tourists,” McMillin says.
Pristine lakes and rivers are not the only way water plays a pivotal role in NH’s tourist industry. Some of the biggest water users in the state include golf courses and ski resorts, as well as the state’s fish hatcheries, which pump groundwater from wells, says Brandon Kernen, water administrator for the NHDES Drinking Water and Groundwater Bureau, adding that a study is being done looking at hatchery systems that are near small streams. “They’re having a hard time complying with discharge standards,” he says. “And communities are concerned about the
water quality.”
The Costs of Safe Drinking Water
New Hampshire has several types of water delivery systems. Private wells make up more than 50% of drinking water sources and the rest comes from municipal water districts, such as the Manchester Water Works, private water companies and Pennichuck Water Works, the largest regulated water utility in the state, which supplies water for 30 communities through its three subsidiaries stretching from North Conway to Lee and the Nashua area. Pennichuck Water Works’ parent company was acquired by Nashua in January 2012 as a non-municipal and non-private utility after Nashua became the sole shareholder of the company following years of eminent domain battles.
Pennichuck Water Works has roughly 40,000 direct water connections, of which 1,400 are commercial and industrial customers. Its average overall annual production is about 12 million gallons per day. “The majority of our service is to a residential customer base,” says Ware. The town of Hudson purchases just over a million gallons a day from Pennichuck on average to serve its customer base. While residential users far outnumber commercial and industrial users, those business customers constitute at least half of the base water usage, Ware says, with one company using up to 600,000 gallons per day.
Keeping water costs low depends on the type of water treatments required as well as the costs of infrastructure upgrades, Ware says. But what is considered low depends where you land on the economic scale, and questions of equity come into play. According to the EPA, 2% of median household income is considered affordable for water. “If you have a $25,000 income, you can afford $500 a year for water,” Ware says. “What if that cost rose to $1,000 a year? It might still be considered affordable to a home making $50,000, but people would go ballistic. Yet, that translates, based on usage, to roughly a penny a gallon. It’s still a pretty good deal.”
But there is a big price that communities across the state will have to pay eventually to replace aging pipes and infrastructure. Pennichuck’s pipes range in age from brand new to 170 years old, Ware says. “We’ve got 600-plus miles worth of pipeline that will need replacement in a timely manner at some point,” he explains, adding that the cost to replace aging pipes is expensive due to several factors. In cities and larger towns where water needs are greater than rural areas, larger pipes are needed, which increases the costs. Other factors include repaving costs, the price of contractors working at night, and specific trenching to avoid existing utilities underground. “To replace a mile worth of pipeline in Nashua proper, in the streets, is over $2 million a mile.”
Population density can be a cost saver when it comes to supplying water. Multi-unit buildings serving hundreds of people keeps costs lower, Goodhue says, adding, “The price of delivery per person in these cases is much lower. But when you need to extend water lines many miles to connect, the cost per resident becomes problematic.”
Eleven years ago, it was estimated the state had nearly $1.5 billion in aging infrastructure needs, says Kernen of the NHDES Drinking Water and Groundwater Bureau. “Eleven years has gone by. Now there’s inflation and supply chain challenges, and things have only gotten older,” he says, adding, “some utilities are now assessing the status of their assets and not just charging what it costs to run water but also to maintain their systems.”
Corliss says the Franklin and Laconia facilities are operationally stable, but finding resources to keep it that way is always a concern. Much of Corliss’s work involves figuring out ways to anticipate failures in the system. As an example, he cites the center-drive mechanisms that move the rakes on the bottom of the tanks. Each one, Corliss says, costs over $100,000 and can take up to a year to arrive. “For the smaller items it can take months to years,” he says. “We have to be on our toes for projects that need to happen, and we need to know what’s going to fail and anticipate these things so we can start planning early. Because when things do fail, you’re going to be stuck with nothing.”
Treating water and testing for contaminants also comes with a cost. In southern NH many wells are contaminated, Ware says. “Ideally, you’d like to have public water in some of these places, but as Larry already expressed, getting public water there requires power and a very expensive piping to put in,” he says. “When you look at affordability, it’s not affordable to get public water to everyone [as the] population is not dense enough based on
affordability criteria.”
