Fans of the Things I Learned Last Night podcast know that the United States has made some missteps over the years. However, everything we’ve discussed pales in comparison to the colossal failure that is the Salton Sea, California. This story has everything; capitalism, floods of biblical proportion, tourist traps, environmental disasters, and nuclear bombs. Yeah, of course, there are nukes in this story. Why not? We can’t even begin to overplay how unreal every step in this strange lake’s journey truly is. This is the bizarre tale of the incredible Salton Sea.
What is the Salton Sea
The Salton Sea is a body of water, only about 40 feet deep at the deepest point, in southern California. The sea is located roughly 100 miles outside of both San Diego and Los Angeles and sits only 50 miles from the US/Mexico Border. The dessert it sits within, also known as the Salton trough, is the second-lowest point in the continental United States and one of the hottest places in the US. The sea itself has gone through periods of extreme prosperity and extreme drought throughout history. Many years before human life dominated the Americas the sea had cycled between dry lake bed and a vast lively body of water.
How can a Sea be accidental?
Oh, are we glad that you asked! By the time the state of California had been established the region was in a period of drought. In fact, the sea was completely dry. At the heart of the dry lake bed stood a city with its namesake, Salton City. In the early 1900s, investors saw an opportunity in the Salton Trough. It was a massive plot of land that could be used for farming. However, since it was a desert, water would need to be rerouted into the valley.
Luckily for investors, the Colorado River flowed not far from the Salton Trough. Furthermore, the state of California had already been discussing the issue of water in southern California. One possible solution was to reroute the Colorado river and bring water to the arid region. This is precisely what happened and the Colorado began to be terraformed to send water to the southern end of California. The Hoover Dam was constructed, in part, to bring water to the farms that would one day dot the Salton Trough.
Floods of Biblical Proporsions
Needless to say, rerouting a river like the Colorado is not a simple task. Numerous engineering challenges come with such a massive undertaking. In 1905 those challenges reach a fever pitch when snowmelt and above-average rainfall caused the Colorado to swell. The swelling caused flooding along the artificial canals and created two new rivers. These rivers both ran directly into the heart of the Salton Trough. Initially, engineers believed that these rivers would dry up quickly and we’re of no real concern. However, after 2 years of incessant flooding, the waters submerged 343 sq. miles in about 40 feet of water.
Image courtesy of NASA
Despite numerous attempts to stop the flooding, the waters raged on. One attempt, by the Southern Pacific Railroad which had an operation in the town of Salton, included pouring excess amounts of earth into the rivers to create a dam. Their efforts were in vain. The waters flowed over the earth no matter how high they piled it. Eventually, this work to stop the flow of water had created a waterfall that stood nearly 100 feet high.
New Life to the Salton Sea
The massive new body of water brought new life in abundance to the once arid climate. Fish swam from the Colorado and populated the waters. Birds flocked from far-off lands in hopes of benefiting from the new fish habitat. Greenery and farms began sprouting up along the coasts of the sea. The new greenery brought wildlife down from the mountains into the former desert. This apparent ecological disaster had brought a new sense of life and abundance to the Salton Trough.
Tourism Booms
The Salton Sea was a very young body of water. Furthermore, it sat in what used to be a very sandy desert. So, it immediately was lined with beautiful sandy beaches. The size of the sea meant that from most points along the man-made sea the other end was not visible. The waters were also notably calm, meaning boating would be great in the Salton.
Seeing yet another opportunity in the region, investors began lining the shorelines with resorts and hotels. The state of California established parks. Within just a few years it had become a tourist destination that people from around the world would flock to for good boating, good beaches, and unreal fishing. The investors in the area had pumped an extreme amount of fish into the Salton Sea to spur tourism. It is rumored that fishing was so good that anglers didn’t even need to bait their hooks.
The Military Gets Involved
If investors can find an opportunity somewhere then you better believe the military can too. That is exactly what happened with the Salton Sea. Before World War II, the shorelines of the sea were dotted with bases from all major branches of the military. The sea offered a safe landlocked body of water on which training operations could occur. These operations include bomber target practice. At the time, the US did not possess missile technology. Well, at that time, no one did. All bombing operations had to be conducted by dropping the payload from a plane. The sea was a good safe place to practice hitting targets.
