Thank goodness we’ve had so much rain lately and don’t have to worry about the drought any more, right?
Well, no.
Turns out, you can’t compensate for 12 dry months with a single wet one.
“It’s still a significant issue. I hear there is anywhere from a three-week to a three-month backlog from contractors” to deepen or drill new wells that went dry this year, said Brandon Kernon, who heads the state’s drought monitoring team.
Concord is still asking people to conserve water, and two-thirds of the state – including all of Merrimack County – is still listed as suffering from “severe drought,” although that’s a bit of an improvement from the “extreme drought” we saw in September.
Here’s the problem: As of Tuesday, the National Weather Service said Merrimack County had received 29.86 inches of rain in the previous 12 months, which is a whopping 12.6 inches below the long-term average.
In other words, we have received one-third less rain and snow than we normally do.
So even though Concord has seen about 2 inches of rain fall since Tuesday, leaving puddles in driveways and making some dirt roads muddy, that didn’t make up for even one-sixth of the past year’s deficit.
That shortfall is most obvious underground, because it takes anywhere from a few days to a year for surface water to make its way down into sandy or bedrock aquifers.
The U.S. Geological Survey operates more than a dozen groundwater-monitoring stations in the state – basically, wells that convey the depth of water to a USGS database. As of the end of November the water in the monitoring well in Warner, located along Interstate 89 between exits 7 and 8, was 32.53 feet below the surface, which is just a few inches higher than the lowest level ever recorded since measurements began here in 1996.
A much shallower USGS well along Sheep Davis Road in Pembroke has risen sharply since late October to 9.97 feet below the surface, but the water level is still lower than it has been some 80 percent of the time over that well’s 16-year history.
This groundwater loss was visible all summer as wells went dry. The problem has lessened mostly because water usage drops sharply when warm weather ends and people stop watering their laws.
“The only real thing that has benefited the wells is that peak use has declined,” said Kernon.
Dan Tasker of Taskers Well Co. in Northwood, who like all well-drillers has scrambled this year to meet customers’ demands, said the situation for wells has improved.
“It has relieved a little bit, as long as we keep getting rain before the ground freezes,” he said.
You can notice some improvement above ground too, he said.
“These little brooks, at least the water’s running – before, they were so dry, you could walk across them,” he said.
But there’s still a long way to go for us to be out of a drought.
“Pinnacle Pond off I-93, near Hooksett’s three wells – you can see how down that is. It’s startling how low it is,” said Kernon.
(David Brooks can be reached at 369-3313 or dbrooks@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @GraniteGeek)
