Distinguished Lecture: Old Dams, New Water

About the event

The Distinguished Lecture Series brings four to six speakers a year, each nominated by a college. The College of Science & Mathematics nominated this fall’s speaker. Dr. Lucia Ferreira-Holm is a hydraulic engineer who has spent twenty years on small dams, the low-head structures that built towns like Porter Falls and that now are too expensive to fix, too dangerous to ignore and too beloved to remove.

Her talk, “Old Dams, New Water: What Mill Towns Owe Their Rivers,” uses three case studies from the region. One of them is uncomfortably close to home. The Millrace channel and its sluice gate come up, and so does the fish passage that opened in 2024. Students who have just registered for ENVS 3650, the new spring course on the Porter River, have been asked to sit in the front rows and take notes.

Schedule

Location and access

The auditorium is on Level 1 of Halvorsen Library, step-free from the main entrance, with wheelchair spaces, a hearing loop and live captions on the screen. Parking is free in the general lots after 4:30 p.m. The stream is captioned and archived the next day.

Admission

Free. Seats are first come, first served, and the room holds about 240. No registration is needed in person. Register in MyPorter for the stream link. Porter Lifelong Learning Institute members have reserved seats until 6:55 p.m.

Contact and related events

Past lectures, including Climate Adaptation for Small Cities, are archived with the series. For the river itself, read the Millrace and Porter River and Porter River and Millrace ecology. The next evening, the Town–Gown Council meets downtown.