In March 1936, the Connecticut River rose faster than anyone in Western Massachusetts had seen in living memory. From Northampton to Hadley, barns and bridges disappeared beneath a tide of ice and mud.
Reports from that time described Northampton as briefly isolated, while floodwaters submerged highways, and hundreds of residents — with fears of power failure looming — fled low-lying neighborhoods with few belongings as National Guard units assisted with evacuations.
The flood was a regional disaster, but it was also a turning point. Congress responded that same year with the Flood Control Act, ushering in an era of federal engineering that reshaped the Pioneer Valley with levees, pump stations and floodwalls designed to keep water in its place.
Within days of the flood, public damage estimates in Hampshire County alone exceeded $2 million (about $46 million in today’s dollars), with officials warning that losses in communities such as Hadley and Northampton were still rising as waters slowly receded.
As the 90th anniversary of that flood approaches this March, those Depression-era systems remain the backbone of flood protection in the valley. They also are showing their age. Recent state and local assessments have found that key portions of Northampton’s flood protection system still rely on mechanical components dating to the original 1930s installation. During the July 2023 rainstorms, record rainfall pushed the system close to failure, forcing emergency crews to manually restart equipment and manage water levels to protect low-lying neighborhoods and the downtown business district.
Hadley faces a different but equally consequential set of risks. Its flood protection system, strengthened in the wake of the 1927 flood, was built to protect the town center and surrounding farmland from Connecticut River inundation. Today, geotechnical reviews have identified stability and seepage concerns along multiple sections. During repair work in 2009, a portion of the levee collapsed, turning what began as a roughly $300,000 project into a $1.3 million emergency. The episode underscored how quickly costs can escalate when aging flood infrastructure fails…