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Salton Sea: The Salton Sea's crisis, explained.
California’s largest lake is drying up.
California’s largest lake is drying up.
The Salton Sea has been shrinking for years, and fish and birds have been dying. The dry lakebed already spews toxic dust into the air, threatening a region with hundreds of thousands of people. And the crisis is about to get much worse.
The water flowing into the Salton Sea will be cut dramatically at the end of this year, causing the lake to shrink faster than ever and sending more dust blowing through low-income, largely Latino farming communities.
The Salton Sea covers 350 square miles in the desert southeast of Palm Springs. For more than a century, the lake has been sustained by water from the Colorado River.
But under a farm-to-city water transfer deal, more river water has been flowing to cities in San Diego County and the Coachella Valley — and less water has been flowing into the Salton Sea.
In 2003, California lawmakers promised to restore the lake. So far, state officials have done hardly anything, even as the Salton Sea has shrunk.
When the water transfers ramp up in 2018, the lake will start receding even faster.
A decade from now, government officials project there will be more than 60,000 acres of exposed lakebed where there used to be water.
The ecosystem is starting to collapse. The lake is already saltier than the ocean, and the remaining fish will soon die out as the salinity rises.
Meanwhile, a dry lakebed laced with toxic dust is being exposed to the desert winds. Childhood asthma rates are already astronomically high in communities near the Salton Sea, and the dying lake is only making it harder for children to breathe.
The Salton Sea and the surrounding communities are in desperate need of intervention. Researchers have estimated the cost of doing nothing in the tens of billions of dollars.
State officials are far behind in implementing solutions, even though they’ve known this crisis was coming for years.
Find out more about these political failures in our timeline of broken promises.
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Broken promises
California far from solutions as Salton Sea crisis looms
Written by Sammy Roth and Ian James. Photos and videos by Zoë Meyers and Jay Calderon
The Salton Sea is a disaster in slow motion.
For more than a century, California’s largest lake has been sustained by Colorado River water, which irrigates Imperial Valley farms and drains into the lake. But the Salton Sea will start shrinking rapidly at the end of this year, when increasing amounts of river water will be diverted from farms to cities. As the lake’s shorelines retreat, thousands of tons of lung-damaging dust are expected to blow from the exposed lakebed, polluting the Imperial Valley’s already-dirty air.
State officials have done little to protect the region’s vulnerable residents from the impending health emergency — even though they’ve known this crisis was coming for nearly 15 years.
California’s latest Salton Sea plan calls for building thousands of acres of ponds and wetlands over the next 10 years to cover growing expanses of dry lakebed and to create habitat for fish and birds. But the 10-year plan remains severely underfunded by the state Legislature and will cover less than half of the dry lakebed that researchers say will be exposed a decade from now.
Ruben Dominguez, who lives near the lake’s southern shore in Calipatria, is frustrated with government officials who’ve talked about revitalizing the Salton Sea for years but have yet to start controlling the dust. His 16-year-old daughter has asthma and stays indoors when it’s windy. He often sees brown clouds drift from the shore into his neighborhood.
“Everybody knows it’s getting worse, but nothing’s getting done,” Dominguez said. “People in Sacramento, they have no idea what we go through over here. They’re not breathing in this air.”
California lawmakers promised to fix the Salton Sea in 2003, after demanding the farm-to-city water transfers that created the crisis. But so far, the state hasn’t lived up to that promise.
Imperial County has the highest rate of asthma-related emergency room visits for children in California, and the county’s 180,000 residents will suffer even more when the water transfers accelerate in 2018. They’re not the only ones at risk. Windblown dust and the rotten-egg stench that occasionally waft from the lake also affect the Coachella Valley, threatening a $5-billion tourism industry. And if California doesn’t live up to its promise to restore the lake, the Imperial Irrigation District could torpedo negotiations over the future of the Colorado River, increasing the odds of unprecedented shortages along a river that provides water to nearly 40 million people.
California’s 10-year plan for the Salton Sea, released in March, would begin to address the lake’s problems — if it’s fully funded. For now, officials are struggling to come up with $383 million, the estimated price tag. That’s enormously frustrating for Salton Sea advocates, who say the state should have stepped up with solutions, and funding, a decade ago. In recent years, California has allocated hundreds of millions of dollars for water projects in other parts of the state.
“We’re sadly expecting a bunch of people to get sick, unless the efforts get ramped up even more,” said Kerry Morrison, who lives in Salton City, along the lake’s western shore, and runs the environmental nonprofit EcoMedia Compass.
“We’re not trying to knock the state’s efforts,” Morrison added. “But it needs to be taken more seriously in high government, and they need to realize there’s a lot of people at stake here.”
‘Triage’ for the Salton Sea
The state’s 10-year plan calls for the construction of a patchwork of ponds and wetlands along the lake’s receding shorelines — approximately 29,800 acres of “constructed habitat” between 2018 and 2028. That’s a significant number, but less than half of the lakebed that researchers estimate will have been exposed by then — at least 60,000 acres, or almost 100 square miles.
The construction will be concentrated along the lake’s northern and southern shores, near the rivers that bring farm runoff and wastewater. Some water from the lake, which is saltier than the ocean and growing progressively saltier, will be pumped to the ponds and mixed with the agricultural runoff to create habitat for fish and birds that’s less salty than the shrinking lake.
The plan doesn’t include any ponds or wetlands along the lake’s eastern and western shores, leaving communities like Bombay Beach and Salton City totally exposed to dry lakebed.
State officials know their strategy leaves a lot to be desired. But after years of failing to secure funding for more expensive fixes, they’ve dialed back their ambitions in hopes of rallying around a plan cheap enough for the Legislature to fund.
“Conditions are dire and we have to do something now for habitat, and we have to do something now for dust suppression,” said Bruce Wilcox, assistant secretary for Salton Sea policy at the California Natural Resources Agency, who led the development of the 10-year blueprint. “This plan is a path forward to address air quality and habitat issues at the Salton Sea.”
Supporters say the state’s plan will limit hazardous air pollution, throw a partial lifeline to fish and birds and build support for future spending. Kim Delfino, director of California programs for Defenders of Wildlife, described the plan as “triage” for the Salton Sea, saying it would make a dent in the immediate crisis and hopefully create momentum toward longer-term solutions.
Phil Rosentrater, the Salton Sea Authority’s executive director, made a similar point.
“It certainly is not everything we want … but I want to be careful not to denigrate or complain about what we don’t have, when we actually do have something we can work with,” he said.
State officials thought they had developed a workable plan a decade ago, too.
In 2007, state officials released an $8.9-billion proposal that was far more ambitious than the current strategy. It would have involved building a horseshoe-shaped outer lake, a berm crossing the center of the lake and an extensive system of dikes, channels and pumps. But state lawmakers balked at the cost.
The new 10-year plan is also less ambitious than a scaled-down 2015 proposal from the Salton Sea Authority, which called for the construction of a 36-square-mile “perimeter lake” around the shrinking, increasingly salty center lake. The authority pegged that plan at just under $1 billion. Also in 2015, the Imperial Irrigation District and Imperial County proposed to build wetlands and new geothermal plants at the south end of the lake, with an estimated cost of $3.15 billion.
But even those price tags proved too expensive for state officials to commit.
“When you put forward originally the $9 billion plan, or more recently a $1 billion plan, it becomes overwhelming for people,” Delfino said. “They freeze, almost like a deer in the headlights. They can’t wrap their heads around it.”
A long way from Sacramento
For a scaled-back plan with a low price tag meant to be a main selling point, it’s still far from clear that Gov. Jerry Brown and state lawmakers will come through with $383 million to fund the 10-year plan.
The state has budgeted just $80.5 million for the Salton Sea so far, leaving a $300 million shortfall. The initial funding, which comes from a $7.5 billion water bond approved by voters, will go toward paying consultants and designing and building canals and ponds along the shore.
Assemblymember Eduardo Garcia, D-Coachella, and Sen. Ben Hueso, D-San Diego, have led the charge for more funding in Sacramento, writing bills to support the Salton Sea and urging their colleagues to join the cause.
Sen. Robert Hertzberg, D-Van Nuys, grew up in Palm Springs and used to go fishing at the lake. He said he’s made it a priority to secure funding for the state’s 10-year plan.
“You have the framework, you have some initial money available to start the process, and we’ve got the ability to help influence the next governor to make this a bigger priority,” said Hertzberg, who chairs the Senate’s Natural Resources and Water Committee.
But California’s top lawmakers have hesitated to show the same commitment, at least publicly.
Through a spokesperson, Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, D-Paramount, declined to be interviewed for this story, or to comment on funding for Salton Sea restoration. A spokesperson for Senate Leader Kevin de León, D-Los Angeles, also turned down an interview request.
A spokesperson for Gov. Brown’s office deferred all questions about Salton Sea funding to the California Natural Resources Agency, which crafted the 10-year plan and has no control over whether or how it will be funded. In an email, a CNRA spokesperson said the agency is “committed to making investments to address air quality and improve habitat at the Salton Sea.”
Even Chad Mayes, whose Assembly district includes much of the Coachella Valley, declined an interview request through a spokesperson. Mayes, the Assembly’s Republican leader, said in an emailed statement: “It’s good to see the state finally moving forward to address this environmental and public health crisis in waiting. While this plan is a step in the right direction, there is a lot of work left to be done.”
In the meantime, California is spending big money on other regional water projects.
Just last year, Brown agreed to contribute as much as $250 million in water bond funding to demolishing four dams along the California-Oregon border, a project meant to restore the Klamath River ecosystem. Officials say the state has already spent $216 million planning and conducting environmental reviews for Brown’s controversial Delta tunnels, which in theory would make it easier to pump water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, near the Bay Area, without harming endangered fish. The tunnels are eventually expected to cost $16 billion.
Asked about the disparity between the sums being spent upstate and the difficulty securing funding at the Salton Sea, Ted Kowalski — director of the Walton Family Foundation's Colorado River initiative — expressed a common sentiment: “It’s a long way from the Salton Sea to Sacramento.”
Broken promises
Over millennia, the depression in the desert known as the Salton Sink has at times been dry and at times been a lake filled with water. The current lake was accidentally created between 1905 and 1907, when Colorado River water broke through irrigation canals in the Imperial Valley and flooded the basin, destroying a railroad line and submerging salt mines in the process.
In the 1950s and 60s, the Salton Sea flourished as a tourism mecca where people flocked for swimming, fishing, boating and waterskiing. In its heyday, the lake attracted more visitors annually than Yosemite — some 1.5 million people per year.
But the lakefront towns deteriorated after flooding in the 1970s. Boating and fishing waned as the lake grew saltier and water quality worsened. Over the last 20 years, the lake has been shrinking as farm runoff decreases and evaporation takes its toll.
The lake’s surface now sits at 233 feet below sea level. The ruins of crumbling docks stand along a receding shoreline, and winds churn up decay. The rotten-egg stench that’s become well known in the Imperial and Coachella valleys — and has occasionally reached as far as Los Angeles — stems from the decomposing algae, carcasses of dead fish and other debris that have accumulated in the sea.
Starting at the end of this year, the lake will shrink faster than ever.
Under a 2003 water transfer deal, the Imperial Irrigation District — which serves Imperial Valley farms — agreed to sell increasing amounts of its Colorado River water to cities in the Coachella Valley and San Diego County. Irrigation District officials were under immense pressure from the state and federal government to make the deal. But they also knew that less water flowing to Imperial Valley farms would mean less runoff flowing to the Salton Sea, causing it to shrink. If they were going to sacrifice some of their water to slake the thirst of growing cities, they needed a guarantee it wouldn’t lead to a health and environmental disaster.
Imperial County was ultimately able to extract a promise from state lawmakers. On Sept. 29, 2003, Gov. Gray Davis signed the Salton Sea Restoration Act, which said it was “the intent of the Legislature that the State of California undertake the restoration of the Salton Sea ecosystem and the permanent protection of the wildlife dependent on that ecosystem.” Meanwhile, the water transfer deal called for the Imperial Irrigation District to replenish the Salton Sea with “mitigation water” directly from the Colorado River through the end of 2017, figuring that would give the state more than enough time to develop and fund a restoration plan for the lake.
