The
Old Woman And the Sea
By Neal Matthews
California Magazine, March
1982
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When the Salton Sea
was called the California Riviera, Fishermen, farmers, oil
companies -- all have designs on the Salton Sea. So does
Helen Burns, whose marina is now beneath its
waters.
THE DISTANCES,
something about the distances
captivated Helen Burns when she first beheld the Salton Sea,
and it hasn't yet freed her. Fifty years may have
passed--she won't disclose her exact age--but the distances,
if nothing else, are still as enervating and stark as they
were when she was twelve. She knew instinctively then that
the sea was where she would be happiest, and for nearly 30
years, after settling there in 1947, her instincts proved
right. But in the mid-1970s her happiness was submerged
along with her land beneath the inexorably rising waters of
the sea.
California's anomalous sealet lies on the
northwestern edge of the Imperial Valley, 150 miles from Los
Angeles, nestled between the mountains that demarcate two
pitiless deserts--the Anza-Borrego to the west, the Colorado
to the east.
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The sea is only a few years older than
Burns, having been formed in 1905, when the Colorado River
was accidentally diverted and rampaged unabated for 16
months through the Imperial Valley and into the Salton Sink,
278 feet below sea level (see The
Great Salton Accident). From that
accident came California's richest body of water (fishermen
rarely come home with only tall tales), and its largest (35
miles long, 13 miles wide). For nearly 80 years, against all
predictions, this unlikely sea has stubbornly clung to life.
Yet its survival remains in doubt as energy companies,
fishermen, local residents, farmers, and various government
agencies tussle over whose interests the sea should
satisfy--and whether its life is worth saving.
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When the Salton Sea
was called theCalifornia riviera Helen Burns ran a thriving marina
that included a rstaurant and bar. Now it all lies about 10 yards
offshore, and she waits for the sea to return it.
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Outwardly the sea looks very much the
same today as it did when Helen Burns first saw it in the
1930s: the overwhelming spaciousness emphasized by the
water's immense and reflective surface, combined with the
sparse shoreline development, make for a pacific magnetism.
The serenity is augmented by an incredible number and
variety of birds festooning the water and sky. But what you
don't see are the thousands of acres of shoreline inun-dated
by the sea's steady rise, and the marinas, motels, houses,
trailers, and dreams that have drowned. Invisible are the
millions of fish that make the sea one of the best fishing
spots in the West, swimming perilously close to oblivion due
to the water's high salt content. Unseen is the potentially
enormous natural gas deposit directly beneath the sea, which
has prompted oil companies to apply for leases on nearly
one-third of the sea's surface, hoping someday to build
drilling platforms on and near the water. Also unapparent to
the eye is the large deposit of geothermal heat beneath and
beside the sea, an energy source so promising that as many
as 28 geothermal plants for the area are now on the drawing
boards.
The sea belongs to everybody and to
nobody, lying as it does in two counties, two congressional
districts, and within the purview of enough boards and
agencies to deliver its administration unto anarchy. Farmers
are eyeball-to-eyeball with local residents; the fishermen
are feeling imperiled by the energy harvesters; and what's
good for the landowners--a lowering of the water level--is
definitely bad for the fish, which cannot survive the
ensuing rise in salinity. Everyone says the last thing he
wants is to harm the delicate sea. But, in keeping with its
setting, a quiet, mostly invisible, but grand fight is under
way.
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One a fairway at
the Salton Sea Country Club, once lush and now abandoned, a lone
golfer drives his ball toward a green that is now
brown.
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ALMOST EVERY
DAY, from her small pink
house in the modest village of Salton Sea Beach on the
western shore, Helen Burns walks the few hundred yards to
the water's edge. "Yeah, it's beautiful down here," she
says, "if you don't think about the past." That past, which
Burns is determined to revive, waits under the salty water
about 100 yards offshore, where she first opened a little
soda and souvenir stand in 1947. It was nothing but a
palm-thatched shack stocked with Nehi and smoked mullet,
which was fished commercially from the sea. Her first
customers were illegal aliens from Mexico making their way
north through the desert, and it wasn't long before her
seaside shack became a favorite stop on the Mexicans'
underground pilgrimage. Few people and fewer houses were
around then; the area was just an unending fusion of sky,
desert, salt water, and heat--lots of heat. Developers were
planning a small clubhouse and motel directly across the sea
from Helen's place, on the northeast shore.
