September TBD, 2026 Submitted By John Borger
We’ve done several deep dives into our Weir River Water System’s summer water travails. Let’s step back a moment, focus on systemic risk, and consider whether continuing to passively accept the new normal of summer-long water bans is numbing us to the clear and present danger of a potential, self-inflicted public safety emergency.
In our crisis scenario, we don’t need ecoterrorist commandos, or a malicious state actor like Iran. We only need to recognize how seasonal lawn irrigation eliminates an already thin safety margin for WRWS’s aged, brittle system, and exhausts our shallow aquifer. We could talk about old water mains, or vulnerable gravity tanks, or any number of other critical components. Instead, let’s confine ourselves to something conceptually simple, without which the system cannot function: 13 very big pumps.
The WRWS Outage Scenario
We know that each summer, when lawn irrigation kicks in, WRWS enters a period during which the aquifer and delivery system are both stressed beyond capacity. More water is being used than the wells can extract from the aquifer. WRWS does not share the exact metrics of this depressing calculus with us, but we know that each June, non-stop pumping so exhausts the local aquifers supporting the municipal wells that they simply cannot extract more water. When this aquifer depletion is combined with the drought condition declared for the Southeast region of Massachusetts, the WRWS Commissioners are compelled to impose a Level II water ban.
WRWS has told us that the problem is automatic lawn irrigation, which consumes fully 35% of the total daily production of the system in sudden, massive drawdowns. These occur in the early morning hours. What would happen if a pump in one of the primary WRWS wells, or at the treatment plant, failed at 5:00 AM? Do these pumps suddenly just shut down? Has that ever happened to another town?
Nantucket Is an Object Lesson for Hingham
Well, yes. In early June 2025, in the town of Nantucket, the primary well pump at Nantucket’s North Pasture facility suddenly shut down. Within a few hours, with that well off-line, irrigation-driven consumption was far outpacing production, and the town’s primary gravity tank level plummeted 28 feet, from a normal 40 feet of water down to just 12 feet – a heart-stopping decline of 70%. A secondary tank also dropped 28 feet. At the time, two other supplemental wells were offline due to discovery of a plume of PFAS contamination. (See Hingham H2O, Part 3). With three wells down and a deeply negative safety margin, the town came within hours of losing head pressure in the mains, which would have meant dry hydrants for the fire department and a massive, system-wide contamination risk, with boil water orders. Early Saturday morning, the town declared an urgent Emergency Water Use Ban to stop the hemorrhaging.
Similar incidents have recently occurred in Hopkinton and in Woodstock, Vermont.
Nantucket Was Lucky But…
Fortunately, Nantucket did not have to procure and install a replacement pump, which could have taken months. The problem was traced to an electrical control system problem and crews working urgently through the night were able to fix the pump on-site by Saturday evening. However, the stringent water ban had to remain in place for several days; otherwise, even with the repaired pump back online, the system would at best struggle to match what irrigation-driven demand would have been pulling out. Allowing lawn watering to resume would have made restoring the 28-foot deficit in the tanks impossible.
This should sound familiar, because even without a pump failing, this is essentially the same scenario we experience in Hingham each June that leads to a Level II watering ban.
What If…
In late spring/early summer, with the odd/even address irrigation scheme in effect, the WRWS needs to be extracting water at its maximum allowable capacity to maintain pressure. There is no safety margin. As WRWS has stated during these times on its Facebook page,
“All our wells are pumping at maximum capacity to keep up with demand… We normally rest the wells for several days on a rotating basis to allow (aquifer) recharge. No wells have been able to rest… groundwater levels have fallen so low that the wells simply can’t produce more water.”
What would happen if a well pump failed and could not be repaired on site? With a Level II water ban and widespread compliance, the WRWS might be able to get by for a time if it could bring an inactive well online. That would entail a complex triage analysis, factoring in relative depletion of each well’s local aquifer, its degree of mineral/PFAS content and the extent of required treatment plant processing. It would mean white-knuckled officials and an even graver situation in the event of additional outages.
Far more concerning is the fact that, during the high-demand summer season, it is not unusual for the treatment plant to need both of its two powerful “high-lift” pumps to keep water flowing to all points in the system. If one of these pumps that pressurize the whole system failed, it would be far worse. WRWS could quickly lose head pressure in the mains, forcing an emergency Level III water ban and probable manual distribution of drinking water during the outage.