Nuclear Target Practice
Naturally, as the Manhattan Project reached its culmination target practice with the mammoth bombs had to be conducted. The atomic bombs were going to be a challenge to drop because of their size and explosive potential. Pilots were going to need to drop these bombs from extreme heights and pull an almost perfect u-turn to get out of the blast radius in a matter of seconds. The Salton Sea became the test drop zone for the bombers that would drop the fat man and little boy bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The bombs that were dropped in the saltwater lake were not live bombs. They were replicas of the nukes filled with concrete rather than explosives to simulate the weight and strength of the bombs. Still, dropping steel encased concrete balls from such massive heights would leave 15-foot craters in the ground if they missed. And they did miss on numerous occasions. The beach became lined with craters from bombs that missed the targets. Regularly military bulldozers would rush to these craters to recover the test bomb and bury the evidence.
Cold War Nukes and the Salton Sea
Early in the Cold War, Russia possessed ICBM’s (Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles), which far predated the United States’ possession of such technology. The Russian technology meant that they could swiftly engage in a nuclear war with the US.
The fear of nuclear war meant that the test bombings of the Salton Sea became even more common. It was just a matter of time before something went wrong. On at least one occasion the military mixed up their live nuclear bombs with their dummy bombs and loaded a bomber for target practice. Today, thanks to a disclosure made by a freedom of information act, we have a record of one such incident in which the live nuke dropped into the Salton Sea was never found. Even though the bomb did not detonate, one must assume that the chemical properties of the water have slowly been degrading the steel casing of the device and leaking radioactive materials into the sea.
The Decline of the Salton Sea
Today the Salton Sea is in serious trouble. The above-mentioned potential nuclear disaster is likely the least of the lake’s worries though. Since the sea has been fed by runoff for over 100 years and it has no outbound water flow the water has slowly transitioned from a freshwater body to a saltwater body. This change limited the possibility for much of the freshwater life that had migrated to the sea. However, the salt levels have just kept increasing and much of the life that was prevalent is dying off in mass die-off events.
Bird and sea life have been in rapid decline for decades. Starting in the ’70s, at seemingly regular intervals, the shores would suddenly be lined with thousands of fish and bird carcasses. The salt caused the death of underwater plant life and the birth of massive algae blooms which further proliferated die-off events. Birds began migrating away from the sea as the fish died off from disease.
Decrease in Salton Sea Levels
Rerouting of the rivers that fed the river for local farm irrigation caused water levels in the Salton Sea to rapidly decrease. The decrease is so noteworthy that all the docks built during the tourism boom are now completely on land. Also, those resort towns are now almost completely abandoned. Small communities of squatters are all the human life that proliferates in the region. Due to the rapid change in salt levels and decrease in water levels, most scientists agree that the lake will dry up again with the next 100 years.
The problems continue in that the sands under the lake bed are now toxic due to the number of chemicals from the disease, salt, and likely the bombs dropped into the sea. As the waters dry the sands are kicked into the atmosphere and are causing further problems to those still living in the valley.
Conclusion
The Salton Sea was an accident. At first, it seemed like a happy accident, in the words of Bob Ross. Over time, however, it became clear that it would become an even greater problem than anyone first imagined. The state of California is now dealing with ecological problems that are accompanying the decline of the Salton Sea. The problems are not limited to the valley. Toxic dust clouds from the dried-up lake bed have traveled as far as Los Angeles polluting the air and leaving a stench of dead fish in the city. There have been a few proposals to solve the problems, but it is not clear if they will pass into viability. Watch or listen to this episode of the Things I Learned Last Night Podcast for more on these proposals and more oddities about this incredible man-made ocean.
Learn more about the social structure of Slab City and the interesting different locations across the town in this week’s episode of Things I Learned Last Night. Things I Learned Last Night is an educational comedy podcast where best friends Jaron Myers and Tim Stone talk about random topics and have fun all along the way. If you like learning, and laughing a whole lot while you do, then you’ll love TILLN. Watch or listen to this episode right now!
Slab City
Sources
Slab City, California – Wikipedia
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