The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Before the Flood: Destruction, Community, and Survival in the Drowned Towns of the Quabbin by Elisabeth C. Rosenberg

Episode Date: August 23, 2021

Before the Flood: Destruction, Community, and Survival in the Drowned Towns of the Quabbin by Elisabeth C. Rosenberg In the tradition of Silent Spring, a modern parable of the American experience and our paradoxical relationship with the natural world. Though it seems a part of the "natural" landscape of New England today, the Swift River Valley reservoir, dam, dike, and nature area was a triumph of civil engineering. It combined forward-looking environmental stewardship and social policy, yet the “little people”—and the four towns in which they lived—got lost along the way. Elisabeth Rosenberg has crafted Before the Flood to be both a modern and a universal story in a time when managed retreat will one day be a reality. Meticulously researched, Before the Flood, is the first narrative book on the incredible history of the Swift River Valley and the origins Quabbin Reservoir. Rosenberg dive into the socioeconomic and psychological aspects of the Swift River Valley’s destruction in order to supply drinking water for the growing populations of Boston and wider Massachusetts. It is as much a human story as the story of water and landscape, and Before the Flood movingly reveals both the stories and the science of the key players and the four flooded towns that were washed forever away.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks this is voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming here with another great podcast we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in thank you you for being here. We really missed you guys over the weekend. And yeah, it was a pretty interesting week when we were down in Las Vegas doing some wonderful shows for some people down there.

And now we're back, back on track. Today, we have the most amazing author. Before we get to her, you're going to want to check her out on youtube.com, Fortuness Chris Voss. Hit the bell notification button over there. Go to goodreads.com, Fortuness Chris Voss. Hit the bell notification button over there. Go to goodreads.com, Fortuness Chris Voss. So we're excited to announce my new book is coming out. It's called Beacons of Leadership, Inspiring Lessons of Success in Business and Innovation. It's going to be coming out on October 5th, 2021. And I'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book. It's filled with a multitude of my insightful stories, lessons, my life, and experiences in leadership and character. I give you some of the secrets

from my CEO Entrepreneur Toolbox that I use to scale my business success, innovate, and build a multitude of companies. I've been a CEO for, what is it, like 33, 35 years now. We talk about leadership, the importance of leadership, how to become a great leader, and how anyone can become a great leader as well. So you can pre-order the book right now, wherever fine books are sold. But the best thing to do on getting a pre-order deal is to go to

beaconsofleadership.com. That's beaconsofleadership.com. On there, you can find several packages you can take advantage of in ordering the book. And for the same price of what you can get it from someplace else like Amazon, you can get all sorts of extra goodies that we've taken and given away. Uh, different collectors, limited edition, custom made numbered book plates that are going to be autographed by me. There's all sorts of other goodies that you can get when you buy the book from beaconsofleadership.com. So be sure to go there, check it out or order the book wherever fine books are sold. Uh, you can go to YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram. How can you keep track?

Wherever all those crazy kids are posting at the Chris Voss Show is at. And our groups, you can go over there and subscribe and all that good stuff. Today we have an amazing author on the show. She's the author of the brand new book, Hot Off the Presses. Still steaming, evidently, from what I hear when it gets shipped to you. It came out August 3rd, 2021. The book is called Before the Flood, Destruction, Community, and Survival in the Drowned Towns of the Quabbin.

Not sure. Did I pronounce that right, Elizabeth? You did. You did. I should have got that clarified, but there we go. I'm not as dumb as I look. The famous author, Elizabeth C. Rosenberg. She is with us today to talk about this book. We're going to be excited to have her, but let me tell you just

a little bit more about her so you can get a good idea of how amazing she is. She writes about the personal and societal impacts of disruptive technologies. She's contributed to the Boston Globe, Boston Magazine, Technology Review, and Fast Company. She's a Harvard Business Press published as well in the Electronic Privacy Information Center and has co-edited. Let me recut that, Elizabeth. Let me recut that. Elizabeth C. Rosenberg writes about the personal and societal impacts of disruptive technologies. She's contributed to the Boston Globe, Boston Magazine, Technology Review, Fast Company, Harvard University Press, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and has co-edited a book on RFID privacy and security. She lives just outside of Washington, D.C. with a frequent presence in western

