CALIFORNIA STEAMIN’
Steam rises from geothermal mud pots along the banks of the Salton Sea in southern California. Thousands who live in shoreline communities cherish the area’s solitude, but now feel forgotten as this receding lake must compete for water as the state reels
Once-bustling marinas on California’s largest lake are bone-dry. Carcasses of oxygen-starved tilapia lie on desolate shores. Flocks of eared grebes and shoreline birds bob up and down to feast on marine life.
An air of decline and strange beauty permeates the Salton Sea: the lake is shrinking — and on the verge of getting much smaller as more water goes to coastal cities.
San Diego and other Southern California water agencies will stop replenishing the lake after 2017, raising concerns that dust from exposed lake bed will exacerbate asthma and other respiratory illnesses in a region whose air quality already fails federal standards. A smaller lake also threatens fish and habitat for more than 400 bird species on the Pacific flyway.
Many of the more than 10,000 people who live in shoreline communities cherish the solitude but now feel forgotten. The dying lake must compete for water as California reels from a four-year drought that has brought sweeping stateordered consumption cuts.
Julie London, who moved to Salton City after visiting in 1986 from Washington state, hopes for help for the periodic rotten odour from the lake that keep residents inside on hot, fly-filled summer nights. The stench in 2012 carried more than 250 kilometres to Los Angeles.
“Unfortunately, that’s the only time anyone will listen because we don’t have a voice,” London, 60, said on her porch, one of the few that still lies a stone’s throw from water. “You can scream all you want. Nobody cares.”
San Diego now purchases more than one-quarter of its water from California’s Imperial Valley, where fields produce run-off that delivers 70 per cent of the lake’s inflows. More water for San Diego means less for the Salton Sea.
In 2003, the state Legislature agreed to spearhead efforts to restore the lake to help seal the San Diego sale. California, which used more Colorado River water than it was entitled to, was under enormous pressure to go on a water diet after Sunbelt cities such as Phoenix and Las Vegas clamoured for their share.
The San Diego County Water Authority and other agencies agreed to deliver water to the Salton Sea for 15 years while the state developed a long-term fix. This year, that water accounts for 10 per cent of the lake’s inflows.
With no fix in sight, the Imperial Irrigation District asked state regulators in November to condition San Diego sales on the state fulfilling its promise, citing the state legislation and the state’s open-ended contractual commitment to pay for offsetting environmental damage.
The 2003 contract to sell water to San Diego for up to 75 years still deeply divides Imperial Valley farmers, who grow much of the nation’s winter vegetables.
Imperial Valley gets nearly 20 per cent of Colorado River water distributed in the western United States and northern Mexico — enough for more than six million households — but some growers fear cities will eventually suck their fields dry.
Bruce Kuhn, who cast the deciding vote for the San Diego sale as a board member of the Imperial Irrigation District in 2003, said he would have opposed the deal without the state’s pledge to the Salton Sea.
Kuhn lost his re-election bid; revenues at his farm services business slid about one-third. “It cost me business and it cost me friends,” he said.
The lake is often called “The Accidental Sea” because it was created in 1905 when the Colorado River breached a dike and two years of flooding filled a sizzling basin that today is about 60 kilometres long, 25 kilometres wide and only 16 metres at its deepest point. The lake, which has no outlet, would have evaporated if farmers hadn’t settled California’s southeastern corner.
Viewed from the air, the Imperial Valley’s half-million acres of verdant fields end abruptly in pale dirt. Colorado River water is diverted near Yuma, Arizona, to a 125-kilometre canal that runs west along the Mexican border and then north into 3,000 kilometres of gated dirt and concrete channels that criss-cross farms. When gates open, water floods fields and gravity carries increasingly salty run-off downhill through the New and Alamo rivers to the Salton Sea.
The lake has suffered a string of catastrophes since tropical storms during the late 1970s destroyed houses, marinas and yacht clubs, ending an era of international speedboat races and glamour that once drew more visitors than Yosemite National Park. Botulism killed large numbers of pelicans in 1996.
Fish kills have happened regularly since nearly eight million croaker and tilapia died in 1999. The water is nearly twice as salty as the Pacific Ocean, endangering remaining tilapia. Winds that stir hydrogen sulphide gas from the lake’s bottom strips oxygen from surface waters where fish swim and creates stenches similar to rotten eggs.
The lake’s fragile state was on display one spring afternoon as thousands of tilapia washed ashore. A white mist rising from the placid waters was evaporation. Great blue herons took flight, while American coots skimmed the surface.
“There are no other places for them to go,” Chris Schoneman, project leader of the Sonny Bono Salton Sea National Wildlife Refuge, said aboard a flat-bottomed vessel, one of a few boats fit to navigate waist-high waters. Residents say speedboats were last seen about four years ago.
Students at Desert Mirage High School in Mecca who have been strategizing after class how to bring attention to the Salton Sea shared stories with state regulators at a March hearing in Sacramento. Respiratory complaints are common in the small town of Latino farm workers who fill a new Catholic church for Sunday Mass.
Jose Alcantara got involved for his mother, Blanca Sanchez, whose bronchitis worsened after she moved in 2010. She rushes to her car for her inhaler while picking crops and skips work when the air is bad.
“That’s why I worry,” said Alcantara, 17, whose family lives in a stucco apartment complex near fields of peppers, corn and citrus. “I don’t want to see my mother in a casket.”