Imperial Irrigation District pitches Salton Sea plan

A plan to increase renewable energy production in and around the Salton Sea — and have utilities help finance the ailing lake’s ultimate restoration — was touted on Capitol Hill this week. (Photo: Omar Ornelas/The Desert Sun)

Raju Chebium
The Desert Sun

WASHINGTON – A plan to increase renewable energy production in and around the Salton Sea — and have utilities help finance the ailing lake's ultimate restoration — was touted on Capitol Hill this week.

Bruce Wilcox, a Salton Sea expert at the Imperial Irrigation District, said the agency's plan would generate about $3 billion over 30 years.

It won't be enough on its own to restore the 376-square-mile lake. But the plan, building momentum since last fall, represents a workable funding solution that has long eluded state and local officials.

Wilcox said it also gives Southern California's congressional delegation and local officials involved in the restoration more ammunition when they ask for the Obama administration's endorsement.

Since 1985, the federal government has contributed about $52 million to Salton Sea restoration, mostly for experimental projects, water-quality and salinity studies and ecosystem monitoring that experts say has helped them understand the science behind the lake's problems.

"What I think (federal officials) should be providing now is money to build things there," Wilcox said after speaking at an event organized by The Wilderness Society to highlight the need for more renewable energy projects on public lands nationwide.

"We're at a point now where we need to start a field laboratory approach – build a 1,000 acres, see how it works and adjust it accordingly," he added. "This is an attempt to get us started in small increments moving toward that bigger restoration."

U.S. Rep. Raul Ruiz said he is pushing the Obama administration to create a renewable-energy zone in the Salton Sea. That would be a preliminary step in making the IID project a reality.

In a brief interview after The Wilderness Society's event, where Ruiz was honored for his efforts to promote renewable energy projects on federal land, Ruiz said saving the Salton Sea requires widespread support.

"This is an all-hands-on-deck project," said the Palm Desert Democrat, who is a member of the House Natural Resources Committee.

"We need the federal government, state government, local government; we need private business. We need the tribes and we need the philanthropists."

State, local and federal leaders for years have debated how to save the dying Salton Sea, only to shelve the plans because of the huge costs associated with the project.

A $9 billion restoration plan unveiled by state leaders in 2007 never got an the California Legislature's endorsement or financing.

The sea's future has become a more pressing issue as time passes. A massive agriculture-to-urban water transfer scheduled for 2017 will further shrink the sea, expose potentially hazardous lake bed and cause widespread air quality and environmental woes.

The IID plan has yet to win state or federal blessings.

In an interview from California, IID General Manager Kevin Kelley said the plan does have the backing of the Riverside County Board of Supervisors.

The IID still awaits a response to a request to the Interior Department, made in February, to commit to allowing renewable energy projects on 80,000 acres it owns in the Salton Sea, he said.

The IID has already pledged to expand clean energy production on 120,000 acres it owns.

Much of that land is now under water, but is expected to become dry after 2017 as the Salton Sea recedes.

"I'd like to have a meaningful expression of support. I'd like a partner," Kelley said. "Getting the land commitment is a start. I'd like to add the 80,000 acres to the available inventory."

The Wilderness Society, or TWS, is backing House and Senate bills filed last year that would expand renewable energy on federal lands and use some of the money to shore up conservation efforts like in the Salton Sea.

But those measures haven't advanced and are unlikely to gain traction before the November elections.

Joshua Mantell, a government relations official at TWS, said he's optimistic Congress will pass the proposal after the election but before the end of this year.

Stinky L.A. smell tied to dead fish in the Salton Sea, officials say

Dead fish along the Salton Sea shoreline in southern California. The South Coast Air Quality Management District acknowledged the possibility that dead fish at the Salton Sea are partially to blame for the rotten-egg smell reported all day Monday. (AP Photo/Nick Ut)

Los Angeles Times

Regional air-quality managers on Tuesday said that the rotten egg odor that hit Southern California on Monday came from dead fish in the Salton Sea.

Air samples collected in the Coachella Valley, near the Salton Sea and elsewhere clinched inspectors’ suspicions of the 376-square mile, murky body of water as the source of the pervasive smell. Atwood said AQMD inspectors collected air samples which contained hydrogen sulfide.

Inspectors found concentrations of the gas, a product of organic decaying matter, heaviest close to the Salton Sea, with a pattern of decreasing concentration farther away.

“We now have solid evidence that clearly points to the Salton Sea as the source of a very large and unusual odor event,” said Barry Wallerstein, executive officer of the South Coast Air Quality Management District.

How unusual? As late as Monday night, AQMD officials weren’t even sure it was scientifically possible for a malodorous scent to trek the distance the Salton Sea’s fumes did. So they asked an air-quality modeler to use sophisticated computer modeling to find out if it was “theoretically possible” for a stench to travel that far.

