Every Tuftonboro emergency call has the same shape. The house was empty since Columbus Day. Then twelve people showed up for the Fourth.
The town’s population better than doubles in summer, and it doesn’t double gently. It arrives on a Friday. Every bedroom, every pull-out, a camper in the dooryard, kids in a tent by the shore. The tank went eight months without being asked to do anything, its bacteria half-asleep in cold water, and now it’s asked to do a year’s work in a week. The field is still soft from spring. Something gives on Saturday night of a holiday weekend, which is exactly when every pumper on this lake is getting the identical call.
The camps tell you what July is here. Belknap has been on the Tuftonboro shore since 1907, William Lawrence up on Federal Corner Road since 1913, Sentinel in Center Tuftonboro. Institutional systems, sized for hundreds of boys, looked after by people who do it for a living — they’re rarely the emergency. The emergency is the rental cottage three doors down from them, and the family camp that got handed to the next generation along with a tank nobody’s opened since the eighties.
Getting to you is its own problem. Route 109 is the road, Wolfeboro to Moultonborough, two lanes along the water. On a July Saturday with the marinas turning boats around it moves at the speed of the slowest trailer, and we come up it with everyone else. Give us the real address, the mailbox color, and whether the driveway is the one with the boat in it. Every minute of not looking for you is a minute sooner.
And the islands. A backup on Cow Island or Little Bear isn’t a same-hour call, it’s a barge call. We’ll be honest about which day that is. Shut the water off, put the guests on the boat to town for showers, and we’ll get there as fast as a loaded pump truck can cross open water, which is to say on a schedule.
Opening the camp Memorial Day weekend? Run the water a day ahead of the crowd, and if you didn’t pump last fall, call us that week — not the week after the Fourth.
Most of the time an emergency pump-out clears the backup on the spot, because most of the time it was a tank that simply ran out of room. Once it’s down we look. Then you get the straight version: this was a one-weekend overload and you’re fine, or this is the first sign of a field that’s done, and here’s what that looks like from here.
The winter version is shorter. A closed-up camp opened for a ski weekend or ice fishing, a line from house to tank that’s shallow and only ever trickles, and a February night at ten below. It freezes. We thaw it and we tell you how to keep it from doing that again.
Emergency response is priced above a scheduled visit, and we say the number before the truck leaves the yard. A pump-out booked in June for a camp you already know will be full in July is the cheap version of this page.
Call and we’ll tell you where you are in line and what 109 is doing. We get to Tuftonboro on holiday weekends. It takes longer than a Tuesday. If you can keep the water off for a few hours it goes a great deal better than trying to muscle through.
Partly. A tank that’s been cold and idle for months doesn’t bounce back to full speed the day the family arrives, and the field is usually still wet from snowmelt. Add a crowd and it’s arithmetic. Pump before the crowd next year and you skip this call.
Then it’s a barge run, and we’ll be honest about the day. Water off, send people to the mainland for showers, and if a neighbor’s tank is also due, get them on the same trip — it’s cheaper for everybody.
Have them shut the water off and stay out of it. Then call us with the address and whoever manages the property. We’ll work with the manager, text photos when it’s done, and tell you whether the renters caused it or the system did.
Usually the line between the house and the tank, on a camp that’s only used a weekend at a time. It doesn’t flow enough to stay open. We thaw it, and the long-term answer is either deeper pipe or insulation, both of which are summer jobs.
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We reply to every request within 2 business hours — emergencies first.
Lakes Region