Shortly after her shack opened for
business, Burns made a sign and proudly posted it:
241 FEET BELOW SEA
LEVEL. Were she to post a sign
today it would be beside the watery ruins of her little
enterprise and she would do it sadly:
228 FEET BELOW SEA
LEVEL, a rise in the water level
of thirteen feet. fishermen now call the underwater motel
and clubhouse on the eastern shore "Sunken City." The rising
water has caused as much as $13 million in property damage,
if all the lawsuits against the Imperial Irrigation District
(IID), which distributes water in the valley, can be
believed.
The migrating Mexicans helped Helen Burns
move her shack back away from the water the first time the
sea wanted it, in the early 1950s. That was just the first
of four such moves over the next 10 years. Then the local
ranchers and farm workers began to visit.
The Friday-night parties at Helen's Beach
House became all night local rituals. The Mexicans taught
the landowners and roadworkers how to dance the mambo.
Burns's recollection of those days is tinged with a
nostalgic yearning. "We went to sleep when it got dark," she
says, the long ago good times etched in her soft eyes. "and
we woke up when it go light. We lived outside, in the
sun."
Burns who was divorced and had two small
children, hauled ice in from Indio, 28 miles to the north.
She trucked in her own well water. There was no electricity
or telephone. She scrubbed her two daughters' diapers at the
flowing well behind Travertine Rock, up the road a
piece.
Like the succession of rings on a tree,
the passing of the years was marked by each new crowd at
Helen's Beach House. The water-skiers discovered the sea in
the early 1950s, just before the land speculators moved in
on what was undoubtedly the new California Riviera. For a
while the skiers and Mexicans partied together at Helen's,
but that was shortlived. A Mexican would ask a skier's
girlfriend to dance, and that was it. The outdoor,
palm-fringed dance floor would erupt into regular Friday
night fracases. Burns can still see the young men clutching
knives and leaping from her roof onto the patio. By the
early sixties the Mexicans and the mambo were gone; the
skiers owned the place, and they were twisting the desert
nights away.
By then the fishermen had discovered the
sea, too, as had the boat races and resort promoters. The
water was said by the racers to be the fastest in the
country, given its consistent flatness and higher density.
Burns subdivided some property she had (her father was the
original landowner at Salton Sea Beach) in order to finance
the dredging of a little harbor, the construction of a small
island serviced by a steel bridge, the planting of
Washingtonia palms, and the building of 105 thatched cabanas
along her white sand beaches. Her little shack grew into a
store, restaurant, bar, and marina. She even installed three
gas pumps and a fuel dock. On weekend nights her beaches
were crowded with sleeping bags arrayed around beach fires.
It was a funky South Seas hideaway, close enough to Los
Angeles to pick up the Top 40 radio stations.
In the late sixties the skiers started to
drift away from Helen's to the fresher waters of Lake
Havasu, on the California-Arizona border. But they were
supplanted at the bar by the developers, architects,
engineers, surveyors, and construction workers who were
building Salton City, the imagined hub of a great seaside
resort, seven miles south. The developers couldn't stomach
the hamburgers, hot dogs, and sandwiches the ski crowd was
content with, so Burns hired a chef, Don Carlos, who
ceaselessly sang, "I wonder who's kissing her now--who
cares!" with a Spanish accent while he cooked bouillabaisse
and tournedos of beef and lobster Newburg.
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The
Great Salton Accident
How a
sink became a sea.
THE SALTON
SEA WASN'T SUPPOSED to
happen. At the turn of the century, farmers were
discovering the Imperial Valley--and discovering
the need to tap the Colorado river. So engineers
working for the California Development Company,
which promoted and sold the farmland in the valley,
dredged two intake gorges on the banks of the
rivers, just north of the Mexican border. Water
flowed freely into the company's canals,
uncontrolled by floodgates. For three years the
river benevolently obliged the farmers, and the
farmland multiplied along with the valley's
population. But in the summer of 1904 the two
intakes became completely clogged with tons of silt
the river had deposited. The flow of water in the
canals stopped. Farmers, faced with ruin, demanded
that the California Development Company do
something.
The pressure to move quickly was
probably the main reason the company opted to
excavate another intake, south of the Mexican
border. The new cut was made in October 1904.
Again, no controlling floodgates were installed, an
omission later realized to be a grave
error.
When several storms dumped water
into the river, the banks of the new intake canal
were quickly washed away. One year after the new
gorge had been cut, the entire Colorado had
buttonhooked northwest and was tearing through the
Imperial Valley, filling the Salton Sink, 278 feet
below sea level. No water was entering the Gulf of
California through a river's previous
channel.
