Even as she was going blind, my mom, ever the poet, delighted in sitting out among the palms and birds, and enjoying and visualizing the scene, as I irrigated my date gardens in the Coachella Valley.
In her 1997 poem, “Colorado Water,” she wrote:
The palm said, “My clover is cool around my bole, over my hidden roots.
My fronds clatter, crash
like waves in the far off sea.”
Concerned that tens of millions of dollarspromised to help address woes at the Salton Sea could vanish from this year’s state budget, a chorus of Riverside and Imperial County officials this week wrote to Gov. Gavin Newsom and California Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot politely demanding that the funding stay on track.
“In May, we joined regional leaders in lauding your decision to include $220 million for the Salton Sea as part of a $5.1 billion dollar ‘California Roars Back’ plan,” wrote the president and vice president of the Salton Sea Authority, a joint powers agency comprising area water districts, both counties and the Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians.
Near Southern California’s dying Salton Sea, a canopy next to a geothermal power plant covers large containers of salty water left behind after super-hot liquid is drilled from deep underground to run steam turbines. The containers connect to tubes that spit out what looks like dishwater, but it’s lithium, a critical component of rechargeable batteries and the newest hope for economic revival in the depressed region.
Demand for electric vehicles has shifted investments into high gear to extract lithium from geothermal brine, salty water that has been overlooked and pumped back underground since the region’s first geothermal plant opened in 1982. The mineral-rich byproduct may now be more valuable than the steam used to generate electricity.
The 22-year-long drought in the Colorado River Basin is growing more severe. The levels of Lake Mead and Lake Powell are lower than they have ever been. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has ordered mandatory cutbacks of water deliveries in 2022 with more cuts predicted in the following two years.
Experts are acknowledging that the river has changed fundamentally: “No doubt climate change is real. We’re seeing it on the Colorado River every day,” as an official quoted in an Aug. 17 Desert Sun article said.
California Senators Alex Padilla and Dianne Feinstein introduced a bill on Friday to expand federal authority over the ecologically threatened Salton Sea east of San Diego County.
The Salton Sea Projects Improvements Act would significantly expand the ability of the Bureau of Reclamation to partner with state, local, and tribal governments to address the public health and environmental crisis at the Salton Sea.
The bill also increases the amount the Bureau of Reclamation is authorized to spend towards these efforts from $10 million to $250 million.
California’s Coachella Valley is my home, made complete by the proximity and awe of the stunning Salton Sea. My community is proud of the traditions, unique desert landscape and vibrant culture that make our valley a special place. Yet as years pass and our leaders fail to act, the Salton Sea, California’s largest inland lake, is dying and people are getting sick. For decades, we have lived under a cloud of dangerous pollutants from the Salton Sea’s drying lakebed.
As the new president of the Salton Sea Authority board of directors, Riverside County Supervisor V. Manuel Perez says he will guide “continued efforts to advance habitat and dust suppression projects” at the Sea, and he has laid out his priorities.
At the June meeting of the Salton Sea Authority board of directors, Perez was elected by a unanimous vote to a one-year term as board president beginning July 1.
State work to improve wildlife habitat and tamp down dust at California’s ailing Salton Sea is finally moving forward. Now the sea may be on the verge of getting the vital ingredient needed to supercharge those restoration efforts – money.
The shrinking desert lake has long been a trouble spot beset by rising salinity and unhealthy, lung-irritating dust blowing from its increasingly exposed bed. It shadows discussions of how to address the Colorado River’s two-decade-long drought because of its connection to the system. The lake is a festering health hazard to nearby residents, many of them impoverished, who struggle with elevated asthma risk as dust rises from the sea’s receding shoreline.
Nearly $3.25 million in federal funding was preliminarily secured for separate project requests at the Salton Sea and the New River on Monday, July 12, according to the office of Congressman Juan Vargas, D-Chula Vista. The funding was part of a 2022 House Appropriations Energy and Water Subcommittee bill that included requests of $2.546 million for a major Salton Sea research project, $200,000 for a Salton Sea feasibility study, and $500,000 for planning and design phases for a potential New River restoration project, Vargas’ press release states.
If all goes to plan, General Motors Co.’s future electric cars will rely on batteries made from a broiling-hot, brownish fluid that gushes from the California desert.
The contours of that future emerged on Friday, when GM struck a deal with a little-known company called Controlled Thermal Resources (CTR) to supply the country’s largest domestic automaker with tons of lithium from a desolate area called the Salton Sea.
The arrangement is the first concrete sign that “Lithium Valley,” as its boosters call it — a green industrial ecosystem that produces zero-carbon electricity, battery-grade lithium and lots of jobs — could actually become a thing.
