The Weir River from Hull looking East
August 11, 2026 Submitted By John Borger
From Glen Mangurian’s recent post in the Anchor on the travails of the Weir River Water System:
“Residents naturally ask the same question every summer: Where has all our water gone?”
“Outdoor irrigation accounts for up to 35% of total water demand.”
“During the morning peak demand, storage tanks are drawn down to near critical levels before they can recover.”
This phenomenon has been aptly named “the tragedy of the commons,” referring to the colonial practice of setting aside pastureland in towns so that people could let their cows graze (as was the case for the Boston Common). The commons belonged to everyone, and therefore to no one. If people can use as much of a valuable resource held in common as they want, there is no incentive to be a good steward of that resource. That’s where we seem to be with water in Hingham.
The WRWS starts each summer with the odd/even address irrigation regimen, which allows residential irrigation twice a week. Because irrigation alone uses fully 35% of total WRWS water expended, the predictable result ensues. The ground water supplies built up over the winter and spring get rapidly depleted in a few short weeks by the insatiable irrigators and the public system wells tapping the subsiding aquifer cannot keep up. Early in the summer, we enter crisis mode and it’s Level II water ban time again, usually for the duration of summer. Inevitably, there are users who somehow don’t get the message, or who deliberately flout the rules. The WRWS plays whack-a-mole enforcement with the water scofflaws.
Let’s Do the Numbers
Experts advise watering grass sparingly. Otherwise, the plants do not build root systems that efficiently access and use moisture. If users emulate nature’s sporadic rains, grass can get by with less water without going dormant.
A typical recommendation for watering lawns is one inch of water per episode. How much water is that? A huge amount! The median lot size in Hingham is a little more than 20,000 square feet. Applying one inch of water to one square foot of grass requires 0.623 gallons of water. Using the understated assumption that a lawn covers 50 percent of the lot, irrigating the median lawn of 10,000 square feet twice a week as permitted in early summer uses around 12,460 gallons per week – just to water the grass! In contrast, the EPA pegs normative daily household rates of water usage per person for drinking, bathing, cooking, and cleaning at 60 gallons, or 420 gallons per week.
Compare: a 4-person household without an irrigation system consuming at the normative rate uses around 1,680 gallons of water a week; a similar household with an irrigation system watering twice a week uses 14,140 gallons – more than 8 times as much! No wonder we run out of water in a few weeks. Back to the tragedy of the commons – the story of the Boston Common is actually a demonstration of the value of enlightened regulation.
The Puritans purchased the 50-acre Boston Common in 1634 to use as a community military training field and a collective cattle pasture. Within just a few years, wealthy families began taking advantage of the system, putting too many animals on the Common, leading to rapid overgrazing and soil depletion. To prevent total ruin, the community intervened. In 1646 (11 years after Hingham was founded), the town fathers voted to cap the total number of livestock on the field at 70 cows at any given time. They established strict “stinting” rules: each citizen was allowed to graze exactly one cow or four sheep. Horses were banned entirely (with rare, specific exceptions for community elders). Regulations worked so well that cows continued to graze on Boston Common for nearly two centuries, until Mayor Harrison Gray Otis formally banned them in 1830—not because the grass was ruined, but because Boston had transitioned into an urban center and wealthy residents tired of stepping in manure.
There are many other such examples, including The Harbor Islands Restrictions of 1739 and the Newbury and Ipswich Commons rules from 1660. Regulation is an American tradition!
In subsequent posts, I’ll do a deep dive into Hingham’s highly regressive rate structure, explore some of the complex moving parts of Hingham’s water dilemma, lay out the looming PFAS regulatory deadlines, and explain why buying into the MWRA’s Quabbin Reservoir-fed system in the future is not the magic solution. In Part 2 of the Hingham H 2 O series, I propose common sense rate solutions the WRWS Commissioners can implement now.
– John Borger
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.