Quabbin Reservoir Documentary

it can be called New England's underwater Pompeii in the 1930s the towns of the Swift River Valley of Massachusetts were destroyed and the valley flooded to create a reservoir the Quabbin Reservoir no one knew what was left of these towns now a team of professionals consisting of researchers from nearby University of Massachusetts members of the Massachusetts State Police dive team and metropolitan district Commission Rangers have joined together to explore the waters of Quabbin Reservoir [Music] this is really the first underwater survey of this body of water this body of water isn't Boston draining supply yet no divers have ever explored the bottom to say what's here because just sampling it from the surface you miss all kinds of things we're very lucky we're able to set up a collaboration with a state police underwater recovery team the MDC Rangers and University of Massachusetts two sort of everybody working together and everybody getting something different from it to explore this body and it's been very fruitful Native Americans lived in the valley for thousands of years in fact the Quabbin was named for a local Native American chief called nonny club on which means well watered place in the 1730's the first English colonists settled in the valley clearing the ancient forests of great oaks chestnuts and white pines by the time of the American Civil War prosperous towns villages and farms filled the valley classic New England architecture characterized the valleys villages and farms very often the houses were large comfortable and well maintained every community had a Main Street with stores in the post office and the common an open green space planted with graceful Elms and sugar maples the common was the spiritual heart of the village churches faced the common cemeteries backed the churches I was born in Greenwich in 1923 my father was the postmaster my father also owned the general store there was no electricity in Greenwich he had a regular privy it was in Indore pretty but no plumbing and we had a stove in a woodshed it was a kind of nice resort area the whole the whole valley was peppered with the summer camps it was a gorgeous place there's not many of us left we used to have a hill back divide door that we used to slidin one at a time and we used to when the ice was safe we used to go skating no pond well that's below where the school was so we had all kinds of stuff in wintertime you know hot hospitais there's only six of us in the school was all boys we used to run like crazy jumping a river down there go skinny different perfumers your back to school the idea of flooding the valley for a reservoir was first suggested in the 1890s as the decades passed and Boston's population grew there was always a need for more water in 1927 the state legislature condemned the swift River Valley it would become Boston's water supply Quabbin Reservoir by the 1930s the end was near mills and factories that had employed people for over a hundred years were torn down and burned railroad lines and bridges were dismantled roads closed the entire area that would be submerged was stripped of homes trees and brush 39 square miles the entire area to be flooded by the reservoir had to be cleared of vegetation small sawmills were set up in the valley to harvest the marketable timber loggers converted Quabbin trees into lumber to build the reservoir brushy overgrown farmland covered much of the valley bulldozers with special blades work to uproot the trees and scrape the land clean then came the fires bulldozers pushed up great piles of brush and tree tops fires burned throughout the valley from a distance it seemed a battle was being fought plumes of gray smoke marked the remains of farms and villages people's memories literally went up in flames the Swift River Valley was on fire for months a green and fertile valley became a blackened and charred lake basin construction of two earthen dams the goodnow dike and Windsor Dam began in 1933 and 1935 each dam consists of a core wall of concrete caissons buried under millions of cubic yards of Earth and fill each dam is over 2,000 feet long when completed the dams impounded over 400 billion gallons of water to move the water from Quabbin toward boston workers tunneled a 24 mile aqueduct through the bedrock the tunnel was excavated from headings at the bottom of 12 construction shafts the deepest shaft penetrated 565 feet below ground at the time the Quabbin aqueduct was one of the longest tunnels in the world the construction of the reservoir took place during the worst years of the Great Depression at its peak the project gave employment to over 3,000 men paying the high wage of 62 and a half cents per hour the jobs were a boon to the unemployed of course political patronage played an important part in who got these Depression era jobs of course James Michael Curley the notorious Boston Paul politician was governor in 1935 and 36 during a key part of the construction phase of this project he had money appropriated for a large brush cutting project in the basin of the future reservoir so that many many of his constituents from Boston mostly unemployed of course were brought out to the Quabbin area many of them were housed in where in Palmer in Belchertown and such nearby and they would ride out to work in the valley to be brush cutters many of them had no