The Salton Sea is a 98-year-old toxic drainage sump in the middle of the California desert. Nobody planned it. The largest lake in American west formed suddenly after over-enthusiastic irrigation engineers triggered a disastrous accident. Their company went bust as a result. Today, the sea is topped up with the run-off from farms that feed America鈥檚 appetite for salad. But now the cities of coastal California want its water, and all of a sudden conversationists are trying to save it. Why would they want to save a toxic, artificial oasis riddled with pesticides and tainted with botulism? Could ancient history come to its rescue? And where does Frank Sinatra fit in?
THE Salton Sea just happened. It was all the fault of Charles Rockwood, a land speculator in California鈥檚 boom years at the start of the 20th century. He and his buddy George Chaffey, who had already made a fortune planting orange groves in Los Angeles, dreamed of turning a desert depression close to the Mexican border into an agricultural boom town by diverting some of the flow of the mighty Colorado river from Yuma in Arizona, 100 kilometres to the east.
Despite the distance, it didn鈥檛 look too difficult. The bottom of the basin was 70 metres below sea level, the second lowest point in the whole of the US. So once the Colorado bank had been breached, it would be downhill all the way.
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In 1901, Rockwood鈥檚 California Development Company constructed a rickety wooden dam and canal to divert some of the Colorado鈥檚 flow into a dried-up stream bed of the Alamo river running down into the depression, which he renamed Imperial Valley. The soils were good and settlers came fast. Within four years, 14,000 of them had established new towns including Calexico, El Centro and Brawley, and planted 120,000 hectares of fields irrigated with Colorado water.
But by 1904 the muddy Colorado had clogged Rockwood鈥檚 canal with silt. Crops were dying in Imperial Valley. So he cut another canal, this time just over the border in Mexico, to send water into the old Alamo. Then disaster struck again. In June 1905, the Colorado was in full spate and broke its banks, pouring into the desert. By the end of autumn the entire river flow was coursing through Rockwood鈥檚 canal and down the Alamo into the Imperial Valley where, having nowhere else to go, it created an inland sea.
As the floods subsided, the river stuck with its new course and seemed determined to remake the region鈥檚 geography. A small waterfall where the river entered the new lake began to cut back upstream, eroding the soft valley soil. Such was the power of the raging river that, for a while, the waterfall was retreating through the desert at a rate of a kilometre a day, consuming everything in its path and gouging out a gorge 30 metres deep and 300 metres wide. Engineers feared that a new Grand Canyon was being created before their very eyes.
The federal government panicked and called in the Southern Pacific Railroad Company, which had lost a chunk of its line from Los Angeles to Tucson in the flood. The company spent $3 million over 18 months dumping 6000 rail-car loads of rock, gravel and clay in repeated efforts to force the Colorado back onto its old course.
Finally, on 10 February 1907, it succeeded. But while the Colorado flowed once again into the Gulf of California, it left behind a new sea covering some 1500 square kilometres.
The new Salton Sea slowly began to evaporate in the desert sun. If all the farmers had departed, the lake would probably have disappeared by now. But they regrouped and successfully lobbied for a more permanent canal to bring Colorado water to California, this time starting on the American side of the border. The All-American Canal was completed in 1938. That, plus year-round sun, became the basis for a billion-dollar business providing salad crops for sale across the US.
The sea, which today still covers some 900 square kilometres, became a useful sump for the unused irrigation water draining off the fields. It gradually became more polluted and salty as pesticides and the tiny amounts of salt brought down by the Colorado accumulated there. But it persisted, and soon the federal authorities had the idea of filling it with fish. In 1929 they tried striped bass; in 1934 salmon; then halibut, bonefish, anchovies and turbot. All died.
In the 1950s they tried 30 species of fish from the Gulf of California and some of these, especially orangemouth corvina, did much better. Today, despite the accumulating toxins and occasional epidemics of disease, the sea is one of the world鈥檚 most productive fisheries, home to an estimated 200 million fish. And the fish attract birds. With the rest of California draining its wetlands for new real estate, the toxic sump has become the state鈥檚 premier bird habitat, providing a home for 380 species, including egrets, cormorants, brown pelicans and various boobies.
So what about Frank Sinatra? In the sixties, before Las Vegas emerged as a desert oasis for the jet set, the Salton Sea was the place to be seen. Along with Sinatra came yacht clubs, beauty contests and nightclubs. Even the Beach Boys put in an appearance on a shorefront that had everything except surf. Then nature intervened. Heavy rains one winter flooded the yacht club and hotels and the jet set took off.
But water is a precious commodity in California, and Imperial Valley鈥檚 legally established right to three-quarters of the state鈥檚 share of the Colorado ensured that the farmers prospered. Until now.
For years, California has been taking more than its legal entitlement of the Colorado鈥檚 flow. It is allowed 5.4 cubic kilometres a year, but usually takes around 6.2 cubic kilometres. With other states growing increasingly thirsty, Washington has ruled that enough is enough. On New Year鈥檚 Day this year, it began cutting flows.
To avoid running dry, the state wants to pay the Imperial Valley farmers to give up almost a fifth of their flow, instead letting it roll on down the All-American Canal to San Diego. The state plans to crack down on chronic water wastage by lining canals and forcing farmers to switch to more efficient ways of irrigating than their current practice of flooding the fields. The farmers are holding out, but most people believe they will eventually give way.
Almost anywhere else in the world such a scheme would be hailed as a triumph for conservation, making more efficient use of a precious resource. But not here, because if farmers no longer flood their land, there will be much less drainage water to flow into the Salton Sea, which will start to dry out. The director of the Salton Sea Authority, Tom Kirk, says his sea may be a sump, but it is also 鈥渁 rich and vital ecosystem of international significance鈥�. It is home to more species than the Florida Everglades, but if the plan goes ahead, within a decade all the fish will have died. 鈥淥n-farm conservation鈥�, as the irrigation engineers call it, would trigger 鈥渙ff-farm Armageddon鈥�. Kirk would like the state to start shutting down farming so that more water is left for the sea.
Will he get his way? Much hangs on how California chooses to classify its toxic oasis. Is it, as historians claim, a man-made lake? If so, it arguably has no right to protection under California鈥檚 conservation laws. But if it is natural, that might be another thing.
Surprisingly, the sea may have a legal case. From a geographical perspective it is no one-off accident. It has been here before. Probably four times in the past 1500 years, the Colorado has briefly changed course and poured its waters into the Salton depression. Often it has formed a lake bigger than the present Salton Sea 鈥� as the tidemarks on surrounding mountains show.
Maybe the Colorado would have rushed into the valley without the help of Rockwood鈥檚 rickety canal during the 1905 floods. If so then the sea is, in part at least, natural and entitled to legal protection. Perhaps its approaching centenary would be a good moment to decide the matter.