14/05/2020
The Creepy Side of California, taken at Salton Sea Beach, California, a little history;
At the beginning of the 20th century, as farmers set up shop in the hot desert climate of the Imperial Valley, they needed to tap into the Colorado River to irrigate their crops. To enable this, the California Development Company dredged two intake gorges without the use of floodgates.
However, in the summer of 1904, the flow of water stopped as the intakes became clogged with silt deposits from the Colorado River. Another intake gorge was created. Once again a floodgate was omitted. In 1905, these human engineering errors allowed saline water to be carried from a flooded Colorado River into the Salton Sink area, thus creating the present-day Salton Sea.
But the Salton Sea is not just a story about the repeated failures of a human endeavour to control nature for human needs. After the Sea’s creation, the area enjoyed a few decades as a tourism resort and felt a boom in recreational fishing. But that was only until the increased salinity and pollution (agricultural drainage, urban runoff, and waste water flows/storm run-off) killed off most fish species, leaving the strange wasteland