clue as to how to do brush cutting when they got paid on Friday we all cash their paychecks and get drunk in the local bars and we're a Palmer and sometimes cause trouble get arrested the there were many many more court cases in the during that period in 1936 when this was going on in the where court and such because of these quote/unquote hooligans from Boston as many of the locals referred to them or woodpeckers was another derogatory term for them because most of them really weren't that efficient people came from all over looking for jobs not knowing whether they could get a job or not they just heard there were jobs I remember many men walking up past my mother's a little hot dogs ten on their way up the shaft twelve look for work and she fed a lot of these people they were they were hungry you know they'd come in and she did it asked for anything and she didn't charge him he could tell they were desperate by 1939 the water began to rise swamps and marshes disappeared under water rivers overflowed their banks and became lakes the lakes merged with other lakes mountains which once characterized the valley scenery slowly transformed into islands in a vast freshwater lake as the waters rose towns farms cemeteries all vanished all under water but what remained of these communities no one really knew a lot of myths about the Quabbin one of the myths was that first of all the towns were intact and we would dive down here we would find church steeples just beneath the surface of the water and the other myth was that the towns are so destroyed and bulldoze it would find absolutely nothing down here and in third myth that there'd be no life here of any interest because the waterway the water itself was only 60 years old so there'd be nothing here of interest it turns out they're all wrong on this particular site here we're over the town of Enfield an Enfield was the richest town of the Quabbin and Phil begins really at the water's edge you can actually see the roads to the side going into the water and then it disappears to about a hunt wente feet is in a valley very steep valley the yellow float marks a location of Main Street in Enfield only divers can visit the town now they followed the line into the dark depths of the reservoir Enfield will soon have its first human visitors in over 60 years [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] only the cut stumps of a shade trees marked the site of Main Street in 1916 Enfield citizens celebrated the town's Centennial American flags and patriotic bunting decorated the buildings floats constructed by the various town organizations were paraded down Main Street on that sunny day Enfield will never have a bicentennial celebration divers discover a depression full of leaves it turns out to be an old well with its rusty pump pipe still in place a gray cloud of water mould floats on the rotting leaves the Congregational Church of Enfield dated from 1786 and was the oldest church in town it had served the community for generations vandals burned the church on August 1st 1936 just nine days short of its 150th anniversary woodpeckers burn the church and anvil early one morning and I was burning brush like I told you and we got the call and run down there but when we got down into the church bell from the church people came down right through the church into the cellar nothing that we could you just watch burn the Grange Hall posture three buildings there is not much left to see just a few stones outline the church's foundation site Enfield Town Hall was the last building standing in the Swift River Valley to commemorate the end of the town the firemen of Enfield sponsored a farewell ball on April 27 1938 the festivities included two bands dancing and the vaudeville show to keep sadness to a minimum the fireman served free beer in the cellar more people attended the ball than ever lived in filled at midnight the town's legal existence came to an end desolation now characterizes the Town Hall site only scattered bricks and granite lentils marked the location of the largest brick building in the Swift River Valley the heart of old Enfield remains unexplored the water is over 100 feet deep and a blanket of sediment has covered much of the town's ruins the bottom of the kawaman is very much like diving in the moon it's just a lunar scape I mean the bottom is just totally empty most of these environments except for to find a little pocket where a town was most of these environments you just jump in the water what you'd see should be diving on a 60-year old pasture that's 100 feet under the water which in a bunch of trees stump sticking up or covered in about six inches of sediment although old maps are important often other clues help the divers find the lost towns an old photograph linked the past with the present in 1936 construction began on a stone baffled dam behind the Greenwich Village store and post office old gasoline pump stand neared the road over 60 years later Greenwich Village has completely disappeared under 70 feet of water although the area to search is still large eventually Greenwich Village is found a hitching post stands in front of an old foundation horses once were tied to the iron ring atop the post now the ring is a mass of rust stones outline old foundations along the eroded riverbank a rusty drum may mark the site of the old mobile gas station east of