Balancing Economic Development and Water Protection
Attracting a manufacturer or major employer can be an economic coup for a community. However, they can also create a major strain on already taxed infrastructure. When new commercial entities come to town or existing ones expand, water usage should be one of the first conversations they have with local officials, Kernen says. “[Companies] need to work with local towns, utilities or wastewater facilities before they get too far down the road with design,” he says, explaining that businesses sometimes run into trouble with the capacity of local water systems. “They need to be able to find water and dispose of the wastewater.”
American Performance Polymers in Colebrook, which produces PPE gloves, balloons and other latex products, uses vast amounts of water, says CEO Richard Renehan. The company invested $35 million in high efficiency treatment systems, including reverse osmosis for the recycling and reuse of the water it was using and currently recycles 70% to 80% (with a goal of greater than 90%) of its water. The company has onsite sources of water as well as town water. “Water is extremely critical for glove manufacturing, and that is what makes polymers and elastomers challenging to make,” Renehan says. “We invested heavily on water treatment systems and go to great lengths to keep that aspect of our factory up and running at all times.”
Henry DeBoer, founder and owner of Epping Well and Pump Company and Epping’s former water and sewer commissioner for 25 years, says that while water is abundant in NH, surging development limits usable supplies. “When gravel aquifers become developed over, it makes that area unusable,” he says, citing examples around the state, including a shopping plaza in Raymond. “When a shopping plaza comes in and develops over what could be an abundant water supply, it cannot be used. We don’t do enough to identify and protect these areas.”
New Hampshire does recognize “high-value aquifers” through a drinking water and ground water trust fund made possible due to a lawsuit in 2015 with Exxon Mobile that found the company responsible for $236 million in damages due to groundwater contamination from MBTEs. The sourcewater protection grant program funds infrastructure and conservation programs and receives around $2 million each year.
DeBoer says NH has “beautiful gravel deposits” but unless a business interest exists, these areas are often not preserved. “There’s not one drop more or less of water on this planet than when the planet was formed,” he says. “Used wisely, water can be a renewable resource that can serve as an economic force.”
One way to use water wisely, DeBoer says, is protecting aquifers. Another is using it for irrigation to create and maintain greenspaces that can offset some of the effects of heat due to climate change. “Water allows greenspaces to exist, it has a cooling effect and creates more oxygen,” he says. “It can be a great resource when managed well.”
Regulating Water
The biggest changes in the water industry DeBoer has noticed over the years include the use of geothermal heating from wells, which uses water as an energy source, as well as rules around outside water usage and awareness about contaminants found in ground water supplies.
Municipal water supplies in NH are monitored for contaminants according to requirements set by NHDES and the EPA. The EPA’s National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permit process establishes discharge limits and conditions for discharges of treated wastewater, or “effluent,” from municipal wastewater treatment facilities, as well as for a number of
industrial processes.
Wastewater that goes straight into the ground, as it does through septic systems, is regulated by the NHDES, which also oversees all public drinking water in NH.
Epping Well and Pump services community water systems, such as condominium developments that use various wells feeding into holding tanks. “A lot of our job is educating people,” DeBoer says, adding that many natural contaminants such as arsenic are found in NH’s water. “It’s always about the safety of drinking water, whether it’s private, community or municipal systems. We’re much more aware of what goes into the ground today than we were prior to the Safe Drinking Water Act in 1974.”
Municipalities test for any contaminants that NHDES says may be found in various regions of the state, and Diers says the presence of perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, in the state has been particularly vexing. “There has been a lot of disruption,” he says, adding that part of the problem is that many people are self-supplied. “We don’t have a handle on self-supply. That is up to individual well owners.”
PFAS are also referred to as “forever chemicals” because they do not break down easily and can lower a woman’s chances of getting pregnant and increase cancer risks.
NHDES has collected more than 7,200 PFAS samples from approximately 6,200 wells across the state and has identified several thousand locations that exceed one or more of the Ambient Groundwater Quality Standards. PFAS that is equal to or exceeding 70 parts per trillion (ppt) have been found in wells around the state, according to NHDES sampling data. (See sidebar on safety levels for PFAS.)
“Hundreds of square miles are contaminated,” Kernen says. “We’re well underway in getting treatment for wells that are contaminated or deactivating the sources and connecting the systems to other ones.”