Massachusetts and is proudly the oldest female member of her CrossFit gym. Welcome to the show, Elizabeth. How are you? I'm great. I'm glad to be here. There you go. Glad to be here. It's an honor to be with you. It's an honor to have you here. You are an author. I love authors. I just got in writing my book. The amount of work and time and stuff, I respect authors so much, even more now before I tried doing my own. And I just have so much respect for the time, work, research, and the editing, all that good stuff. So welcome to the show. Congratulations on the book. Give us your plugs so people can find you on the interwebs. Sure. The easiest way to do it is at Amazon. You can just search Before the Flood Rosenberg. I'm the only one there. I don't know the address at Simon & Schuster, but I know that

you can get it there and you can ask for it at your local bookstore. There you go. Pick it up, guys, wherever those fine books are sold, but I'm going to go to places where there's the fine books are sold. If you go to the ones that are in the back alley, you never know. Sure, you never know. Anyway, so welcome to the show. Give us the reason you wrote this book, Elizabeth. What motivated you? So I've always really been preoccupied with the things that happened before. The planet of the apes at the end, the old cliche, it's the Statue of Liberty.

If you live in New England for a long time, everything's like that. You're going to discover the Statue of Liberty on the beach a lot. And I was fascinated with the idea that the place where people from metropolitan Boston, for the most part, get their drinking water, there was an entire civilization under there, if you want to call it that. As an anecdote, in the mid-90s my husband to be took me out to the quab and i'd never been out there and we drove up and he said look down and i said he said there were towns under there oh wow just blew me away because all he's just watered like for miles around and i was you know my little 20 something self was it was stunned. And it haunted me for a really long time that there was something. In every place, there was something before.

And here, there was nothing. Here, there was drinking water. And if you go there during the drought, I've never seen this, but supposedly you can see the street grids underneath. And I was haunted by that idea of there is this destruction for a larger purpose. And then I got to thinking about who were those people, what we know who lived there, but who did the construction slash destruction? And the idea that there were engineers from MIT that lived with those people and married those, married the girls, were in charge of the civic organization so they would destroy things by day and they would

embed themselves in the community at night. And that just haunted me for years. And finally, I said, I'm going to try, see what I can tease out of this. And it was just, it was fascinating to find out who these people were and how they communicated with each other. If you can imagine, you know, what that's, these guys come into your town, you're like these old Yankees, lived there for 200 years. These guys come in and they say, hi, we're going to buy up your houses. We're going to tear down your trees and get rid of your farms and level your churches. And by the way, we're going to be living with you. How do you handle that? How do you live with that? And it was the depression. And you know what? They did it. They lived that way for a decade. So this was during the Depression era time then?

Mostly. I would say in the legislation that created the Quabbin Reservoir and all its outside parts was passed in 1927. The valley was flooded in 1939, and people were drinking the water full time by 1946. Wow. So it roughly corresponds to that. Where is the reservoir located? What state? It's in Massachusetts.

And all you have to do is drive out straight from Boston, either on the Mass Pike or on Route 2, which is a local highway. It's about an hour and a half drive. And it is this amazing thing. You go there, and it's this huge body of water. As far as you, I can see with these islands, and we'll get to what the islands actually are. The islands are actually mountains.

So you're looking and there's nature preserve and hiking trails and fishing, and you would never know, like you literally never know that it was once something else. So they send in, I guess, the Army Corps of Engineers? Is that who it was? No. Just to really give you a quick history that Boston does not have a lot of fresh water.

And the state was building reservoirs further and further west of the city as the 17th century as the population expanded. And they built a place called the Wachusett Reservoir, which is in the middle of the state. And then that was in 1895. And at that point, even as they were building it, they said, this is not going to be enough water for the city and for the metropolitan area. So they did the nuclear option. They said, we're going to take this valley. And this is after some discussion. There's not even 4,000 people living in it. There's maybe 2,500 people still living there and about 7,000 graves. There's going to be a million people in the trial in Boston by 1930. We're just going to take it and we're going to try and treat them fairly. We're with the government. We're here to help, right? Yes. Yeah. And so that is for the descendants of people who live there.

