Life in the Slow Lane : Nature, Man Put Final Touches on Yearlong Process of Producing Salt
Mark McCortney came here from a competitive, hurly-burly, corporate rat-race in Los Angeles to a job that is about as exciting as watching grass grow. And he loves it.
The 30-year-old executive shucked his business suit for work boots and khakis when he signed on early last year as plant manager for Western Salt Co. and took over the reins of the firm’s 1,300-acre saltworks at the southern end of San Diego Bay.
Only now has the newcomer seen the full cycle of the saltworks’ production schedule, solar evaporation that yields pure salt from muddy seawater. The process, which uses the forces of nature more than man, takes 12 to 18 months.
The silence on the salt ponds is broken only by the distant sounds of machinery and the constant cries of birds that inhabit the salt ponds in droves.
“There’s something special about this place,” McCortney said. “It grows on you and you become part of it.” Witness the fact that the work force at the plant features several father-son combinations and averages about 15 years on the job.
“Early in the morning, the birds go into a feeding frenzy,” McCortney said, describing the synchronized ballet of the diving, fighting, snatching birds. “The big pelicans are comical when they dive. Their bodies go limp as they fall and they hit the water headfirst with a splash that looks like an accident. It’s a wonder they catch any fish at all.”
“I didn’t know a darn thing about salt-making when I came,” McCortney confessed, “but I didn’t have to. I had a crew down here who knew what they were doing, and all I had to do was listen and learn.”
Most of McCortney’s learning came from soft-spoken Don Dittenhaver, his predecessor, who was raised at the saltworks in a comfortable home next to the mule yard.
Dittenhaver retired last year after 25 years as plant manager when McCortney came aboard but has stayed on as consultant. His father, Neil, managed the works for 50 years, once rebuilding the levees that curve artfully around the 30-some salt ponds after the infamous flood of 1916. The flood, blamed on an overzealous rainmaker named Charles Hatfield, caused millions of dollars in damage around the county and took out a dam on the Otay River, washing the saltworks out to sea.
Dittenhaver remembers when mules helped 120 laborers harvest salt. Later, when steam engines came into vogue, the mules and the mule yards next to his home gave way to “dinkeys”--miniature locomotives--that ran on tracks along the salt pond levees.
The dinkeys each pulled four cars from the harvest areas to a pit where the chunks of sodium chloride were dumped out of the bottoms of the hoppers into a washing, grinding, sorting, drying machine that is little changed today. Now, bulldozers and skiploaders do the work of a dozen men with shovels and wheelbarrows, and powerful semis trundle 20-ton loads from ponds to pits from where it is processed and dumped into an imposing 50-foot mountain which, McCortney brags, “is the most unique landmark in the county.”
McCortney now can talk knowledgeably about hydrometers and Baume scales, magnesium chlorides and calcium sulfates but, he said, salt-making is a simple art conducted much as it was a century ago.
As early as 1871, a 60-acre salt-making plant was operating where the present Western Salt Co. now sits, turning out enough salt to handle Southern California’s needs for salting down food and curing hides. The saltworks grew but the market changed. When refrigeration canceled the need for salt in preserving meat, the demand shifted to industry, where salt became important in petroleum refining and almost every other industrial process.
More recently, tuna fishermen became the most valued customers of Western Salt Co. And when the tuna fleet left San Diego harbor for western Pacific Ocean ports, Western followed them, shipping tons of salt to places like Honolulu and Apia, Samoa, where the fleet now docks. There, the super-seiners can buy Western salt to preserve their tuna catches for weeks until they reach U.S. or Mexican ports for processing.
Currently, the largest market for industrial salt is the water softener industry. Most of the company’s 65,000-ton-a-year production is shipped out by truck to retailers of water softeners and de-icing salts for streets and driveways.
McCortney said the company is negotiating an agreement with Weyerhauser to send a 6,000-ton load of salt to the Northwest United States as a return load on an ocean-going barge that brings lumber into San Diego.
Western salt, which cost $7 a ton in 1909, now costs $56 a ton at the Bay Boulevard plant. The eight-fold price increase over the 77-year period compares favorably with the rise in the cost of living over the past eight decades, McCortney points out. Water, sun, tides, gravity and time are the main ingredients, all of which are free to the company.
Levees with flood gates trap seawater in shallow ponds where the sun starts the process of salt-making by evaporating the water. As the salinity increases, the brine is shifted, usually by gravity flow, into lower secondary ponds where the evaporation process continues. At a point when the saltiness of the water has reached a crucial stage, the brine is pumped into pickling ponds where unwanted salts and other impurities drop to the bottom, leaving nearly pure sodium chloride, which is recovered in the fourth phase of crystallizing ponds.
As the salinity of the water increases, the color changes from muddy brown, to dark blue, to azure to a pinkish tinge. The final product, pure enough to serve as table salt but more valuable for industrial uses, resembles a frozen, snow-covered pond.
Western Salt was the first to sacrifice a year’s salt crop to create a salt-bottomed crystallizing pond system on which new crops can be harvested at 97%-99% purity. Now, every saltworks does it, McCortney bragged.
The vast, silent salt factory serves as home for hundreds of species of birds and fish and other sea life, McCortney said. But no official wildlife sanctuary has been established, he said, because of the cost of liability insurance. Audubon Society bird watchers still come in to keep tabs on a pair of mating hawks on the endangered species list; state Fish and Game wardens visit to study the unprecedented numbers of pelicans congregating on the ponds, and Sierra Club and other environmental group members sometimes walk the levees to admire the teeming ecosystems within the saltworks.
“It’s an entirely different world out here,” McCortney said. “It grows on you until you never want to leave.”
But the solitude and silence of the salt ponds that have occupied the south end of San Diego Bay for more than a century won’t last forever, McCortney admits. Beneath the salt lies gold in the form of bayfront real estate which some day will sprout marinas and waterfront hotels and condominium complexes where now clumsy pelicans crash-dive headfirst at their prey.
