Quabbin & MWRA Water & Sewer

[JumboBuc]

Greater Boston benefits tremendously from the MWRA to an extent that I don't think people fully realize. If you told me that it's the best-managed public agency in the country I'd have no reason to disagree. We have clean, abundant, renewable, great-tasting water that is delivered efficiently and affordably and our sewage treatment infrastructure is truly world-class. Even the worst droughts we experience barely make a dent in the Quabbin. People don't get excited about this stuff, but it matters!

Cambridge's refusal to get on board makes no sense at all.

If only our transportation infrastructure was designed, built, and managed so well...

 

[Justbuildit]

100% agree! It's extremely boring but our water-in-water-out infrastructure with Deer Island has got to be the best integrated system in the country. Clean and abundant fresh water with very little pollution in what used to be a horribly polluted harbor.

 

[393b40]

It's nothing nefarious. They just can (and do) cite the 2010 Boston water emergency ad infinitum as reason for staying independent from the MWRA district. Cambridge was pretty much the only community inside of 128 that had drinkable water during the 4 days of the boil emergency that affected everybody else and gave the region a big economic hit. I remember it well. I was living in Cambridge at the time, and was pretty much the only person in my office who was able to shower that whole week.

Feels more like more of a reason to keep the reservoirs as backups rather than primary usage.

 

[Scott]

Cambridge doesn't get primarily get water from the MWRA but it's sewage is treated at Deer Island, and there is an effort to separate the storm drains from the sewers to minimize discharge during heavy rain events.

Combined Sewer Overflow Control Planning Program - Joint efforts by Cambridge, MWRA, and Somerville

The Draft Plan is here! The City of Cambridge, the City of Somerville, and the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority are proud to present the Draft Updated Combined Sewer Overflow Control Plan (Draft Plan) – an achievement that reflects years of collaboration,

voice.somervillema.gov

 

[NHMaples]

Cambridge doesn't get primarily get water from the MWRA but it's sewage is treated at Deer Island, and there is an effort to separate the storm drains from the sewers to minimize discharge during heavy rain events.

Combined Sewer Overflow Control Planning Program - Joint efforts by Cambridge, MWRA, and Somerville

The Draft Plan is here! The City of Cambridge, the City of Somerville, and the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority are proud to present the Draft Updated Combined Sewer Overflow Control Plan (Draft Plan) – an achievement that reflects years of collaboration,

voice.somervillema.gov

Last I heard from the Charles River Watershed Association was that what the MWRA is proposing will not fully separate the pipes for storm water from the pipes from sewerage and the overflow, although decreased, will still spill into the Charles. For decades ahead fecal matter will continue to end up in the river. Their proposed Long Term Control Plan would actually lower the standards to make a combined sewer overflow acceptable. The plan is being packaged like a great improvement, but in actuality it would lock in discharge into the river for longer than most well-informed people would care to imagine.

 

[Scott]

That's correct but the MWRA has to approve any plan and they are pushing back. I think there should be complete separation but it will an expensive project either way

 

[themissinglink]

The Quabbin has long quenched Boston’s thirst. Now its towns are struggling and asking anyone who drinks water to help. - The Boston Globe

The Quabbin Reservoir supplies drinking water to 2.5 million people who mostly live in Greater Boston, but not a drop to those who live beside it.

www.bostonglobe.com

Drought is making everything worse and exposing stark differences between east and west. While Bostonians freely wash, flush, shower, and spray their summer tomatoes with Quabbin water, Quabbin residents face water bans and contamination.
In New Salem, the town coordinator brought in buckets of water to flush the toilets. At Shutesbury’s town hall, a sign warns visitors not to drink the tap water — the town has spent around $700,000 to remediate toxic forever chemicals found in some wells. In Wendell, O’Donnell, the fire chief, eventually drafted water from a nearby pond to put out the fire at Bowers’s house, but the pond was shallower than normal, which slowed him down.
[...]
Earlier this month, Governor Maura Healey acknowledged the “pressing needs” of these Quabbin towns, while urging the state to more fully recognize their public service, in a letter to Stephen Estes-Smargiassi, interim executive director at the MWRA.
It’s not the first time Healey has backed the fight for Quabbin equity. In June 2025, she filed the Mass Ready Act, which proposes around $3 billion in environmental bond authorizations. It also directs the MWRA to make annual payments of $50,000 to each Quabbin host town for two years.
House and Senate versions of the Mass Ready Act both call for the establishment of a Quabbin Host Community Trust Fund to support critical needs in watershed communities; MWRA would deposit $35 million annually, drawn from ratepayer money. The Senate’s bill also creates a dedicated Quabbin seat on the MWRA board of directors.

