Imperial (129 page)

But the salinity of the water we generously give Mexico increases year upon year. The salinity of the Mexicali Valley aquifer increases by twenty point six milligrams per liter
²⁴⁴
per year. And now Arizona’s Wellton-Mohawk district takes up irrigation with a vengeance.

Wellton-Mohawk’s sewage carries total dissolved solids of as much as fifteen thousand milligrams per liter, so that at Morelos the Colorado River water sometimes bears a salinity of twenty-five hundred milligrams per liter.
Plants can flourish when irrigated with water as high as 1,350 parts per million.

A book called
Collapse
informs me:
The major problem affecting California agriculture is salinization as a result of irrigation agriculture, ruining expanses of agricultural land in California’s Central Valley, the richest farmland in the United States.
THE DESERT DISAPPEARS
.

What about Mexican agriculture?—
The bountiful continent is ours, state on state, and territory on territory, to the waves of the Pacific sea.

It’s not okay with the water, said Yolanda Sánchez Ogás in 2003. After fourteen years, Emilio López Samoa, an engineer, made a runoff from Wellton-Mohawk to the Golfo de California. Salt water had destroyed a lot of land here in the Mexicali Valley, and we couldn’t get it back. It ruined the cars in the city, the engines. It ruined everything in the valley. So the Mexican government tried to recuperate the land. And they moved the people on the best land to other places: Centinela, Zamora, Progreso. It hurt them a lot, because they didn’t have enough water to wash themselves. Now again they have salt! And there’s not enough water. And we have to send water to Tijuana.

In 1973, the International Boundary and Water Commission of the United States and Mexico decides that water at Morelos must be no saltier than a hundred and fifteen milligrams per liter.

The Yuma Desalting Plant obligingly appears in 1974. But it’s so expensive to run that for a considerable while, just out of the goodness of our hearts, we choose to dilute our effluent with extra water . . .

May I tell you how much water has been bypassed at Morelos from Wellton-Mohawk? These amounts
measure the degree of deprivation of the American water users as a consequence of promulgation of Minute 242.
Poor Americans! “Moisture Means Millions.” In 1974, we give Southside over a hundred thirteen thousand needless acre-feet; in 1976, more than two hundred and five thousand acre-feet! A water consultant warns:
The average amount by-passed . . . is about one-fourth of the annual water allotment to the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. In dry periods . . . these quantities would be damaging to the urban areas of Southern California.

Chapter 142

SUBDELINEATIONS: POISONSCAPES (1888-2003)

That is Imperial Valley. It is the “Topsy-Turvy Land” of America . . . Here people look up and not down at sea level . . . The land is fertilized by adding liquid fertilizer to the irrigation water.

—Holtville Chamber of Commerce, 1952

I
n 1921, certain busybodies dare to raise the idea that maybe the State Board of Health should regulate the proposed Burbank sewer farm. The voice of freedom, the voice of individual right, counter-argues:
The function of the State Board of Health does not appear from any act to “design” sewer systems, but to “guard” against the design and operation of such sewer systems and sewer disposal plants which would create a nuisance and be dangerous to public health.
In other words, the state may be reactive but not proactive. Wasn’t this the American Idea once upon a time, and isn’t it the Imperial Idea itself?

In 1930, the city of Los Angeles advises in its annual report that
final plans for grease skimming tanks should now be made . . . After such installation the removal of the grease in the sewage flow will . . . greatly improve the physical conditions along the Hyperion Beach. Although all solid matter in the sewage which cannot pass the 1/16th inch slots is intercepted by the screens, the effluent contains considerable oil and grease, which, after being discharged into the ocean, may be carried by winds and currents to beaches some distance from Hyperion. It is therefore recommended that these skimming tanks be built as soon as possible to protect the beaches.

