Qualla: The Town Beneath the Water

The Town Beneath the Water: Introduction

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit TheAustinMan, CC BY 3.0. Somewhere beneath the surface of the reservoir behind Camanche Dam lies a town that misspelled its own name. Settlers from Iowa named it Camanche in the mid-1860s, borrowing the name from their hometown -- which had itself misspelled "Comanche." The error stuck. For nearly a century, the little community on the Mokelumne River survived while bigger Gold Rush towns around it vanished. Then the East Bay Municipal Utility District came calling, and the 40 or 50 families who called Camanche home learned that their town was standing in the way of a $35 million dam vital to a $283 million water project. By 1964, the valves were closed, and the town of Camanche disappeared beneath 431,000 acre-feet of rising water.

Image: TheAustinMan | CC BY 3.0

The Town Beneath the Water: Gold, Lime, and Irish Luck

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit TheAustinMan, CC BY 3.0. During the California Gold Rush, the stretch of Mokelumne River that would eventually vanish under Camanche Reservoir attracted prospectors to camps with names that told their own stories: Poverty Bar, Clay's Bar, Winters Bar, and Limerick -- the last named for the Irish immigran...

Image: TheAustinMan | CC BY 3.0

The Town Beneath the Water: Taming a Dangerous River

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit TheAustinMan, CC BY 3.0. The Mokelumne River had a destructive streak. In November 1950, flooding along the river caused approximately $1.1 million in damage. Another flood from December 1955 into January 1956 inflicted nearly $750,000 in losses. The rich croplands downstream, which depended on the river...

Image: TheAustinMan | CC BY 3.0

The Town Beneath the Water: Engineering for the Worst Case

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit TheAustinMan, CC BY 3.0. Camanche Dam was built to handle catastrophe. The earthfill structure uses a zoned design with an impervious core, and its engineers incorporated multiple safety features that reflected hard lessons from dam failures elsewhere. Relief wells at the base allow underground water to ...

Image: TheAustinMan | CC BY 3.0

The Town Beneath the Water: Poison in the Water

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit TheAustinMan, CC BY 3.0. The dam solved the flooding problem, but it inherited another one. Northwest of Valley Springs, the abandoned Penn Mine had been leaching acid mine drainage into the Mokelumne River for years. Copper residue from the closed mine poisoned the water, killing fish and fouling the re...

Image: TheAustinMan | CC BY 3.0

The Town Beneath the Water: Salmon Below the Spillway

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit TheAustinMan, CC BY 3.0. At the base of Camanche Dam, the East Bay fish facilities include what was once the largest artificial salmon spawning channel in the world -- the first of its kind in California. The channel was built to compensate for the spawning habitat the dam destroyed when it blocked the r...

Image: TheAustinMan | CC BY 3.0