The disaster was too big for the
California Development Company to handle. Settlers
began to lose property and hope; many left the
valley. The company went bankrupt, and it was left
to the Southern Pacific Railroad, whose tracks
through the desert were threatened by the rising
sea, to wrestle the river back onto its natural
course.
But after two difficult and
costly attempts to build a dam across the 1,
200-foot-wide breach in the riverbank, the
railroad's resolve wavered. In December 1906 the
Southern Pacific was forced to appeal to the
federal government for aid. President Theodore
Roosevelt was able to give only vague assurances
that the government would help pay for the work,
but he was most insistent that the railroad had to
restore the river to its rightful
course.
In 1907, the Southern Pacific
redoubled its efforts to build a dam across the
breach. A crew of railroad workers, local Indians,
and drifters recruited in Yuma, Arizona,
Constructed a railroad trestle across the rushing
water. Over a period of fifteen days, in shifts
around the clock, workers dumped trainloads of
boulders and gravel into the river. Finally, in
early February, the Colorado stopped flowing into
the Salton Sea and began emptying once again into
the Gulf of California.
For want of one good floodgate,
California saw perhaps the greatest engineering
achievement of the young century--the rerouting of
the West's mighty river. And the state was left
with a monument to that achievement and the blunder
that prompted it: a vast, placid desert sea.
N.M.
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The
rampaging Colorado created the sea and massive problems for a
waterlogged railroad.
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Then, in the early 1970s, the developers
departed. Thirty thousand lots had been subdivided and sold
at Salton City and another development, Vista del Mar.
Hun-dreds of miles of residential streets had been built,
sewers had been installed, a golf course was flourishing,
and marinas were packed with fishermen. The only things the
developers didn't provide were houses. So when they left
Helen's Beach House there weren't many people to belly up in
their wake. The people who had bought the lots did so for
the same reason the de-velopers subdivided: someday this was
going to be the new riviera, the new Palm Springs, and when
that day came this land would be worth bundles. The future
sold the land, and the future owned it-and still does. You
can buy a 125-foot-by-75-foot lot today at Vista del Mar for
$4,000, placing $71 down and paying $65.40 a month, with no
interest. And be assured, you won't have any neighbors if
you decide to actually live on it. Enough lots, streets, and
services for a community of 80,000 people now wait eerily
empty, save for about 800 souls, at Salton City and Vista
del Mar.
By the time the developers abandoned the
sea, its level was rising steadily. And in this period of
the sea's evolution the salinity was rising with it. A
second government study in five years reemphasized what
everybody already knew: without a desalinization effort, the
fish would soon begin dying off, and along with them would
go many of the birds. The bad publicity generated by these
doomsday pre-dictions had helped slow the developers'
momentum. How could a riviera flourish on a dead sea? The
Mexicans were long gone, the skiers were at Lake Havasu, and
the boat racers had no races to compete in since the
developers, who had fostered the Salton Sea 500 as a
promotion gimmick, had left with their profits. Only about
1,500 people lived along the 125 miles of shoreline. Helen's
Harbor began to sink slowly into the rising waters.
Eventually all that was left were the two tall white light
poles sticking up like grave markers out of the sea and the
rows of stumps barely jutting above the water along the
submerged road that used to lead out to the swimmers' and
skiers' beaches.
By 1976 the marinas to the north and
south of Salton Sea Beach, and those on the eastern shore,
about a dozen in all, had also succumbed to the rising
waters. The nearby golf course, which had been a ver-dant
jewel; was abandoned to the desert, the palms along its
brown fairways dying in the parched heat, a flagpole here
and there sticking forlornly above a brown green. It's hard
to believe now there could be such a situation," says Helen
Burns, standing on the tiny shred of beach that is all that
remains of her once thriving business. She breathes deeply
of the remaining elements that started her affair with the
Salton Sea: the distances, the silent pastels, the
emptiness, a strange stillness in which only the dry wind
outsings the birds.
IF ONLY THE SEA HAD
REMAINED just a gigantic gutter
of agri-cultural runoff, which is its pri-mary function,
then people wouldn't have become attached to it. A seed of
this attachment, the abundant fish, were planted
artificially by man in this artificial sea in the early
1950s and have since formed their own ecosystems.
