Major plot points in some recent movies have involved the evacuation of a town due to its being intentionally flooded by a new dam. Has this ever happened in real life? Are there submerged towns scattered about this great land containing untold riches, ripe for harvest? –Mattyj, via e-mail
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And yes, this is long-standing practice in the U.S. too, if that’s the great land you mean. When New York City started running low on clean water in the early 1800s, for instance, the answer was to build the Croton Dam, which meant flooding hundreds of acres where people were living and working. A few decades later the reservoir needed an upgrade; this time four towns and 400 farms were condemned to make way, and as a bonus six cemeteries’ worth of bodies had to be dug up and reburied. The same kind of thing happened all over: the former towns of Conowingo, Maryland, and Kensico, New York, now lie beneath reservoirs that bear their names; what was once Oasis, Missouri, sits at the bottom of Table Rock Lake, and Shasta Lake contains what’s left of Kennett, California. The inundation process is usually fairly gradual once the dam’s in place–depending on geography it can take years or even decades for a doomed town to disappear entirely.
In some cases, though, dams do jeopardize items of broader significance. The textbook example is the the Aswan High Dam in Egypt, which in the early 60s threatened ancient ruins in the Upper Nile Valley. With waters already rising, a multinational effort helped dismantle nearly two dozen monuments and move them to higher ground; in gratitude Egypt gave a few to countries that pitched in, which is how the 2,000-year-old Temple of Dendur wound up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Archaeologists in Sudan are now scrambling to unearth barely explored Kushite settlements before a new Nile reservoir, near the city of Merowe, covers the area (it’ll displace about 50,000 people too), while last month in Turkey the fight continued over the recently completed Yortanli Dam, which stands to flood the Roman and Byzantine ruins at Allianoi.
