Plumber in Hanover, MA

Water and sewer in Hanover — and what it means in your basement

Hanover runs entirely on its own groundwater. The town's water division operates nine wells across four separate well fields and three storage tanks, feeding a distribution network of about a hundred and ten miles of main, some fourteen hundred valves, twelve hundred hydrants, five thousand water services and roughly three hundred backflow prevention devices. A town on wells rather than on a regional reservoir has water chemistry set by the aquifer beneath it, and that is what decides how fast sediment accumulates in a heater and how often a tankless coil needs descaling here. The backflow program is worth noting for anyone adding an irrigation zone or a boiler fill: cross-connection control is actively managed, and a device that fails a test is a compliance issue rather than a nuisance. Much of the town is not sewered, so a slow main line raises a Title 5 question before it raises a cabling one.

Source: Town of Hanover, Water Divisions.

How Hanover was built — and what is behind the wall

Hanover was part of Scituate before it stood on its own, and its part in the North River shipbuilding trade was the iron: the ponds here and in Pembroke supplied the bog iron that, with timber from the riverside forests, made the tidal river one of the great shipbuilding stretches of colonial New England, producing more than a thousand vessels between 1678 and 1871. Iron and bog left the town with wet low ground and a scattered rural settlement pattern rather than a dense mill core. In practice that means older houses on large lots with long private service lines, disposal systems set in ground that does not always drain freely, and additions built across two centuries where the pipe material changes at the join.

Source: North and South Rivers Watershed Association.