But that still hasn’t happened.
This year, the Imperial Irrigation District is releasing the final flows of mitigation water to the lake. At the end of 2017, those flows will cease and the Salton Sea’s decline will accelerate.
To visualize what that change will mean, it helps to drive through a trailer park and down onto a section of dry shoreline, where tire tracks cut a path across the flat, crusty lakebed to the mouth of the Alamo River.
There, behind a lush thicket of desert plants, water the color of café mocha flows down the Alamo River channel into the Salton Sea. This river, filled with soil and fertilizers from farm fields, is the largest source of water flowing into the lake. Over the next few years, the river will dwindle and the shoreline will retreat rapidly.
The Salton Sea is now about 35 miles long and 15 miles wide. It’s projected to shrink during the next 30 years to about two-thirds of its current size.
The costs of inaction
In theory, investing $383 million into the Salton Sea — or even several billion — should be a no-brainer. While the costs of allowing the lake to keep shrinking are hard to quantify, the nonprofit Pacific Institute, a think tank, has estimated the damage could range from $29 billion to $70 billion over 30 years. Those estimates include higher healthcare costs from respiratory illnesses, lower property values and ecosystem damage. They don’t include reduced farm productivity from dust emissions, which Pacific Institute researchers characterized as too difficult to predict.
By those estimates, even the long-discarded $9 billion plan is a bargain.
Morrison noted that the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has already been forced to spend at least $1.8 billion to suppress dust at Owens Lake, which was infamously drained to provide water for Los Angeles. The Salton Sea is three times the size of Owens Lake, and more than 10 times as many people could be affected.
“It’s going to cost the state a lot of money when they have to pull some emergency Owens Lake-style projects” at the Salton Sea, Morrison said.
Garcia, who represents the Imperial Valley and parts of the Coachella Valley in the state Assembly, is confident the Legislature will go a long way toward filling that gap.
In the Senate, Hueso has introduced the Salton Sea Obligations Act, which would authorize $500 million in bonds to fund Salton Sea restoration. The Senate approved the bond measure last month. If it clears the Assembly, it would require voter approval in the November 2018 election.
Garcia has proposed $30 million for the Salton Sea as part of his $3.1-billion park bond, which is moving through the Legislature and would also need to be approved by voters next year. Garcia said he’s trying to convince his colleagues that a bigger slice of the park bond money should go toward the Salton Sea. Meanwhile, a wider-ranging bond proposal in the Senate, from de León, contemplates $40 million for the Salton Sea. It’s expected the two bonds will be combined.
Garcia believes legislative leaders are committed to finding solutions. He noted that Rendon, the Assembly speaker, put the Salton Sea on the Democratic caucus’ to-do list at its strategic planning session in February. He also pointed out that several state Senators — including Hertzberg, Ben Allen, Toni Atkins and Henry Stern — attended a Salton Sea tour in March.
Those lawmakers and others, Garcia said, will be key to building support for additional funding.
“There are a lot of people that still have not completely, completely embraced this idea, and the cost. And the different numbers that have been put out there are somewhat frightening, if you want to talk about the $9 billion state plan, or the more recent $3 billion plan,” Garcia said. “This $380 million plan that focuses on ecosystems and public health — that feels more tangible.”
Regardless of what the Legislature does, some additional funding should become available. The federal Department of Agriculture has already approved $7.5 million in grants for projects that improve air quality, water quality or habitat on farmlands at the southern end of the lake. And the Water Funder Initiative, a nonprofit backed by several philanthropies, including the Walton Family Foundation, has pledged $10 million in Salton Sea funding over the next five years.
The federal government has also promised $30 million over the next decade, with then-President Barack Obama pledging last year to “reverse the deterioration of the Salton Sea before it is too late.” But it’s not yet clear whether the Trump administration will make good on the $30-million commitment. Nobody has said the money isn’t coming, but it hasn’t been allocated, either.
The $30 million from the federal government is supposed to cover operations and maintenance costs for the ponds and wetlands built over the next 10 years, Wilcox said. If the Trump administration doesn’t come through, the state will have to find another funding source for operations and maintenance, on top of the $300 million shortfall it already faces for construction.
The perfect and the good
Even if the 10-year plan is fully funded, implementing it won’t be easy.
Michael Cohen, a researcher with the Pacific Institute, pointed out that state and federal agencies don’t have a strong track record of getting Salton Sea projects built quickly. Existing wetlands projects have been slowed not only by a lack of funding, but also by tricky environmental permitting and complicated questions of land ownership and mineral leasing rights, Cohen said.
“One of the challenges is that a lot of these projects are being run out of Sacramento, but the conditions on the ground in the Imperial Valley are not quite what they expect,” Cohen said. “They really need to get projects in the ground much faster.”
The state has hired a consultant, Tetra Tech, Inc., to design the canals, ponds and wetlands contemplated in the 10-year plan. Construction is supposed to begin next year on a section of dry lakebed west of the mouth of the New River. Cohen is hopeful that Tetra Tech “will apply some real project management experience and skills to move some of these projects forward.”
“My hope is that in the next two months or three months, once the consultant really gets working on this, that they’ll come out with a better, more inspirational 10-year plan,” Cohen said.
Riverside County officials think they can do better than the state’s plan. They’re working to form an “enhanced infrastructure financing district” around the lake’s northern shore, which would take out loans and issue bonds to pay for Salton Sea restoration projects, then pay off those debts with the increased tax revenue that would theoretically be generated by revitalized lakeside communities. That revenue would include growth in property taxes, sales taxes and hotel taxes.
It’s hard to know whether that plan is realistic: It banks on a restoration program so successful that people, businesses and private capital flock to lakeside communities, with as many as 73,750 residential units built over the next half-century and more than one million hotel room rentals per year in Riverside County by the early 2040s. A study commissioned by the Salton Sea Authority found lakeside development could generate between $715 million and $2.2 billion for Salton Sea restoration projects, if Riverside and Imperial counties both establish financing districts.
Brian Nestande, Riverside County’s deputy executive officer, said he’s frustrated that the state’s plan doesn’t include detailed discussion of an infrastructure financing district, or the perimeter lake concept, which the county supports. He said the county is moving forward with its own plans, with a goal of building a “north lake” that promotes tourism and rebuilds ecosystems.
“We’re just going to make it a lot better. They’re going to do minimal, we’re going to do better than minimal,” Nestande said. “We’re going to do a deeper sea, so that more flocks of birds and fish can live there.”
Still, Nestande said he understands why the state is focused on a less-ambitious approach.
“I think it’s just simply money,” he said. “Here’s the sad reality: We’re in a (relatively) unpopulated area. You have one or two legislators that care, not too much else beyond that.”
State and local officials know the 10-year plan won’t fix everything, and they acknowledge they’d be trying to do more if they thought they could get more funding. But with the water cutoff coming at the end of 2017, they don’t want to let the perfect get in the way of the good.
“What you don’t want to get into is the paralysis of analysis, where you don’t do anything because you’re still analyzing the problem,” said Alex Schriener, a geologist who used to work on the Salton Sea geothermal field and now serves on the state’s Long Range Planning Committee. “We make a positive impact to the environment and to health and safety, and then, as more money and time becomes available, we can work on other solutions.”
The state’s strategy focuses on the next 10 years and does not include long-term fixes. One option that will be studied, Wilcox said, involves building a “perimeter lake” that would stretch more than 60 miles along the lake’s west shore and cover up the dry lakebed.
Another option would involve importing water to boost the lake’s levels. It could be seawater brought by canal from the Sea of Cortez or the Pacific Ocean, or slightly salty groundwater brought by pipeline from elsewhere in Southern California.
The costs of either path remain unclear. Wilcox has set a goal of reaching a decision on a long-range strategy by the end of 2018.
Colorado River’s future hangs in balance
By 2014, the Imperial Irrigation District and Imperial County had gotten tired of waiting for California to fulfill its then decade-old promise to restore the Salton Sea. So they submitted a petition to the State Water Resources Control Board, warning that for the water transfers to go forward, the state would need to commit to action at the Salton Sea. That caught the state’s attention, ultimately prompting the development of the 10-year-plan released last month.
But it’s not clear whether the plan is good enough for the irrigation district.
Imperial Valley officials have applauded the plan as a big step forward, but they’re also looking for a more binding commitment from the state. A day before the plan’s release, the district and the county filed a motion with the State Water Resources Control Board. They want the board to order the completion of a final plan by October 1, and they want that final plan to contain more specifics, such as acreages of projects for each year and actions to obtain additional funding.
District and county officials also said it will be critical to have a “firm and unequivocal commitment on the part of the State of California to fund the projects” outlined in the plan.
“The bright side is that they’re now talking about a 10-year roadmap. The downside is that the map doesn’t get you to 10 years” in terms of funding, said Kevin Kelley, the Imperial Irrigation District’s general manager. “So we’re going to be looking for some sort of acknowledgment, explicit acknowledgment of this state obligation over the course of 10 years.”
If the state doesn’t satisfy irrigation district officials, they aren’t afraid to play hardball.
For the last few years, California, Arizona and Nevada have been working on a deal to use less water from the over-allocated Colorado River, which provides water for nearly 40 million people but has dwindled during 17 years of drought. Without an agreement to leave more river water in Lake Mead, Arizona and Nevada could face unprecedented mandatory cutbacks — a situation no one wants to risk, including California. The Golden State would avoid mandatory cuts, at least initially, but it’s possible federal officials would step in and force California to share in the pain.
The Imperial Irrigation District has decided to use those high-stakes negotiations as a bargaining chip to force action at the Salton Sea. District officials have said they will only agree to a Colorado River deal after California adopts a viable Salton Sea plan.
From a financial standpoint, the Imperial Irrigation District has good reason to demand solutions. The district owns much of the land along the lake’s southern shore that could become dust-emitting playa, meaning it could be sued for damages by people who suffer the consequences of those emissions. Some farmers who receive relatively cheap water from the irrigation district are worried they could be forced to pay more for that water to cover the agency’s legal liabilities.
“Are we talking millions of dollars? Are we talking billions of dollars? If we get into billions of dollars, how is it going to get paid?” asked Jack Vessey, who grows leafy greens, melons and other crops in the Imperial Valley. “Is it going to break the IID? Is it going to break the system of what we do here?”
Vessey said farming profits have already been squeezed by rising labor costs and other factors, and higher water costs would further decrease growers’ earnings.
The Imperial Irrigation District’s board of directors nearly rejected the 2003 water transfer deal, narrowly approving it in a 3-2 vote only after coming under immense pressure from the federal government and water users across the Southwest. If the district decides the state’s plan isn’t good enough, it could upend that longstanding deal, as well as the Colorado River negotiations.
The irrigation district isn’t the only party that could throw a wrench in the works. Morrison, the Salton City-based activist, said “a lot of residents have expressed interest” in suing the state.
“I’m not ready to say if that’s anything we would be planning on or not,” he said. “But there’s a lot of interest in residents who know that accepting the status quo of Salton Sea management without seeking more is not enough, without keeping even the balance of health here now.”
Toxic dust
Toxic dust and asthma plague Salton Sea communities
Written by Ian James. Photos and videos by Zoë Meyers and Jay Calderon.
Kaylee Pineda likes to be outdoors. She rides her bike, plays Little League baseball and enjoys swinging on the monkey bars at school.
But when the wind picks up and the air turns hazy, she knows she needs to stay indoors. The dust can suddenly trigger her asthma and leave her gasping for air.
“I feel like my chest tightens,” Kaylee said. “My heart starts pumping.”
Kaylee, who is 9 years old, uses an inhaler every morning before going to school and every night before going to bed. Sometimes, when her chest hurts and she struggles to breathe despite the medication, her mother drives her to the hospital.
A serious asthma crisis is afflicting communities around the Salton Sea. The southeastern corner of California has some of the worst air pollution in the country, where dirt from farmland and the open desert mixes with windblown clouds of toxic dust rising from the Salton Sea’s receding shores.
Imperial County already has the highest rate of asthma-related emergency room visits for children in California. And the problem is about to get much worse.
