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The Salton Sea is manmade and stinks

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V

verbum

Member
I live in Georgia and have never seen the Salton Sea. I always assumed it was left over from when the North American continent lifted up and the ocean drained away.
Apparently it has been stinking up southern California lately with a rotten egg smell. I also found out from the story that the Salton Sea was a result of an irrigation accident back in 1905. And it's only 60 feet (~20m) deep.
Something new everyday.

LOS ANGELES — Across Southern California, as far afield as Ventura County to the north of here, Orange County to the south and San Bernardino to the east, residents awoke this week to an olfactory insult: a sulfurous smell, like rotten eggs, wafting across hundreds of miles, source unknown.

Some people checked the eggs in their refrigerator; officials tested the air at landfills. In some places, the odor was so strong that people wondered if a sewer line had ruptured.

“O.K., why does it smell like rotten eggs? I smelled it in Sylmar, San Fernando & Porter Ranch,” Jennifer Guzman wrote on Twitter before ending with a frustrated expletive.

But by late Monday, the culprit had been identified: the Salton Sea, that shrinking saline accident of irrigation 150 miles southeast of here in the Colorado Desert...


For decades now, the sea, created by accident in 1905 and fed in part by agricultural runoff, has been shrinking, while the salinity continues to rise. During heat waves, like the recent one that has baked the region, the oxygen content in the water suddenly drops, killing thousands, sometimes even millions, of fish. Almost eight million tilapia died on a single summer day in 1999.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/12/us/salton-sea-is-blamed-for-southern-california-stench.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Salton%20Sea,%20Gary%20Nicholson-500.jpg
 
V

verbum

Member
ItAintEasyBeinCheesy said:
Irrigation accident?

Someone left the hose on or something. Looks like a huge lake.
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From Wikipedia:
In 1900, the California Development Company began construction of irrigation canals to divert water from the Colorado River into the Salton Sink, a dry lake bed. After construction of these irrigation canals, the Salton Sink became fertile for a time, allowing farmers to plant crops.

Within two years, the Imperial Canal became filled with silt from the Colorado River. Engineers tried to alleviate the blockages to no avail. In 1905, heavy rainfall and snowmelt caused the Colorado River to swell, overrunning a set of headgates for the Alamo Canal. The resulting flood poured down the canal and breached an Imperial Valley dike, eroding two watercourses, the New River in the west, and the Alamo River in the east, each about 60 miles (97 km) long.[6] Over a period of approximately two years these two newly created rivers sporadically carried the entire volume of the Colorado River into the Salton Sink
Click to expand...
 
B

bjork

Member
verbum said:
Apparently it has been stinking up southern California lately with a rotten egg smell.
Click to expand...

Damn, that's what that was? I was going nuts the other day trying to figure out what was so smelly.

And yes, The Salton Sea is a disaster. There's a documentary (forget the name) made in the last few years about the Salton Sea and the people who live there now, and it's a sad state of affairs.
 
C

chaostrophy

Member
bjork said:
Damn, that's what that was? I was going nuts the other day trying to figure out what was so smelly.

And yes, The Salton Sea is a disaster. There's a documentary (forget the name) made in the last few years about the Salton Sea and the people who live there now, and it's a sad state of affairs.
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Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea, narrated by John Waters. I'm fascinated by odd, out-of-the-way places so I loved the film.
 
desertdroog

desertdroog

Member
They could film a live action Borderlands movie there.

That said, the best part of that Salton Sea Documentary is "Hunky Daddy".
 
S

StopMakingSense

Member
I love the Salton Sea. Such a weird place to visit. A ton of abandoned and rusted out homes and shit to photograph and explore at Bombay Beach. And date farms. Salton Sea Beach is basically all fish / bird bones and shells.
 
S

SUPREME1

Banned
“O.K., why does it smell like rotten eggs? I smelled it in Sylmar, San Fernando & Porter Ranch,” Jennifer Guzman wrote on Twitter before ending with a frustrated expletive.
Click to expand...


Okay, this is a straight up lie. No way in hell or in the universe that she, being in Sylmar/Porter Ranch (northwest of Los Angeles), could smell a body of water which is hundreds of miles east... and almost at the Arizona border.
Sorry, just not happening. Especially seeing how the wind comes in from the west and blows east (inland).


WTF.
 
H

Herpes Reasons

Banned
“O.K., why does it smell like rotten eggs? I smelled it in Sylmar, San Fernando & Porter Ranch,” Jennifer Guzman wrote on Twitter before ending with a frustrated expletive.
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lol. dumb lady.
sewer system is prevalent and everywhere in so cal.
its like saying you smell the sewer in the middle of manhattan, nyc and say "oh it must be coming from jersey."

how idiotic is she.
 
A

Angry Grimace

Two cannibals are eating a clown. One turns to the other and says "does something taste funny to you?"
Because it's gross and no one takes any care of it. Every once in a while there's a proposal to try and lower the salinity but it never gets off the ground.
 
bigsnack

bigsnack

Member
I was actually at the Salton Sea about 2 weeks ago, helping a friend take some pictures for a project of his. The stench was absolutely unbearable. It was bad enough before we opened the windows, but when we rolled the windows down near our destination, my eyes started watering immediately. I also started salivating, and was on the verge of heaving. A huge cluster of flies flooded the car also....

However, it is a sight to see. With all of the crazy abandoned buildings and everything else, it is pretty cool to go and check out.
 
