Salton Sea Rescue Would Make History, Prehistory

Through the millenniums, nature created its version of the Salton Sea at least three times, and it disappeared every time.

People made the current version by accident in 1905, and now an act of Congress has given new hope to a few activists who are working against time to save California’s largest lake--and the millions of birds that depend on it.

To succeed, the effort must defy the laws of politics and business, not to mention gravity. It would make not only history, but prehistory.

At 227 feet below sea level, the lake is about 35 miles long and 15 miles wide: a puddle compared with ancient Lake Cauhilla, the Salton Sea’s natural predecessor.

A result of shifting rivers and mountains, Lake Cauhilla measured 50 by 100 miles and covered much of southeastern California until it began evaporating about 500 years ago.

In 1905, as farmers began channeling water west from the Colorado River, a dike overflowed. The leak wasn’t stopped until 1907. The Salton Sea had begun its career as an agricultural sump.

With no natural outlet, the lake is 25% saltier than the Pacific Ocean and saturated with decades worth of fertilizer--actually nutrients, as State Recreation Area Supt. Steve Horvitz points out.

The problem, he says, isn’t that the Salton Sea is dead, but that it fosters so much life, from algae to fish to birds. And, one season or another, 380 species of birds can be found here, about half the species in the United States.

Tilapia, imported African perch, thrive in the salty water. Fishermen also catch corvina and sargo. But when the algae “blooms” and sucks up oxygen, the fish die en masse.

On a recent visit, tilapia carcasses lay thick along the shoreline. Flocks of shorebirds picked their way across beaches made crunchy by fish bones and barnacles.

Herons don’t mind the smell of rot, and neither do a growing number of fishermen who reel in the live fish before they suffocate.

“They’re all good eatin’,” says Jean Hungerford, volunteer caretaker at Mecca Beach. Hungerford’s neighbor at the near-empty campground caught 20 or 21 “right off the bat,” he says, and was cooking some for supper.

Mary Bono, who represents the sprawling desert district in Congress, defied political tradition as a freshman by bringing home about $13.4 million in appropriations to lay the groundwork for a cleanup.

She is the widow of Sonny Bono, who died in a skiing accident last January. He, too, was a congressional champion of the sea; his death provided impetus for the rescue plan.

“It’s a real step forward,” says Tom Kirk, who has been working on cleanup studies as part of the Salton Sea Authority. The task force started with 75 possible projects, eliminated all but 35 and is whittling the list to six, he said.

A preliminary draft is expected in June, with the final document ready in 2000, says Bill Steele, project manager for the Bureau of Reclamation.

When the studies are completed, Mary Bono plans to put Sonny’s name on a bill that will implement them. There’s no time to lose, she adds.

“We understand that we’re working against a time limit,” she says, “and it could be 12 to 15 years before it becomes a dead sea.”

Restoration costs remain uncertain because no one knows what form cleanup will take.

Ideas include:

* Diking off part of the lake. Kirk likens that to “cutting off an arm to save the rest of the body.” But Horvitz worries that many birds would end up on the wrong side of the dike and die.

* Pumping fresher water in and saline water out. “The billion-dollar question,” says Kirk, “is where you pump water to and where you pump it from.”

The pumping question moves into water politics, which can be tough.

After years of infighting among Southern California water agencies, the Imperial Irrigation District, which owns rights to Colorado River water, has agreed to deliver to San Diego up to 200,000 acre-feet of water annually for the next 30 years.

Imperial district farms are a major Salton Sea feeder, along with the New and Alamo rivers, which flow through the Imperial Valley. The sea takes in about 1.3 million acre-feet of water a year and loses a like amount to evaporation. Spread across the lake’s surface, that amounts to a depth of about six feet.

Horvitz figures water diversions like San Diego’s will eventually lower the lake level and further concentrate the killing mix of nutrients.

“The purpose of the sea is farm runoff,” says Paul Cunningham, spokesman for the Imperial district, which has law and precedent on its side. Not all farmers are behind the cleanup, he says, but most are, and so is the district.

But then the district also will divert water to San Diego, meaning less fresh water for the lake.

“We’ve consumed the wetlands in California,” Horvitz says. “It’s roads and houses now. We live there, not the birds. There’s nowhere else for the birds to go.”

Besides, economics isn’t just farming and water deals, Horvitz says. It’s tourism too.

Hungerford, 75, recalled the days when celebrities came from Palm Springs to water ski and you couldn’t find a spot to fish from shore.

“More people used to come to the sea than went to Yosemite National Park,” says Horvitz. A million people a year visited in the 1960s. When the mid-1990s drought caused mass fish and bird die-offs, visitors at the state park dropped to 80,000, the all-time low.

The numbers have risen back to 250,000, but Horvitz believes that a million or more should visit annually. Health authorities have cleared the lake as safe for swimming.

“This isn’t a dead sea. There’s beautiful sunsets, trails along the lake,” he says. “Yeah, the sea is an ugly duckling at times, but it needs our help.”