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Jeff McKelvey, 67, changes the flouridating system from an automatic feed to a manual set-up in Newbury, Vt., on Friday, Oct. 14, 2022, after a reduced water flows over the summer caused the equipment to not function properly. With the village's three artesian wells and two surface infiltration galleries that provide water to be filtered and treated for drinking not produce enough last summer, water was supplemented from an open reservoir, requiring a boil water order. (Valley News - James M. Patterson) Copyright Valley News. May not be reprinted or used online without permission. Send requests to permission@vnews.com. Valley News photographs — James M. Patterson

"Listen to that rain, isn't that nice?" said Jeff McKelvey, 67, a retired designer for furniture manufacturer DCI, who operates the Newbury Village water plant, as a soaking rain fell over Newbury, Vt. McKelvey took drove a piece of equipment from the plant to his home workshop to work on Friday, Oct. 14, 2022. (Valley News - James M. Patterson) Copyright Valley News. May not be reprinted or used online without permission. Send requests to permission@vnews.com.

Water operator Jeff McKelvey stands atop a 350,000 gallon tank holding the filtered and treated water supply for the Village of Newbury, Vt., on Friday, Oct. 14, 2022. When the supply ran short due to drought conditions last summer, the village drew water from a nearby open reservoir, requiring frequent filter changes that cost about $1,000 a week, and state regulations still required a boil water order. "It's ridiculous when people go out and buy water," said McKelvey. "This is perfectly good water." (Valley News - James M. Patterson) Copyright Valley News. May not be reprinted or used online without permission. Send requests to permission@vnews.com. Valley News — James M. Patterson

LEBANON — As glaciers crept down to New England from the north 2 million years ago, the dense ice, constantly lurching under its own weight, snatched up loose rock and soil from the bedrock. When warming temperatures later forced the ice sheet back into retreat, it deposited that material as sandy gravel.

In Lebanon, some of the debris that was left behind — a memory of New England’s glaciated past life — sits right at the confluence of the Mascoma and Connecticut rivers, on a small peninsula by the wastewater treatment plant that just happens to be owned by the city.

Now, as Lebanon begins thinking about diversifying its municipal water source, that spit of land could provide the city with a virtually “drought-proof” supply.

Dowsers, or “water seekers,” used to traverse New Hampshire and Vermont with forked witch hazel or willow branches, waiting for their divining rods to gravitate downward. Some called it bunk, and others called it magic, but the branches did (sometimes) point to a vein of water below the earth’s surface that could be tapped for a well.

But Lebanon — which currently relies on water from the Mascoma River — hired Portsmouth-based Wright-Pierce Engineers to use geological mapping to search with more scientific certainty for a viable secondary water source. The firm’s findings gave the city better, if not more complicated, news than it could have hoped for.

As persistent dry conditions in recent years have drained groundwater levels in the Connecticut River Valley to all-time lows, Lebanon is finding unprecedented possibility in the history of its rocks and rivers. The combination of the gravelly material left behind by the glacier right at the river convergence has created ideal conditions for digging an incredibly powerful well.

“It’s a pretty phenomenal geological scenario that you have here, and it’s not very common in the state of New Hampshire,” said hydrogeologist Greg Smith, one of the owners of Wright-Pierce Engineers. The location is fit for the construction of a radial collector well, which can sometimes cost upward of $5.5 million but is suited to extracting the incredible amount of groundwater present at the site.

Wright-Pierce built a similar well in Manchester, which supplies — and sells — water all the way to Salem. If Lebanon were to eventually commit the money to embark down a similar path, its aquifer “could easily be the highest-yielding well site in New England by a long shot,” with the potential to be twice as productive as the Manchester well, Smith said.

In the western United States, where severe drought conditions, primed by climate change, have turned water into a commodity on a state-by-state scale — Colorado, for example, sells out its eponymous river to water-strapped California — regionalization is required to maintain water resources.

While the droughts faced in New England are far less intense, a similar aggregation of water utilities, where possible, can provide a level of climate resiliency that municipal facilities lack when they stand alone.

As water systems are tested across the Upper Valley, both in private wells and at the municipal distribution level, Lebanon sits quietly on a gold mine. Elsewhere, towns and homeowners across the Upper Valley are reckoning with cold, hard geological facts, which are made particularly problematic by fickle climate, stubborn drought and a swelling population.

In Newbury, Vt., Jeff Mc-Kelvey, manager of the village’s water department, has been contending with water reliability issues “since the beginning of time,” he said. The glacier’s lazy withdrawal wasn’t as generous in providing future water access in other parts of the region.

For almost half a century, the village would often have to go on boil notice when dry wells forced municipal water to dip into its open reservoir, which at the time fell below water quality standards.

That changed in 2008, when the village underwent a massive, expensive overhaul of its water distribution system. It dug three bedrock wells, installed new cartridge filters to improve water quality and replaced almost all of its distribution piping. But the line that feeds Mc-Kelvey’s house is still from the 1910s. “Those lines were put in with picks and shovels,” he said.