the baffled dam divers find a bridge with the curious name hell puddle bridge hell Hollow bridge was pointed out to us by one of the Rangers who said that occasionally this bridge structure would come out of the water whenever the reservoir was low the pier is massive it looks like a megalithic monument rather than something built recently the bridge itself sits in part of a reservoir that has a lot of nutrients entering into it and so therefore there's a lot of algae and lot of life growing in the reservoir which makes the water very cloudy on the stones are all sorts of invertebrates colonies bryozoans all kinds of life are using the old bridge as a home he'll huddle bridge was part of the Swift River Road system along the shore these old roads still vanish into the water these roads linked the Swift River Valley towns with the rest of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts the forest is slowly reclaiming the highways that Model T Fords and horse-drawn buggies once traveled underwater the roads hide beneath several inches of brown sediment but the divers soon learn what clues to search for by the time the water filled the reservoir the roads had been neglected for decades New England's winters destroy asphalt roads cycles of freezing and thawing slowly break them up underwater the edges of the road show this damaged chunks of cracked and split asphalt seem to flow from the roads edge the cracked and potholed roads descend deep into the reservoir smallmouth bass have discovered that potholes can easily be turned into nests the fish sweep out the sediment and have ready-made spawning sites in the roads travel subsurface sometimes the roads have high retaining walls made of field stones where a road was built along a hillside the walls can be massive six to ten feet high now these walls provide homes to fish that use the spaces between the rocks for cover we've done a lot of diving in the Connecticut River and we first got to the Quabbin it was really a surprise bass first of all the Quabbin is fishless in comparison to Connecticut River in the Connecticut River every time you dive you always see fish all around you here most of the dives we wouldn't see a single fish the only time we see fish in this in this reservoir is when we run into human structures in fact the fish are almost diagnostic you start seeing a lot of fish in the water column you're very likely in there some sort of a record of a building or a bridge or something here and there culverts are found where the old roads eroded culvert pipes lie exposed on the old road beds the culverts mark where long-forgotten streams and Brooks once flowed under the roads New England homes in the 1800s often were surrounded by white picket fences granite posts supported these fences that were attached to the granite with iron bolts now the bolts are masses of rust the fragile boats literally dissolve when touched rows of granite posts also marked the sides of the roads in some places perhaps these posts supported guardrails most homes in the Swift River Valley were wooden the cellar had a dirt floor and field stone side walls topped with granite sill blocks now only the outlines of the Stone cellar walls break through the sediment the cellars are filled in and the building's vanished it is hard to believe anyone ever lived here [Music] occasionally poignant reminders of the past inhabitants are found an old plate catches a divers imagination fragments of a wine bottle lies scattered near a stone wall near some foundations broken beer bottles and whiskey flasks litter at the bottom perhaps evidence of a past owners pleasures almost all of the house foundations are a filled stone but occasionally the divers find cement structures this cement foundation may have been for a farm building the stairs once led to someone's home children probably played on the steps in summer some foundations still have the skeletons of shrubs preserved underwater the black clump of stems may have been a lilac bush growing at the corner of the house during the evictions families often dug up their flowers and shrubs and replanted them at new homesteads every house had a well often the wells are lined with bricks stone walls crisscross the landscape everywhere for over a century farmers cleared their fields of rocks and built miles of walls now the farmers are dead the fields are gone but the walls remain mute reminders to Yankee tenacity hard work and sprained backs although many people lost their homes with the destruction of the Swift River Valley for some it was an opportunity to make a profit to Springfield industrialists Dugan and maja they came in around 1925 and they purchased a farm and land between Curtis Hill and Curtis pond John J Duggan and Thomas F mehar purchased a 163 acre farm for six thousand eight hundred fifty dollars on a pleasant rocky knoll overlooking a pasture Duggan and maja soon began construction of an attractive stone Lodge completed in 1926 this building became the clubhouse of the notorious Doug Mar Golf Course just one year later the state legislature passed an act confirming the destruction of the Swift River Valley for the reservoir the town of Greenwich would be flooded the project was in its initial stages when they purchased this so they knew the Quabbin Reservoir was coming let us say and when the time came to put an appraisal figure on it they