Ironically, the surge of flooding that finally wiped out
Helen's Harbor and millions of dollars worth of other
property in the mid-seventies actually saved the fish
population-at least for the time being. But the relief the
property owners want most, a lowering of the water level,
will undoubtedly speed the demise of the fish because it
will increase the sea's salinity level.
Over the decades the sea has become
increasingly salty. As the farmland in the Imperial Valley
expanded, larger amounts of salt entered through the sea's
main in-lets, the New and Alamo rivers at the southern end.
Now more than 5 million tons of salt are deposited in the
sea every year, originating in both the alkaline soil of the
valley and the ever increasing salinity of the Colorado
Riviera; 50 miles to the east. Since the sea lies in a deep
trough and has no natural outlets, its salinity continuously
climbs as pure water evaporates in the desert heat and
leaves behind the salt.
Biologists assume that the resident
cor-vina, sargo, and talapia, the main sport fish, will no
longer be able to reproduce when the salinity reaches 40,000
parts per million. The sea was about to nudge that level,
which is much saltier than the ocean, when tropical storms
Kathleen and Doreen brought desert floods in 1976 and 1977.
The influx of fresh water reduced the salinity, helping the
fish, but wreaked havoc by flooding the property owners. Now
that the water level is slowly dropping, sparking hope for
better days among Burns and her neighbors, the fish are
swimming the plank. When the sub merged marinas are back on
the edge of dry land they may not be of much use to
fishermen. "The thing about the sea," observes one local,
"is you're damned if you do and you're damned if you
don't."
Assuming the prolific wildlife in and
around the sea is worth preserving, an assumption not
universally held, the damned-if-you-do principle seems to
apply to the impending energy development on and near the
sea. "We want to see the Arabs off our backs like everybody
else, but not at the expense of the fishery," says Ron
Ackert, a leader of the local effort to save the sea's
wildlife. Area sportsmen are loudly asserting that, given
the sea's delicate balance (a result of having no outlets),
even a minor spill of oil or geother-mal waste could
devastate the ecology Arid it takes no great flight of
imagination to see that the near future may bring a specific
choice between survival of the sea or development of
energy.
So many agencies and empires--the
counties of Riverside and Imperial, the layered and
overlapping bureaucracies of California and the United
States have a direct or oblique say in what happens to the
sea (since they all own large chunks of land there) that
it's not hard to find opposite intents at work. The
California Department of Fish and Game, for instance, is
considering adoption of a strongly worded policy statement
on the sea that calls for tough preservation measures and
opposition to developments that would harm the ecosystems.
Meanwhile, the Bureau of Reclamation, a federal agency, is
studying a water conservation plan in the Imperial Valley
that, if fully applied, would decrease the sea's surface
area by about half by the year 2005. Needless to say, this
would kill the sea's fish and wildlife and drive the
remaining humans away. Add to that plan the area's 28
proposed geothermal power stations, which may end up using
water from the sea or its tributaries for cooling and
injection into the underground thermal pools, and the
outlook for the sea's biological survival is extremely
clouded.
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A giant puddle of heat energy, capable of
producing 4,500 megawatts of elec-tricity, underlies the sea
and its environs, and within the decade there could be a
dozen geothermal plants siphoning power near its shores, on
both land and water. The current method of extracting
mile-deep heat has led Imperial County to require that water
be injected back into the earth to replenish the fluids
taken Out. Neglecting this step of the process would abet
the already considerable problem of land
subsidence--settling of the ground--in the Imperial Valley
Where will this injection water come from? It appears now
that it won't be coming from the sea itself, but rather from
the sea's lifeblood: the runoff water leaving the farmlands.
And less water coming in means a surge of salinity for the
sea.
But perhaps the strongest threat posed by
geothermal development is the increased seismic activity it
is known to create. The Imperial Valley is one of the most
seismically active areas in the country, with nine fault
lines crosshatching the Salton Sea region. Experts don't
know yet whether geothermal development will help reduce
earthquake risk by stimulating several small quakes, thereby
relieving seismic pressure, or whether sucking out the
earth's juices will trigger a big one. Bombay Beach, a dusty
cross between a fisherman's hamlet and a retirement refuge
on the southeast shore of the sea, population about 500, has
recently been fingered by earthquake specialists as possibly
the next epicenter of a major temblor on the San Andreas
fault. Bombay Beach also happens to be only fifteen miles
from a nearly completed geothermal plant. Just how
earthquakes will affect the sea, the geothermal plants and
their hazardous wastes, and the delicate sloping of the
valley, which conveniently allows gravity to transport water
to the farms, the residents, and the sea, remains an ominous
mystery.