Next exhibit: a pretty graph which simultaneously depicts the area, population and sewer mileage of Los Angeles between 1900 and 1931. Although all three curves begin near zero, their slopes rise divergently,
area
going up the least, to four hundred and forty-two square miles as of 1930;
population
climbs higher but still linearly, up to one point two million; while
sewer miles
increase exponentially, over-towering its two rival quantities at the princely elevation of twenty-three hundred and thirty-one. Three scales on one axis, doesn’t that equate to comparing wormy apples, rotten oranges and tainted Imperial Valley grapefruits? Well, who am I to say that there isn’t some profound principle in play all the same? Los Angeles, city of cities, gets denser as it expands, and as it gets denser it requires a maze of sewer pipe! The chief of California’s Bureau of Sanitary Engineering has an explanation for this phenomenon:
We take it as a matter of course nowadays that plumbing has passed for a luxury.

Twenty-three hundred and thirty-one miles of sewer pipe! What does this “mean”? (What does any number “mean”?)

A hundred and fifty-five thousand acre-feet of sewage per year now spews from Los Angeles County into the Pacific Ocean. From Orange County comes only six thousand acre-feet.

In
A SURVEY OF SEWAGE DISPOSAL IN CALIFORNIA AS PRACTICED APRIL 1929: Includes all systems known to us, administered by public authorities
, we’re informed that San Diego sends its raw sewage to bays, as does National City with its septic tank effluent; Oceanside eponymously prefers the ocean. Chula Vista’s Imhoff tank effluent goes to bays, and Los Angeles’s to sloughs; however, Los Angeles’s fine screens go to the ocean.

The Department of Public Health, which compiled the survey, concludes:
There are no set standards of sewage disposal.

A REQUEST

Stop for a moment and consider the implications of that one sentence.

FISH-FEEDING

But a new dawn looms, at least for sewage.
The arrangement is essentially contractual and the result of it is to bring the sewage of many communities to central points for treatment. It is difficult to adequately appraise the importance of these huge centralizing projects in their localities and to the state unless one contemplates what the situation would have been without them. Sanitation and development would have been next to impossible.

Here is one of the upcoming miracles of bureaucratic centralism: The Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts
embrace thirteen cities entirely, parts of three others, and contemplate the inclusion of ten more within the next few years . . . Before long it will be necessary to . . . convey the effluent into the Pacific Ocean 5000 feet off shore. This is the ultimate plan which will serve upwards of 2,000,000 people.

“A STREAM IS LIKE A WOMAN”

So much for sewage (almost). What about other feculence? Fortunately, the main industrial wastes of California are still agricultural, deriving from
canneries, milk-plants, sugar factories and olive pickling works.
How safe, how innocent! Because
there are no set standards of sewage disposal,
Lodi, to pick a random example, is one of the towns which
run their cannery wastes, raw, to valuable rivers and channels through special industrial sewers, forming great masses of ugly slime and deposits in the stream.

But “ugly” is the wrong word here. My attitude is incorrect. For correctness, I refer you to a 1975 column in the
California Farmer
—yes, in 1975 there were still people who missed the good old days in Lodi:
In some respects a stream is like a woman. We instinctively enjoy the beauty of each . . . There are times, however, when the bearer of this beauty must bend her back and dirty her hands at an unbecoming chore. So might it not be necessary for the waters of the purest stream to irrigate a field, drive a turbine, or rinse away the dirt of civilization?

In this spirit, the cities of El Centro and Imperial in 1916 improve their amenities from
the primitive sewer system of the earliest days
to a grand new
outfall sewer
which
empties into New River.
By century’s end, San Diego will be likewise bending her back and dirtying her beautiful hands a trifle:
Chollas Creek is a heavily urbanized watershed tributary to San Diego Bay. The Chollas Creek watershed has been added to the 303(d) list as a result of toxicity measured during wet weather monitoring.

BURIED TREASURES

There are also instances of trouble caused by paper mill wastes, tanneries and gas plants.
How safe and innocent might those instances be?

Consider the Arrowhead manufactured-gas plant in San Bernardino, which operated from approximately 1881 to 1912.
²⁴⁵
In 1994, investigators found that the soil remained contaminated with unsafe levels of lampblack, lead, arsenic, and petroleum hydrocarbons, including toluene. In the groundwater, trace amounts of cyanide now lay intermingled with dangerous amounts of thallium and the carcinogen benzo(a)anthracene.
The flow model indicates constituents of the soil contaminants first reached groundwater no later than the 1930s.
Fortunately, San Bernardino is out of Imperial; it doesn’t affect me.