apparently tried to suborn the local Assessors to value their property at a lot higher than what it was worth and they ended up asking for a million dollars for it included in the property besides the original farmstead in the farmland the golf course in the stone clubhouse they laid out a paper subdivision going up and down hills and through swamps as such to try to add value to this property while other residents of the valley faced eviction and watched their homes burn the Doug Marr developers kept planning and building the Commonwealth of Massachusetts confiscated the Doug Marr property in 1933 the entrepreneur is Duggan and mehar offered the land and buildings to the state for four hundred thirty six thousand five hundred dollars they claimed that their improvements had greatly enhanced the property's value the Country Club on Curtis Island the remains of it that's the only standing building in the whole Quabbin preservation we dove in front of the Country Club we found what it remains the buildings in fact we are diving on a golf course and the golf course today doesn't have grass but it's just a field of green algae the golf course and its improvements are now underwater in a shallow section of the reservoir covered by 35 to 40 feet of water on the flooded course smallmouth bass hunt for food on the greens and in the sand traps built upon a sandy pasture the golf course required over 8,000 feet of piping for watering the lead pipe still poked through the sediment in places divers search for the remains of buildings that stood near the fairways strange excavations underwater exposed the corner of a stone foundation the divers wonder who or what did the digging pieces of a tile flue lie near the foundation along with some bricks scattered on the bottom a chimney collapsed here beside the building electrification was an improvement listed by the Doug Martin developers divers find the concrete footing of a light pole the Doug Mar golf course boasted a spacious terrace or Piazza a place where golfers and guests could relax over drinks after nine holes you can imagine people sitting on this Terrace sipping martinis after a golf ground that was that was quite the place it was a little notorious because they used it I think there was a lot of booze falling up there during during the Prohibition people would ride up the railroad Springfield up into Greenwich to go to the course I'm told that some of the gentlemen who did use it mostly again from the Springfield area would sometimes bring their wives up for the weekend sometimes they bring other women and even though prohibition was going on at the time that there seemed to be no lack of good things to drink there some of the local boys got to be caddies for the golfers and they said they often received fairly substantial tips for those days liquid boy 1920s from these springfield big shots is at least one of them referred to specifically the state confiscated the Doug Mar golf course in 1933 the legal debate over its value lasted until 1937 the Commonwealth of Massachusetts ultimately paid one hundred seventy nine thousand dollars for the property which came to eleven hundred dollars per acre for land and buildings nearby landowners received an average payment of $100 per acre the Doug Marr was a good investment considering that 1933 was the worst year in the depression for the divers it is time to leave the Doug Marr air is getting low goodbye to an underwater golf course but the state bought for $20,000 per holes the lost towns of the quad Minh passed by below as the boat speed home the forested sure looks uninhabited and from a distance it seems a trackless wilderness seventy years ago farms dotted the hillsides the forest tides cellar holes and stone walls on land and in the water quaggan carries the scars of man's presence in addition to transforming a valley that was home to 2,500 living residents the Quabbin engineers had to locate and move 7,500 deceased residents as well there were 34 cemeteries in the valley 13 of which are now underwater exclamations began in 1932 and continued throughout the decade a hearse carried each box individually for interment outside the watershed in Quabbin Memorial Park Cemetery in most cases even the tombstones were pulled up and reset relatives could have their relatives were dug up and moved delivered any cemetery in the United States but they had to make arrangements with the MDC to be at the cemetery at the proper day in a proper time and that they missed they brought the caster's back and bury them in qualifier the Congregational Church of Enfield built its cemetery on a hillside north of the town the upper boundary is above water and marked by a row of granite posts in the forest as the exploration of Enfield cemetery begins state police cruisers from different parts of the state arrived with the dive team members divers make last-minute gear checks before descending to the old burying ground [Music] as soon as we hit the bottom he ran into a wall that backed into the cemetery I knew it was a cemetery because one of the divers picked up a piece of marble tombstone the cemetery had been built as a series of steps or terraces up the hillside at first I thought we were wasting our time we saw nothing and then as we were swimming along the top of one of the terraces some stonework materialized out of the gray water the stonework