For some Salton Sea residents, the
benefits of geothermal development far out-weigh the risks.
For others the most important question is who will have the
final say on decisions that could eventually kill the sea's
wildlife. Technically the sea's waters belong to the people
of the state of California.
"The issue is, the life or
death of the biggest and richest lake in the state
shouldn't be decided in a couple of boardrooms," says Tex
Ritter, the chief ranger at Salton Sea State Recreation
Area, on the northeast shore. "It should be the peoples'
decision. And it's coming quick."
CLOISTERED BOARDROOMS
and quick decisions now seem
more distant than on the northern horizon snow capped San
Jacinto, over the indigo waters into which 67-year-old
Willard Woolen, possibly the best fisher-man on the sea,
sinks his lure. Southward, off the stern of his small boat,
the sun lays down a silver veneer out of which juts
low-slung Mullet Island. Behind the island the world seems
to fall away into nothing. To the east, the sea's deep
greens fade into the rich browns of the Chocolate Mountains;
to the southwest the morning water quickens to gunbarrel
blue before shimmering into azure on the slopes. of
Superstition Mountain. As always, the desert sky is a
streaked enamel bubble. The peace is palpable. The scene
conspires in the false impression that this sheet of water
and the life within it have always been here and always will
be.
Woolen keeps his Evinrude idling on the
theory that corvina are attracted to the noise. He and his
two fishing buddies, Al Chaffee and Del Jaclsson, stare
intently into the water. The men, all in their sixties, are
concentrating on the thin monofilament disappearing beneath
them. The sea's greatest depth is only about 50 feet, and we
have just about reached that now Woolen chatters, calling to
the fish as if he were summoning a wary house cat; We have
been here only five minutes, and already he thinks it's too
long without a strike. He begins to stomp on the wooden deck
to make more noise. Presently, everybody is hauling in two
and three-pound corvina. "One year," chuckles Woolen from
beneath his blue baseball cap, "I fed all of Bombay Beach
and half of Los Angeles."
Willard Woolen is a retired produce man
from Ontario who has been fishing the sea for 22 years. He
has spent winters in a trailer at Bombay Beach for the last
ten years, fishing more or less daily and hitting the road
with his wife when the summer heat turns the sea into a
90-degree cauldron. He is a contented and gen-tle man, yet
he and Helen Burns have become unwitting combatants. He is
one of hundreds of hardcore fishermen, both seasonal and
permanent residents, who think the Salton Sea provides the
best fishing in the state, if not the whole country and are
glad to fight for it. Woolen and his comrades tell stories
of the twelve- and fifteen- and twenty-pound corvina that
used to be landed routinely. But now the big ones don't seem
to be biting as often, and some fishermen think it's due to
the proliferation of another fish, the talapia, which have
become an easy food source for the corvina.
The corvina were planted in the sea in
1951,just one of more than 30 fish species the Department of
Fish and Game brought up from the Gulf of California. The
corvina, sargo, and gulf croaker were the only fish that
caught on and spawned, and for twenty years now it's been
difficult to fish for an afternoon and not catch the limit
of corvina (nine) and ice chests full of sargo and talapia.
The corvina have in fact grown so healthy and strong that
Texas game officials recently took some from the sea for
transplantation in the Gulf of Mexico, where the fish don't
appear naturally.
The talapia were introduced to the sea
accidentally, having swum in through the irrigation canals,
where they are used to keep the weed growth down. Small
species of mollies also may have come in accidentally from a
now defunct tropical fish farm near the All-American canal,
along the east shore; the ubiquitous barnacles, which
quickly beard any structure left in the watei, were
introduced inadvertently, it is assumed, by the navy
seaplanes that flew in from San Diego Bay for training
missions during World War II.
Like corvina, talapia are excellent
eating fish. But unlike their larger predators, you can take
as many talapia as you like. People regularly cart off two
ice chests full of talapia in a day, all caught on a line
from shore. Though no fish from the sea is supposed to be
taken commercially, ranger Tex Ritter knows better. He has
overheard fishermen say that all they have to do is pull up
on a poor street in L.A. and yell, "Fish!" and they can sell
all they catch. Just last December game wardens busted an
illegal gillnetting operation on the sea that was being run
from San Diego by several Southeast Asian refugees. The fish
they were apprehended with mostly very large corvina-weighed
almost 3,000 pounds and were estimated to be worth about
$9,000.
