Hanover Explores Long-Term MWRA Water Regional Pipeline and Fast-Tracks Critical Well Replacement
HANOVER - July 13, 2026 - Facing a summer of razor-thin water margins, the Hanover Select Board held an extensive discussion Monday night detailing a massive regional proposal to connect the town to the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority (MWRA) pipeline infrastructure. In parallel to the multi-year proposal, town officials fast-tracked a critical local pipeline capital project—moving up the complete drilling and replacement of Pond Street Well No. 1 to avoid a catastrophic deficit next summer.
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The Select Board welcomed Ryan Allgrove, a principal consultant engineer with Apex Engineers, who presented the high-level findings of a comprehensive regional water supply study evaluating a joint municipal consortium of South Shore towns. The analysis—which historically tracked demands across Hanover, Hingham, Hull, Abington, Rockland, Norwell, Scituate, and Cohasset—projected maximum-day water demands out 20 years.
The technical data revealed that under standard growth models, the core South Shore municipal cluster faces a combined regional deficit of 2.1 million gallons per day (MGD) on peak summer usage days. While Hanover sits on the lower end of that immediate gap, any aggressive structural growth—such as multi-family housing expansions triggered by state MBTA zoning mandates—would easily force a deficit of 320,000 gallons per day. Furthermore, the town operates with highly restricted “firm capacity” redundancies. If Hanover were to lose its single highest-producing municipal well pump on a high-demand holiday weekend, the town would instantly plunge into a 400,000 gallon-per-day systemic supply deficit.
The proposed structural blueprint leverages pipeline expansions currently being designed and permitted by the Town of Weymouth, which is tapping into a 7.5 MGD regional allocation from the MWRA via a pipeline route through Braintree. To extend that water from South Weymouth into the remaining consortium towns, engineers modeled a conceptual transmission main spanning 8 to 13 miles using 12- to 36-inch diameter pipes.
The total infrastructure cost for the entire multi-town extension scales to over $100 million. While early cost allocations based strictly on projected volume needs yielded a theoretical $1 million placeholder for Hanover, Select Board members and Town Manager Joseph Colangelo explicitly urged caution regarding the numbers, noting that absolute costs, inter-municipal route mitigations (especially with Norwell pulling back due to administrative bandwidth), and the structure of an oversight entity remain completely unnegotiated. Geographically sitting further east, Hanover’s network access remains highly dependent on whether intermediate anchors like Abington and Rockland choose to move forward.