insisted the series of granite curbing surrounding a family plot as I swam around I wondered whose family plot was this and then one of the divers discovered a name the name was Underwood Francis Underwood was one of the most famous residents ever to have lived in this valley it polish the book describing life in common that was really a history of the town been filled to find his family plot on a very first dive into the cemetery was just unbelievable along the sides of the plot we discovered the remains were shrub a shrub that had been planted by some mourners in the past when the common cemeteries were cleared out it was generally said all the tombstones were moved to the new cemeteries obviously this fine indicates that this was not so that stones were left behind in this particular case we found a couple of stacks of 19th century marble tombstones and on top of those tombstones for fragments of slate tombstones that were even older not far from the stack of tombstones we discovered the remains of a road this road up from the church into the cemetery proper along the road you could still see the granite posts with their iron bolts this was the road in which horse-drawn horses would have carried coffins from the church to be buried on the hillside this pedestal at one time may have supported an obelisk now the pedestal wears just a veil of green algae [Music] farther along we saw other remains of monuments scattered on the bottom of the reservoir bits and pieces of granite from other tombs pedestals that have been broken off and occasionally we just see a lone granite shaft sticking up through the sediment in other places we found just scatterings of granite blocks these again probably outlined family plot piled up ready to move and then just abandoned not far from this area we found the remains of a wall above it we immediately start running into fragments of marble poking through the sediment it looked as though various tombstones have been broken up and abandoned everywhere we looked with see flecks of white sticking out swinging along one of the terraces we start seeing a lot of fish we follow the bass and soon we found that the fish were congregating around a structure beneath the reservoir this structure was large about 50 feet long and 10 feet wide and consisted of iron beams jutting out of the sediment we think now this was a winter mausoleum this is the place where bodies were stored in New England when the ground is frozen it is impossible to dig what was done in the past was to store the coffins in the winter mausoleum then when spring came and the ground thawed the graves were dug into coffins buried [Music] besides hampering funerals the winter season also brought deep snowfalls that isolated the valley communities travelers relied upon horse-drawn sleighs in 1873 the relative isolation of the Valley communities came to an end with the advent of the railroad the valley became linked to the rest of the country both ideas and people traveled the rails the Train was affectionately known as the rabbit possibly because it covered the 50-mile route in a series of very short hops the short distances between the stations meant that the train stopped almost every three miles sometimes the train stopped for other reasons as well my mother went to Ethel High School and she went on the train he's going to train in the morning come back to train at night one spring day the girls got together talked to the conduct and asked to stop the train so they go out pick some flowers for their teacher he did he stopped the train he ran I'll pick some flowers go back on and on them off they went engineer was able to make up the time so things were little easy back mostess with the coming of the railroad the valley changed new industries developed based on the area's most abundant natural resource water the Swift River Valley was known for its beautiful lakes in winter when these lakes froze crews cut the thick ice into blocks for shipment on the railroad sometimes the ice harvest filled over 300 freight cars the valleys rivers were dammed in a number of locations and small industrial centers developed mills and factories fueled by water power produce straw hats textiles and piano Lakes the forests on the hillsides were cut to make charcoal the railroad linked this commerce to the outside world the old rabbit train made its last run on June 1st 1935 ending 62 years of service in the months following its closure crews pulled up the tracks and leveled the stations divers searched for the depot in the lost town of North Dana the plastic jug will serve as a boy to mark the site the water pressure slowly crushes the jug as the diver swim deeper and deeper under water very little remains of the beloved rabbit train line on the old right-of-way a diver finds a rail spike the depot hides beneath 60 feet of water perhaps its destruction was so complete that nothing survived the state police divers find something tying the line to a cement foundation a diver sends the buoy to the surface nearby a row of stones and some bricks outline an old foundation in the Depot area broken roof slates stick up through the sediment of the old Depot very little remains just sand rocks and slates along one side of the stone foundation wooden beams outline a rectangular area perhaps all that is left of the platform in front of the Depot to reach the depot