The three wells and additional filtration capacity gave the village some security against drought. But its water supply is farther from the river than Lebanon’s, and high up on a steep hill.

In bedrock, water moves through fractures — cracks that spider through the rock, creating passageways to the surface. If there’s enough water for humans to use, the location can be tapped as an aquifer.

Hills that survived the glacial period could do so because they’re made of stronger stuff than what’s down in the river valley, where the bedrock is riddled with the fracture zones and covered by the coarser, gravelly material that makes pumping water easier.

“Picture 2 miles of ice sitting on top of the ground. That’s just a huge amount of force,” Smith said of the old glacier days.

But the hills were tough enough to hold up.

“The glacier broke apart any rock that it could. But hills are more competent, and they were left behind with much less fractured rock, so consequently much less storage, in that bedrock aquifer,” Smith added.

With little storage to begin with, drought makes matters worse — testing long accepted solutions as the fractures in McKelvey’s hilly bedrock wells struggle to recharge from falling water.

Wintertime offers some reprieve. When it rains in the summer, vegetation competes with the fractures in the bedrock for water — sucking a portion of it up before it has a chance to sink down into the ground. In the wintertime, there’s no such fight, and snow is free to melt and sink.

Newbury’s wells leave the village vulnerable to even slight fluctuations in the water table level. “Right now we’re in tough shape,” Mc-Kelvey said. This summer, the village was on boil notice for a month and a half, the longest it has ever been, and for the first time since the 2008 improvements.

He plans to seek funding from the state and maybe use the town’s ARPA money, to bolster Newbury’s water system again. “It’s a big bummer that we’re in this situation again,” he said. “We thought we’d tamed it.”

Meanwhile, McKelvey’s wells remain in competition with the trees. For him, it’s good news that the leaves are falling.

Ten minutes south of Newbury on Route 5, Bradford Vt., is in better shape. Their municipal system pulls from a gravel-packed well and isn’t high up on a hill like Newbury’s. But that doesn’t guarantee easy water access for Bradford residents that rely on private wells.

Abigail Teullane, a fourth-grade teacher at Bradford’s elementary school, didn’t have water for almost a month and a half this summer. Teullane lives on Roger’s Hill, and her dug well ran dry after a touch-and-go summer just as the school year started back up.

Teullane, her husband, Forrest, and their 3-year-old son had to improvise. Her husband showered at the residential school where he works and did the family’s dishes there.

“For probably six weeks he would take those 5-gallon big bubblers from school, fill them up, strap them into the back of his Civic, drive home and empty them into our tank,” Teullane said. He was carting 20 to 25 gallons of water a day.

Teullane and her family aren’t alone in their well difficulties.

“With three years in a row of severe drought in the state, we’re seeing a little more effect even in the bedrock wells,” said John Pasquale, a project manager for New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services.

Pasquale helps run the state’s Water Assistance for Natural Disasters program, which provides grant money for low-income New Hampshire residents to repair their wells, drill new ones, or even connect to a community water supply.

“These are very expensive projects,” Pasquale said. “And so they really affect lower-income residents.”

As is the case with many rural states, around 45% of New Hampshire residents and 30% of Vermonters rely on private wells.

Before this summer, emergency well assistance from the state was mostly going toward dug wells, which are cheaper, shallower and are quicker to run dry. But now that the water table has been subject to persistent drought conditions for a few years in a row, private bedrock wells — usually the hardier option — are hurting too.

Climate change has led to extreme rain events next to periods of scarce rainfall. A few heavy storms don’t quickly restore groundwater levels, and drought conditions carry on longer deep in the ground than they do above it. Low recharge levels, a symptom of the compounding drought that the Upper Valley has experienced for the past few summers — as well as historically low snowpack — have left these wells increasingly unreliable.

Groundwater sometimes seeps directly from the bedrock out of a hillside, or leaks out of a road cut. In the winter it takes the shape of long icicles, blanketing rock walls along the side of the road in drooping spikes. But data indicates groundwater levels in the Connecticut River Valley never fully rebounded from the drought that began in the summer of 2020. A test well run by the New Hampshire Geological Survey in Newport is at historically low levels.

“Once these bedrock wells are low, it’s hard to get them back up,” said Ted Diers, administrator of New Hampshire’s Watershed Management Bureau. “This is the problem when we have multi-year droughts. Normally we wouldn’t even worry about a bedrock well, but now they’re causing problems.”

As the days get shorter and the temperatures turn cold again, Diers said it’s time for the Upper Valley to start putting its gardens and lawns to bed.

“At this point people should just stop outside watering,” Diers said. “One of the things that we’re worried about is what if we don’t get a good recharge, good snowpack. These things build up over time, and we don’t want to go into summer with any less water than we already have.”