Like Nantucket, Hingham Must Be Self-Sufficient
WRWS is not connected to any external water source. There is no back-up pipeline from Weymouth, Rockland, or Norwell. If a critical pump failed, and water pressure plummeted, we would have to cope on our own. Hingham could request that the Plymouth County Mutual Aid Network dispatch one of the water tanker trucks maintained in semi-rural areas to support firefighting and pray we did not have a multi-alarm fire like the one that incinerated the classic old house at #4 Mann Street in July 2022. WRWS Commissioners would issue boil water orders and declare an even more stringent Level III water ban. Retailers in the region would likely be hard put to keep bottled water in stock.
How long could this go on? Months! High-capacity, submersible well pumps are specialized, hand-crafted pieces of complex industrial machinery. They must be custom-machined and calibrated to match the exact depth, diameter, chemical profile and flow rate of the destination well. Once procured, installing a new municipal well water pump is a painstaking, time-consuming engineering project.
While the WRWS keeps basic mechanical spare parts on hand and services its equipment during non-peak times, a burned-out pump motor or broken shaft in any season would pose a serious procurement challenge. In the post-pandemic supply chain environment, it is likely that several months would be required to specify, design, manufacture, and ship a custom, heavy-duty municipal well pump casing and motor.
Once the pump finally arrived, installation would require deploying a specialized rig and a highly trained crew to pull as much as a hundred feet of heavy steel pipe out of the ground for replacement of the pump. This process alone would take several days of intense mechanical labor, during which that well would still be offline. A prolonged outage during peak summer demand would severely stress an already beleaguered system.
WRWS would be forced to struggle through months of reduced production, during which it would be at risk for further outages, with potentially cascading impacts.
Even Scarier…
What if one of the treatment plant high lift pumps failed? How long would it take to replace it? Again, these are not generic, “off-the-shelf” pumps. The impellers must be custom-machined and balanced by the manufacturer to match the exact pressure head required to push water up specific elevations like Turkey Hill without blowing out the older downtown mains.
Sourcing the heavy iron housings and huge electric motors (with horsepower comparable to tractor trailer trucks) would be subject to prevailing global industrial backlogs. Major manufacturers like Grundfos and Wilo currently quote lead times ranging from 3 to 9 months for newly configured municipal-scale units.
Summary
Enough, you get the picture. The WRWS relies on a fragile, custom-tailored infrastructure with complex engineering only as reliable as its weakest component. Each of the 11 well and 2 treatment plant pumps is critical. Especially with irrigation demand, an ill-timed failure could cripple the system. Keeping the water flowing is an ongoing challenge for WRWS in the best of circumstances; repeatedly stressing this aged system to the breaking point is ill-advised. During each sudden, massive drawdown caused by lawn irrigation, the water officials walk a tightrope over the abyss of a potential public safety crisis.
Is it prudent to resign ourselves to the new normal of annual, summer-long Level II water bans? When lawn irrigation is allowed, the WRWS authorities are often operating the system in the red zone of negative safety margin. While lawns are sopping up precious water, the implicit bet is that every straining pump, electrical transformer, storage tank, and water main will continue to operate perfectly, and somehow an increasingly discharged aquifer will yield the necessary water. If a pump failed while the system is under normal, household load during non-irrigation seasons, it might be a manageable challenge; if a critical pump failed while irrigation is drawing 1.9 million gallons a day for lawns, it could trigger a public safety emergency. The droughts that are becoming the new normal compound the risk.
Price Signals Value
These sudden, massive, irrigation-driven drawdowns of our shared water are dangerous and must end. They needlessly stress an already beleaguered system, suction PFAS into our fragile aquifer and create the clear and present danger of a water emergency. It is incumbent upon the WRWS Board of Water Commissioners to act with all deliberate speed. They must follow the expert guidance of government agencies and private water associations, and emulate the common-sense measures implemented by scores of other water authorities. They must initiate a new schedule of volume-driven, tiered water rates in which price levels sharply increase with escalating consumption. A tiered structure, or a sufficiently high seasonal irrigation rate, would clearly signal the true value of this precious resource, make squandering water on lawns prohibitively expensive and incentivize conservation. All of us must support a culture of sustainability and end our WRWS tragedy of the commons. Good stewardship must go viral. The precious water we hold in common belongs to everyone; so does the responsibility to conserve it.
– John Borger
Coming in Hingham H2O, Part 7 – The new WRWS revenue maximization imperative that may be impeding adoption of a new rate schedule.
John Borger has lived in Hingham for 37 years and has been active in the Town’s fight against climate change and its quest for sustainability.