At the end of this year, the sea will begin to shrink more rapidly under a water transfer deal that’s abruptly cutting off a large portion of the Colorado River water that flows into the lake. Thousands of acres of lakebed will be left exposed in the coming years, sending bigger clouds of fine dust wafting into the air in the Imperial and Coachella valleys – which is laced with pesticides such as DDT and heavy metals that have accumulated in the lake over decades.
California’s 10-year plan for the sea calls for building ponds and wetlands on sections of the exposed lakebed, or playa. But those projects will cover up less than half of the more than 60,000 acres of playa that will be left dry over the next 10 years.
Kaylee’s mother, Eva Pineda, said she’s afraid that more dust in the air will be disastrous for people’s health.
“I know asthma is going to get worse for the kids here,” Eva said. “All those little particles are going to be flying around here and it’s going to go into everybody’s lungs.”
All three of her children have asthma, and many other people in the area suffer from allergies, chronic sinus infections and other respiratory illnesses. Eva said she hopes something gets done to combat the dust.
“It should be taken care of because it’s really going to affect us,” she said. “If it doesn’t get fixed, there’s going to be a lot of ill people with breathing problems.”
The costs of coping with asthma
Every weekday morning at Westmorland Union Elementary School, a brightly colored flag is raised on the flagpole. If the flag is green, the air quality is good. If it’s yellow, it signals to parents and children that the air pollution level is “moderate.”
Kaylee checks the color of the flag each morning when her mother drops her off.
“Yellow is be careful. Orange is people who have asthma, stay in. Red is for everybody, stay in,” Kaylee said. “If it’s super windy, I stay in the office. Or I just stay in the classroom.”
She knows a green flag means it will be a good day and she’ll be able to play outside with her friends during recess.
The school in Westmorland, flanked by farmland south of the Salton Sea, is one of 10 schools in the Imperial Valley that use the flags. Many parents also receive emailed alerts from the Imperial County Air Pollution Control District when pollution reaches unhealthy levels.
A total of 64 children have asthma at the school – 17 percent of the student body. Students’ inhalers are kept in the office, where the children come if they have trouble breathing.
When Eva attended the same school in the 1980s, she remembers fewer students had asthma. Back then, the Salton Sea was also very different; its level was much higher and the water was less salty.
Eva remembers her stepdad would take the family fishing at the sea.
“We would go swimming in there,” she said. “It was beautiful.”
Now people in Westmorland complain about the smells of decay that waft from the sea. The last time Eva visited the lake, she saw dead fish scattered along the shore. She hasn’t been back in years, even though the sea lies just several miles away.
Kaylee recently went on a field trip to the Salton Sea with her third-grade class. She enjoyed watching the birds and running around with her classmates.
“It was a nice day, a little bit windy but not that much for my asthma,” Kaylee recalled, sitting in her living room. She added, pleased: “I didn’t use my inhaler.”
Kaylee has learned to measure her days by how well she keeps her asthma in check.
She was first diagnosed with asthma when she was 5. Since then, she has been regularly using a nebulizer and taking puffs from inhalers.
Her asthma is often triggered by a fit of coughing. When it won’t go away, her mother takes her to the emergency room – usually two or three times a year.
Once last year, Kaylee was hospitalized for three days until she was well enough to go home. The previous year, she had a cold and needed to stay in the hospital for five days.
The hospital bills have added up over the years. Eva previously paid between $700 and $800 every time Kaylee went to the ER, and $3,800 for the five-day hospital stay.
That was when she had medical insurance through her previous job at a KFC restaurant. Now Eva is unemployed. Her husband died of cancer in 2015 and she’s been relying on Social Security benefits while making plans to study accounting. She’s thankful that Medi-Cal now covers Kaylee’s medical bills.
On a recent afternoon, Kaylee went about her routine to prepare for a Little League game. She sat inhaling and exhaling into a mask, her nebulizer humming.
Outside her house, trees were bending in the gusty wind and haze filled the air.
Eva said she was surprised the baseball game hadn’t been canceled. Then her phone rang with a call from the coach, who confirmed it was called off due to the weather.
“Yeah, it’s really bad,” Eva said. “When it gets this bad, this is what happens.”
Years of inaction and frustration
The Salton Sea is California’s largest lake and has been sustained by water running off farmland in the Imperial Valley for more than a century. The lake was created between 1905 and 1907, when floodwaters from the Colorado River burst through canals and filled the low-lying basin in the desert.
The sea’s coming decline stems from the growing strains on the Colorado River. Under the water transfer deal, which was approved in 2003, the Imperial Irrigation District is selling increasing quantities of water to growing urban areas in San Diego County and the Coachella Valley.
The agreement called for the Imperial district to send “mitigation water” from its canals into the sea through 2017 – a period intended to give state agencies time to prepare for dealing with the effects. At the end of this year, that flow of water will be cut off and the lake will recede more rapidly. Over the next 30 years, the sea is projected to shrink to about a two-thirds of its current size.
The water transfer deal isn’t the only thing pushing the Salton Sea toward a drier future.
The Colorado River is severely overallocated and has dwindled during 17 years of severe drought. Scientists have projected that human-caused climate change could cause the river’s flow to decrease by 35 percent or more this century.
Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration released its 10-year plan for the Salton Sea in March after years of delays and unrealized plans, and following pressure by the Imperial district, which has repeatedly warned it won’t support a Colorado River drought deal until the state delivers a viable “roadmap” for the sea.
While the state’s $383-million plan and an initial $80 million in funding have drawn praise as important first steps, some activists say they’re concerned that much more needs to be done – and that leaders in Sacramento have long neglected the worsening health problems in one of California’s poorest regions, where Latinos make up the majority of the population and many are farmworkers.
“Government ignored the problem,” said Luis Olmedo, who leads the Brawley-based nonprofit Comité Cívico Del Valle. “It’s just poor planning and basically ignoring a predominantly low-income disadvantaged community.”
Olmedo’s group has promoted the flags program in schools to alert students and parents to air pollution. His organization also sends health workers to the homes of asthma patients to help them pinpoint hazards in their homes and their surroundings.
Last year, his group helped install a new network of 40 air monitoring devices across the Imperial Valley. Olmedo said he views the initiative, which was funded by a federal grant, as an environmental justice project that fills in gaps in the data collected by government agencies and allows people to sign up for local air pollution alerts.
Olmedo said controlling dust from the Salton Sea should be a priority, along with reducing threats from other pollution sources such as farmers burning their fields.
“We shouldn’t have this level of asthma,” Olmedo said. “It is a crisis. It’s an emergency. It needs to be dealt with.”
Researchers have been warning for years that if actions aren’t taken to control dust, the sea will become a costly disaster.
The Pacific Institute, a think tank focused on water issues, estimated in a 2014 report that without significant steps to address the sea’s problems, the costs over the next 30 years could range from $29 billion to $70 billion – including higher health care costs for illnesses and lower property values.
The group estimated the costs of unchecked windblown dust on public health could reach as high as $37 billion by 2047, worsening asthma and other illnesses ranging from lung cancer to cardiac disease. Within three decades, the group warned, the exposed lakebed could be releasing as much as 100 tons of dust into the air per day.
More than 18,000 acres of dry, salt-encrusted shoreline have already been left exposed as the lake has receded over the past two decades.
When winds rake across the lakebed, sand blows in drifts and dust billows into the air in brown clouds. It settles in neighborhoods downwind of the sea, in towns from Calipatria to Brawley to Westmorland, blanketing lawns and sidewalks and leaving cars coated with grime.
For Karol Ruelas, an 18-year-old senior at Brawley Union High School, a windy morning can trigger fits of coughing. On a recent day when Brawley was under an alert for unhealthy air during a dust storm, Ruelas stayed inside most of the day.
“The Salton Sea has affected my health greatly,” Ruelas said. “Sometimes it’ll get to a point where I cannot breathe because of the dust from the Salton Sea.”
She has severe allergies and chronic sinus infections, or sinusitis. She swallows a pill every morning and takes more if she has an attack. Sometimes she needs to get a shot to control her breathing problems.
“I’ve actually had points where I’ve been enjoying my day and then it gets windy and then my airways fill completely back up,” Ruelas said. “And I remember the first time, I absolutely panicked. I was like, ‘Oh my God! Why can’t I breathe?’”
Her doctor has recommended surgery for her sinusitis. In the meantime, he’s suggested she avoid exercising outdoors and stay inside as much as possible. The doctor also recommended she consider moving away to an area with cleaner air.
She told him she prefers to stay in the Imperial Valley, even though it may involve staying on medication.
“This is my home and I don’t want to leave it,” Ruelas recalled telling him.
She hopes to eventually become a nurse here and help others who suffer from asthma and allergies. She’s concerned and frustrated, though, by the lack of action so far.
“If nothing is done and they allow the Salton Sea to recede and expose even more sand, it will get definitely worse. My attacks will definitely get longer and more often,” Ruelas said. “I’m hoping that action will be taken.”
Studying the dust threat
The water that flows into the Salton Sea from the Alamo River and the New River contains a mix of pollutants, including pesticides in agricultural runoff and sewage effluent from Mexicali.
Over the years, researchers studying water and sediment samples from the sea have found heavy metals such as mercury, copper and arsenic, and pesticides such as DDT.
Until recently, no detailed studies had ever been conducted on the makeup of the dust.
Now two researchers from the University of Southern California are carrying out the first study of its kind to discover what’s in the dust. They’ve scooped up soil samples from the playa, sealed it in plastic bags and sent it to researchers at the University of Iowa, where the dust is analyzed to check for heavy metals, pesticides, bacteria and fungi.
They’ve also installed devices to collect airborne dust at schools in Calipatria, Westmorland and Brawley.
“Other researchers have detected toxic metals in samples taken directly from the playa, but we don’t know if these contaminants are being carried in the dust and making their way into the communities,” said Shohreh Farzan, a professor of preventive medicine at USC’s Keck School of Medicine. “If this is happening, breathing that metal-laden dust could be particularly toxic.”
The study by Farzan and fellow USC professor Jill Johnston is being funded through a grant from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. They’re also conducting a community health survey, using questionnaires to ask families about asthma and other ailments such as wheezing, coughing and sleeplessness.
“You have a community that’s really burdened by respiratory health issues,” Johnston said. “When you have that issue and then on top of that you’re putting potential impacts of the Salton Sea, this community can be really vulnerable.”
California has one comparable example of a lake that turned into a costly health hazard: Owens Lake, which dried up in the 1920s after water was diverted to supply Los Angeles. The dry lakebed on the east side of the Sierra Nevada became a major source of air pollution, and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has spent $1.8 billion in Owens Valley, primarily to control dust.
Because the Salton Sea is much bigger than Owens Lake and in an area with a larger population, the long-term costs could end up being higher.
Some of the dust-control methods that state officials plan to employ around the Salton Sea have been used previously at Owens Lake, such as flooding the lakebed to create shallow ponds or plowing the dry playa.
The Imperial Irrigation District has been experimenting with plowing stretches of the southern shore that were underwater a decade ago.
On a recent morning, a tractor pulled a plow across a flat expense of lakebed, cutting deep furrows in the sunbaked soil. This “surface roughening” project near the dry boat ramp at Red Hill Bay is one portion of about 800 acres that have been plowed.
The plowing creates furrows in the soil about three feet deep from top to bottom, forming dust-trapping ridges. “The dark soil in the bottom of the furrow is moist and soft and fine-textured — a type of soil that forms stable clods.”
So far the irrigation district has spent $200,000 on the project, using funds made available through the water transfer deal.
Jessica Lovecchio, who is leading the project, said her team is gathering detailed information on how effective the plowing is and how long the furrows will hold up before it’s necessary to plow again. Plowing doesn’t work as well in sandy areas, so in those spots workers have been planting seeds of salt-tolerant plants. When the plants take root, they form natural barriers that block windblown dust.
“We can come in and be proactive and make sure this area doesn’t blow dust,” Lovecchio said, standing near the tractor. “If we’re able to get out now and do something on the ground to eliminate dust, that is just that much less dust in the future.”
These kinds of waterless measures will likely play an important role given the large gap between the areas where ponds and wetlands are to be built and the vast expanses of lakebed that will be left exposed. Other methods may include spraying chemicals to create a hard crust or laying down bales of hay, logs or woodchips to create windbreaks.