A

AniHawk

Member
a friend and i went there a year ago. bombay beach really does look like something straight out of fallout. but the most terrifying thing was the trailer that had 'the hills have eyes' spray painted on the side.
 
Z

Zhengi

Member
The thing with the Salton Sea is that the water flows northward from places like the New River. Since the New River is connects many parts of the Imperial Valley and Baja California, there are a lot of nasty things that end up in the river flowing to the Salton Sea from pesticides to trash to human waste from toilets. If the water flowed southward, it would end up in the ocean instead of stuck in the Salton Sea.
 
R

RagnarokX

Member
Yeah, it was nearly one of the greatest man-made ecological disasters of all time. The Colorado River was almost permanently rerouted into California.
 
V

verbum

Member
Herpes Reasons said:
lol. dumb lady.
sewer system is prevalent and everywhere in so cal.
its like saying you smell the sewer in the middle of manhattan, nyc and say "oh it must be coming from jersey."

how idiotic is she.
Click to expand...

From the article.

But by late Monday, the culprit had been identified: the Salton Sea, that shrinking saline accident of irrigation 150 miles southeast of here in the Colorado Desert.

By Tuesday morning the southeasterly wind, and with it the smell, had died down, offering a reprieve in the Los Angeles area.

Later that evening, the South Coast Air Quality Management Board confirmed that the Salton Sea was the likely source of the smell. Sam Atwood, a spokesman for the agency, called the proliferation of the smell across the region “almost unprecedented.”

“I’ve been here over 19 years, and I don’t recall anything like this,” Mr. Atwood said. “If this was from the Salton Sea, how could the odor have carried so far and still had a very strong nature?” ....


The Salton Sea is less than 60 feet at its deepest point now, according to Andrew Schlange, general manager of the Salton Sea Authority. He said the sulfurous odor escapes from the lake a few times a year, usually after a storm stirs up the organic matter, like dead fish, decomposing at the bottom.

In the past, though, the smell has been confined to the Coachella Valley, where the lake is. But Mr. Schlange called a disturbance that blew through the area on Sunday night “maybe the perfect storm.”

“As shallow as the sea is, it got stirred up,” Mr. Schlange said. “With the wind blowing from the southeast, we probably got a very big blast of this odor coming up.”
Click to expand...
 
H

hydragonwarrior

Member
Bump on this topic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BKhVnv7IDw

From what I've learned, the drying up of this lake will expose a lot of toxic material (like aerosols from the 1960's to the chemical fertilizers used by many of the corporate farms). And dust storms will likely spread all of this around California.

Probably a few more years to see this happen, but to the guys and gals in Cali (and well, people around that state as the dust could go anywhere), wanted to bring it up as you'll probably have to pay up some costs when it comes to cleaning up the lake if it's even possible at this point. And it's fascinating to read about Salton Sea in general.

Extra tidbit of info: The sea itself stinks due to all of the pollution and dead fish caused by said pollution, and the worst of it is that the water has no where to drain into since it's a basin. Water goes in and doesn't go out (so think of a sink but always plugged). And hence, any pollution that went in just stayed in there and sank to the bottom. So once it dries up, all the bad stuff is exposed.
 
T

Talladega Knight

Member
hydragonwarrior said:
Extra tidbit of info: The sea itself stinks due to all of the pollution and dead fish caused by said pollution, and the worst of it is that the water has no where to drain into since it's a basin. Water goes in and doesn't go out (so think of a sink but always plugged). And hence, any pollution that went in just stayed in there and sank to the bottom. So once it dries up, all the bad stuff is exposed.
Click to expand...

This is not true. Most of the fish die-offs are due to rising levels of salinity.

In fact, I think it's been said that the Great Lakes are more polluted than the Salton Sea.
 
H

hydragonwarrior

Member
Talladega Knight said:
This is not true. Most of the fish die-offs are due to rising levels of salinity.

In fact, I think it's been said that the Great Lakes are more polluted than the Salton Sea.
Click to expand...

Hm from reading this (and the wikipedia article), the salinity is due to irrigated water run off and a salt plant that was flooded out:

http://saltonseamuseum.org/salton_sea_history.html

Can't find info on the Great Lakes pollution levels but I'm sure it's pretty bad, but because Salton Sea has no real "drain", any chemicals there can't ever get diluted.

Glad some animals can live here though! I'm just concerned of all the chemicals and such sitting at the bottom... and of course, because all the water is being diverted, another reason why this lake is evaporating quickly...

Another good article on the sea: http://www.wired.com/2012/09/salton-sea-saga/
 
C

Clydefrog

Member
hydragonwarrior said:
Bump on this topic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BKhVnv7IDw

From what I've learned, the drying up of this lake will expose a lot of toxic material (like aerosols from the 1960's to the chemical fertilizers used by many of the corporate farms). And dust storms will likely spread all of this around California.

Probably a few more years to see this happen, but to the guys and gals in Cali (and well, people around that state as the dust could go anywhere), wanted to bring it up as you'll probably have to pay up some costs when it comes to cleaning up the lake if it's even possible at this point. And it's fascinating to read about Salton Sea in general.

Extra tidbit of info: The sea itself stinks due to all of the pollution and dead fish caused by said pollution, and the worst of it is that the water has no where to drain into since it's a basin. Water goes in and doesn't go out (so think of a sink but always plugged). And hence, any pollution that went in just stayed in there and sank to the bottom. So once it dries up, all the bad stuff is exposed.
Click to expand...

oh... crap.
 
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