 

[citydweller]

Could we drink the water that's treated at Deer Island? Or does it need further treatment to be safe for us? Seems like a waste of resources to just pipe it out into the harbor after we treat it.

The technology certainly exists to purify water regardless of the contamination. Dean Kamen's company (deka) created a portable unit to do just that but not sure how the technology would function at mass.

Slingshot – DEKA

dekaresearch.com

Pure Genius: How Dean Kamen's Invention Could Bring Clean Water To Millions

How Kamen's slingshot water invention could help millions receive clean water.

www.popsci.com

 

[JeffDowntown]

Could we drink the water that's treated at Deer Island? Or does it need further treatment to be safe for us? Seems like a waste of resources to just pipe it out into the harbor after we treat it.

The wastewater discharge from Deer Island would need a lot more treatment to become safe drinking water. The technology exists, but the cost per gallon of water is high compared with the cost of maintaining a controlled watershed like Quabbin. Drinking water reclaimed from wastewater is usually cheaper than desalination of seawater. But it tends to be a hard sell to the public (it is done in places like Singapore).

 

[Scott]

I have mixed feelings about this. The towns near the Quabbin have used wells and septic tanks because the people there did not want to pay for water and sewer. Now they are having problems with their wells and the obvious solution is to hook them up to the MWRA. This does not mean that they got screwed by the city folk or that they should get more money that others won't. If you bust out a calculator and add up the cost of paved roads, modern schools and all the other stuff you may notice that some of these towns are so small they could not possibly afford those things. The same calculator will tell you that Boston gives more than it gets. So they should cut the rhetoric and we have an adult conversation about this without the Trumpian city bashing.

 

[Stlin]

I have mixed feelings about this. The towns near the Quabbin have used wells and septic tanks because the people there did not want to pay for water and sewer. Now they are having problems with their wells and the obvious solution is to hook them up to the MWRA. This does not mean that they got screwed by the city folk or that they should get more money that others won't. If you bust out a calculator and add up the cost of paved roads, modern schools and all the other stuff you may notice that some of these towns are so small they could not possibly afford those things. The same calculator will tell you that Boston gives more than it gets. So they should cut the rhetoric and we have an adult conversation about this without the Trumpian city bashing.

Even so, that part of the state is so sparsely populated it probably still would be massively expensive to build and then maintain a water treatment plant and distribution infrastructure; many of those towns have a population under 2000, and New Salem & Wendell combined are under that; I actually suspect that funding treatment solutions for individual wells is possibly still more viable than long term operations of a water system. Granted, many of those towns do already have a water distribution system - a surprising number, including Orange, Athol and Ware - and honestly? State funding to upgrade their treatment plants to handle PFAS has a state revolving loan program, and expanding it is probably overdue. If that money has to come from the MWRA paying a bit more in PILOT? That seems reasonable to me. Not to get into a political argument, but I don't think there's a realistic solution where state dollars aren't majorly involved. At least part of the issue is just how the Quabbin is constructed... I don't know how you actually would connect the Quabbin to serve Orange/Athol and the small towns since it's not exactly set up to be drawn from at the northern end, where it's actually quite shallow since its set up to be drawn from the south where it's dams are in Ware.

That said, There already is a MWRA treatment plant in Ware, for the Chicopee aqueduct towns. Expanding that to also serve Ware & Belchertown to replace their aquifer/riverine sources shouldn't be too involved - I just don't know there's a one size fits all solution that fixes Petersham, Belchertown and Orange at the same time.