IMPERIAL BESIEGED

Now for the Riverside manufactured-gas plant. Dates of operation: 1888-1911. (This is unnerving; this is in the Inland Empire itself, on the border of Imperial.) At the end of the twentieth century, when the document about it entered the State Archives, no groundwater analysis had yet been done, doubtless for lack of committed funds or of desire to know the truth. If I had to guess, why wouldn’t I suppose the presence of cyanide, thallium and benzo(a)anthracene? In any event, investigators have already discovered the following treasures in the soil: polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in carcinogenic quantities, antimony, arsenic, barium, cadmium, chromium, vanadium. In 1992, two hundred tons of contaminated dirt were hauled away so they could contaminate someplace else.

The data tells similar parables for Long Beach, Colton, Los Angeles, Santa Ana.

W. H. SHEBLEY, DRAGONSLAYER

When would a new dawn come? I can provide an exact date: 6 June 1916, when the Fish and Game Commission advises the public, in circular letter number two thousand and seventy-nine,
In order that the matter of water pollution . . . be handled under one uniform plan for the State, which means that all these various matters must be handled by one person, I recommend that all business of this nature be turned over to W. H. SHEBLEY.

And Californians lived happily ever after.

A heartwarming fable from 1927, “FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE.”

Trial of the suit against the Shell Oil Company for polluting the waters of Petaluma Creek resulted in a fine of $200 . . . A crew of men were put to work with hoes and shovels and the oil soaked banks of the creek were cleaned up in a highly satisfactory manner . . . Both the commission and the company were well pleased with the outcome of the action.

Meanwhile, the Director, Bureau of Hydraulics (a subdepartment of the Fish and Game Division), writes to the Union Oil Company’s Manager of Refineries in Los Angeles:
My dear Mr. Page: . . . The looks of that ditch and the effluent were a distinct disappointment . . . It is the sincere desire of the writer to cooperate and work with the oil companies in the prevention of pollution, but it cannot be indefinitely postponed . . .

I won’t quote many more of these crazily half-friendly, half-adversarial letters involving such perfectly named personalities as Mr. William Groundwater, Manager of Transportation at the Union Oil Building; but the sorrowful Director of the Bureau of Hydraulics is
taking the liberty of again calling this to your attention. From the reports received, it appears that the oil is again coming down . . .

In that same year, 1927, almost a hundred oil companies in Huntington Beach receive injunctions for oil pollution. The Orange County Associated Chamber of Commerce worries about the fishing and the beach resorts.

In 1929 the Shell Company of California reassures the Fish and Game Commission that certain allegations about its operations in Los Angeles are unfounded. Oh, yes, the Shell Company denies that
water being discharged from our Wilmington Refinery into Nigger Slough carried considerable traces of oil.
It must be true, then. All’s right with the world.

Who on this nobly oil-slicked globe of ours
wouldn’t
rather be left alone? Who doesn’t subscribe to the Imperial Idea? Why can’t Shell piss out from her Wilmington refinery whatever color of urine she likes? In 1954, when the Department of Health, Education and Welfare begins intervening more actively to impose pollution standards on the various states of Northside, a Los Angeles Department of Water and Power typescript
For Intradepartmental Use Only
goes out from the Sanitary Engineering Division to Mr. Burton S. Grant, Chief Engineer of Water Works and Assistant Manager, BUILDING. The Principal Sanitary Engineer grieves:
The matter of Federal interference by the U.S. Public Health Service when unsolicited is of great concern to the State Water Pollution Control Board.
No worries, mates! The Principal Sanitary Engineer will hold the line! In 1963 the United States Department of the Interior continues to admit defeat:
The general objective is maintenance of a minimum dissolved-oxygen content of 4 ppm in the streams receiving the waste. The requirements for waste treatment are generally far in excess of the standards met today . . .