Woolen reels in his fourth or fifth
corvina of the morning and slides it into a floating creel.
He surveys the western shore before casting again, searching
for the telltale cloud of dust that signals an oncoming
blow. When the wind kicks up the sea can turn from a glassy,
sleepy pond without a ripple into a rocking, crashing,
deadly ocean in just minutes. There have been several
drownings over the years, some of them especially gruesome.
Woolen tells of the day eight or nine years ago when he and
his wife, Dorothy, were out fishing after a big blow in
which two men had lost their boat. One fisherman valiantly
towed the other until exhaustion forced him to save only
himself. After ten days searchers hadn't been able to turn
up any sign of the other man. While motoring toward a
favorite fishing hole, Woolen spotted something in the water
near the western shore. His wife begged him not to check it
out, but Woolen had to. Sure enough, "it was the fella who'd
been miss-ing," he says. "He was bloated up like a pig,
floating on his back with his eyes open." Dorothy hasn't
gone out in the boat since.
Such experiences seem to temper the bond
between fishermen and the sea. As these stories are told and
retold in the beer joints along the shore, where a shaker of
salt is usually served up with every draft, the fishermen's
sense of the sea's permanence is annealed. The sea is not an
ephemeral, transitory freak of agriculture to them; hell,
people have died out there. That ups the stakes
somehow
So it really wasn't all that surprising
that in December 1980, when word got around that the federal
government was processing Chevron's application to ex-plore
for oil and gas directly beneath the sea, the sportsmen
reacted vociferously. They formed the Salton Sea Fish and
Wildlife Club and demanded protection for the environment.
What is surprising is that they may have gotten it. The
Bureau of Land Management (BLM), after a boisterous meeting
with the locals, almost immediately pulled back on its plans
to issue leases. Chevron was, and still is, talking about
building platforms out on the water, constructing islands,
slant drilling from shore, and drilling straight down beside
the sea. (Energy developers have applied for leases on most
of the federal land in southeastern California, including
the Salton Sea area, largely in the wake of Mexico's huge
1981 natural gas discovery in the Gulf of California.) All
of it sounded nightmarish to the sportsmen, who argued that
just a small oil or refuse spill could irreparably harm the
fish and birds. In early 1981 they succeeded in getting the
BLM to postpone the issuance of exploration leases for at
least a year, to allow for more public comment and to expand
the environmental assessment process.
"The general public didn't know what was
happening until the club started screaming," says Woolen as
he steers his little blue boat back toward Bombay Beach. In
three hours the fishermen have each hobked their limit of
corvina. The fierce link between the sportsmen and the sea
caught the federal bureaucrats by sur-prise. Like the
general public, the feds weren't even sure if there was fish
life in the sea. "They wanted to put platforms out here,"
Woolen says incredulously as his squinty eyes sweep the
sharp blueness. He doesn't believe he'll see it, but they
still might put platforms out here someday. "We're trying to
save it for the younger people," he says, "not for
ourselves."
THE FISH AND
WILDLIFE
CLUB
knows that the threats posed by
the oil and gas exploration are still some years ahead, and
many people believe the club's ability to write letters and
employ pressure tactics might in-deed have an effect on the
way local energy development progresses. On the other hand,
Helen Burns--who hopes to reestablish the bar and restaurant
some-day--and her neighbors wouldn't mind seeing platforms
on the sea and geother-mal plants on the shore as soon as
possible, because the resulting influx of people would
advance the local economy. Also, they figure that the more
people living and working around the sea-there are now fewer
than 5,000--the more political clout the area would have in
dealing with its many woes.
No group or agency is grappling with the
most serious and immediate of those woes-the rising
salinity. "There's a good possibility that within two to
five years we'll have a spawning problem," Ritter says on a
recent day off as he cleans a bunch of talapia and sargo in
the state park's fish cleaning shack. He has been the local
park ranger since 1975, and at that time the salinity was
just less than 40,000 parts per million, the critical level
for the fish. Then the tropical storms hit. By 1978 the
salinity had decreased to 36,400 parts per million. Since
then the salt level has been climbing. In September 1981 the
salinity had reached 39,500 parts per million. Ritter fears
the water level has topped out, and, barring the remote
chance of another major flood, the salinity will climb
sharply as the water level sinks.