Water management veteran John Boisvert, chief engineer at Nashua-based Pennichuck Water Works, has felt the burden of an even drier climate on water utilities. Boisvert’s firm does a lot of work along the Seacoast, which was classified as being in severe drought for most of the summer. The Upper Valley is not immune to that kind of drought, and as the climate changes, it’s likely that the area will experience the drought impacts of more southern regions.

“The Upper Valley is blessed with groundwater resources,” Boisvert said. “But as populations grow and demand stays higher for longer periods in hotter, drier summers, the stress on those resources becomes evident.”

Per-capita water use has actually gone down in the last two decades. Six-gallon-flush toilets have been replaced with 1½-gallon-flush toilets, and the same goes for other water-intensive appliances like washing machines. Populations, however, have grown, and water reliability is more variable.

Now’s the time to start asking tougher questions about water usage, Boisvert said.

“Is the reason that we’re not resilient that we have these demands each summer so people can irrigate their lawns? Because if that’s why we’re not sustainable, why we’re running into trouble, that’s a real fundamental problem that needs to be resolved.”

Further, revenue shortfalls for utilities can occur if the peak demand that they rely on to support their bottom line doesn’t materialize in the summer.

“You see this a lot when you get really wet summers,” Boisvert said. “Irrigation and seasonal use goes way down, and water utilities undercollect and have to dip into their rainy day funds to pay their fixed costs.”

Tying utility rates up with usage was supposed to discourage superfluous water use, but that doesn’t always work in practice.

“In some communities, they don’t care,” Boisvert said. “You could triple or quadruple the rates and they’re still going to water their lawns. Because they can afford it.”

Unfortunately, the large-scale planning that Boisvert points to as a solution to these problems can be costly, and water infrastructure eats up cash quickly, with distribution piping costing between $200 and $400 a foot. The value of long-term planning, and the actual price of construction, have to be balanced.

“I mean when you really look at hard infrastructure, this money doesn’t go that far,” Boisvert said, adding that this makes it all the more important to ensure that infrastructure initiatives really count.

“Let’s not just create projects. What is the overall goal? What is the target that we’re trying to hit?” he asked.

Lebanon’s possible super-aquifer could provide the kind of regional resiliency that Boisvert believes the future requires.

The radial well collector in Manchester is a blueprint for how Lebanon might pursue a similar large-scale water source. It was installed in tandem with extensive piping underneath Interstate 93. The expansion helped jump-start the Southern New Hampshire Regional Water Project, sending water from Manchester almost 50 miles south to Salem, as well as to other distant towns like Derry and Plaistow.

The Manchester well produces around 7 million gallons per day. Due to more favorable sand and gravel deposits next to the confluence of the Mascoma and Connecticut Rivers, estimates foresee the potential site in Lebanon for a similar installation as producing almost twice as much water.

Peak day water demand in the city was around 2.2 million gallons in 2019. The potential well site could far outproduce a growing demand, heightened by rising temperatures and population growth. By 2020, that peak demand had increased by 300,000 gallons.

As far as smaller municipal water supplies go, Newbury isn’t alone in its search for water security. Some towns closer to Lebanon that haven’t suffered as much yet but are staring down a drought-stricken future, are learning from their less fortunate neighbors.

With money from the state’s revolving loan fund, Enfield’s Director of Public Works Jim Taylor wants to supplement its water sources, hoping to add backup wells. The town’s two primary wells have been in the ground now for 40 years, and bedrock wells eventually start to lose production power. Also, Enfield, like many other Upper Valley towns, is growing.

“We’ve added a carwash and there’s a potential for a larger development that might be going into town, so it’s prudent to consistently be looking upstream to try to find new sources to meet that demand,” Taylor said. “We’re not in a state of emergency like some other towns, but if the drought went on for an additional year it might be another story.”

Newport, N.H., received $750,000 from the Northern Borders Regional Commission to dig an additional water supply well “to increase the water system’s supply capacity, resiliency, and security,” said the news release announcing the grant.

“These things aren’t just plugged in right out of the box,” Newport Town Manager Hunter Rieseberg said. “You can’t act on a crisis the day of. You have to act now.”

Lebanon plans to pursue the search for a secondary water source by potentially drilling a “conventional well” at the site — which would still be unusually high-yielding — while continuing to sit on the option for the super-aquifer. Smith called the expensive radial collector well that would be needed to tap the gigantic water source to its full potential, but which could cost upward of $5.5 million dollars, “the nuclear option.”

“I’m not recommending you do this now,” Smith said to the Lebanon City Council in an August meeting, citing its colossal price tag. But the mythic well has the potential to yield on the order of 10 to 20 million gallons a day, and Smith imagines that could be used as a regional supply.

City Manager Shaun Mulholland echoed Smith’s hesitation, as well as his excitement.

“As you see what’s going on in the rest of the country, this is a resource that maybe could be of value to people over the next 20 to 30 years, that we’ve got in our back pocket,” Mulholland said.

“This could be lucrative for us in the future when people are trying to find water and they don’t have it.”

Frances Mize is a Report for America corps member. She can be reached at fmize@vnews.com or 603-727-3242.

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