That's very much the viewpoint. There's a real us and them dichotomy. There is the urban. It reminds me. This is what's like the Hunger Games in the sense that here's the capital. And the capital is going to take what it needs. And we're going to sacrifice all of you because we need to remain in power and relevant. And there's no Katniss.

There's no real hero here. Everybody did what they could. The state did what they could. The engineers did what they could. The people who live there did what they could. Now, when you say there's bodies out there, did they dig up the cemetery? Did they just leave the cemetery and flood in the water? No, you can't dig up.

You can't leave the cemeteries. Part of the deal that they had with the people is they were going to build a brand new cemetery, and they were going to take all 7,000 graves, if people wanted, and put them in plots that were as close as possible to the arrangements they had in these little church cemeteries. And that took years and years. They have in the headquarters, the Kwabna headquarters, they have little index cards that show who everybody is and their dates and who they're buried near. And they did pretty well until the end. So I want to say, if you're drinking Quabbin water, there are no dead bodies at the bottom, I promise.

But there are some headstones. It's very different than the Vegas Lake Mead water. Yes, it is. It is. It's different. This was such an issue that they wanted this water to be pure, that it was just going to run through these natural rock tunnels for 30, 60 miles. And I drank Boston water for a long time. It's not fabulous, but I will say it's very clean.

Well, there you go. There you go. So what are some of the teasers and stories that are in here that people are going to want to read about the book and the adventures of what went on? It's pretty interesting. It's pretty interesting. It's pretty interesting. And one of the things that I like to talk about is just that this is people's stories in their own words. The Keepers of the History did a really amazing job of recording people's oral histories in the 70s and the 80s. So I just, I transcribed a lot of those and you can hear just the huge, what a, how many different voices there are and how many different opinions. So there's like a different attitude and a different opinion for

every voice. And so you have some of the engineers who you can tell really wanted to do their best. You have the townspeople who are super angry. This is like 35, 40 years after the valley was flooded and they're still angry and bitter. There's the woman who had a ninth grade education who merited MIT engineer and became after they moved to upstate New York. And after his death, she became like a goodwill ambassador. And she's so funny and self-effortless, dry. And then there's, I think of them as like the Greek chorus. Just two guys.

They were grave diggers. They were sand hogs. They burnt things. They tore things down. They were locals and they drank a lot. And they're funny. They're like, they're super funny. And it was my intent that I would just be a neutral operator that I would let people speak. And I would let the journalists of the time speak also, because their journalism was wonderful. The local papers especially were just right on the ground and they were just watching like a gog at this happening. One of the other cool things that I like to talk about is the invasion of what were called the Woodpeckers in 1936. And James Michael Curley, who was the governor of Massachusetts at the time, who was like an old, big time graft Irish politician, took a bunch of guys who had never had any work experience, but their parents

were local, loyal voters, and took them out into the country and said, here, we're going to pay you way over given wages, cut things down for summer, live well and party. And they just, just everybody, everybody hated. And like the loathing from everyone is, and they're just a bunch of really comic characters. And so the reason I bring up the comedy is a lot of it is so dark. There's so much grief and so much anger and yet there's this kind of black comedy that's running underneath all of it and people say that they've laughed aloud when they get to the part about the woodpeckers this is not a book you laugh a lot and i don't want people to be like dragged down it's gotta be i imagine i mean this is still in the era where this is still in the era where people

stayed in the same area this is their livelihood uh this was their roots if you will this is where they raised their family and their family raised their family and they had very deep roots in these different sections and so i unlike now where we have it after levittville we have this whole let's move around the country and do different things and people disperse to the coast and different migrations. These people were still, you were taking away their homeland, basically. Yes, we were taking away everything. The people as a whole were really acutely aware historically that that land had belonged to the Indians. And they were reminded of it constantly because the Indians, the Nipmuc Indians had lived there for so long that it was just, you'd go on a walk and you would dig up an arrowhead and you just look down and you'd find something. And so while they were deeply enmeshed in the land and the land meant so much to them, there was a lot of poetry written. I don't think it's good poetry, but it was folk poetry about we took this land from the Indians and now this land is being taken from us and we kind of deserve

it. Kind of some irony there. Yeah. So they were aware of the irony, but yeah, that's all they had. So a lot of the people who speak say we were poor, but we didn't know it because we had land wow we had enough to eat we had space we had everything we needed these were really self-sustaining communities up into the beginning of the 20th century they grew their own they made their own they were very insular for the most part. There were these really big class distinctions. But overall, the farmers and the working people, that's what they had was land. And so a lot of the older generation afterwards really died of broken hearts. Wow. They had heart attacks.