“I think we’ve shown it was theoretically possible,” said Sam Atwood, a spokesman for the AQMD. “But this is just something we did not expect.”

Inspectors ruled out landfills, oil refineries and a natural springs site as possible sources.

“The air samples were the final piece of the puzzle,” Atwood said. “Our inspectors did go out to the Salton Sea and did smell some very strong odors at the sea, as well as at the locations leading up to it.”

But it took the might of a powerful storm blowing from the southeast to bring the stench of the Salton Sea to L.A. All in all though, L.A. got lucky, compared with the town of Mecca, just north of the Salton Sea, and Indio, which received larger doses of the gaseous, funky odor.

“The storm originated in the Gulf of California and the Sea of Cortez and hit the Imperial Valley and Salton Sea,” said Tim Krantz, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Redlands. “We had huge squalls and pretty heavy winds in the Coachella Valley. The winds pull the surface layers of the sea off from the southeast to northwest, and that surface water is replaced from the depth.”

And those depths are all kinds of stinky.

Experts said the winds from the Sunday night storm unsettled the fetid layers of water near the bottom of the sea, bringing them to the surface.

Andrew Schlange, general manager of the Salton Sea Authority, said that in the last week, a large number of fish died in the body of water, likely exacerbating the problem. But he said the fish die-off, which is a normal occurrence, was not significant enough on its own to explain the well-traveled odor.

Rather, he said, the storm upset an anaerobic—or oxygen-deprived—lower layer of the sea, where organic material lays decomposing, releasing the noxious hydrogen sulfide gas, with its distinct rotten egg smell.

The good news was that by Tuesday the odor had greatly diminished. As of about 5:30 p.m. Monday, there had been 235 complaints about the smell, Atwood said. Since then, there have been less than 10, though the “sulfur-type” odor still lingered in some parts of the region.

Atwood said a meteorologist for the AQMD has looked at the thunderstorm reports, and that along with wind-measuring instruments in the Coachella Valley, they determined that winds of more than 60 mph blowing from the southeast probably blew the rank odor to the L.A. Basin.

“That’s unusual because usually the winds are blowing in the opposite direction,” he said.

The Salton Sea has lost much of its depth. It's about 50 feet at its deepest point, with an average depth of about 30 feet, Schlange said. That means it doesn’t take as potent a weather event as it did in the past to cause an upswell that sends the water near the bottom to the top.

Schlange said the Salton Sea is losing much more water through evaporation than is being replenished through agricultural runoff and other sources. If water wasn’t flowing into the sea, it would lose a depth of about 4 to 6 feet a year through evaporation.

If something isn’t done to better replenish the Salton Sea, Schlange said issues with far-flung odors could be more common in the future. He said there’s a plan to do mitigation work on the sea, but money to fund it is lacking.

“All of a sudden Sunday evening, we had all these conditions that came together to allow something like this to occur,” Schlange said. “It’s occurred before, but not at this magnitude.”

Off-road people may see impact of dust controls

The Arizona Land Department is considering closing a major portion of state trust land to motorized vehicles. In particular, it would target off-roaders

Editorial

Yuma Sun

Trying to keep the dust from being stirred up in the middle of the desert has always seemed a little futile to us, despite the fact that federal environmental officials insist that it is necessary.

The federal government has certain standards for air quality and one of them involves keeping levels of dust in the air below certain levels. If states or cities do not meet those standards, then they are "punished" by imposition of strict control rules and the eventual loss of federal funding.

Arizona and Yuma County are under the gun for not meeting these dust standards and a number of steps have been required over the years to minimize dust, including watering dirt roads and watering down construction sites.

Now a new wrinkle has been added by the Arizona Land Department for some parts of Maricopa County and Pinal County. The department is considering closing a major portion of state trust land to motorized vehicles. It in particular would target off-roaders.

Four-wheel vehicles, dirt bikes and ATVs would be banned from popular trail areas because the Land Department says they stir up too much dust, raising the potential the state would not meet dust attainment standards and would lose federal road money.

Some off road groups have a different suspicion, and that is that the Land Department just doesn't like off-roaders going into the rugged back country areas, and that it is using the dust attainment rule as an excuse.

There is no proof of that, but the end result would be the same whatever the reason - off-roaders couldn't enjoy their recreational activity. And there are a substantial number of them in Arizona and in our area.

The Associated Press reported that some believe as many as 500,000 people in our state participate in off-roading, with much of the growth in the past decade. There has been as much as a 350 percent increase.

Off-roading is also popular in our area, and keeping within dust containment levels here is an ongoing problem. Could this activity eventually be limited here also? Perhaps.

There needs to be recognition by the federal government that dust is a natural part of our desert environment. Yes, human activity can cause dust, but a big factor is natural causes like the wind. So far, controlling nature is beyond the reach of the government, so they focus on human activity, unfairly imposing impractical standards on dust control.

The federal government needs to back off and accept that dust is natural part of our environment here.