The Accidental Sea

The water you are looking at was not supposed to be here. There is no version of this landscape in the natural geological record that includes an inland sea at this location. What you are seeing is the result of an engineering failure that ran for eighteen months and could not be stopped.

In the autumn of nineteen-oh-five, an irrigation canal that fed Colorado River water into the farming districts of the Imperial Valley broke through its headgates. Not just a leak. The entire flow of the Colorado River, one of the great rivers of the American West, was diverted. It poured north into the Salton Sink, a dry lake bed lying more than two hundred feet below sea level, with nowhere to go and no natural outlet to the sea.

For eighteen months, engineers employed by the Southern Pacific Railroad, working under the direction of company president E.H. Harriman, fought the break. They drove pilings, poured concrete, and diverted channels in the summer heat of the Imperial Valley while a five-hundred-square-mile inland sea grew behind them. The railway finally stopped the flood in February of nineteen-oh-seven. The resulting body of water had no future as anything but what it became: a closed basin fed entirely by agricultural runoff, growing saltier every decade as evaporation outpaced the water flowing in.

What happened next compressed a century of ecological history into a few decades. In the nineteen-fifties, the Salton Sea had beaches, yacht clubs, and an air show that drew headline performers to the Salton City waterfront. Developers platted vacation communities along the shore. Families bought lots. By the nineteen-seventies, the salinity had crossed the threshold that fish could tolerate, and the die-offs began. The resorts closed. The families sold if they could, abandoned their property if they could not.

What remains is what you can see: a lake that was made by accident, peaked as a resort, failed as an ecosystem, and is still here, still shrinking, still the largest lake in California. The Salton Sea is not a metaphor for anything. It is a thing that happened, and is still happening.