They died of burst appendices when they wasted away. The grieving was such, and they moved, which to us, like the couple towns over, that wouldn't mean anything to us. And yet it's been, it's so traumatic for them. And there's one scene where one town over where a lot of the people moved holds a welcoming ceremony for the people who come. And I have a newspaper clipping of the people there. And these are some grim folks.

They do, you know, I have the program. There's a lot of, you know of singing and dancing and speechifying. These people are just in town hall with straight faces with all their coats and their hats on trying to get warm and just looking like they don't want to be there. They want to be home. It's not even on the map anymore. It's gone. What kept you going through this book? What really motivated you to tell these stories to these people and tell the story that was in there? You know, it kind of becomes a thing in itself. If you've ever done research on something,

it's just, it's so interesting just to do the research and to see where you ended up. Like my kind of holy grail was to find documentation of any interactions between the engineers and the towns. And so I would go back and I also couldn't quite figure out the timeline at first. And so I'd go back and back to the same places and say, hey, can I see these materials again? And they'd be like, oh my God, it's you. Aren't you done with this yet?

And patient, I want to give a huge shout out to the people at the Quabbin Visitor Center. They brought out their archives for me over and over and they let me sit in the restricted areas and look at all their photographs. And so that's what I was trying to find. What was the core? What was this relationship like? I started out looking at the marriages because that was a an overt sense that there were that there were relationships and i would look through here's like a school christmas program and there would be they're doing a christmas carol and there were a couple engineers in the cast so that they you knew that was happening

there was an engineer giving out a school award to a fourth grader so we knew that they were doing that we knew that they were singing in the choir that there were latin from an engineer to the some of the townspeople thanking them for everything that they'd done but it's every little piece and it became like an obsession like pulling all the little pieces together to see if i could form a coherent negative, coherent narrative. And that's interesting to me when a government does this, I would this fall under the eminent domain sort of thing. Some of it is, yes,

some of it is eminent domain. So what they tried to do was buy people out first and they wanted to be fair about that. It started out in the twenties and they really, they wanted to be fair about that. It started out in the 20s and they really, they tried to be fair. And so they would have locals do the appraisals because they felt that the locals would be most trusted. And they would do three appraisals and pick the highest one. And so the more wealthy people who had big, nice properties, the state really wanted those for office buildings. And they went for those first. And then gradually, as the depression progressed, people were just getting what they can and what they could. And then finally,

as the time for flooding arrived, then the state was starting to take just by eminent domain. That's usually what happens at the end. They get the holdouts and they just ramrod them. Yeah. And there were people who were very much holdouts, people who just lived this big family on this stony little farm up on the mountain and didn't want to move and refused. And that's the father of that family is the one who died of appendicitis after they had to move.

And the daughter of that family became, you know, one of the faces of the people who started the Swift River Valley Historical Society, which is also something, if you're interested in this, I don't know if it's going to be open this summer. It's open on Wednesdays and Sundays at the best of times, and this is not the best of times. But the state really did what they could. They hired a really awful guy, though, named R. Nelson Moult. And he was just, my guess is he was pretty on the spectrum and took things very seriously and very literally and was humorless and people could not stand him. And he wrote all the really the formal language telling people to get out and that the formal language for all the taking.

And he was just loathed and dreaded every time they said there's a there's an anecdote in the book where a man claims that he had a conversation with the molt in the poll in the post office and supposedly according to this guy that molt says oh what a beautiful area This is going to look so good when it's underwater. Underwater. Oh, wow. And the guy says, you're not really saying that, are you? And he's like, sure I am.

And these are people's homes and stuff. Yeah, these are people's homes. Wow. That's brutal. It's brutal. And this same guy, I have a tape of him where he actually starts sobbing on tape where he talks about the loss of his son. Oh, I'm sorry. I was thinking you were talking about the other guy who was the mean guy.