The state’s 10-year plan focuses on the northern and southern shores and doesn’t include any ponds along the western or eastern shores. In those areas, where there is no river inlet nearby to supply water, more of the shoreline could end up etched with plowed furrows.
Stuck indoors
Griselda Peralta wasn’t planning to retire early. But in 2015, at age 59, she developed an uncontrollable cough.
She was working at the time as an attendance clerk at Bill E. Young Jr. Middle School in Calipatria. At first she thought the cough was just her allergies acting up. Then the cough persisted and her voice grew hoarse. Sometimes she felt as if she were choking and close to passing out. She found it hard to function at work.
Peralta was diagnosed with asthma and she soon decided to retire.
Two years later, she keeps an inhaler ready at all times in case her asthma suddenly strikes. She has one inhaler in her bedroom, another in the kitchen and a third in her purse. She gets an allergy shot once a week.
When Peralta catches the odor of the Salton Sea in the breeze outside her house, she said she feels pressure in her sinuses and her speech changes, as if she’s losing her voice.
Some people describe the smell as resembling rotten eggs. Peralta said the odor seems like the stench of sewage and dead fish mixed together.
“It really affects me,” she said. “I just try not to be out there, especially when it’s windy.”
During most times of year, the prevailing winds blow out of the west and northwest, carrying dust from around the lake toward communities such as Calipatria and Niland.
Sitting in her living room on a breezy afternoon, Peralta said she dreads going grocery shopping because she knows she can’t stay out very long.
“I love gardening. I love to be outside. And now just to see that I can’t, I can’t be out there like I want to be out there, it’s really hard,” she said, her voice quavering as she held back tears. “I was even getting depressed.”
Peralta has turned to crocheting, which helps pass the time indoors, and sometimes ventures outside to her front-yard garden when the weather is calm enough. She’s managed to plant snapdragons and marigolds this year, though the garden is much sparser than usual.
She’s also tried wearing a mask outdoors to protect herself, but her eyeglasses fog up and she finds the mask uncomfortable. When the weather is breezy, she said she prefers not to take her chances.
“The way it is right now, I’m just a prisoner here inside. I can’t go outside,” Peralta said. “As soon as I step out the door, I right away start feeling it.”
Peralta has lived in Calipatria for nearly 50 years, and for years she has heard politicians talk about solving the sea’s problems.
“I hope it happens because I mean I’m 61,” she said. “I don’t know how long it’s going to take before it gets fixed and if I’ll be still alive by then. But I just feel that my style of life could be better.”
Inhalers on the baseball field
On Kaylee’s Little League team, four of the 11 players have asthma.
The coach, Keith Allison, said he watches his asthmatic players and is prepared to respond if any of them start gasping for air.
“I learned to start seeing the signs,” Allison said. “If they have trouble at all, then I have to pull them out of the game.”
Before one game in May, Kaylee prepared at home by taking a few breaths with an inhaler. She and her teammates also keep inhalers ready in the dugout or with their parents in case they need them.
“Keep your eye on the ball,” Eva shouted from the snack bar when her daughter went up to bat. “Send it out, Kaylee!”
Eva was preparing nachos at the snack bar alongside Nancy Rosiles, whose 8-year-old son Christopher has severe asthma. Rosiles said she often takes an inhaler to her son in the dugout. A few times this year, Christopher had an asthma attack on the field and she rushed him to the emergency room.
Rosiles keeps an eye out for the signs when he’s batting or playing in the outfield. He will seize up, his shoulders tense and his chest heaving as he struggles to breathe. It happened at a game a month ago.
“The game ended and he started coughing and coughing. I gave him his inhaler and he couldn’t stop,” Rosiles said, speaking in Spanish. She said he was standing up to leave with her when his legs gave out and he collapsed.
At home, he sleeps propped up with pillows. He sometimes starts coughing in the middle of the night.
“I sleep with the doors open because I need to be listening to his breathing all night long,” Rosiles said.
If he isn’t doing well enough in the morning, she keeps him home from school. She said Christopher has missed about 30 days of school this year.
“I do everything they tell me to do for him, but I don’t see that he’s getting any better,” Rosiles said, leaning on the counter. “I feel frustrated that I’m unable to help him. He also cries sometimes.”
She said Christopher wishes he could play soccer or basketball or run around like his friends.
“He can’t. The only sport he can play and not feel bad is baseball,” she said. And even playing baseball, the coach often pulls Christopher out after a couple of innings so he can rest.
While Rosiles chatted with Eva in the snack bar, Kaylee was playing left field. There was only a slight breeze, but dust drifted from the unpaved parking lot and the children stirred up dirt as they ran the bases.
On the bench, Kaylee took a couple of puffs from her inhaler. She then walked to her mother in the snack bar and took a third puff.
“I did it because I was running and the dust hit me and I started coughing,” Kaylee said.
Eva said she hopes that as the kids get older, they may eventually grow out of their asthma.
“I’ve actually considered moving from here, but it’s hard. My roots are here,” she said.
Eva said she’s afraid of how the asthma problems will worsen with more dust around the Salton Sea. She said state officials’ plan to cover portions of the lakebed with ponds and wetlands sounds good, but she still has doubts about their ability to deliver.
“Is it really going to happen?” she said. “I don’t see they have it as a priority.”
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Disappearing birds
As the Salton Sea deteriorates, bird populations are crashing
Written by Ian James. Photos and videos by Jay Calderon and Zoë Meyers.
A decade ago, Guy McCaskie would stand on the shore of the Salton Sea and marvel at the vast masses of birds that congregated on the water and flew overhead. Nowadays he looks out over the lake and is saddened by how few birds he sees.
Most of the American white pelicans have disappeared. So have most of the double-crested cormorants and eared grebes. McCaskie said these types of birds are vanishing because they can no longer find enough fish or other food in the lake.
“I see less than 10 percent of what I used to see out here,” McCaskie said while birdwatching on the south shore. “It’s really drastic.”
This lake in the California desert has long sustained one of the nation’s prime sanctuaries for migratory birds, and McCaskie is witnessing dramatic changes as the ecosystem unravels.
Other biologists and birdwatchers say they’re seeing the same troubling trend: Bird populations are crashing.
The Salton Sea, which is saltier than the ocean and getting progressively saltier, appears to be reaching an ecological tipping point that researchers have been predicting for years.
Rising salinity is projected to eventually render the lake unlivable for tilapia, a fish introduced decades ago that has become a vital food source for birds. Recent counts have found fewer fish-eating birds. The declining numbers of pelicans and cormorants suggest much of the lake is already so salty the fish can no longer reproduce and are dying out.
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The Salton Sea has been a rich oasis for birds for more than a century. The lake was formed starting in 1905, when floodwaters from the Colorado River burst though canals and filled the low-lying depression in the desert known as the Salton Sink, covering an ancient lakebed. Since then, agricultural runoff has sustained the Salton Sea and the lake has become a rare inland stopover point for birds along the Pacific Flyway, the great migratory route that stretches from Alaska and Canada to Central and South America.
Now, however, the amount of water flowing into the lake is gradually decreasing as more Colorado River water is transferred from the farmlands of the Imperial Valley to growing urban areas. In the coming decade, the lake will shrink more rapidly and its salinity will keep rising, threatening much of the bird habitat that remains.
In an attempt to intervene, California officials have announced plans to build thousands of acres of ponds and wetlands along portions of the receding shores over the next 10 years. The goal is to create new habitat where birds can survive while also covering up dry lakebed that would otherwise spew hazardous dust into the air.
Biologists and conservation groups have voiced support for the state’s plan, saying the more habitat the better — and as soon as possible, before more birds disappear.
McCaskie, a retired engineer, has been birding at the Salton Sea for most of his life and is a legend among California birders.
“I think a lot of birdwatchers have their patch, a place they like to go and keep track of what’s going on,” McCaskie said. “My patch is the south end of the Salton Sea.”
He remembers a very different Salton Sea when he first visited the shore in 1958 after moving to California from his native Scotland. At the time, the lake was in its heyday as a tourist destination and a popular fishing spot.
“I was impressed by the sheer numbers of birds, to the point that I wanted to keep going back,” he said. And come back he has, consistently for decades, driving to the desert from his coastal home in Imperial Beach. He’s been coming about once a week for more than 15 years.
Now 80, McCaskie still enjoys jotting down the species he finds and observing how the birds shift with the seasons. He has taken detailed notes for years, and he’s seeing decreasing numbers of most species at the sea.
Lately he has also been spotting emaciated carcasses of eared grebes washing ashore.
“You used to see a million eared grebes on the sea,” McCaskie said. Now he sees very few, and he said many of them “are in serious trouble up on the beach because they can’t find any food and they’re dying.”
As for the ponds and wetlands that are slated to be built, McCaskie doubts the state and federal governments are willing to allocate enough funding to truly head off the lake’s deterioration.
“I’m just seeing a pretty steady decline, which seems to be getting more rapid as we approach the end,” McCaskie said. “I honestly don’t think they’re going to be able to save much of the sea.”
‘It’s crashing’
California’s latest plan calls for building a patchwork of ponds and wetlands along the receding shores — approximately 29,800 acres of “constructed habitat” — between 2018 and 2028. Those projects will be concentrated along the northern and southern shores, near the rivers that bring farm runoff and wastewater. Some water from the lake will be pumped to the ponds and mixed with agricultural runoff to create habitat for fish and birds that’s less salty than the lake.
Most of the funding for California’s $383-million plan has yet to be approved by lawmakers. The state has budgeted $80.5 million so far to begin designing and building canals and ponds.
The state’s efforts are being led by Bruce Wilcox, the assistant secretary for Salton Sea policy at the California Natural Resources Agency. Wilcox is an ecologist who enjoys birdwatching at the sea and has participated in bird counts. He said it’s a major concern that the numbers of pelicans and cormorants are dwindling, and his aim is to create new habitats as quickly as possible to offset areas that are lost as the lake grows saltier.
“We wanted to be able to put things on the ground now,” Wilcox said, “because we need to stabilize habitat and we need to address dust.”
On a sunny afternoon outside the North Shore Yacht Club, Wilcox met Dan Cooper, a biologist who was finishing up a bird count, binoculars in hand. The two chatted about the lack of birds.
“We knew this would happen. It’s crashing,” said Cooper, who is conducting a series of bird surveys for the conservation group Audubon California. “We have found very few birds over most of the sea.”
The Salton Sea lies 233 feet below sea level in one of the hottest places in North America, where searing temperatures evaporate huge quantities of water, leaving growing concentrations of salt. The lake level has gone up and down over the years, reaching high levels in the 1990s and early 2000s. Since then, the Salton Sea has been declining as the amount of water flowing in has decreased.
Salton sea salinity
Salinity of the Salton Sea (in parts per thousand).
The salinity level now stands at nearly 60 parts per thousand. Seawater, by contrast, has salinity of about 35 parts per thousand. The lake’s salinity is projected to reach an estimated 153 parts per thousand in 2045.
Other lakes in the West, such as Mono Lake and the Great Salt Lake, have higher salinity levels than the Salton Sea. Those lakes still attract birds, though they’re different species that feed on creatures such as brine shrimp and brine flies rather than fish.
That matters, Cooper said, because California has lost more than 90 percent of its natural wetlands, and the Salton Sea has offered a rare inland sanctuary for many types of birds.
“This is really the last big wetland we have in the interior part of Southern California, so once this goes, that’s pretty much it — unless we start building a lot of other constructed wetlands,” Cooper said. “That’s probably the only solution.”
Birds may try to adapt by flying elsewhere to search for food. A century ago, migratory birds found the newly formed lake in the desert and altered their routes as they flew between the Sea of Cortez and wetlands to the north.
But the trouble is that the birds now have fewer places to turn. Expanding development has destroyed wetlands. So much water is drawn from the Colorado River that its delta in Mexico usually sits bone dry. Across the West, climate change is adding to the stresses on birds and other creatures from frogs to lizards.
Cooper lives in Ventura County and has been visiting the sea every other month since November to lead groups of volunteers in the surveys, which were started to gather more data on the declining bird populations.
