The Salton Sea is at the center of a legal challenge to a plan designed to protect the Colorado River, which serves 40 million people and 7,812 square miles of farmland in the West.The Colorado River Drought Contingency Plan seeks to keep two Colorado River reservoirs from dropping so low they cannot deliver water or produce hydropower. Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming worked for years to come up with the plan.