Yeah, that sounds like your classic government thing. Yeah, I mean, so he was everything that you would fear. And one of the things I found was his, and I included this in the book, is his recommendation letter. Wow. was his, and I included this in the book, is his recommendation letter. And he says he takes things very literally, but he's a hard worker and quote, he knows how to get along with the country people. And the answer is, I don't know who thought that. I think that was just like, they had to get him on the payroll because they needed somebody who actually didn't live in Boston on the payroll. Yeah. You probably, you got to have somebody who can escape. I remember years ago, there was like a, there was an older hospital and this is during,

I think one of the booms of 2008 or something. It was during some sort of boom area. And this big investment group become, or hospital chain had bought this hospital in South Salt Lake City, Utah. And, but to the South of it, there were two or three blocks of neighborhoods of these really old homes. They're in, I don't know what stage of gentrification you call them, but they're at the end of their 30, 40 year life. And a lot of the people who are living it were senior citizens, people who'd lived there all their lives. Those folks don't want to move. They usually can't afford, they're on fixed income. They don't want to afford to move. I think it was boomed. The hospital gets the local government to start doing in-of-domain. They tried the first nice stuff. They, hey, we want to buy

everyone out. They bought some people out and they tried pressuring with in-of-domain. And it really stuck my mind because there was this one old home and I never saw the owner, but this owner put like siren lights on their signs. And the city of XYZ is trying to steal our home and this hospital is trying to steal our home. And it was really unique to watch. And I always remembered it because they pretty much got every house around this one house. It was like the last man standing. And these people, they had like multiple signs, sirens. You couldn't drive by this house without going, yeah, they're pretty unhappy with the city and the hospital at this point.

The funny thing is they finally beat that person. They finally leveled all of the properties. Yes, I got it. Seizure by Emmett Domain. Yeah. Recession hit. They were never able to this day expand that property or those things. It's been 20 years. And all they did was get the property for free or

whatever sort of deal they worked out. But shortly after they seized that property, that final property, recession hit, totally made it to where it was not competitive to invest in the hospital anymore. I think they shuttered the hospital after a recession. And it was such, I remember thinking about it. I'm just like, what a horror show. They destroyed all these people's lives, the homes and everything they built for all their lives for a failed project. And at least in the case of the reservoir, you can say it's still running. It is a fantastically successful project.

It will never, ever run out of water. Oh, that's good. You can ship some of that to California. I think about that a lot. I think it's in California where there's a town where they're actually not going to expand. They're not going to build out because there's no more water. Yeah. There's a,

there's some pictures of, I don't know how accurate they are. I haven't gotten a chance to really make sure that and vet them. But my friends tell me there's a picture of something like a year or so, two ago, it was a beautiful lake and now it's just like a dry. Yeah. So it is sad.

We need to do other things. Like I, my understanding is Nestle water. Nestle has some lake or reservoir in Northern California or someplace where they just have a limited dipping rights. And we need to knock off some of this bottled water crap. This has got to go, really, when you think about it. I don't know about you. I grew up in the era where, hey, if you want to drink a water, you got it from the tap

or you got it from the thing or whatever. But that's another thing, I guess. Anything more you want to tease out to readers to pick up the book? I don't know. There's so much there. Really, it's like a short book. I think that it is a narrative that we need to start thinking about more. In a way, it's very specific to its time and place in the sense that it's new England. It's the depression. Everybody's white and Christian. That's that,

that the racial aspect, they think about it in terms of like Protestant versus Catholic. That, that was a big issue at the time. In those days. But the, the issues that were defining them, then are the time. But the issues that were defining them then are the same. You have the Democrat versus Republican, urban versus rural, college educated versus not, progressive versus conservative

in the traditional way. And all those, it's like a still, like a microcosm of things that are still happening. And so I think of it, you know, like the publicists like to call it a parable, the parable. But how can we work through these issues? And I'd like for the audience to be able to think about water and forced migration is going to be an issue that there's increasingly, there's going to be people who have to leave their land because of flooding or because of drought, whether they're places where they live are going to be taken for water or whether there's just going to be so much flooding. I think about the people in Houston who are living on these cement plateaus and how is that sustainable? Yeah. I know with Vegas, you have underground aquifers springs that are underneath the city. That's the only thing that keeps that city going. It doesn't live off that.