Frankly... And this may be the hugely locally unpopular opinion... but I generally feel like the state should be directly involved in providing services in Western Mass - instead of letting these tiny towns come to ad-hoc agreements with each other, I think it may be best for the state to come in and build the regional/county capacity to consolidate the operational functions of many of the MA small towns - many already rely on regionalized boards of health, shared fire and police departments, regional schools...

 

[RandomWalk]

Maybe someone in the state government is regretting the past decision to annex the former towns to neighboring towns, instead of creating a single municipality for the reservoir and watershed.

 

[WormtownNative]

Even so, that part of the state is so sparsely populated it probably still would be massively expensive to build and then maintain a water treatment plant and distribution infrastructure; many of those towns have a population under 2000, and New Salem & Wendell combined are under that; I actually suspect that funding treatment solutions for individual wells is possibly still more viable than long term operations of a water system. Granted, many of those towns do already have a water distribution system - a surprising number, including Orange, Athol and Ware - and honestly? State funding to upgrade their treatment plants to handle PFAS has a state revolving loan program, and expanding it is probably overdue. If that money has to come from the MWRA paying a bit more in PILOT? That seems reasonable to me. Not to get into a political argument, but I don't think there's a realistic solution where state dollars aren't majorly involved. At least part of the issue is just how the Quabbin is constructed... I don't know how you actually would connect the Quabbin to serve Orange/Athol and the small towns since it's not exactly set up to be drawn from at the northern end, where it's actually quite shallow since its set up to be drawn from the south where it's dams are in Ware.
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That said, There already is a MWRA treatment plant in Ware, for the Chicopee aqueduct towns. Expanding that to also serve Ware & Belchertown to replace their aquifer/riverine sources shouldn't be too involved - I just don't know there's a one size fits all solution that fixes Petersham, Belchertown and Orange at the same time.

Frankly... And this may be the hugely locally unpopular opinion... but I generally feel like the state should be directly involved in providing services in Western Mass - instead of letting these tiny towns come to ad-hoc agreements with each other, I think it may be best for the state to come in and build the regional/county capacity to consolidate the operational functions of many of the MA small towns - many already rely on regionalized boards of health, shared fire and police departments, regional schools...

I'd argue that the state level is almost too big for that, and county government should return. For example, after the county level government was dissolved, most, if not all, of its functions in Franklin County were taken up by FRCOG and honestly, they do most stuff pretty well. But if there's a place where county level government should exist in Mass, Western Mass is probably the best place to start. But that's a sidebar discussion to have elsewhere.

To get back to the original topic, I concur that the smaller plant to the south of the Quabbin should be expanded to serve Belchertown and Ware better, but once you get north of those towns, I almost wonder if there should be a program through the MWRA or DCR or (insert an alternative state department here) where residents in those towns could qualify for a 0% interest loan to drill a deeper well similar to MassSave But these towns will also have problems with that because of geography - they are all on peaks in-between the valley that houses the reservoir itself and either the CT river valley's eastern edge or the northern Worcester hills. If you're on top of a hill, you're not likely to find much ground water sticking around.

 

[bbfen]

I'm seriously not being a dick, I just don't know what I'm about to ask. To Scott's comment:

"The towns near the Quabbin have used wells and septic tanks because the people there did not want to pay for water and sewer. Now they are having problems with their wells and the obvious solution is to hook them up to the MWRA."

Why wasn't this originally at least designed/planned for (even if not implemented)? Was Quabbin designed before anyone recognized global climate patterns evolving? Because those towns didn't wanna nut up the cash? Or was it gravity-feed challenges, or maybe tax base issues? Or, stupid, stubborn independence by the suburbs from us filthy Boston proper residents?