Each year the National Audubon Society also holds its Christmas bird count in places across the country, including separate counts by volunteers at the north and south ends of the Salton Sea. Data from the latest surveys show the numbers of several key species were far below average last December.
On the south end, the number of cormorants declined from 15,326 in 2013 to 659 last year.
On the north end, the number of eared grebes – a migratory species that feeds on small fish and worms – plummeted from a recent high of 11,435 in 2012 to 192 in December. The number of white pelicans dropped from 12,506 in 2013 to just 859.
Cooper recalled that until recently, when he drove along the shore he’d see rafts of pelicans bobbing in the water and diving for fish.
“Those may be a thing of the past,” Cooper said. “The big birds are going.”
Rushing to preserve habitat
Over the years, mass fish die-offs have signaled the Salton Sea’s creeping deterioration.
The lake used to be filled with fish such as corvina, croaker and sargo, all of which disappeared as the lake grew saltier.
The nutrient-rich runoff from farms has also boosted the growth of algae. When the algae dies, it sinks to the bottom of the lake and decomposes along with other dead creatures, creating oxygen-deprived water filled with hydrogen sulfide, which smells like rotten eggs.
When windstorms periodically whip across the lake, they churn up the decaying material from the bottom, releasing a foul stench into the air. The winds also stir up the oxygen-poor water from the bottom, killing fish, worms and other small animals that birds prey on.
In the 1990s and 2000s, repeated die-offs left millions of fish floating on the surface and washing ashore.
While the shores are still littered with fish skeletons, no one has reported mass die-offs of tilapia in the past several years – another sign that there may be few fish left in the sea.
Late last year, the Audubon Society released what it called a “road map” for preserving bird habitat at the Salton Sea. Using data from 1999 and 2015, the group found that birds use about 58,000 acres of habitat around the edges of the lake, with different birds requiring different types of habitat. The most popular habitat type, Audubon researchers found, was deep water, followed by mudflats and shallow water, mid-depth water, playa and wetlands with vegetation.
The state’s 10-year plan calls for building 29,800 acres of wetlands and dust projects on exposed playa, but the receding shoreline will continue to provide some additional habitat even as salinity levels increase, said Andrea Jones, the report’s lead author and director of bird conservation for Audubon California. She pointed out that several thousand additional acres are already managed for conservation in areas such as the Sonny Bono Salton Sea National Wildlife Refuge.
“This plan is really a framework,” Jones said. “It’s a great start, but it’s going to need a lot more detail before we can say, ‘This is going to go a long way toward supporting the birds.’”
The Audubon Society is helping the state estimate how much water would be needed to maintain the ponds and wetlands. One key question will be what types of habitats it makes sense to build given the limited amount of water available – whether habitat for fish-eating birds, shorebirds or other species.
Al Kalin, who farms near the lake’s southern shore, has also witnessed the sharp declines in some bird species. He said that while it may sound like a good idea for the state to build deep-water habitat for fish and fish-eating birds, that approach may be too little, too late.
“It doesn’t make sense to me that you go ahead with a plan of building ponds to grow fish for fish-eating birds when the birds have already left,” Kalin said. He suggested the water could be better used in shallow ponds where shorebirds could forage for worms and other food in the mud.
While Wilcox and other state officials consider options, they’re aware that ecological changes are unfolding rapidly.
At the national wildlife refuge, biologists have been finding the bony carcasses of eared grebes. They’ve collected some of the mud-covered birds and sent them to a lab to determine the cause of death.
Last year, hundreds of the birds perished. Lab tests confirmed they starved.
Watching the birds disappear
Once a week, McCaskie sets out in his white Toyota RAV4 for a day of birding at the Salton Sea. He leaves his home about 4 a.m. so he can make it to the area before sunrise.
He doesn’t bring any bird book to identify species because he doesn’t need one.
“If I see something I don’t know, it won’t be in the book,” McCaskie said.
More than a decade ago, McCaskie co-authored the book “Birds of the Salton Sea.” He keeps a detailed list of the species that have been documented in and around the sea, including surrounding desert areas and farmland. There are 446 species on the list.
In a typical daylong outing, McCaskie spots between 110 and 130 types of birds. “You should never see less than a hundred species of birds,” he said.
Arriving at one of his birding spots in the national wildlife refuge, McCaskie got out of his car and looked at the shallow water using his binoculars and telescope. He pointed out American avocets, ruddy ducks and black skimmers.
“Have a look. The skimmers are sunning themselves,” he said with a smile. After another look through the telescope, he said: “That’s a red-necked phalarope. It nests in the Arctic tundra.”
McCaskie didn’t see any western sandpipers. He expected to find gulls congregating along the shore, but they were absent, too.
“I was hoping that we would have some shorebirds down in here, but that’s not to be,” he said.
At the end of the day, he prepared his notes with tallies of the birds he saw along the shore and in surrounding areas, from 25 brown pelicans to a single white-crowned sparrow. He spotted 116 species in all.
While that overall count hasn’t changed much yet, McCaskie has noticed a couple of species, such as wood storks, have completely disappeared. He has also seen sudden changes in the types of birds that are coming to nest.
Great blue herons are still building nests atop snags protruding from the water. But McCaskie said other birds that rely on fish – such as Caspian terns, least terns and Forster's terns – aren’t nesting at the sea this year.
“We’ve got to be very close to the point where it can’t support life. And nobody’s doing anything fast enough to stop it,” McCaskie said. “I think that the cost to actually do something is so high that they’re avoiding it.”
One of the sites where ponds and wetlands are being built is Red Hill Bay in the national wildlife refuge, where the shore has receded more than a mile during the past decade. Berms have been constructed on the dry lakebed, and the area will be flooded to create 500 acres of shallow wetlands.
This new habitat should provide a haven for ducks and geese in the winter and a feeding area for migrating shorebirds in the spring and fall, McCaskie said. Islands in the new wetlands should create a nesting spot for terns.
Still, the restoration project at Red Hill Bay will cover only a tiny fraction of the thousands of acres of lakebed that have been left dry and exposed.
McCaskie said it makes him sad to see this rich ecosystem falling apart.
“It was unique and it’s going,” he said. “I feel sorry for the people that follow after me. They’re going to be missing out.”
What keeps him coming back to watch the deterioration of a place he loves? Partly, it’s curiosity. Every time he comes to the lake, he finds new wrinkles in the shifting numbers of birds.
“I’m just sort of stuck in the mud coming out here now. I just can’t pull myself away from it,” he said, standing on the shore.
But there’s also a larger purpose behind his dedication and the extensive notes he takes: keeping a record of the sea’s demise and the birdlife that’s being lost.
Desert Sun reporter Sammy Roth contributed to this story.
Reengineering the sea
Two paths for long-term fixes at California’s shrinking sea
Written by Ian James and Sammy Roth. Photos and videos by Zoë Meyers and Jay Calderon.
Near the southeastern shore of the Salton Sea, hot steam bubbles up from the earth and gurgles out of mud volcanos, rising into the air.
This active geothermal zone runs along the San Andreas Fault, where geologic forces allow the Earth’s natural heat to rise near the surface, creating one of the world's most powerful geothermal hot spots. The energy reservoir extends beneath the Salton Sea, where underwater vents release steam that rises in boiling circles of bubbles on the lake’s surface.
As California officials struggle to decide on long-term fixes for the receding lake, there’s new momentum around an old idea: importing seawater from Mexico’s Sea of Cortez, and using the area’s plentiful geothermal power to desalinate that water. A subsidiary of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Energy, which already operates 10 geothermal plants in the area, is developing a seawater desalination proposal and has pitched it to lawmakers in Sacramento.
The idea of piping in water to the Salton Sea has long drawn passionate advocates, including many people who live around the lake and want to see it restored to the thriving tourist mecca it was decades ago. While some government officials havedismissed seawater import as impractical or too expensive, Bruce Wilcox, California’s Salton Sea czar, hasn’t ruled it out. He’s been considering proposals from people who think importing seawater could work.
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“Ten years ago, five years ago even, I think it was, ‘Let’s do something so these people will leave us alone,’ quite frankly,” said Wilcox, the assistant secretary for Salton Sea policy at California’s Natural Resources Agency. “Now I think it’s, ‘You know what, there’s some merit there. Is there a way to make it work?’ There are still a lot of hurdles.”
Wilcox hopes to reach a decision on a long-term strategy for the Salton Sea in 2018. He cautioned that plans to bring in water from the Sea of Cortez or the Pacific Ocean face significant obstacles, including complicated engineering, hefty costs that could reach into the billions of dollars and — in the Sea of Cortez scenario —a long-term agreement with the Mexican government.
The Trump administration has only made that harder, said Michael Cohen, a researcher with the Pacific Institute and a member of the state’s Salton Sea Long Range Planning Committee.
“Given their push for building a big wall, that doesn’t really create good neighbors and it doesn’t seem that that’s going to make Mexico very willing to cooperate on a U.S. issue,” Cohen said.
A ‘smaller but sustainable’ future
Many advocates of Salton Sea revitalization say California’s 10-year plan for the lake, which was released in March, is a good start. But even though state officials promised to restore the Salton Sea back in 2003, their 10-year plan will leave more than half of the dry lakebed exposed. And they still don’t know what they’re going to do beyond 2028, as the lake’s decline speeds up and more toxic dust is blown from the exposed lakebed, polluting the region’s air.
In the long term, officials are leaning toward building a “perimeter lake,” which would stretch more than 60 miles around the Salton Sea’s current shoreline. The local Salton Sea Authority has been working on that plan for a few years, and Wilcox estimated the total long-term cost at around $2 billion. He said the perimeter lake would be 10-12 feet deep in places and would vary in width from about 900 feet to nearly three miles, covering large stretches of exposed lakebed.
The perimeter lake idea reflects a popular mantra among state and local officials: the need for a “smaller but sustainable” Salton Sea. If officials go that route, it would preclude seawater import.
“I think a smaller but sustainable sea points toward the perimeter lake,” Wilcox said. “Right now we’re more confident that that will work than we are that water import will work.”
But as difficult as importing seawater would be, it’s not clear a perimeter lake is feasible, either.
A plan prepared for the Salton Sea Authority last year estimated that building an earthen levee for the perimeter lake would cost $9.4 million per mile, which at a total length of 66.7 miles would come to about $627 million for the levee alone. Wilcox said the perimeter lake could be built in pieces, reducing the costs. The state is also studying how much water would be needed.
“I’d like to get us a position where we can put aside either water import or 'smaller but sustainable sea' and concentrate on what we’re going to do moving into the future,” Wilcox said. “Because those are two different, divergent directions and we need to make that decision.”
Berkshire Hathaway eyes the Sea of Cortez
State officials have set a high bar for considering water import proposals. Anyone who wants a plan to be considered will need to pay for their own engineering and feasibility studies — a process that could cost more than $1 million, Wilcox acknowledged at a recent public meeting.
Several companies are thinking about doing feasibility studies. One of them is Berkshire Hathaway Energy’s CalEnergy subsidiary, which owns all but one of the 11 geothermal power plants nearthe southern shore of the Salton Sea.
State Sen. Bob Hertzberg, D-Van Nuys, said he recently met with officials from Berkshire Hathaway Energy, who presented a concept for importing water from the Sea of Cortez and using geothermal energy to desalinate the water. Randy Keller, CalEnergy’s director of development, acknowledged the company is “looking at” seawater import but declined to share details.
Desalinated seawater could be used to boost the lake level and to create less salty habitat for fish and birds.
“We have more private-sector interest in water import now than we have in the past,” Wilcox said. “There are several organizations that are considering building something like this themselves and then entering into agreements with the state or the federal government or the water agencies to purchase water.”
Wilcox has fielded all sorts of proposals for importing water to the Salton Sea, including an Illinois businessman’s idea of sending in a “water train” from the Midwest to refill the lake. Some of the proposals involve building a double channel or pipeline that would transport seawater to the Salton Sea and send a flow of saltier water back out to the ocean.
“As we get further and further into this, we understand more and more that water import is difficult,” Wilcox said. “But we’re still going to look at it.”
Wilcox said he thinks some of the water import proposals aren’t viable, and others might work but will require more study. If Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Energy decides to move forward with a geothermal desalination proposal, the company’s plan would have one big thing going for it: Berkshire’s $620 billion in total assets.