One of the most extensive cases of PFAS contaminants in drinking water involved the Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics facility in Merrimack, which manufactures coated textiles and films using chemicals that contained PFOA and other PFAS, and was previously the site of Chemfab, a company that operated fabric coating and cast-film equipment. After PFOA was discovered in area drinking water in 2016, “NHDES launched a massive testing effort to determine the extent of the contamination,” according to the NHDES website. More than 500 properties, primarily in Litchfield and Merrimack, were initially found at greatest risk and an extensive sampling program identified more than 1,000 additional properties that have tested above the drinking water standard.
In addition to providing bottled water to those affected residents, a NHDES agreement with Saint-Gobain requires the company to provide alternate water to more than 1,100 impacted properties, including connections to municipal water systems at 529 properties and point-of-entry treatment (POET) systems at 605 properties.
That work began in Summer 2022 and much of it is expected to be completed by the end of this year, according to NHDES. “Construction for municipal water connections throughout Bedford and Merrimack, and waterline extensions in Merrimack, is anticipated to begin in fall 2023 and spring 2024. A potential waterline extension for areas of northern Londonderry is still being evaluated,” according to NHDES.
The state provides each municipality its own set of criteria, called the master sampling sheet, that outlines various chemicals and compounds for which is must test in drinking water. NHDES recommends that homeowners with private wells have their drinking water tested every three to five years.
DeBoer says carbon treatment is the best way to remove PFAS from drinking water but the problem, he explains, is that it’s a forever chemical. “The only way to get rid of PFAS chemicals is to incinerate them at very high temps after they are captured by the carbon,” he says, adding that water from wells that contain PFAS end up being used for outside irrigation and can end up being blown around in the wind. “Water moves around, and it’s going to move to some other area eventually. In my opinion, people should treat with activated carbon.”
Wells at the former Pease Airforce Base in Portsmouth are treated with activated carbon, but the costs can be prohibitive, reaching into the tens-of-millions of dollars.
Those who use more than 20,000 gallons in NH must report their water use to the state, according to Kernen. “We do a lot of source water protection trying to make sure our water is safe,” he says, citing the source water protection program designed to improve project developments and assist communities. “New Hampshire municipalities have the most say in how to protect groundwater. NHDES regulates best management practices.”
In March, the EPA proposed a first ever drinking water standard that would set the limit on PFOA and PFOS to 4 parts per trillion. New Hampshire, which has its own standards along with a dozen other states, would be required to follow the federal standard. “This will double the number of public water sources that exceed the current standard,” Kernen says, adding that regulatory costs “could easily reach a billion dollars.”
NHDES budgeted $7.5 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds to offer planning grants without requiring matching funds. Of that, $3.75 million has been budgeted for wastewater and stormwater projects through the Clean Water State Revolving Fund program. The Clean Water Planning Grant budget provides for a maximum grant amount of up to $100,000.
Long-Term Planning Needed
Some of the challenges ahead for the state’s water systems and delivery include making sure smaller communities are integrating their housing-development decisions with water supply and wastewater capacity, Kernen says. “For new connections this goes through NHDES, and sometimes communities are finding there isn’t an adequate amount of water,” he says.
Another challenge is seasonal subdivisions built in the 1980s or 1990s increasingly being used as year-round residences, increasing demand. Cyber security is another challenge. “A lot of these water systems work on telemetry, and so operators can operate their systems remotely and check on the status of things,” Kernen says. “This is one way to counter a reduced workforce but that opens up systems to vulnerabilities.”
Proactively investing in the future is crucial for municipalities, Kernen says, which is why education is a focus for NHDES. “It isn’t a miracle that we have safe water,” he says, citing the many systems that need to be in place to make clean water possible. As communities expand, it is important communities understand the limits of their capacity to maintain a healthy system.
“When you expand, you’re giving up capacity,” he says, unless a community also invests in expanding the capacity of its water and wastewater systems. As an example, Kernen cites a source development charge Manchester Water Works (MWW) has been using to build a new water source on Merrimack River. Hooksett Village also has a source development charge, and Exeter has what it calls a water assessment fee. These are surcharges paid by water customers to invest in future capacity, Kernen explains, comparing the charges to an individual putting money aside for their personal finances that arise. “Every day our water systems are getting older and older. These funds set aside money for known future costs instead of waiting for the reckoning to come. Municipalities need these funds built into their master plan to develop more capital, so they don’t wake up one day with a $20 million bill.”
Current Issue - May 2024