PLOURDE SAND & GRAVEL CO., INC.

The Bow-Hooksett violation list turns over, but paperwork, not pollution

The roster of facilities in significant non-compliance around Bow and Hooksett has shifted since the count of 52 violators taken on July 21. Plourde Sand & Gravel Co. in Bow, one of that original group, is now listed as resolved. In its place, three facilities not on the earlier list have since entered significant non-compliance: Bow Auto Parts, Kent Nutrition Group, and the Pike Industries plant in Hooksett. BrightFarms NH remains non-compliant, unchanged from before. All three new entries carry the same flag: a discharge monitoring report was not received. That distinction is worth holding onto, because it is a different kind of problem than a documented pollutant exceedance. These facilities are cited for missing paperwork, not for a measured violation, which also means there is no effluent data on file to say what, if anything, they are actually discharging, or in what volume. The regulatory system caught the absence of a report, not the presence of a pollutant. That distinction matters for anyone trying to read these rosters as a signal of river health. A facility can sit in significant non-compliance for months over paperwork alone, invisible in terms of what is actually going into the water, while another with real exceedances shows up identically on the same list. Anyone downstream who wants to know what is actually in the water at these three sites will find, for now, that the record is silent rather than concerning.

Fifty-two facilities in violation as summer low flows peak

July 21: a summer low-flow day, when a river's power to dilute what enters it shrinks to its annual minimum. The same discharge that passes largely unnoticed in April's high water becomes, in midsummer heat, a far larger and more visible share of total river volume. Right now, across the Gulf of Maine Coastal Plain, fifty-two facilities are in significant non-compliance with their Clean Water Act discharge permits — and the timing could hardly be worse. The violators include gravel operations like Plourde Sand & Gravel, food processors such as BrightFarms, industrial manufacturers, and wastewater treatment plants — including the Manchester and Nashua facilities on the Merrimack — spread across the watershed. All fifty water bodies formally assessed within the region already carry impairment designations; not one meets its designated water quality standards. The Clean Water Act was built around exactly this seasonal dynamic — the recognition that summer low flows demand stricter compliance. But a violation record this broad, at this moment of peak vulnerability, suggests that the law's protective intent and its enforcement reality have drifted far apart.