Dana, Massachusetts was one of the towns wiped off the map to make way for the Quabbin Reservoir, but much of what was Dana is now watershed, and thus above water. Here’s the old Main Street and grassy town common. You can imagine the Eagle Hotel, the General Store & Post Office, the church, the school, automobiles, people…
Intellectually, Dez had understood that in order to turn the valley into a bowl of water, every structure, every tree would have to be leveled, but intellect had not prepared her imagination.
–From CASCADE
This photo, courtesy of the Quabbin Visitor’s Center, shows the town of Enfield as it was being razed to make way for the flooding.
My fictional town of Cascade, in my novel of the same name, faces drowning. What’s not fiction is that flooded towns happened everywhere, all over this country—Florida, California, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas. And they happened all over the world. There’s a lake in Italy, Lago di Vagli, that is actually a hydroelectric dam. In the forties, water authorities flooded a stone village, and every ten years, when the lake is emptied for maintenance, the village emerges from the water like a ghost.