MIT and Building the Quabbin Reservoir: 1920-1946

MIT and Building the Quabbin Reservoir: 1920-1946

Hosted by the MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Professor Andrew Whittle, this talk will focus on MIT’s influence on the history, design and construction of the Quabbin Reservoir project of the 1920s and 1930s, which destroyed and flooded four towns in western Massachusetts. The speaker will show contemporaneous photos taken by Quabbin engineers and a rare Commonwealth-produced Technicolor silent film, and relate the Quabbin conflict to contemporary climate change, managed retreat, and water rights. You can learn more about this topic, in the MIT Technology Review article, "Our water infrastructure needs to change."

About the speaker:

Elisabeth C. Rosenberg is the author of Before the Flood: Destruction, Community, and Survival in the Drowned Towns of the Quabbin (Pegasus Books/Simon & Schuster, 2021). She is a writer and editor who focuses on the interplay between individuals, demographic groups, and disruptive technology and has contributed to the Boston Globe, Technology Review, Boston Magazine, Fast Company, Harvard University Press, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center. She divides her time between Washington, DC, and Amherst, MA.