The California State Water Resources Control Board Friday urged people and their pets to avoid the water in the Salton Sea due to a toxic algae outbreak.
Officials said that patches of toxic cyanobacteria have been discovered at numerous sites in the sea, and a dog recently died after swimming in the water.
California’s shrinking Salton Sea is getting a closer look scientifically with the state, local air districts, and community groups examining air, water, and even dust from the parched shoreline where water was once plentiful.
California remains far behind its targets for addressing exposed playa around the Salton Sea, according to data released in the 2021 Salton Sea Management Program annual report. But state officials expressed optimism in a public workshop that they are finally beginning to catch up to those goals.
The state was supposed to implement dust suppression projects or build wetlands habitat across 3,500 acres of exposed playa by the end of 2020 to tamp down dust that’s imbued with a century’s worth of salts, pesticides and other agricultural runoff. Only 755 acres around the mouth of the New River had been completed in that timeframe, although 2020 represented the first year that any state-led dust mitigation projects was finished at the lake.
When Imperial County officials broke ground on the Red Hill Bay project in 2015, it was heralded as the beginning of a new era around the Salton Sea. State officials were beginning a long-awaited restoration project that was projected to be done in two years. The 400-acre site on the eastern edge of California’s largest lake was underwater not too long ago, but water transfer and more efficient irrigation in the valley have cut the flow of water into the lake.
As persistent drought and climate change threaten the Colorado River, several states that rely on the water acknowledge they likely won’t get what they were promised a century ago.
But not Utah.
Republican lawmakers approved an entity that could push for more of Utah’s share of water as seven Western states prepare to negotiate how to sustain a river serving 40 million people. Critics say the legislation, which the governor still must sign, could strengthen Utah’s effort to complete a billion-dollar pipeline from a dwindling reservoir that’s a key indicator of the river’s health.
California is spending more than $200 million to keep an unfolding ecological crisis from getting worse. The state wants to stabilize habitat along the southern bank of the Salton Sea, the state’s largest lake.
That is good news for nearby residents concerned about their health, but the restoration could also affect everyone who draws water from the Colorado River.
California’s desert is littered with remnants of broken dreams — hidden ghost towns, abandoned mines and rusty remains of someone’s Big Idea. But nothing looms larger on an abandoned landscape than the Salton Sea, which languishes in an overlooked corner of the state.
Tensions grew in a series of back-and-forth exchanges between attorneys for the Imperial County Air Pollution Control District and the Imperial Irrigation District regarding the Red Hill Bay project site during a third day of hearings over an air-pollution violation order against the district.
A hearing board met Friday, Feb. 19, for the third part of its hearing to discuss a petition from Air Pollution Control Officer Matt Dessert for an order for abatement against the district for violations of air district rules and regulations. An order for abatement is an enforcement action that requires an owner or operator who is out of compliance to take specific action to get back into compliance with air district rules.
Imperial County officials are considering suing the federal government over continued inaction at the polluted New River.
Members of the Imperial County Board of Supervisors during their meeting on Tuesday, Feb. 23, discussed potentially suing the United States government or sending a strongly worded “demand” letter to federal officials to try to sway them to take action on building a wastewater treatment facility on the border to help clean the filthy waterway.
California is poised to begin the first major restoration project at the Salton Sea. The state is investing more than $200 million in a project that will create flooded ponds and other habitats on the exposed lakebed at the southern edge of the lake. “We’ll complete the work over the next two-and-a-half years, I believe completing the project in 2023,” said Wade Crowfoot, secretary of the California Natural Resources Agency. The Salton Sea has been shrinking rapidly and exposing a dusty lakebed since the Imperial Irrigation District stopped feeding the state’s largest lake mitigation water in 2018.