Another proposal involves piping in brackish groundwater from desalination plants in the Inland Empire, which currently send that salty water to the Pacific Ocean. The Santa Ana Watershed Project Authority, which operates those desalting facilities, has discussed building a pipeline to send the plants’ moderately salty wastewater to the Salton Sea instead, although that proposal could also face major hurdles.
“We’re putting this water into the ocean, so maybe there’s a better use for it,” said Celeste Cantú, the authority’s general manager. She said the plants don’t produce enough water to keep the Salton Sea at its current level, but might provide enough water to wet down exposed lakebed.
“I think the Salton Sea is the biggest health-related water challenge in California, and we have to embrace solving that,” she said.
Kevin Kelley, general manager of the Imperial Irrigation District, said he thinks importing water is a good idea, “but it’s got a longer fuse, and my concern is that it becomes a distraction from the job at hand, which is to address the next 10 years and a dramatically receding shoreline.”
'We will stay here no matter what'
Whatever approach California chooses for the Salton Sea, it will be a massive engineering project. And it won’t end with construction. The new infrastructure — whether a perimeter lake, canals, pipelines or some other engineering solution — will need to be maintained indefinitely.
“This is going to always be a managed system,” Wilcox said. “So whatever you do, whatever you put in up there, the days of just letting the water run into it and let happen what happens are over.”
The Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians take a long-term view, too.
The tribe’s reservation straddles the northern end of the Salton Sea, and tribal leaders plan to build wetlands on a dry 85-acre site near the water to keep down dust and provide habitat for fish. Alberto Ramirez, who manages the wetlands project, said the Torres Martinez have already secured funding from local and federal agencies, and they hope to complete the project by fall 2018. To build the wetlands, the tribe will use groundwater pumped from beneath the reservation.
For the Torres Martinez, finding fixes for the Salton Sea is imperative. They have no plans to pack up and leave.
“We’re always going to be here,” said Thomas Tortez, the tribal chairperson. “We see it as our land since the beginning of time. The Creator gave us this land, the Creator put us here, so we will always be here. Given the choice, we will stay here no matter what.”
In the long term, tribal leaders are hopeful for the Salton Sea. They don’t know what the solutions will be, but they know their ancestors watched as the Salton Sink filled with water and emptied out again over the course of millennia, alternating between inland sea and bone-dry desert. Tribal traditions speak of a sea that returns even from insurmountable circumstances.
“The tribe values our elders and our children, so those are the ones we’re concerned with. We don’t want the sea to dry up and have the toxins be airborne,” Tortez added. “We want the sea to be a live sea again. We hope that one day we’ll have an inflow and outflow, it will be recreational again, and we can save our elders and our children.”
California’s Dying Sea was produced by The Desert Sun and the USA TODAY NETWORK in collaboration with the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism’s JOVRNALISM class. The project features a four-part series by Desert Sun journalists and virtual-reality stories produced by student journalists in partnership with The Desert Sun.
Special thanks to JOVRNALISM professor Robert Hernandez, USC professor Stuart Sender and drone journalist Ben Kreimer. The USC students who produced the project include: Zara Abrams, Amber Bragdon, Judy Cai, Helen Carefoot, Taylor du Pont, Gabby Fernandez, Magali Gauthier, Luis Hernandez, Jutta Hoegmander, Sara Krevoy, Noorhan Maamoon, Giovanni Moujaes (lead editor and producer), Cameron Quon (who also produced the credits), Marie Targonski-O’Brien, Kacey Weiniger, and Jordan Winters (who narrated the stories).
Desert Sun journalists involved in the project include: Ian James, Sammy Roth, Zoë Meyers, Sarah Day Owen, Jill Castellano, Greg Burton, Jay Calderon, Richard Lui, Denise Figueroa and Kate Franco.
USA TODAY journalists involved: Pim Linders, Shawn Sullivan, Mitchell Thorson and Karl Gelles.
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The injustice of Atlantic City’s floods.
New Jersey's working class are forgotten as federal government funds fixes for wealthier neighbors.
Coastal communities are enduring growing flood risks from rising seas, with places like Atlantic City, sandwiched between a bay and the ocean, facing some of the greatest threats. Guided by new research by Climate Central’s Scott Kulp and Benjamin Strauss, reporter John Upton and photographer Ted Blanco chronicled the plight of this city’s residents as they struggle to deal with the impacts. Upton spent months investigating how the city is adapting, revealing vast inequity between the rich and the poor.
By John Upton
May 10, 2017
ATLANTIC CITY, NJ - A driver plowed a sedan forcefully up Arizona Avenue, which had flooded to knee height during a winter storm as high tide approached. The wake from the passing Honda buffeted low brick fences lining the tidy homes of working-class residents of this failing casino city, pushing floodwaters into Eileen DeDomenicis’s living room.
“It wasn’t bad when we first moved in here — the flooding wasn’t bad,” DeDomenicis said on a stormy morning in March, after helping her husband put furniture on blocks. She counted down until the tide would start to ebb, using a yardstick to measure the height of floodwaters climbing her patio stairs. She was tracking how many more inches it would take to inundate the ground floor. “When somebody comes by in a car, it splashes up. It hits the door.”
DeDomenicis has lived in this house since 1982, a few hundred feet from a bay. She used to work as a restaurant server; now she’s a school crossing guard. Her husband walked a mile to his job at Bally’s Casino until he retired in January. They’ve seen floods worsen as the seas have risen, as the land beneath them has sunk, and as local infrastructure has rotted away. “It comes in the front door, the back door, and then from the bottom of the house, in through the sides,” DeDomenicis said. “You watch it come in and it meets in the middle of the house — and there’s nothing you can do.”
Eileen DeDomenicis on the patio of her home on Arizona Avenue as a high tide and rain cause flooding in parts of Atlantic City. Credit: Ted Blanco/Climate Central
Two miles east of Arizona Avenue, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is spending tens of millions of dollars building a seawall to reduce storm surge and flooding risks for Atlantic City’s downtown and its towering casinos, five of which have closed in the past four years. A few miles in the other direction, it’s preparing to spend tens of millions more on sand dunes to protect million-dollar oceanfront homes.
But the federal government has done little to protect the residents of Arizona Avenue, or the millions of other working class and poor Americans who live near bays up and down the East Coast, from a worsening flooding crisis. Seas are rising as pollution from fossil fuel burning, forest losses and farming fuels global warming, melting ice and expanding ocean water. With municipal budgets stretched thin, lower-income neighborhoods built on low-lying land are enduring some of the worst impacts.
Climate Central scientists analyzed hundreds of coastal American cities and, in 90 of them, projected rapid escalation in the number of roads and homes facing routine inundation. The flooding can destroy vehicles, damage homes, block roads and freeways, hamper emergency operations, foster disease spread by mosquitoes, and cause profound inconveniences for coastal communities.
Atlantic City is among those facing the greatest risks, yet much of the high-value property that the Army Corps is working to protect was built on a higher elevation and faces less frequent flooding than neighborhoods occupied by working class and unemployed residents — an increasing number of whom are living in poverty.
Earthen mounds called bulkheads built along Atlantic City’s shores to block floods have washed away, or were never built in the first place. Flap valves in aging storm drains have stopped working, allowing water to flow backward from the bay into the street when tides are high. At high tide, stormwater pools in Arizona Avenue, unable to drain to the bay. The flooding is getting worse because seas have been rising along the mid-Atlantic coast faster than in most other regions, and the land here is sinking because of groundwater pumping and natural processes. High tides in Atlantic City reach more than a foot higher than they did a century ago and sea level rise is accelerating.
New Jersey has done little to address the problem, aside from administering federal grants that have helped a limited number of residents abandon or elevate vulnerable houses. “We expect each town to focus on planning and budgeting for mitigating flooding,” said New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection spokesman Bob Considine. Atlantic City can nary afford the kinds of capital improvements needed to provide meaningful relief.
The Army Corps last year began a study of bay flooding in a sweeping stretch of New Jersey covering Atlantic City and 88 other municipalities, home to an estimated 700,000. The study was authorized by Congress in 1987, but it wasn’t kickstarted until federal research identified widespread risks following Superstorm Sandy.
Video by Ted Blanco
The bay flooding study is “fairly early in the process,” said Joseph Forcina, a senior Army Corps official who is overseeing more than $4 billion worth of post-Sandy recovery work by the agency, including construction of a $34 million seawall in downtown Atlantic City and tens of millions of dollars worth of sand dune construction and replenishment nearby. The study is expected to take more than two years. “We really are in the data-gathering mode.”
The study will help the agency propose a plan, which Congress could consider funding, to ease flood risks when high tides and storms push seawater from bays into streets and homes. It will consider the effects of sea level rise but it won’t directly address flooding from poor drainage of rainwater, meaning any fixes spurred by the study are likely to be partial at best. “The Corps is not the agency that deals with interior drainage,” Forcina said. “That’s a local responsibility.”
Floods are driving up insurance rates, while routinely causing property damage and inconveniences. Federal flood insurance promotes coastal living in high-risk areas, and the program is more than $20 billion in arrears following Hurricane Katrina and Sandy. Arizona Avenue residents received Federal Emergency Management Agency letters in March warning of insurance rate increases ahead of 5 to 18 percent a year, which “makes us want to leave even more,” said Tom Gitto.
Raising three children on Arizona Avenue, Gitto and his wife have been unemployed since the closure last year of Trump Taj Mahal, where they worked. He said the flooding has become unbearable but property prices are so low that they feel trapped. Two houses on Arizona Avenue recently sold for less than $35,000. Gitto paid a similar price for his fixer-upper in the 1990s, then spent more than the purchase price on renovations. Flood insurance provided $36,000 for another refurbishment after Sandy ravaged their home.
Flooding strikes the Jersey Shore so often now that the National Weather Service’s office in Mount Holly, N.J., raised the threshold at which it issues flood advisories by more than 3 inches in 2012 “to avoid creating warning fatigue,” flooding program manager Dean Iovino said. Such advisories were being issued nearly every month in Atlantic City before the policy change, up from an average of four months a year in the 1980s.
One out of 10 of the 20,000 homes in Atlantic City are at elevations that put them at risk of flooding each year on average, Climate Central found, though some are protected by bulkheads and other infrastructure that help keep floods at bay. The research was published Wednesday in the journal Climatic Change.
The proportion of the city’s streets and homes affected by flooding is projected to quickly rise. Within about 30 years — the typical life of a mortgage — one out of three homes in Atlantic City could be inundated in a typical year. That would be the case even if aggressive efforts to slow climate change are put in place, such as a rapid global switch from fossil fuels to clean energy.
The worsening woes aren’t confined to Atlantic City, though risks here are among the greatest in America. Neighborhoods near bays can experience rapid increases in the number of streets and homes exposed to regular floods, with small additional sea level capable of reaching far into flat cityscapes and suburbs.
Elsewhere at the Jersey Shore, in Ocean City, N.J., the analysis showed one out of five homes are built on land expected to flood in typical years, a figure that could rise to nearly half by 2050. Other cities facing rapid increases in risks include San Mateo along San Francisco Bay in Silicon Valley, the lumber town of Aberdeen at Grays Harbor in Washington state, and Poquoson, Va., which has a population of 12,000 and juts into the Chesapeake Bay.
The greenhouse gas pollution that’s already been pumped into the atmosphere makes it too late to prevent coastal flooding from getting worse. It’s simply a matter of how much worse.
The benefits of acting now to slow the effects of warming later would become clearest in the second half of this century. In Atlantic City, if global pollution trends continue and defenses are not improved, 80 percent of current homes risk being inundated in typical years by the end of the century, the analysis showed. By contrast, if greenhouse gas pollution is aggressively reduced almost immediately, the number of homes expected to be exposed to that risk in 2100 would fall to 60 percent.
As efforts to protect the climate founder in the U.S. and elsewhere, unleashing higher temperatures and seas, communities like the DeDomenicises’ have three basic options for adapting. They can defend against floods with infrastructure that keeps tidal waters at bay, such as bulkheads, pumps, and marsh and dune restorations. They can accommodate the water using measures such as elevating existing houses and building new ones on stilts. And they can relocate altogether, an option that’s expected to lead to mass migrations inland during the decades ahead.
