Paradise lost in California drought: The old man and the Salton Sea

• Report: Without a remedy, almost a third of the 350-square-mile body of water will be left in dust
• Only a few residents like 88-year-old Earl Griffis remain from the resort's glory days
• San Diego is siphoning off water to protect its own water supply

BOMBAY BEACH, Calif. — It’s hard to imagine a swinging resort vibe along the crusty shores of today’s Salton Sea.

Long gone are the luxury boats that drew stars inland from Hollywood to this accidental sea that first filled with Colorado River water after a massive 1905 canal breach. And it’s harder still to imagine what would ever draw them back, now that cities are consuming more of the water that used to run off of farm fields and replenish the salty lake.

The salty beach is a widening, smelly reminder of the ecological trade-offs of growing urban water demands.

“It’s going down and it’s going to keep going down,” said Earl Griffis, one of a sprinkling of residents on the Salton Sea’s east shore.

The Southwest’s worsening water shortage will make saving the Salton Sea difficult, because any fix requires water from an over-stressed Colorado River. But letting it go could send severe dust pollution into neighboring valleys and kill off millions of migratory birds whose historic natural stopovers have long since been drained.

The sea's north side, midway between Yuma and Los Angeles, blossomed into an unlikely and short-lived oasis for Hollywood's elite.

Singer Frank Sinatra boated there. Band leader Guy Lombardo set a speedboat record there. Entertainer-turned-congressman Sonny Bono dedicated himself to its preservation; a wildlife refuge on the south shore is named after him.

Griffis remembers watching the Marx Brothers gas up their boat and buy bait at the marina during its mid-20th century heyday.

That's when corvina imported and stocked from the Gulf of California fueled fishing frenzies. Now, with less incoming freshwater, it’s too salty for those fish.

Griffis built his home in wetter and grander days, surrounding it with an oasis of palms, eucalyptus trees and potted plants. A fountain of recirculated Coachella Valley tap water flows into a little pool labeled “Cement Pond.”

Behind his chain-link fence is a cracked and faded neighborhood watch sign.

It’s not exactly the retirement haven he had pictured when he bought the land in 1971, or even when he moved there for good, in 1989.

Bombay Beach looks bombed out. Neighboring house trailers are vacant, except when the meth cookers, who mostly leave him alone, come squatting. To stroll along the beach is to crunch the sun-bleached bones of tilapia, the sea’s remaining sport fish and one he never cared for.

“I’m not going to worry about it,” Griffis said. “I’m 88 years old.”

But lots of people are worried about it, and not just because the Salton Sea has lost its recreational cachet.

Experts expect the water to recede and expose tens of thousands of acres of playa by 2035. This would unleash a new dust source that could blow toward cities, including Palm Springs. Many also fear the exposure of decades worth of farm chemical runoff.

The dust exposed as the sea recedes contains heavy metals and pesticides including DDT. The remaining water's increasing concentration of selenium endangers fish and waterfowl, and any who eat them.

“The loss of the Salton Sea would impair public health,” said Michael Cohen, a Colorado-based Salton Sea and Colorado River researcher from the Pacific Institute in Oakland.

Flows to the sea diminished in 2007 when Mexico, with U.S. help, stopped discharging polluted wastewater into a river that fed it.

Now changes on the American side will take the water lower.

San Diego’s water provider bought water from the nearby Imperial Irrigation District to protect it from shortage elsewhere in its supply, such as the Sierra Nevada snow drought currently afflicting California. More than 100,000 acre-feet are already flowing toward the coast, and at full transfer in 2021 the annual number will be 200,000.

An acre-foot, 325,851 gallons, is enough to flood an acre 1 foot deep, and about the amount that two Southwest households use in a year.

For every 3 acre-feet that Imperial Valley farmers use on their fields, one ends up in the Salton Sea. For now, the irrigation district is fallowing some fields to make up the sea’s losses to the San Diego deal. But the farmers did not want to lose ground forever, and wrote a 2017 end to fallowing into the contract.

Cohen authored a report last year predicting that without a remedy, the 350 square-mile body of water will lose 60 percent of its volume and expose 100 square miles of dust in just 15 years. The salinity, already hard on fish and wildlife, will triple.

“To restore what (the sea) was in the ‘60s you’d need more water,” Cohen said. “But most people are saying that water’s just not available.”

Instead, the irrigation district and others are working toward a plan that would carve the sea into a series of bermed pools, each saltier than the last as the water works its way through them. This would maintain at least a portion of the bird habitat -- and possibly a sport fishery — instead of letting all of the water go salty. It also would allow water managers to manipulate depths and maximize the amount of soil that remains covered.

“I see a restored Salton Sea that is much smaller than it was, but is stabilized,” said Bruce Wilcox, who has worked as Imperial Irrigation’s environmental manager and is starting a new job planning Salton Sea policy for the state. “We will lose some size but we will gain functional value.”

Partners in the San Diego water deal have pledged $375 million for environmental mitigation, which Wilcox said will help with plantings and soil contouring to limit wind erosion, among other things. But it will take much more — billions — from the state and other sources to complete the work envisioned in the sea itself.

Rod Jeffries, a 64-year-old urban refugee from San Francisco, is confident the state will act.

“The powers that be are confronted with the reality that we can’t do nothing,” said Jeffries, who was working at his friend’s four-room motel in Salton City, on the sea’s west side, last month. “That thing is full of toxic chemicals” that can’t be allowed to go airborne.

His favored solution is to pipe seawater from the gulf, since the water is already so salty.

People don’t come fishing anymore, he said, though he did have to caution a couple of guys against eating the tilapia. Instead, visitors now go dirt-biking or four-wheeling in the desert.

“Fortunately, the pelicans and the birds are still here,” he said.

Griffis, a retired construction superintendent, couldn’t get enough of Bombay Beach during his working days. He came over from his Riverside home every weekend and vacation, always calling ahead to have a bar reserve him a case of Olympia Gold Light beer for every day of his visit.

He scoured the desert for pretty stones — black, orange, gray and white — to build his mantle. His wife’s ashes are in a box on it. He plans to have his own mixed with hers atop the nearby Chocolate Mountains, in a waterfall they used to visit, back when it had water.

He remembers frequent strikes by the sea’s corvina up through the 1970s and into the ‘80s, some of them 30 pounds or more and with a white-meat flavor “better than ocean sea bass.”

In an old photo he’s bare-chested, holding five corvinas on ropes.

“This was more fish per rod than any other lake in the whole continental United States.”

Now, with no corvina and with less and less water, he calls the sea “sick.” He hasn’t fished in years, and won’t.

But while he’s alive he’s not going anywhere, and he’ll keep using the tap water to keep his own place green. His monthly bill is about $300.

“I built me an oasis,” he said. “Everybody said I was crazy, but I enjoy it.”