Wakefield is a height of land, and you can read it in where the water goes. Lovell Lake empties at Sanbornville and starts the Branch River. Great East goes out its dam at the Maine line, down the Newichawannock Canal into Horn Pond and away on the Salmon Falls. Pine River Pond runs northwest toward Ossipee Lake, Province Lake drains north, and Balch and Belleau head east into Maine. Whatever comes off your roof and your drive joins one of them. Our job is getting it into the ground first.
Three watersheds out of one town is unusual, and it explains why so many different people have opinions about your runoff. The Salmon Falls side is the big one — a 330-square-mile watershed shared by 21 towns in two states, rising right here and running down to meet the Cochecho and form the Piscataqua. The Pine River side goes the other way entirely, into Ossipee Lake. Balch and Belleau drain east into the Little Ossipee. There is no downstream neighbor to pass the problem to; you’re at the top.
The town writes that into the ordinance rather than just worrying about it. In the Residential II Shorefront district, construction has to keep the site’s natural hydrology to the extent possible, disturbance has to be minimized, and best management practices have to put runoff into the ground so it doesn’t reach surface water. Change the exterior footprint or roofline at all and you owe an infiltration trench under the drip edge and along the lower side of the drive — a rain garden can stand in where it suits the lot better. A local Shoreland Permit rides along with the state one. And impervious cover inside the protected shoreland zone tops out at 30 percent of buildable area, which is half what the rest of town gets.
There’s a reason people here take it seriously. The Acton Wakefield Watersheds Alliance has been at this since 2005 across the state line in both directions, and its Youth Conservation Corps spends summers putting erosion controls into waterfront properties on Balch, Belleau, Great East and Lovell — dripline trenches, infiltration steps, the same kind of work we do with a machine. Meanwhile variable milfoil has been in Belleau since 2000 and Balch since 2002 on the state’s infested list. Nobody around these lakes needs convincing that what runs off the land shows up in the water.
The practical question on any given lot is whether the ground will take water or shed it. On the stratified-drift gravel, infiltration works beautifully — a trench or a dry well will swallow a roof’s worth of rain and never back up — but the same permeability is why the aquifer overlay wants four feet of clean separation above seasonal high water and keeps salt out of it entirely. On the till and the shallow-to-bedrock ground, water sheets instead, and the answer is interception uphill rather than a hole to pour it into. A test pit tells us which one you’ve got in about an hour.
Find out which side of the divide you’re on and whether your ground is gravel or till before you buy any drainage product. On gravel the answer is put it in the ground; on till the answer is intercept it uphill. Guessing wrong costs the whole install.
We walk it wet whenever we can. A dry August site visit on a Wakefield lot tells you almost nothing; the same lot during a March thaw or the morning after two inches of rain tells you everything — where the water comes onto the property, what path it takes, where it stalls. The fix belongs at the top of that path. Fighting it at the foundation wall is the expensive way to lose.
Curtain drains go in three to four feet deep, perforated pipe bedded in washed stone and wrapped in fabric, run across the slope to daylight. On the gravel ground we swap daylight for an infiltration trench sized to the roof area it’s taking, set with its four feet of separation over the seasonal high water table. Dripline trenches along the house and the low side of the drive do the everyday work and satisfy the shorefront requirement at the same time. Culverts get sized for the melt and aproned with stone so the outlet doesn’t scour.
Regrading is the cheapest tool on the list and the most ignored. A striking number of wet Wakefield cellars are wet because somebody graded the yard toward the camp in 1968 and nobody has touched it since. Six inches of fall in the first ten feet fixes more basements than any pipe we install. On lake-side work we sketch where the water goes and hand it to you when we leave, whether the permit asked for one or not.
Curtain and French drains in Wakefield run $2,000–$8,000 depending on length, depth and how far it is to daylight; regrading, swales and repiping downspouts usually come in under that. Dripline and infiltration trenches on shorefront lots are quoted per site after a test pit proves the ground will take water. Culverts are priced per site. Flat quote.
Inside the Residential II Shorefront district, any change to the exterior footprint or roofline triggers it — a trench under the drip edge and along the lower side of the driveway or parking area. The ordinance does allow another suitable practice, like a rain garden, where that’s demonstrably a better fit for the lot.
On the stratified-drift sand and gravel, very well. It needs four feet of vertical separation between the bottom of the system and the seasonal high water table, confirmed by a qualified professional, and it should take clean roof water only — nothing off a salted drive, since that ground feeds the wells downstream. On till it just fills up.
Uphill, and then at the grade against the house. Most Wakefield cellars take water off the slope behind them or out of the road ditch, and intercepting it with a curtain drain up the hill beats fighting it at the wall. After that we check whether the yard falls toward the building, which surprisingly often it does.
No, and you wouldn’t want to. The shorefront standards require runoff to be discharged into the ground rather than to surface water, and the whole point of the buffer is filtering. We take drainage to a level spreader, a swale or an infiltration trench set back from the shore and let the ground do the work.
The one at the road entrance is part of the driveway permit — NHDOT on Route 16, 153 and 109, the town on town roads — and they’ll want it sized to the ditch it’s carrying. A culvert farther up your own drive is yours to build, but we still size it for the spring melt. An undersized pipe is how a driveway turns into a brook.
Free site walks, test pits before quotes, flat pricing, and a crew that knows Lakes Region ground.
Tell us where the property is and what you’re trying to do. We’ll walk the site, talk it through, and give you a straight, flat quote.
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