Lake blamed for stench blown across Southern California

By IAN LOVETT
11 September 2012

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. 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 stench was quite familiar to those who live near the Salton Sea, where mass fish die-offs have become commonplace. “The Salton Sea is ghastly,” William T. Vollmann wrote in his book, Imperial. “Come closer, and a metallic taste sometimes alights upon your stinging lips. Stay awhile, and you might win a sore throat, an aching compression of the chest as if from smog, or honest nausea.” 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. 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. […] The Salton Sea Authority has for years been working on a plan to prevent the lake from shrinking any further. But the plan requires substantial government money, which has not been forthcoming. “The time clock is running now,” Mr. Schlange said. “We either get this fixed or it’s going to go dead.”

Lake Is Blamed for Stench Blown Across Southern California