I think it takes power off the dam. But this is certainly for our times. In fact, recent reports, I don't know if you've seen them, the federal government's starting to come down on water rights, and they're starting to get pushy, if you will, which they probably should at this point. Somebody probably should figure all this stuff out. And I come from Vegas where you do a lot of wands or conservation you don't have lawns there they

when i first went to vegas in in 1998 they paid you four thousand dollars to tear up your lawn and you had to sign a thing you'd never replace it and i love xeriscaping because i don't have to mow oh we don't have to yeah deal with i in a townhouse with, we have a brick patio in the back and some little bushes in front. And like, I am, I feel virtuous. Yeah. I love it. I love it. There's no mowing.

My family lives up here in Utah and they love lawns. And you're just like, this is such a vanity project. Like the only reason you, the only reason you like lawns is because it's just vain because everyone else has one. So you've got to, you've got to, and it's crazy. In California, it used to drive me mental. I would see, I came from Vegas and stayed in California for several years. And you'd see the runoff going down the street and for a mile of the over uh watering of the lawn and i just be like this is insane you people live in a desert and you're always talking about water conservation saving the world hey man maybe you get rid of that lawn or turn off the the vanity

water on the lawn but that whole thing needs to stop and i think i can't remember what it was but i saw a percentage was of uh i think gavin newsom recently shut down the you know told people hey back off on the lawn crap and i read that some sort of portion of what how much a percentage is the lawn yeah i don't yeah i don't remember what that was but i've seen it it's like i i don't want to throw out a figure that's wrong, but I was really shocked at how much. This is not so much of an issue on the East Coast. And I just wanted that the Quabbin is unique in the sense that it is one of the only, I looked this up, one of five reservoirs in the entire country that is only for drinking water. It is not for electricity. It is not for electricity.

It's not for irrigation. All it does is go into taps. And maybe there should be more of that. I don't know where there's room to build another reservoir that's just for drinking water. And then we can take the hydropower and do something else with that. And we can take the irrigation

and do something else with that. But maybe they should get a reservoir for flint they probably use something new but you're right i think a lot of i think the future holds that we're definitely going to be coming using water as a scarce resource etc etc give us your plugs as we go out where people can find you on the interweb is an order of the book i'm gonna plug amazon i hate to it, but they make it so darn easy. Just go to Amazon, type Before the Flood Rosenberg. I'm the only one. And once you do that, if you're an independent bookstore person, then go to your bookstore. I'm going to be on tour. I'm not quite sure the dates yet. If there's some way I can get it, probably I'm going to be in New England in October,

hopefully doing a number of live dates and book signings, et cetera, et cetera. And I encourage everyone, if you're going to be in New England, if you're going to be in Massachusetts, please go visit the Quabbin. It's an amazing place. It's even more amazing if you know its history. And if you want to get some books about the Quabbin, I'd look at Quabbin the Accidental Wilderness, I think by Michael Tugas. But know where you're going because you go there and there's stone foundations everywhere. And those were people's lives. Those were people's homes and their farms. There's roads that go down into the water.

Those were highways. Like this was a living place. It was, it was, and now it's for everybody and it's worth doing. I just, I see. I really encourage it.

There we go. There you go. It's been wonderful to have you on the show. Thank you very much for spending time with us today. Thank you. What a pleasure. Thank you. And to my audience, thanks for tuning in.

Go order the book up wherever fine books are sold. Before the Flood, Destruction, Community, and Survival in the Drowned Towns of the Quabbin. You want to check that baby out. It sounds like an awesome read. And of course, we may see more of this in the future as water becomes scarcer and we need more reservoirs or I don't know what's going to happen. It's going to be weird. Maybe we'll just, maybe we'll just all have to go purge so we can fight over the water. Anyway, guys, go to goodreads.com forward slash Chris Voss. Go to youtube.com forward slash Chris Voss. Hit the

bell notification button, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, all those different places. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Thanks for being here and we'll see you guys next time.