He deftly slices open a fish belly from
rectum to gills and yanks out the guts. "Three hundred and
sixty square miles of water, and it's going to be dead--the
fish and the birds," he says. His knife edge cuts along both
sides of the dorsal fin, down in front of the tail, and then
down behind the pectoral fins. "The Salton Sea is the best
inland fishery in the state. It could produce more food,
more protein per acre, than the surrounding farmland. You
think if this lake was in Japan they'd let it die? Hell no!
They'd be cultivating the hell out of it."
He guts another talapia. "The problem is,
there's no agency in charge of the sea, like they have at
Lake Tahoe--a commission. The potential is staggering. But
look who's fishing it. Retired people and minorities. They
haven't got any clout." He grabs another fish. Ritter is
well acquainted with the sea's inertia, and he is not
optimistic about its future.
There have been numerous proposals over
the years to control the sea's salinity problems, and
they've run the gamut. In the late sixties there was a
flurry of talk about dredging a canal from the sea all the
way to the Gulf of California, a distance of about 100
miles, and installing a series of locks for the transference
of water. A more practical proposal envisioned pipelines
snaking from the sea to the gulf, providing both water-level
stabilization and salinity control. Like a lot of other
plans, this one faded into oblivion.
The idea that progressed the furthest was
the 4-square-mile "diked impoundment," or evaporation pond.
A 27-mile-long dam would have been built across a portion of
the sea's southern flank, forming a pond. As the impounded
water evaporated, water from the sea would have been let in,
creating an outlet so that not all of the salts entering the
sea would remain in it, as they now do. It was estimated
that this project could have reduced the salinity to about
35,000 parts per million, roughly the same as the ocean, in
eight years.
But the plan, in the end, was not on
fate's agenda. In the early sixties, when it started to look
as though the sea might in fact be the next riviera, the
water became an object of intense scrutiny. Approximately
twenty federal and state agencies made salt control studies.
A conventional wisdom was developed, and it was
un-equivocal: without drastic control measures the abundant
fish would be wiped out by the 1980s. Some of the local
residents began a save-the-sea campaign and prevailed on
their Republican congressman, Victor Veysey, to take an
interest in the salinity problem. Veysey pushed through
Congress several bills that called for more studies, and
once it became obvious that the giant, $58 million
evaporation pond was the best plan, he helped obtain federal
money to test the sea floor and determine whether that
material could be used for the dam (it couldn't).
Then the dominoes fell. In 1974, Veysey
was ejected from the district by congressional
reapportionment, and the sea was bisected by new political
lines. Republican Clair Burgener, who represented parts of
San Diego and Orange counties, now had the southern
two-thirds of the sea in his district, and Republican Jerry
L. Pettis, who represented part of Riverside County, had the
northern third. The new congressional boundaries ran along
the same line that separates the sea into Imperial County in
the south and Riverside County in the north. Burgener tried
but couldn't generate much interest in Washington; Pettis
was beginning to take an interest in the sea, but he died in
a plane crash in 1975. The rest of the save-the-sea momentum
died when the economy sank into a deep recession and
President Ford put a clamp on federal spending. Then the
casket was latched: in 1975 the Department of Interior sent
a letter to a local preservation committee acknowledging
that desalinization was possible, but it would have to be
done without the financial help of the federal government.
It was just not worth the expense, according to the feds.
Fifteen years of hope and work had fizzled down to the
recurring knell: the sea is going to die anyway; let it.
HELEN BURNS SITS ON A
concrete boulder beside her tiny
spit of beach and tries to convey the importance of the
sounds around her. "There used to be a whole line of cabanas
along here," she says. "When the wind blew the palm fronds
rattled." That rattling, combined with the lapping of the
water and the calling of the birds, was what Helen's Harbor
specialized in. "It's soul food," she muses. "And I think
people need that even more now than before."
It would be impossible to find anyone
more dedicated to the sea's interests than Helen Burns. So
it can only be seen as a black irony that the lawsuit she
and many of her neighbors filed to stop the rise of the
water and thereby preserve the sea's recreational value has
activated such a stringent water conservation effort in the
Imperial Valley that it appears the water level will be
continuously falling from now on, the fish slowly
disappearing.
The lawsuit was filed in 1976 by 37
shoreline property owners against the Imperial Irrigation
District (IID), which holds in trust the water rights of the
valley's farmers and controls distribution of irrigation
water to their 450,000 cultivated acres. The property owners
retained a scrappy attorney, Lowell Suther-land of El
Centro, who set out to prove that the recently drastic rise
of the sea's level was totally unnecessary; that it was due
mainly to wasted water that never touched an agricultural
field, and that this constituted negligence on the part of
the IID. He argues that the tropical storms wouldn't have
been so devastating if the district hadn't already dumped so
much unused water into the sea.