from the West travellers crossed a stone and iron bridge that spanned the middle branch of the Swift River [Music] the bridge may have been dynamited large granite blocks have fallen into the old river bottom this site is a jumble of granite blocks and rusty iron beams the bridge is now a mass of timbers and iron I beams planks all collapse downward into the river bed swimming up the side of the old riverbank we found a granite post that marked the entrance of the bridge this post still stands on the bottom of the Quabbin although no longer marks the entrance of a bridge now it's just a lonely monument the river bottom is about 70 feet beneath the surface we've been down there for over a half hour and it was time to come up for a diver the most important thing is to control the rate of ascent this is where you can get the bends a dry suit has a layer of air between the diver and the water so as the diver goes up this air expands due to the decreased water pressure as this trap air expands the diver will be carried up faster a diver will check his depth and then press a valve on his upper arm and this valve on his upper arm allows the air that is inside the dry suit to escape thus he reduces his buoyancy and slows the rate of ascent although weightless underwater on land the divers carry a 70 pound burden so going from water to land is not easy the divers literally crawl out of the water north of the Depot a dam once held back the river this dam supplied water power for the Crawford Mills a cotton cloth factory exploring to North Dana Mills underwater was like discovering a labyrinth underwater there seem to be walls everywhere the massive walls of these mill structures just been on and on and on we could literally get lost in the corners as we went around one structure to another some places stairwells to send it into nowhere there was very little left of these Mills except the stonework but then in the actual floor of the Mills you could see it where different kinds of machinery and contrivance must have been set up to do the work of the mills iron beams with bolts sticking up disfigured by colonies of iron bacteria and then the puzzling structures of iron work embedded in granite blocks connecting different things we could never figure out what these were about but we found them quite frequently iron itself is all disfigured with colonies of iron bacteria no Moses looks as if pustules are developing on the iron the iron bacteria are using the iron as a food source they're basically eating it for lack of a better work although the wooden factory buildings were leveled and burned occasionally something fragile somehow survives like this China bowled it couldn't help but wonder who left this bowl who put this bowl on top of the foundation so 60 65 years ago someone the last person perhaps that left this mill complex laid this delicate Bowl on the foundation and the waters of the Quabbin slowly buried it you can see where the mills themselves had used a swift river to dump their waste these waste pipes are located all along the mill structures they were using the Swift River as a means of waste disposal which is really not unusual in New England mill towns the river bank served as convenient places for garbage and industrial dumps the river bank fulfilled the primary rule of waste disposal out of sight out of mind the towns of the Swift River Valley followed this practice of riverside dumping in north dana as in other areas of the Quabbin divers have discovered tumbled accumulations of rotted cans old bottles broken jugs early auto tires and rusty iron machinery along the submerged riverbanks to archeologists the long-forgotten piles of refuse represent time capsules of the valleys history but two environmental scientists the submerged dumps raised concerns about seepage and long-term contamination [Music] we discovered the dumps beneath the Quabbin Reservoir quite by accident along the banks of the Swift River above the town we ran into this enormous pile of bottles rusty cans horseshoes old equipment wheel hubs and old tires all sorts of material dating from about the terms a century we had inadvertently discovered the North Dana town dump all this rubbish is just scattered along the river bank for about seventy feet this garbage was probably buried when the Quabbin was constructed but because the rivers of this valley still flow underwater the dump has been eroded and exposed I must admit when I first saw these things it was appalling I kept thinking why is this material at the bottom of a public water supply visually the dump assaulted me but didn't have any real public health consequences my feeling is it probably doesn't probably because of the volume of the water the Quabbin works because of the audacity of its builders they made it very very large and by making it very very large sites like this like this dump have a very small impact primarily because of the dilution factor 400 billion gallons of water is a lot of water consequently whatever leeches out of this dump which is buried beneath the waters of the Quabbin is not measurable when we look at the water that comes out of the Quabbin but again when you find something like this beneath the reservoir it does give you quite a surprise a call for help interrupts exploration of the reservoir fisheries biologists conducting a salmon and lake trout census have