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NY Times, Nov. 11 2014
Preserving an Accident, the Salton Sea in California, for the Good of Nature
By FELICITY BARRINGER
MECCA, Calif. — The area around this town of date palms attracts two
kinds of migrants — hundreds of humans who work the land, and millions
of birds that stop to rest and gorge at the nearby Salton Sea. The sea
is a 110-year-old, increasingly briny, shallow lake that covers 350
square miles but is dwindling fast.
It was actually an accident, created when Colorado River floods
overwhelmed flimsy dikes, but it now fills crucial ecological niches in
southeastern California. Its wetlands and fish attract as many as 400
species of migrating birds. As it disappears, officials are scrambling
to fend off the consequences.
“It’s not a tragedy yet, but it could be a forthcoming tragedy if there
is a failure of our government officials to take preventive measures,”
said Roger Shintaku, director of the Salton Sea Authority, a
quasi-governmental agency.
Every year, the north shore of the Salton Sea is a little farther from
this Sonoran Desert town, partly because of drought and partly because
of the sale of Colorado River water to coastal areas. The migrating
pelicans and grebes that hang out there have fewer fish to eat as the
shallow water disappears. And the dust from desiccated shallows blows
into the air and is easily inhaled by local children, whose asthma rates
lead the state.
Environmentalists say there is some urgency to the problem. A recent
report by the Pacific Institute, a nonprofit based in Oakland, predicts
that in 15 years the water volume will decrease by 60 percent, 100
square miles of lake bed will be exposed and the water will get three
times as salty. The average depth of the receding sea is now less than
30 feet.
The big fish, mostly tilapia now, could disappear. If so, migrating
birds, like the brown pelicans on the shore here, will have little to
eat. The exposed sand and dust, blown by desert winds, will contribute
to dust clouds, making attainment of federal air quality standards
impossible. Over 30 years, the cost of inaction, the Pacific Institute
report argues, will be $29 billion to $70 billion.
In some ways, Salton’s fate is like that of other disappearing saline
lakes, such as the almost-vanished Aral Sea in Central Asia and Lake
Urmia in Iran: They are slowly getting saltier and disappearing because
people have purloined the water that flows into them.
The Salton Sea’s increasing brininess and oxygen deprivation caused by
abundant algae are fatal to fish, whose remains sometimes line the
beaches. And perhaps because this organic matter is fermenting in a
place without oxygen, it sometimes emits a rotten-egg smell that can be
blown as far as Los Angeles, 150 miles away.
The people most directly affected by the somewhat overpowering odor live
in Imperial County, where the population has many poor farmworkers, and
the Coachella Valley around Palm Springs, which is rapidly growing.
Researchers estimate that the population around the sea, now about
650,000, will double in 30 years.
“This is a disaster waiting to happen, if it hasn’t already started,”
said Bruce Wilcox, who runs the environmental arm of the Imperial
Irrigation District. The district receives Colorado River water for its
farmers; the runoff and municipal waste feed the Salton Sea.
He doesn’t exactly say federal, state and local agencies have new
urgency about the problem, but he made it clear that at least there was
a sense of purpose after a decade of relative torpor. The agencies are
planning to create smaller wetlands and at least one tilapia-friendly
deepwater spot, while separating hypersaline water from less briny areas.
Some Californians have not given up hope of bringing back the days when
the sea was a fisherman’s paradise and a weekend destination that lured
Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra for speed-boating trips, but officials say
all that is over.
Vicken Etyemezian of the Desert Research Institute in Las Vegas said the
lake’s disappearance “should make us consider very carefully the
potential for very serious air quality problems.”
Toxic selenium may have become concentrated on the beaches, prompting
worries that birds could inhale it with dust particles, and could suffer
major reproductive problems.
None of this is a surprise. In 2007, California, then a financially
strained state, developed an up to $10 billion menu of solutions. But
little was done.
Everyone agrees things will get worse if at the expiration of a contract
in 2018 the Imperial Irrigation District stops supplying mitigation
water, which now slows the sea’s decline. However, the recent passage of
the state’s $7.5 billion water bond issue is likely to provide tens of
millions of dollars to the long-underfunded effort.
The Imperial Irrigation District is exploring a plan to cover the
exposed lake bed by attracting construction of geothermal power plants,
although the expense of producing energy by pulling hot water and steam
from the ground has discouraged new business.
Both the water district and California’s Natural Resources Agency are
starting small engineering projects to create an area of deep water and
ensure the continuation of large fish in the river and to provide a
wetland for migrating fowl.
The focus on fish and the birds that eat them while they rest on their
journeys between Alaska and South America has drawn attention from the
National Audubon Society.
The spread of civilization has dried up a lot of the rest stops for such
birds. The Colorado River delta in Mexico, once home to thriving
wetlands, is now desiccated. So are other onetime rest stops. The Salton
Sea is now one of the few way stations left for birds migrating on this
route. The water bonds approved on Election Day will help.
“As money becomes available, we will have projects to put it into, and
it won’t sit idle,” said Keali’i Bright, the deputy secretary for
legislation at the state Natural Resources Agency. His agency is
creating a deepwater habitat to house tilapia. “We’ve appropriated $25
million to build 600 to 700 acres of this project,” he said.
Not far away, Imperial Irrigation District plans call for a small
wetland and marshy, low-water area called Red Hill Bay. Ideally, both
projects would remain as the lake adjacent to them receded.
If nothing is done as the disappearing sea becomes more saline, said
Stan Senner of the National Audubon Society, “we’ve left the birds no
alternative.”
The Salton Sea, he added, “is a microcosm of the world. Everything will
be increasingly managed as we leave fewer natural resources. The
complexity of the issues grows as the resources are becoming more and
more scarce.”
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