The California legislature voted Monday to keep the Salton Sea in its budget proposal sent to Governor Gavin Newsom. Assemblymember Eduardo Garcia said he’s pleased the legislature found a way to allocate some funding for the Salton Sea despite the fiscal challenges created by the pandemic.
The origin of California’s largest lake is a well-known tale. In an attempt to turn the desert into lush farmland more than a century ago, humans tried — and temporarily but dramatically failed — to exert control over nature.
“The Salton Sea in south California was created in 1905 when spring flooding on the Colorado River breached a canal,” NASA’s website spells out. For 18 months, the most important river in the West flowed along what appeared to be a novel course through the Salton Basin, which lies 227 feet below sea level.
Being born from an engineering miscalculation on the part of the California Development Company means the Salton Sea has been written off as an “accident” in histories inked on many pages, ranging from The Washington Post to the Daily Mail.
But that framing is too simplistic, new research suggests, arguing that the sea’s formation was inevitable, regardless of the famous canal breach in 1905.
The people of California’s Imperial Valley can be as unforgiving as the region’s harsh desert climate. It’s been 16 years since Bruce Kuhn cast the fateful vote to transfer tens of billions of gallons of Colorado River water from the valley’s sprawling farms to thirsty coastal cities, reshaping water politics in California and across the West.
David Snydacker knew going in that California’s Imperial Valley was a “graveyard for lithium-extraction technologies.”
For years, companies had tried and failed to find a cost-effective way to pull the valuable mineral — a key ingredient in the batteries that power electric cars — from the naturally heated fluid deep beneath the Salton Sea. One of the most recent busts was Simbol Materials, a much-hyped startup that collapsed in 2015 shortly after Elon Musk’s Tesla Inc. offered to buy the firm for $325 million.
The California Natural Resources Agency this week released its Salton Sea Management Program annual report, which trumpeted the first completed dust suppression project and set ambitious goals for upcoming mitigation efforts.
The report lays out an aggressive target of 3,800 acres on which the agency hopes to complete efforts to tamp down dust by the end of 2020 to catch up with its long-term benchmarks.
“We’re well-positioned and have identified a suite of projects that will help us accomplish that goal by the end of this year,” said Arturo Delgado, the agency’s assistant secretary for Salton Sea policy.
IMPERIAL — Representatives from Imperial Irrigation District and Imperial County took to the air Friday to get a keen view of California’s largest and most troubled lake.
Coordinated by Audubon California, the flights took off from Imperial County Airport Friday morning, flying over the perimeter of the Salton Sea. Passengers witnessed the decline of the receding lake and viewed the IID’s and the state’s dust mitigation projects and Audubon’s proposed new project, Bombay wetlands.
More than dust-filled air could be plaguing residents around the quickly evaporating Salton Sea in Imperial Valley. University of California, Riverside research shows toxic aerosols could also be filling the air. The problem has to do with agricultural fertilizer in the Salton Sea wetland area. UC Riverside toxicologist Sabbir Ahmed and first-author on the study says the fertilizer is rich in the element selenium, which is necessary for human body health, but not in excessive doses. Ahmed said plants in the area digest this mineral and release into the air as an aerosol, which is air filled with liquid or solid particles.
In his recent Your Turn column, Alexander Schriener wrote that we need to focus on viable solutions for the ailing Salton Sea. I’d like to address some of the points made in that column.
“The Salton Sea is going through the natural evolution …,” Schriener wrote. There is nothing natural about farm chemicals. This is an intensely farmed region where the preferred means of disposing of these toxins is to use half as much water as the irrigation required simply to flush these chemicals into the sea, two or three times a year for over 100 years.
The Imperial Irrigation District board of directors voted this week to approve an option to sell 2,880 acres near Niland and Calipatria to a Moreno Valley-based developer for the construction of an “inland port.”
The board postponed action on the deal in December and called for more information and new terms, which IID staff presented before Tuesday’s vote. By a 4-1 vote, the board approved the amended deal, with President Norma Sierra Galindo as the lone vote in opposition.
After years of playing third fiddle to solar and wind power, geothermal energy is poised to start growing again in California.
Three local energy providers have signed contracts this month for electricity from new geothermal power plants, one in Imperial County near the Salton Sea and the other in Mono County along the Eastern Sierra. The new plants will be the first geothermal facilities built in California in nearly a decade — potentially marking a long-awaited turning point for a technology that could play a critical role in the state’s transition to cleaner energy sources.