snagged their net on the bottom it is caught on an obstruction 80 feet below the biologist asked if the dive team will cut it free and save the net Blake Gilmore the head of the Massachusetts State Police dive team has the responsibility of going to the bottom of the net and freeing it it is a dangerous job underwater in the darkness the net is invisible it is just as invisible to the divers as it is to the fish if you become snagged in the net and in your twisting and turning pull the regulator out of your mouth and can't retrieve it you've got a minute or so to live [Music] as Blake goes down into the blackness cutting the net free he is not alone safety divers hover above them these divers have the responsibility that if Blake gets caught they must cut him free [Music] the net has been cut free it had been snagged on an old stump a catch of lake trout and landlocked salmon is hauled up we will measure and weigh each of the fish to determine the relative weight the size to weight ratio Phrygia class will also take stomach samples out of the fish to see what they're eating see if there's a change in the áfourá geing behavior and periodically we'll take scale samples which we use to determine the age of fish after we've done our counts we have a significant number of lake trout to deal with and to dispose of if we find a an eagle nest with young active young in it we'll leave three or four lake trout near that site for the Eagles to harvest the rest of the fish we take back to our facility and freeze them and they're either given to Tufts when they have a an injured eagle or Osprey to feed our they're used to provide winter food for the Eagles at Quabbin when the reservoir freezes over and food supplies are very limited besides fish other interesting creatures like this newt live in the reservoir mussels inhabit the sediments filtering food particles from the water in an area near the flooded town of Enfield a population of a rare species of freshwater mussel is thriving whereas many populations of this species in other New England waters have declined almost to zero within a Quadro reservoir we were fortunate to find an example of a special concern species one of these rarer forms and this particular species is called al Asma dontoh undulator this little freshwater mussel as you can see is only a few inches long and it's oriented in the substrate something like I'm holding here except to be this portion of the annulled that is below my pointer would be in the substrate itself would be anchored by this muscular foot and kept in position if it had to move at all the foot would do all the movement so above my pointer you see the animals what you see the animal is that portion which be exposed above the substrate and it's the business-end so to speak because there are two openings in this organism there's a lower opening right here that I'm sticking the probe into and that allows water into the organism and it's carrying with it food oxygen and is circulated within the space in here that's concealed by these valves the gills are aerated food is removed and transported up to a region at the anterior portion of the animal where the food is ingested waste water then is passed to the upper portion of the animal up here it collects excrement and other sorts of waste products and passes out another little chamber right through here and that's basically how these organisms live you rarely see these things anymore in this part of the state anyway it is probably a relict to some extent of former stream fauna that flowed in the area and surviving a population managed to find a little niche or a place to hide and hang on in the Quabbin Reservoir this animal has probably lasted or held on in Quabbin Reservoir because of the nature the quality of water while a water quadrant is considerably better than surrounding streams and lakes anymore and it probably enables a lot of these sort of rare organisms including our freshwater mussel iseman dog modulator to survive freshwater sponges are common throughout the Quabbin on one dive a rare species of sponge was discovered the divers were able to go down quite deep water and find an interesting species of freshwater sponge that had always been traditionally considered rare in the region and this is because most of the collecting and surveying that had ever been done was done in shallow water near shores no one ever went into deeper water in circumstance divers brought some of this up and it turns out to be this quite rare species for Romania ever died is interesting little species because it was originally scribed from Gilder pond in the Mount Everett reservation in western Massachusetts and so in a sense it's our little freshwater sponge but has been seen very rarely since then but since the diving operations in Quabbin Reservoir we now know that it does live in very deep water and it's fairly common down there so that's one of the nice benefits you get out of this type of survey work this type of exploration during the underwater exploration of the Quabbin bottom samples were collected on almost every dive sometimes interesting organisms were scraped off of rocks in other instances sediment samples were collected for analysis in the laboratory one such sample yielded a surprising discovery another interesting creature that was discovered by diving in the Quabbin Reservoir was an interesting