Modeling by University of Georgia demographer Mathew Hauer projects 250,000 being forced by rising seas from New Jersey by century’s end if pollution levels remain high, with nearly 1.5 million refugees fleeing to Texas from U.S. coasts elsewhere. And from Florida — the poster child for sea level dangers in the U.S. — 2.5 million may be driven to other states.
All three strategies are being pursued to some extent in Atlantic City. All of them are expensive, limiting the options available for a city in decline. “Cities boom and bust,” said Benjamin Strauss, coauthor of the new study and vice president for sea level and climate impacts at Climate Central, which researches and reports on climate change. “Neighborhoods can thrive, and fall into decay. Those are, to some extent, natural cycles of economic life. But now, superimposed onto that for Atlantic City at just the wrong time is this awful existential sea level threat.”
The Army Corps is building a seawall to protect downtown Atlantic City from floods caused by storm surges. Credit: Ted Blanco/Climate Central
Barrier islands like Absecon Island, upon which Atlantic City grew as a gaming and vacation mecca, line the East Coast, from New York to Florida, natural features associated with the coastline’s wide continental shelf and shallow waters. Until barrier islands were developed and armored with seawalls, roads and building foundations, low-lying shores facing the mainland could keep up with rising seas. Wind and waves washed sand and mud over growing marshes, helping to build up the land. Now a century of development has locked down the shape and position of the islands, blocking natural processes.
“It’s a huge problem for the U.S.,” said Benjamin Horton, a professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, which is a global leader in researching sea rise. “These barrier islands are important for so many things — important for housing, important for the economy. They’re important for a variety of industries. They’re especially important for ecosystems. And the barriers protect the mainland from hurricanes; they’re a first line of defense. You lose the barrier islands and where do you think the big waves are going to hit?”
As barrier islands and mainland coastlines were developed, wealthy neighborhoods clustered near ocean shores, where the elevations tend to be higher, which reduces flood risks, and where views are considered the best. Lower-income neighborhoods and industrial zones grew over former marshlands near bays and rivers, where swampy smells are strongest and where flooding occurs most frequently.
That divide between rich and poor is clearly on display on Absecon Island, where stately houses built on higher land facing the ocean are often occupied only during summer — when risks of storms are lowest. The vacation homes and downtown Atlantic City casinos will be protected from storm surges by a new seawall and sand dunes built by the Army Corps, despite lawsuits filed by homeowners angry that dunes will block ocean views.
Poorer neighborhoods are exemplified by Arizona Avenue, a block-long street between a bay and a minor thoroughfare. Bricks in fences and walls are stained by floodwaters and decaying beneath the effects of wakes from passing cars. The century-old, two-story houses have concrete patios and little landscaping — plants are hard to grow in the flood-prone conditions.
During high tides that accompany new and full moons, the street can flood on sunny days. Rubber trash cans can be buoyant in floodwaters, tip over and foul the street with spoiled food and bathroom waste, which residents sweep away after floods recede. Cars are frequently destroyed. Many of the houses along Arizona Avenue had to be stripped and renovated after Sandy filled them with floodwaters and coated walls and ceilings with mold.
The winter storm that inundated Arizona Avenue in March was a typical one for the region. The nor’easter struck during a full moon, meaning it coincided with some of the highest tides of the month. Floodwaters stopped rising a few inches beneath the DeDomenicises’ front door. Emergency crews patrolled in vehicles built to withstand high water. These kinds of floods are called “nuisance floods” by experts.
Nuisance floods are becoming routine features of coastal living around America, and their impacts are difficult to assess. Washington and other major cities could experience an average of one flood caused by tides and storm surges every three days within 30 years, according to a study published by researchers with the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists in the journal PLOS One in February. Rain and snow that fall during storms increase flood risks.
Residents of Arizona Avenue describe anxiety when tides and storms bring floods, especially if they aren’t home to help protect their possessions. The rising floodwaters can be emotional triggers — reminders of the upheaving effects of floods wrought by major storms like Sandy in late 2012 and Winter Storm Jonas in early 2016. Some of the residents have spent months living in hotels while their homes were repaired following storms. One of Tom Gitto’s children was born while the family was living in a hotel room paid for by the federal government after Sandy.
Susan Clayton, a psychology and environmental studies professor who researches psychological responses to climate change at the College of Wooster, a liberal arts college in Ohio, said such triggers can lead to sleeping difficulties, “profound anxiety” and other symptoms. The frequent risk of flooding may also make people constantly fear for their homes and for the security their homes provide.
“It tends to be very important to everybody that they have some place that they feel they can relax, where they can be in control,” Clayton said. “Your home is your castle. When your home is threatened, that can really undermine a sense of stability and security. It’s not just the flooding, it’s the idea that it’s your home itself that’s being threatened.”
The economic impacts of nuisance floods can also be far-reaching — researchers say they’re more impactful than most government officials assume. “Since they don’t get a lot of attention, we don’t have a data record of nuisance flooding costs,” said Amir AghaKouchak, a University of California, Irvine, scientist who studies hydrology and climatology.
Cars and vans can create wakes when they’re driven through floods in Atlantic City’s bay neighborhoods. Credit: Ted Blanco/Climate Central
AghaKouchak led a study published in the journal Earth’s Future in February that attempted to quantify the economic impacts in large coastal cities. The researchers were hamstrung by the dearth of data. Their preliminary findings, however, suggested that the cumulative economic impacts of nuisance floods might already exceed those of occasional disaster floods in some areas.
“There’s a lot of cost associated with this minor event,” AghaKouchak said. “Cities and counties have to send out people with trucks, pumps and so forth, they have to close down streets, build temporary berms.”
On Arizona Avenue, residents say they feel abandoned by all levels of government. Like an Appalachian coal town, many here depend upon a single industry — an entertainment sector that’s in decline, anchored by casinos that draw visitors to hotels, arcades, restaurants, gas stations and strip clubs.
“They forget about us,” said Christopher Macaluso, a 30-year old poker dealer who owns a house on Arizona Avenue and grew up nearby. “We’re the city. If they didn’t have the dealers, the dishwashers, the valet guys, the cooks and the housemaids, what have you got? We definitely feel left out.”
With casinos operating in nearby Pennsylvania and elsewhere following the lifting of gambling bans, the flow of visitors to Atlantic City has slowed over a decade from a gush to a trickle. Some towering casino buildings stand abandoned, like empty storefronts in a dying downtown. Others are filled well below capacity with gamers and vacationers; their gaudy interiors faded and gloomy.
One out of every six jobs in Atlantic City was lost between 2010 and 2016 as nearly 5 percent of the population left, according to the latest regional economic report by New Jersey’s Stockton University, which is building a campus in the city. The number of Atlantic City residents using food stamps rose to 15 percent in 2015, and more than one out of every five children here is now officially living in poverty.
President Trump’s construction of two ill-fated casinos in a saturated industry intensified the Atlantic City gaming bubble that began its spectacular burst a decade ago. (As president, Trump is dismantling regulations designed to slow sea rise and other effects of warming.) The city is so broke that its government operations are being overseen by New Jersey.
Flooding in Fairmount Avenue near Arizona Avenue at high tide during a storm. Credit: Ted Blanco/Climate Central
“From the moment they started pulling handles in Pennsylvania, the cash that was pouring into slot machines in Atlantic City started to fall,” said Stockton University’s Oliver Cooke, who compares the city’s economic plight to that of Detroit. “As the economy melted down and the land valuations in the city headed south, the tax base just completely melted away.”
Unable to pay for far-reaching measures taken by wealthier waterfront regions, like road-raising in Miami Beach and sweeping marsh restorations in the San Francisco Bay Area, Atlantic City has taken only modest steps to ease flooding.
Using funds from a bond sale and state and federal grants, the city has been refurbishing sluice gates in a canal that were built to control floodwaters but haven’t worked in more than half a century. It plans to replace flap valves in two stormwater drains near Arizona Avenue for $16,000 apiece. “We’re treating that money like gold,” said Elizabeth Terenik, who was Atlantic City’s planning director until last month, when she left its shrinking workforce for a job with a flood-prone township nearby.
That’s far shy of the tens of millions of dollars being spent just blocks away. The Army Corps is using Sandy recovery money to alleviate hazards in wealthier parts of the city and elsewhere on Absecon Island and in New York and other nearby states, while flooding affecting low-income residents of Arizona Avenue and similar neighborhoods is overlooked.
“The Corps does not say, ‘Here’s a problem, and we’re going to fix it’ — somebody has to ask them to help,” said Gerald Galloway, a University of Maryland engineering professor and former Army Corps official. “It depends on a very solid citizen push to get it done. The Corps of Engineers has a backlog of construction awaiting money. You need very strong organizations competing for it.”
Coastal New Jersey’s working class have little power in Washington and their cities manage modest budgets. The divide in Atlantic City reflects a grand injustice of global warming — one that’s familiar to Pacific nations facing obliteration from rising seas, and to Alaskan tribes settled by the government on shrinking coasts. While the wealthy may be able to adapt to the effects of climate change, the poor oftentimes cannot.
“In some cases, the most vulnerable populations will not be able to move,” said Miyuki Hino, a Stanford PhD candidate who has studied coastal resettlements around the world. “In other cases, they’ll be forced to.”
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from rand.org
Rising waters threaten China's rising cities.
In the Pearl River Delta, breakneck development is colliding with the effects of climate change. Climate change works like an opportunistic pathogen, worsening existing woes, not acting alone.
Rising Waters Threaten China's Rising Cities
In the Pearl River Delta, breakneck development is colliding with the effects of climate change.
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN, Photographs by JOSH HANER
GUANGZHOU, China — The rains brought torrents, pouring into basements and malls, the water swiftly rising a foot and a half.
Changing Climate, Changing Cities
How climate change is challenging the world’s urban centers.
Mexico City
Part 1
The city of Dongguan, a manufacturing center here in the world’s most dynamic industrial region, was hit especially hard by the downpour in May 2014. More than 100 factories and shops were inundated. Water climbed knee-high in 20 minutes, wiping out inventory for dozens of businesses.
Next door in Guangzhou, an ancient, mammoth port city of 13 million, helicopters and a fleet of 80 boats had to be sent to rescue trapped residents. Tens of thousands lost their homes, and 53 square miles of nearby farmland were ruined. The cost of repairs topped $100 million.
Chen Rongbo, who lived in the city, saw the flood coming. He tried to scramble to safety on the second floor of his house, carrying his 6-year-old granddaughter. He slipped. The flood swept both of them away.
Flooding has been a plague for centuries in southern China’s Pearl River Delta. So even the rains that May, the worst in the area in years, soon drifted from the headlines. People complained and made jokes on social media about wading through streets that had become canals and riding on half-submerged buses through lakes that used to be streets. But there was no official hand-wringing about what caused the floods or how climate change might bring more extreme storms and make the problems worse.
A generation ago, this was mostly farmland. Three vital rivers leading to the South China Sea, along with a spider’s web of crisscrossing tributaries, made the low-lying delta a fertile plain, famous for rice. Guangzhou, formerly Canton, had more than a million people, but by the 1980s, China set out to transform the whole region, capitalizing on its proximity to water, the energy of its people, and the money and port infrastructure of neighboring Hong Kong.
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Rushing to catch up after decades of stagnation, China built a gargantuan collection of cities the size of nations with barely a pause to consider their toll on the environment, much less the future impact of global warming. Today, the region is a goliath of industry with a population exceeding 42 million.
But while prosperity reshaped the social and cultural geography of the delta, it didn’t fundamentally alter the topography. Here, as elsewhere, breakneck development comes up against the growing threat of climate change. Economically, Guangzhou now has more to lose from climate change than any other city on the planet, according to a World Bank report. Nearby Shenzhen, another booming metropolis, ranked 10th on that World Bank list, which measured risk as a percentage of gross domestic product.
While it is difficult to attribute any single storm or heat wave to climate change, researchers say there is abundant evidence that the effects of climate change can already be seen — in higher water levels, increasing temperatures and ever-more severe storms.
