If your system quit during high water, the odds are it isn’t broken — it’s underwater. A saturated leach field cannot take another drop until the ground gives back what it’s already holding, and in Plymouth that situation comes around more often than it does most places. What you do in the first hour matters. And the move almost everybody reaches for first is the wrong one.
FEMA describes the Pemigewasset River Corridor as one of the most flood-prone areas in the state, and Plymouth sits right at the confluence of the Pemi and the Baker. The ice jam problem here is real and it’s documented: the Ice Jam Database records 18 events on the Pemigewasset at Plymouth between 1981 and 2019. Of twenty events studied across that period, nineteen were preceded by atmospheric rivers driving warm rain onto snowpack.
The jam that formed on 26 February 2017 ran about four miles. It put water over Route 175A, closed exits on I-93, flooded two gas stations, shut buildings on the Plymouth State campus, forced people out of housing, and left something like fifty student cars frozen into a parking lot. Another one came through on 13 January 2018. Which makes this a January and February problem every bit as much as an April one, and that catches out people who file flooding under spring.
The town writes it into the ordinance. Plymouth carries a Floodplain Development overlay district, and Section 705 requires that new or replacement on-site systems in a special flood hazard area be designed to minimize or eliminate infiltration of flood waters into the system and discharge out of it, and be located to avoid impairment or contamination during flooding. If you’re replacing a system down near either river, that language is what your designer is working against.
If you’re down near either river, find out now whether your system sits inside a special flood hazard area — the town holds the maps. It won’t change what you do the night the water rises, but it changes everything about how a replacement has to be designed under Section 705, and that is not something you want to be learning during a flood.
Stop using water. That’s the whole first step, and it’s the only one that reliably helps. Every gallon you send out has nowhere to go and comes back the way it left. No laundry, no dishwasher, minimal flushing. If there’s a bathroom in the basement below the level of the tank, assume that one backs up first and stay out of it.
Do not pump the tank while the ground is saturated. This is the move everybody reaches for and it is genuinely the wrong call. An empty tank sitting in waterlogged soil can float — concrete is heavy, but it displaces a great deal of water when it’s hollow — and a tank that floats tears its inlet and outlet pipes loose on the way up. Now you’ve got a structural repair stacked on top of a flood. We wait for the water to drop, and we’ll tell you that on the phone even though it means not sending a truck. Might cost us the job. That’s fine.
Once the water does drop, the order is pump, inspect, and then run it under load before you trust it again. Silt gets in during a flood, and silt inside a leach field is not something that flushes back out. If the house was evacuated or the power was off for any length of time, check the pump chamber if you have one — a pump that sat submerged and then got energized does not always come back. And if the system went under entirely, treat the well as suspect until it’s been tested.
Emergency and after-hours work carries a premium, and you’ll hear the number on the phone before we roll rather than on the invoice afterward. If the emergency call turns into a diagnostic visit later that week, the pump-out counts toward it. We won’t quote a repair standing in the dark beside a flooded yard — anything we told you at that hour would be a guess with a price attached to it.
No — wait until the groundwater drops. An empty tank in saturated soil can float and tear its inlet and outlet loose, which turns a temporary problem into a genuine repair. Stop using water, ride it out, and call us to pump once the ground has drained. We’d rather tell you that than sell you a bad decision at eleven at night.
As long as the ground takes, which is days rather than hours and can run a couple of weeks if the water table stays up. The field cannot accept water until the soil around it will. There is no additive or treatment that speeds that up, whatever the label on the bottle says. Keep water use down and let the ground do the work.
Ice jams. The Pemigewasset backs up behind ice at Plymouth regularly — 18 recorded events between 1981 and 2019 — and the trigger is usually warm rain landing on snowpack rather than the spring melt. The February 2017 jam ran four miles and put water across Route 175A. Winter flooding is an ordinary category of problem in this town.
If sewage is inside the house, it’s an emergency. If it’s standing outside over the field and the house still drains, usually it isn’t — cut water use hard and it can wait for daylight and a better price. We’ll ask a handful of questions on the phone and tell you honestly which one you’ve got, even when the answer costs us the call.
If you have a pump chamber or an alarm, yes. Gravity systems don’t care about power at all, but a pumped system stops moving effluent the moment the breaker goes and the chamber just fills. When the power returns, the pump may or may not. If there’s a red alarm light on a post out in the yard, that is precisely what it’s there for.
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