Water began flowing from a pipe onto hundreds of acres of dry, sunbaked lake bed as California officials filled a complex of shallow ponds near the south shore of the Salton Sea in an effort to create wetlands that will provide habitat for fish and birds, and help control lung-damaging dust around the shrinking lake.
The project represents the state’s largest effort to date to address the environmental problems plaguing the Salton Sea, which has been steadily retreating and leaving growing stretches of dusty lake bottom exposed to the desert winds.
California Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot celebrated what he called a major milestone as water cascaded into a newly constructed basin and spread across cracked soil Thursday, launching one of the first portions of a long-promised project that was delayed for years because of challenges such as insufficient staff and the need to negotiate land-use agreements.
“This project, this water will suppress harmful dust as the Salton Sea recedes. It will also provide thousands of acres of habitat for wildlife, for birds that use this as a rest stop on the Pacific Flyway,” Crowfoot said.
“It’s proof positive that difficult things, difficult projects are possible,” he said. “I’m proud of our progress stabilizing the sea for communities and for nature down here, with so much more work ahead.”
The habitat area in Imperial County is being filled with water after an adjacent area called East Pond received its first water in April. In the coming weeks, state officials said the flooding of these sections will bring to fruition the first 2,000 acres of the Species Conservation Habitat Project, a central effort in California’s plan for improving conditions at the state’s largest lake.
The $200-million project was originally envisioned to cover 4,100 acres, for which the bulk of construction has been completed. The state’s latest plan, however, calls for expanding the project to more than 9,000 acres, using an additional $245 million in federal funds that the state secured in 2022.
The Salton Sea covers more than 300 square miles in Imperial and Riverside counties. It lies about 242 feet below sea level in the Salton Trough, which over thousands of years has cycled between filling with Colorado River water and drying out.
From 1905-07, the Colorado flooded in the region, filling what became known as the Salton Sea. The lake has since been sustained by water draining off farms in the Imperial Valley, but it has been shrinking since the early 2000s, when the Imperial Irrigation District began selling a portion of its Colorado River water to growing urban areas under an agreement with agencies in San Diego County and the Coachella Valley.
The lake’s level has declined about 13 feet since 2003. Its water is now about twice as salty as the ocean and continues to get saltier with evaporation, a shift that has caused drastic declines in fish and bird populations.
Along the dry shorelines, windblown dust contributes to harmful air pollution in low-income, predominantly Latino communities, where people suffer from asthma and other respiratory illnesses at high rates.
California’s 10-year plan for the Salton Sea, which came out in 2017, called for building nearly 30,000 acres of dust-control projects and wetland habitat around the lake by 2028. The state has lagged far behind those goals.
The newly inaugurated wetlands project has been in the works for more than a decade and is long overdue, said Eric Montoya Reyes, executive director of the nonprofit group Los Amigos de la Comunidad.
“We acknowledge all of the hard work and obstacles surpassed to produce the first significant milestone project, out of many needed,” Montoya Reyes said.
Montoya Reyes said he hopes to see the state accelerate progress on the rest of the project, as well as other planned projects to suppress dust around the Salton Sea. He said the efforts should be prioritized given the area’s high rates of respiratory illnesses, driven partly by toxic lake bed dust laced with pesticides and other pollutants that have accumulated over decades.
“We have so much work to do that impacts environmental and human health,” he said.
Environmental advocates said the expanding wetlands could help bird populations rebound.
“It’s a significant achievement, and we’re really delighted to see the progress,” said Michael Cohen, senior fellow for the Pacific Institute, a nonprofit think tank focused on water issues.
State officials’ commitments to help address the effects of the Salton Sea’s decline go back more than two decades. As part of the 2003 deal that transferred some of the Imperial Valley’s water to cities, California officials promised leaders in Imperial County that the state would take responsibility for dealing with the environmental problems at the Salton Sea that would result from the water transfer agreement.
For years, Imperial’s officials pressed for the state to speed up long-delayed projects to build wetlands along the retreating shores. In 2017, state water regulators adopted an agreement setting targets for state agencies in building thousands of acres of ponds, wetlands and other dust-control projects around the Salton Sea.
Cohen said the progress on the habitat project is “a huge signal that the state is starting to meet its obligations.”
“And I think we’re going to see in the next weeks and months that there’s huge numbers of birds out at this project, and likely a lot of fish out there,” he said.
In recent years, as evaporation has taken its toll on the Salton Sea, its water has grown progressively saltier — too salty, in fact, for fish such as tilapia, an introduced species that previously provided an abundant food source for migrating birds. And populations of once-numerous birds such as American white pelicans, double-breasted cormorants and eared grebes have declined.
While the state has touted the project as habitat “restoration,” Cohen said he thinks a more precise description is “remediation.”
“The Salton Sea is ever-changing, and to say we’re going to restore something suggests you’re going to bring it back to a particular point in time,” Cohen said, noting that the effort is geared toward creating new, viable habitats that work with the lake’s changes.
The wetlands project is designed to create lower-salinity habitats where fish and birds can thrive. A mix of saltwater from the lake and freshwater from the New River — which takes in agricultural runoff from the Imperial Valley and wastewater from Mexico — is being pumped to the wetlands, which feature constructed ponds, islands and berms.
Creating shallow-water habitats with these lower salinity levels, similar to habitats the lake provided more than three decades ago, is intended to help birds migrating along the Pacific Flyway, where shorebirds that depend on shrinking saline lakes have suffered declines in recent decades.
Gov. Gavin Newsom called the filling of the wetland a “major step in California’s environmental leadership — breathing life into critical ecosystems while creating cleaner air for communities around the Salton Sea.”
E. Joaquin Esquivel, board chair of the State Water Resources Control Board, said improving conditions at the Salton Sea is critical to public health and the economies of the Imperial and Coachella valleys.
For too long, Esquivel said, the Salton Sea “has been seen as an unfortunate liability, when in fact it is one of California’s greatest assets.” This ongoing project, he said, “is turning the page on that narrative.”
Another smaller effort is planned on the lake’s east shore near the community of Bombay Beach. The group Audubon California has announced that it will receive a $5.2-million grant from the California Wildlife Conservation Board to support a 564-acre wetland habitat project on that part of the lakeshore.
Andrea Jones, the group’s director of bird conservation and interim executive director, said the project “will ensure that these wetlands continue to provide refuge for species facing habitat loss and climate change challenges.”
