A Wave of New Hope for Saving a Sick Sea

BOMBAY BEACH — Richard Cole, expertly slicing and gutting a string of croakers he caught in a morning’s leisurely labor, pronounces judgment on California’s biggest, most perplexing and most disreputable body of water.

“It could be a lot better,” said Cole, 61, a retiree from San Bernardino. “They’re trying to clean it up, you know.”

Indeed they are. For the first time in the two-decade decline of the Salton Sea, the sea’s custodians have a plan afoot to return it to its former glory.

Time was when it was one of the state’s top fishing and recreation hot spots--a body of warm, smooth water 35 miles long, 17 miles wide, twice as big as Lake Tahoe, a paradise for fishers, a mecca for boating and skiing enthusiasts, an affordable getaway just a modest freeway drive away for the coastal masses.

The Hollywood crowd and hundreds of thousands of others flocked to the Salton Sea, nestled between the Chocolate and Santa Rosa mountains, to luxuriate in the desert sun.

In recent years, the inland sea has become California’s environmental basket case, the not-so-marvelous invalid, a salty, rust-colored, smelly corpus straddling Imperial and Riverside counties.

After years of indecision and indifference, the four governmental bodies with joint custody of the sea--two counties and two water districts--coalesced four years ago to form the Salton Sea Authority and mount a rescue effort.

Now the authority has a preferred plan for saving the sea--dikes and brine ponds to reduce the rising salinity.

Authority members will journey to Washington to present their idea Thursday to five Southern California congressmen who have banded together as an ad hoc Salton Sea salvage squad.

Sea lovers are cautiously optimistic. Never before has Capitol Hill shown such interest in the inland body of water.

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“I’ll wait and watch, but I’m encouraged,” said Norm Niver, a retired musician and television repairman who has lived beside the sea for decades and who has chronicled its ups and downs as a community newspaper columnist. “This is a window of opportunity that may not come again.”

But news about the Salton Sea seems destined to get worse before it gets better.

Dead, hollow-eyed fish line the shore. Swimmers emerge covered with a briny film. Mass “mortality events” of birds have become virtually an annual occurrence.

On Friday, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that the continuing deaths of double-crested cormorants in the southern section of the sea are linked to a Newcastle disease virus akin to that which is lethal to domestic poultry. About 2,200 of the black water birds (and 2,200 birds of other species) have died since March.

“What we’re seeing is another disease being added to the list of diseases in an ecosystem that is in terrible trouble,” said Don Voros, a regional official whose duties include overseeing the Salton Sea National Wildlife Refuge.

The agency placed the sea on a kind of quasi-quarantine and asked the public not to rescue or move any sick birds, lest the disease spread. Federal scientists are scurrying to determine if this strain of Newcastle disease is the kind that attacks poultry.

Last year, the sea was the site of the largest recorded die-off of pelicans, diagnosed as caused by avian botulism. In other years, thousands of eared grebes have died, with scientists unable to pinpoint the cause.

The pelican deaths were particularly ominous, because scientists discovered a previously unknown link between dying fish and dying birds, suggesting that both are imperiled and that diseases could be passed from one to the other.

An ecological collapse of the sea could disrupt the bird population from Canada to the Gulf of California. Millions of birds from 360 species use the Salton Sea as part of their migratory travels along the Pacific Flyway.

What is not known--but widely suspected among environmentalists--is whether the birds and fish in the Salton Sea are paying a deadly price for decades worth of pesticide use in surrounding agricultural fields. Pesticide-laden agricultural runoff flows to the Salton Sea via the New and Alamo rivers.

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To the Salton Sea Authority, the sea’s main problem is not pesticides but salinity. It is the high salinity (30% saltier than the Pacific Ocean) that creates the stink, the off-putting color and thousands of dead fish from oxygen deprivation.

“We can save the Salton Sea,” said Paul Cunningham, an official with the Imperial Irrigation District. “It’s just a matter of the willingness of people to write a significant check.”

The tab for the dike proposal is about $200 million. Authority members would like a 15%-85% split between the authority and the federal government, with the latter paying the long end.

The salinity problem is caused by leaching from the salt sink at the sea’s bottom. Water dumped into the sea from the two rivers becomes increasingly salty through leaching.

The dike proposal would designate part of the sea as a brine pond. Water would be continuously pumped from the sea to the pond in a never-ending evaporation process. A side effect would be to shrink the size of the sea, eliminating flooding.

Periodic flooding of seafront property has led to a string of multimillion-dollar lawsuits against the water agencies. The level of the sea has fluctuated greatly during rainy years and during years when agricultural runoff has been higher than anticipated.

One reason the Hollywood celebrities stopped coming to the Salton Sea is that the resorts and marinas favored by the Marx Brothers, the Beach Boys, Phil Harris, Jerry Lewis and others were washed out. The shoreline is dotted with the abandoned remnants of hotels, marinas and restaurants.

Attendance at the Salton Sea State Recreation Area has plunged two-thirds in two decades.

The dike plan is not the only stratagem under consideration. The five congressmen--Duncan Hunter (R-El Cajon), Sonny Bono (R-Palm Springs), Ken Calvert (R-Riverside), Ron Packard (R-Oceanside) and George Brown (D-Colton)--have some ideas of their own for the Salton Sea.

One idea is to bolster the shrubs, trees and vines along the banks of the New and Alamo rivers to cleanse their waters of toxic substances and salt before they reach the sea. Developed by San Diego consultant Sandra Walker for Brown, the proposal received a boost Friday when Voros singled it out as “intriguing” and environmentally friendly.

Another idea is to dig a canal between the Salton Sea and Mexico’s Gulf of California and, through pumping, exchange the salty water from the former with less salty water from the latter. The Bureau of Reclamation studied a canal proposal in 1991, but its price tag (in the billions) and the complexities of binational politics were seen as prohibitive.

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In some ways, the Salton Sea is the most unnatural of natural resources. It only exists because irrigation engineers goofed in 1905 and allowed the Colorado River to jump its bank and rush northward for 18 months into a dry lake bed.

The Salton Sea has no natural drainage and no true source of fresh water. It survives only on agricultural runoff, serving, in effect, as a sump. The fish were stocked in the 1950s to promote tourism.

The sea’s sulfuric smell and funny color are its definable features but are not harmful and are, in fact, caused by a naturally occurring chemical reaction among oxygen, heat, algae and plankton. Under federal standards, the sea is not polluted.

The cormorant die-off around Mullet Island notwithstanding, elsewhere on the Salton Sea the corvina, tilapia and croaker are in healthy abundance, and veteran fishers like Cole extol their size, availability and spirit.

“It’s one of the few places in Southern California where you can fish from the bank and get a limit,” Cole said. “And these fish are fighters.”