little worm a polychaete worm pocket worms are very rare in freshwater there are typically marine organisms there are very few species which are adapted to freshwater environments this one little species called man Yukio speciosa which was originally described from the Schuylkill River in Pennsylvania has turned up from in different times from lakes and ponds throughout northern North America we never expected to find this thing in New England there are no historical records of it down here at least in southern New England this remarkable little animal is probably only about five millimeters long and it lives on the bottom typically in deep water and of course this was the situation in Quabbin Reservoir the tentacles you see would extend from the tube and they represent the head of this worm tentacles on this particular animal are very interesting they are used to filter out food food a channel towards the mouth which is at the base of the tentacles so they are in effect filter feeders you can see the intestine extending along the length heading up towards the mouth region again where the tentacles are positioned and look at the again the swimming like movement of the parapodia again the animal believing is in a tube and wondering why it can't go up and down the Quabbin Reservoir is an artificial lake and we would not expect to find this creature in a situation like this but lo and behold one of the divers came up with a bottom sample of my students in my course were going through it and at the very time I indicated to my class that was very unlikely you'd ever find this sort of organism one of my students revealed one and we all looked at it it was a live little specimen of many young Q speciosa well thrilled to find this sort of thing we were able to videotape it while it was still alive which I believe has not been done before it's a remarkable little discovery we're at clueless as to how this thing might have gotten in there but it's living there the finding of a number of rare aquatic species and the reservoir was at first a puzzle the body of water is only 60 years old how did these rare species get here the answer may be in Quabbin history in the past the Swift River Valley was known for its beautiful lakes perhaps the biodiversity of these lakes has been preserved in the reservoir that flooded then as the water rose the animals in these lakes escaped to live and flourish in the new reservoir the Quabbin provides drinking water for over 2.2 million people it preserves 81 thousand acres of land and water the largest tract of open space in southern New England the Quabbin reservation is without doubt the most important natural resource in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts yet we still know very little about what is under its waters we look around the Quabbin and we see nothing but beauty but what you're looking at is really something that was a human tragedy a human tragedy of enormous proportion there are towns villages schools that had to be destroyed there were cemeteries where graves have to be open the bodies removed [Music] when you walk through the bobbin wilderness you'll see a stone wall or CS foundation and the stone walls are beautiful they're close with vegetation the foundations they'll have ferns growing on them these now are more rock gardens they give you no impression that people lived here that people were driven out of here in other words on land Nature has healed the Quabbin under water the tragedy of the Quabbin is still there the nature has not healed it the ruins of the buildings the ruins of the schools the desecrated cemeteries all of this material is just laying open it's as if the event just happened yesterday when I left it was it was no big deal to me because I was only a kid and there was a new event adventure moving to Belgium and I didn't think much about it but now I think about it because I think about the fact that I can't take my kids and my grandchildren even my great-grandchildren that can show that where I lived [Music] it isn't there and I feel bad about that I would like to take them and take them swimming in the old swimming hole or so boating on Quabbin lake and that bothers me now I supposed to change for a lot of people they were uprooted and that doesn't happen today the old folks were very upset very upset they like taken every all their life away one of the great great people that came out of Quabbin was Eleanor Schmidt I asked her what she thought of the quality the whole picture he said I have two beauties I remember the beauty of the way it was and the beauty the way it is now [Music]

Channel: Chuk-n-Sarah Pratt

Views: 45,293

Rating: 4.873518 out of 5

Keywords: Eminent Domain, Quabbin Reservoir, Boston Drinking Water, Largest

Id: QuerxmlFG8k

Length: 57min 57sec (3477 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 20 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/petermackner22]

why is it 1 :the same guy from forensic files 2 :an hour long

[u/Johnnypants69]

Always wondered if they did a dive there. Wonder what they might have missed during the planned destruction of all of those towns. I read that quite a few people whose lives were in those towns committed suicide rather than see their homes be destroyed and flooded, but I can’t necessarily confirm that. I can imagine the anguish of your whole “world” being washed away