I don't have any context, and wonder if someone else does. (And, for the record, I have no issue hooking up the outer belt communities, since I already subsidize them with my taxes. May as well send me money westward for a damn good reason like sanitation instead of more fucking bike lanes ::ducks:

 

[WormtownNative]

I'm seriously not being a dick, I just don't know what I'm about to ask. To Scott's comment:

"The towns near the Quabbin have used wells and septic tanks because the people there did not want to pay for water and sewer. Now they are having problems with their wells and the obvious solution is to hook them up to the MWRA."

Why wasn't this originally at least designed/planned for (even if not implemented)? Was Quabbin designed before anyone recognized global climate patterns evolving? Because those towns didn't wanna nut up the cash? Or was it gravity-feed challenges, or maybe tax base issues? Or, stupid, stubborn independence by the suburbs from us filthy Boston proper residents?

I don't have any context, and wonder if someone else does. (And, for the record, I have no issue hooking up the outer belt communities, since I already subsidize them with my taxes. May as well send me money westward for a damn good reason like sanitation instead of more fucking bike lanes ::ducks:

At the time of construction, these towns were (and most still are) tiny. With the exception of Belchertown and Ware, most of these towns are stable in their populations and have been for years. Ware and Belchertown each have seen modest growth of about 3000 people since the Quabbin was built in the 1930's, but the rest of these towns hover around 1000-1500 residents. (Shutesbury is the largest at just over 1700.)

These are rural communities with significant portions of conservation land and very hilly geography. It's simply not cost effective to run water mains and sewage lines in this sort of environment.

 

[Stlin]

I'm seriously not being a dick, I just don't know what I'm about to ask. To Scott's comment:

"The towns near the Quabbin have used wells and septic tanks because the people there did not want to pay for water and sewer. Now they are having problems with their wells and the obvious solution is to hook them up to the MWRA."

Why wasn't this originally at least designed/planned for (even if not implemented)? Was Quabbin designed before anyone recognized global climate patterns evolving? Because those towns didn't wanna nut up the cash? Or was it gravity-feed challenges, or maybe tax base issues? Or, stupid, stubborn independence by the suburbs from us filthy Boston proper residents?

See below; the page headers are the source, but these are the enabling laws effectively for the initial creation of the Quabbin under the MDC, now the MWRA, and the later 1947 construction of the Chicopee Valley Aqueduct. Basically... The state legislature of the time was intent that the surface waters from the Ware and Swift Rivers belonged to the MDC and even if the towns tapped it above the dams, they would have to pay the MDC for the water and the infrastructure to access it... And by using that water they'd then be on the hook for a "fair proportion" of the states costs to build the Quabbin in the first place. In 1926&1927 through 1938.... I'm pretty sure that felt like a bad deal.

That said, the fact is that the MWRA today still only provides bulk water and sewerage - in its own words, it's a wholesaler. It's still on the cities and towns to distribute it, as it enters the local distribution system. There's a reason water and sewer rates aren't uniform, and why you still pay BWSC, Somerville Water & Sewer etc and not the MWRA - they buy water from the MWRA and sell it on to you after delivering it. Ware, Belchertown etc had their own preexisting water systems with their own sources, and still do, and just elected to continue with that and not to connect to the MDC at the time and incurr those costs, and Worcester and Cambridge, though they're connected to the MWRA system, day to day rely on their own sources where they don't have to pay MWRA per gallon.

Spoiler: Cambridge water cost savings due to own supply

(I did the math a while ago - per CWD, on an annual average Cambridge uses ~12-13 million gallons per day. At MWRA bulk rates of about ~$5090/MG, that would cost Cambridge roughly ~23M annually for water supply. In 2027, inclusive of watershed & source supply, treatment and transmission, CWD is budgeted for just over $12M, plus $3.5M for admin. This may be why Cambridge water rates are substantially lower than Boston's - Cambridge rates start at 4.15/100 cubic feet, while BWSC starts at 7.019/100, Somerville $7.30/100. (Cambridge sewer, which does go to the MWRA, is a lot more expensive however - nearly triple what BWSC charges, but not too dissimilar to Somervilles rates. I have yet to square that discrepancy.)

 

[HenryAlan]

Water in Cambridge doesn't taste nearly as good as water in Boston. I'm happy to pay more for that.