Before the jury last year Sutherland
presented his case as if it were a detective story. The
amount of water entering the sea from the IID every year is
about 1.1 million acre-feet. (An acre-foot is 325,851
gallons.) One of Sutherland's experts, Bill Gookin, an
irrigation engineer from Scottsdale, Arizona, had to track
where all that water was coming from, since there are only
three ways it can exit the IID's system: as leach water that
has been flushed down through the fields to extract the
salts that are a constant problem in the alkaline soil; as
wastewater; a certain amount of which is allowed to every
farmer; and as spillage, the dumping into drainage ditches
by the IID of canal water that has never touched the surface
of a field. Through relatively simple calculation and
observation, Gookin determined that leach water and
allowable waste totaled about 550,000 acre-feet, or only
about half of the volume entering the sea from the IID. The
rest, he figured, had to be spillage of water that was never
used.
But how could this be proved, since the
IID claimed to monitor spillage closely and disputed that it
was wasting a significant amount of water? Sutherland had a
plan to prove that Gookin's calculations were correct. He
hired some high school kids to measure and photograph
spillage Out of 21 IID canals for a three-month period. The
photographic evidence was dramatic: torrential cascades of
precious water gushed unused before the stunned jury. The
frequency of spillage the high school sleuths witnessed was
also dra-matic: water was being dumped 61 percent of the
time they monitored.
The information acutely embarrassed the
IID. Sutherland would ask an official on the stand if his
records showed spillage occuring at a certain time on a
specific day, and when the official answered no, the
attorney would produce a photograph of spilling water taken
at the moment in question. Not only was the record-keeping
of the IID impugned by the facts, but Gookin was able to
determine that about 1,515 acre-feet were being dumped
through the spillways every day, or about 550,000 acre-feet
annually. Gookin added this to the 550,000 acre-feet already
accounted for, and it totaled the 1.1 million acre-feet
known to be entering the sea.
Sutherland admits that his sampling
wasn't justified statistically. "But viscerally," he says,
"I feel pretty good about it." Evidently so did the jury. It
took only 45 minutes to decide that the IID was negligent in
its water management and that the damaging rise in the
Salton Sea was due to the district's unnecessary waste of
more water every year than the city of Los Angeles uses. The
damage phase of the suit started last month. The IID is
planning to appeal.
So did Helen Burns lose her marina,
harbor, store, her little island with the bridge, and her
105 cabanas because millions of gallons of water, ordered by
the Imperial Irrigation District, left Hoover Dam, rushed
down the Colorado River into the Imperial Valley, through
the canals, and finally collected in the Salton Sea without
ever moistening a dirt clod? A jury chosen from the farming
community was convinced that is exactly what
happened.
Now water conservation has taken a strong
hold in the valley, and the sea has begun to drop. That's
good news for Helen Burns. For the fishermen, that's not
such good news. About the only hope the sea has now for
survival as an ecosystem is the remote possibility, being
strongly urged by some Salton Sea lovers, that a task force
can be assembled and provided with the power and the
money--and the will--to save it.
There are so many ifs and so little time,
though the desert's agelessness seems to allow the sea all
the time in the universe. Indeed, some biologists, having
been predicting the fishery's death for 25 years, have
stopped predicting at all and are now as hopeful as Helen
Burns of better days to come. On her daily trips down to her
fragment of beach, Burns is still taken with the elements,
which are just as they were when she first came here as a
girl. And yet, how different it is at the same
time.
"Look at this," she says, gesturing over
the wide blue waters, empty of boats. "look how beautiful it
is here, and there's nobody. Ten years ago on a Sunday like
this it would have been packed with skiers." It used to be a
different place. On the wall of her Beach House, she kept a
plaque inscribed with all the names of the people who swam
the thirteen miles across the sea. "People don't swim
anymore," she mumbles, gouging the sand with her old tennis
shoe. "They jog." She looks out into the quickening chop
where her little island used to be and fondly recalls the
rare brown pelican that took up residence on the steel
bridge every winter. For eleven years, from 1967 to 1978,
that was the pelican's roost, and he would only leave it to
find food or to let a pesky sunbather across. Helen Burns
hasn't seen that pelican since the sea claimed the
bridge.
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