Reclamation district president has close ties to Mokelumne
By Matt Brown
News-Sentinel Staff Writer
Aleck Dambacher stands on top of his levee and surveys the ground below. The 71-year-old reclamation district president lives in a house a stone’s throw from the Mokelumne River on the same 50 acres his father used to farm.
On one side of the levee, the Mokelumne River rolls past under a dense riparian forest that blots out the sun on the olive water below.
On the other side, row after row of cabernet grapes suck up river water that has been pumped over the levee for irrigation.
From up here, the field is a sea of green grape leaves. Twenty years ago, however, the field was a sea of water.
During the great flood of 1986, Dambacher’s levee broke, sending the normally placid Mokelumne rushing onto his land.
“It’s neat to be on the river, except when the water level gets up to the top,” Dambacher said. “You have second thoughts about living in the Delta then.”
It took Reclamation District 348, which protects 10,000 acres of farmland from Thornton to the Delta from floods, $4.5 million to clean up from the disaster. That’s when Dambacher decided to run for the three-member reclamation district board.
Reclamation districts, as established by the California water code, are set up to maintain levees in flood-prone areas.
“I said I’m going to be part of the guys that tries to prevent this from ever happening again,” said the six-foot tall Dambacher, who is bald on top and graying at the temples.
From protecting farmland from the unpredictable river to harnessing its water for thirsty crops, Dambacher is explicitly tied to the Mokelumne.
Part of his task of making sure the levees are intact includes making sure trespassers and boaters aren’t destroying his fortifications.
“There is a lot of boat traffic,” he said. “They don’t seem to care about how much wake they produce and we do get a lot of etching away of the levee, which costs us money.”
Besides public access, another threat to Dambacher’s levees is downed trees, which rip out chunks of levee when they fall and add to erosion. The California Department of Fish and Game loves the trees because they are an ideal habitat for salmon and trout. The department has added reams of red tape to the process of removing trees from a waterway like the Mokelumne.
“The river is full of trees,” he said. “It’s pathetic. It weakens the levees. Usually, the ones that fall into the river, they pull some of the levee with it. But we leave the trees in the river.”
Growing up on his ranch next to the New Hope Road bridge, Dambacher spent a lot of time on the river. Some of his earliest memories are of fishing for trout, salmon and bass. He helped his father farm beans, corn and asparagus before setting off on an international career in the Air Force.
Twenty years later, he came back to the ranch, where he leases the agricultural land and provides water to grape growers, and shares in their profits.
“Farming in this area is totally dependent on the river,” he said.
East of here, the Woodbridge Irrigation District provides Mokelumne River water to farmers through a series of ditches and canals. Along this stretch of the river from Thornton to Walnut Grove, farmers rely on noisy pumps and giant pipes that suck water out of the river like straws.
“It’s all irrigated. We have our pumps right here,” he said pointing to a green pump house on stilts above the river with a two-foot wide pipe extending 20 feet down into the river. “Drawing water out of the river into that ditch supplies many of the parcels around here.”
Dambacher is careful not to take too much water out of the river. He vividly remembers that day in 1986 when there was much more river water in his fields than he could ever possibly need.
Though he spends most of his days working on or near the river, you won’t hear Dambacher advocating for more public access to the river.
“My interests are not in access to the river,” he said. “My interests are in keeping the water on that side of the levee.”