And climate change not only poses a menace to those who live and work here, or to the massive concentration of wealth and investment. It is also a threat to a world that has grown dependent on everything produced in the area’s factories.
Some of the liveliest parts of Guangzhou are near the water, and are being flooded more and more often.
The rising South China Sea and the overstressed Pearl River network lie just a meter or so below much of this new multitrillion-dollar development — and they are poised to drown decades of progress, scrambling global supply chains and raising prices on a world of goods like smartphones, T-shirts, biopharmaceuticals and even the tiny springs inside your ballpoint pens.
As always, climate change works like an opportunistic pathogen, worsening existing woes, not acting alone. This can make it hard to pin down, easy to dismiss. Notoriously, China today is crippled by air pollution, linked to local emissions from coal-fired power plants, steel factories and cars. New research shows that rising temperatures and stagnant air resulting from climate change — caused largely by worldwide emissions of carbon dioxide — are exacerbating China’s smog crisis, which has contributed to millions of premature deaths.
The Chinese government has become an outspoken voice on climate change. President Xi Jinping, who is meeting this week with President Trump, has urged the signatories of the 2015 Paris climate accord to follow through on their pledge, while state-run Chinese media has criticized the Trump administration for “brazenly shirking its responsibility on climate change.”
China is now the world leader in domestic investment in renewable energy, and over the past decade the central authorities in Beijing have made environmental performance a higher priority for civil servants. But stronger mandates haven’t yet overcome the pace of expansion, a decentralized fiscal system, lax enforcement and a culture that frequently pits growth against green. The country continues to consume as much coal as the rest of the world combined, and to increase its steel capacity.
Villagers in their flooded home after rainstorms pounded Guangdong Province in May 2014. Bobo Deng — ImagineChina, via Associated Press
Here in Guangdong Province, all the new cars, the concrete and the belching factories spike temperatures, endangering sick and elderly people, creating urban heat islands and incubating pandemics like dengue fever, an outbreak of which slammed Guangzhou in 2014, afflicting 47,000 people.
On top of this are the floods and tidal surges, worsened by a mix of ever-more severe storms and land sinking under the sheer weight of development — amplifying the impact of rising waters. The flooding and surges overwhelm hastily planned, often shoddily constructed buildings and neighborhoods with overstressed sewage systems in poorly conceived areas of urban sprawl. The Chinese authorities like to show off the region’s shiny new office towers and airports, which generate cash and enhance the country’s prestige. Fixing costly sewers that no one sees is not a high priority.
In the meantime, the costs of inaction rise like the tides and temperatures.
The destruction of Shenzhen’s wetlands in recent decades poses one of the area’s biggest climate challenges.
Natural Defenses Paved Over
One afternoon, I met Cai Yanfeng at a Starbucks in Shenzhen. The Starbucks occupies a ground-floor corner in a factory complex where her parents used to work, now converted into high-end rental lofts and art galleries. Fashionable young Chinese sipped Frappuccinos and stared at smartphones.
Shenzhen was still a sleepy fishing village of some 35,000 during the late 1970s when Chinese authorities declared it a Special Economic Zone, bringing in huge investments and waves of migrants from the countryside who have helped make what today is a metropolis of 11 million. Ms. Cai arrived during the early 1980s as a toddler with her parents. Now trained as an urban designer, she has seen the city’s evolution and, at 36, is a relative old-timer.
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She was recalling her childhood, when she would cross the street up the block from where the Starbucks is now to play in the mangrove swamps hugging the bay. Ms. Cai gestured out the window, as if pointing at something, although the world she was conjuring up had long ago vanished. Today, the street she used to cross is the size of an American Interstate. Where the mangroves started, not far from the Starbucks, a hospital campus flanks a shopping mall. The mangroves were ripped out and bulldozed, replaced by landfill, and smothered by acres of concrete, asphalt, office towers, high-rise apartments and industrial development.
“It started with amusement parks along the beach,” Ms. Cai remembered. “Then the city built another big road near the sea, with the area filled in between with residential blocks. Things sped up after that.”
The destruction of the wetlands where Ms. Cai once played is now one of the region’s biggest climate challenges. Mangroves provide a natural buffer from the sea, shielding the coastline, reducing the impact of waves and rising water, filtering out salt that can infiltrate freshwater reserves, absorbing exceptional quantities of carbon and lowering ambient temperatures. But about 70 percent of the mangrove forests in Shenzhen are gone. And their disappearance is accelerating: 2,100 acres paved over between 1979 and 1985; 6,700 more acres during the next decade; thousands and thousands more since.
Recently, Chinese officials announced plans to add yet another 21 square miles of landfill along Shenzhen’s coast. The problem isn’t just the destruction of mangroves. Landfill is notoriously vulnerable to rising waters. When Hurricane Sandy socked Lower Manhattan in 2012, it swamped streets built on landfill, peaking where the island’s long-obscured natural shore had once been. In the end, nature always finds its level. Along the Huishen Highway in Shenzhen, rising seawater recently eroded a stretch of landfill three football fields long, leaving a shamble of asphalt and concrete. When a typhoon pounded the delta in 2008, a third of the sea wall in Zhuhai crumbled, letting water reach the city.
About 70 percent of the mangrove forests in Shenzhen have been cleared.
By contrast, Zhuhai’s nature preserve, where the mangroves had not been cut down, absorbed the brunt of the water and survived.
In Shenzhen, I came across Xiyong Beach, which local fishermen say has been shrinking, gradually swallowed up by rising waters that experts here link to climate change. Chen Tegu, a professor in Guangzhou with the State Oceanic Administration, has been taking measurements since the mid-1980s, watching coastline disappear. Mr. Chen ticked off statistics about temperatures, storms and drought, predicting that the South China Sea could rise almost as much as a foot and a half by the end of this century.
That increase, exacerbated by the sinking of the land, will mean more salt water infiltrating the delta, which, combined with drought, threatens drinking water. A drought several years ago caused water shortages for millions of delta residents, and five major saltwater incursions from the South China Sea have hit the region in the past 20 years alone. These incursions corrupt not only the water that people drink but also the water used by factories, corroding equipment and raising production costs, with ripple effects all along the distribution network. Local agricultural yields have been hurt as well. China has been building water treatment plants, but the pace hasn’t kept up with the threat.
I asked Ms. Cai whether she thought people in Shenzhen worried much about climate change. “Some NGOs talk about it,” she said, “but people here still focus on the economic side of things, on jobs and G.D.P. They care about whether we are a first-tier city yet. Are we beating Guangzhou?”
Liang Bo, who works for the Shenzhen Mangrove Wetlands and Conservation Foundation, agrees. I walked with her through a waterfront park that’s more or less where Ms. Cai once played in the mangroves. Along the shore, garbage washed up on the rocks from the murky, gray water in the bay.
“It’s worse at low tide,” Ms. Liang said. “You really see how filthy it has become.” Because of all the landfill and new development, she said, water no longer flows in and out of the bay as it once did. So garbage gets trapped, stagnation gets worse, fish are killed off. That scenario is repeated throughout the delta, where small rivers and tributaries have been filled in and paved over to make way for new highways, office parks and housing developments, adding to the strains on an already inadequate system of drains and sewers.
“The sea, the wetlands and mangroves used to be part of people’s lives here,” Ms. Liang pointed out. “But most of the people who live here now weren’t around when the mangroves were still here. They see this park, which makes us more vulnerable to rising seas and typhoons, as they do all the tall buildings and highways. They equate it with progress.”
Climate change is worsening existing problems in China, like the effects of air pollution linked to car emissions.
The Trillion-Dollar Question
“Air pollution is a direct challenge to people, it’s right in their face,” said Ma Jun, founder and director of the citizen-led Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs in Beijing. “It’s about the food they put on their table for their children. So they’ve made noise, and things have changed in terms of air pollution policy by Chinese authorities. On the other hand, climate change is happening at a different speed. Sea level rise is not something you easily notice.”
This is the challenge everywhere. Storms, like hot days, happen all the time — and they have always happened. So people don’t automatically chalk them up to climate change. Climate change is like the tortoise. Development is the hare. “The problem isn’t unique to China,” Mr. Ma said. “There is no obvious, short-term solution to climate change problems, no clear strategy everybody agrees is what needs to happen to offset climate change. And there’s no certainty about how to pay for what needs to be done. So there’s reluctance to address the issue. What’s the business model?”
That’s a trillion-dollar question, according to the World Bank, which projected the potential cost of damage to coastal cities worldwide from rising seas to be somewhere near that figure. It estimates that China is already losing 1.4 percent of its annual G.D.P. to climate change. Last spring, residents in Guangzhou woke again to flooded streets after a furious downpour swept across the delta and drowned entire neighborhoods of the city. Local news media, once more, said that there had been nothing like it in years. And as usual, Chinese social media sites buzzed with posts of people trapped in flooded cars. One man, named Pang, became an overnight celebrity for catching a fish with his umbrella, then going home and making soup with the head and tail. “It was fresh and tender,” he told The Guangzhou Daily.
Canals and waterways that once helped to drain cities like Guangzhou have been paved over. Library of Congress, via Getty Images
Rains brutalized many other cities throughout southern China last year: More than 160 people were killed by drowning and landslides, dozens went missing, 73,000 homes collapsed and more than a million acres of farmland were destroyed. The death tolls from floods across China have actually been trending downward, thanks to improved emergency relief efforts. But the damage is increasingly felt in urban areas, where overdevelopment continues to outpace the country’s appetite for climate change adaptation and natural disaster preparedness.
That’s partly because canals and waterways that once helped to drain cities like Guangzhou naturally have been filled in and paved over with concrete and asphalt. Especially in older, underserved areas, the infrastructure replacing the canals is shoddy. While Guangdong now claims more billionaires than any other province in the country, it is also home to millions of low-wage workers and migrants from the countryside who have settled in cheaper, poorly maintained neighborhoods, the crumbling legacy of humongous Socialist-era housing developments.
Zhou Jianyun, an architect and professor who moved to Guangzhou as a student in the early 1980s, took me one day to see some of the older parts of the city most prone to flooding. We toured the area around what used to be the ancient city gates. Streets once lined with handsome covered pedestrian arcades from the 1930s have been widened into boulevards to make more room for cars. Farther west, older neighborhoods spill toward the Pearl River. In many ways, these neighborhoods, like Guangzhou’s ancient villages — crowded, labyrinthine vestiges of old Canton now dwarfed by giant new shopping malls and housing complexes — are the liveliest parts of the city. But they are also more and more frequently underwater because they are near the river, inadequately protected and ill served by the outdated sewage system.
A waterfront park in Guangzhou.
To the east, an immense, modern district called Tianhe has risen from next to nothing in 30-odd years, its offices and apartment blocks now overshadowed by the super-tall skyscrapers of Guangzhou’s Zhujiang New Town, with its opera house by Zaha Hadid and its signature Canton Tower. The picture-postcard image of New Town can bring to mind American downtowns from the late 20th century — cities like Atlanta or Phoenix, only glossier and on a vast scale. Advertised as more environmentally conscious than older parts of the city, with better flood protections, New Town is still a sprawling development conceived for cars and glass towers, with a carbon-heavy diet still dependent on highways and air-conditioning.
“The cities we now have are partly based on what we saw in American movies — on the dream of big malls, airports, highways and tall buildings,” Mr. Zhou said. “I belong to the generation that witnessed the biggest change. We had been almost like North Korea, closed off. Suddenly we could see American movies.”
“This became our idea of progress,” he added. “Only we wanted to do everything bigger, because we thought that is what it meant to be modern. The actual needs of the real city are ignored.”
“In many ways, we are still living a dream,” he said.
Guangzhou’s International Finance Center skyscraper.
An Exodus and an Opportunity
Clearly, the region’s future depends on whether, and how fast, Chinese officials redefine that concept of progress.
“China’s feelings about modernization keep changing,” said Zhou Ming, an urban planner in Shenzhen who expressed some optimism for the future. We met one afternoon in the glittery hotel lobby at the top of KK100, a 1,400-foot skyscraper with a panoramic view that takes in Hong Kong.
“Before the opening to the outside world, people didn’t have food to eat,” he said. “So they focused on jobs and basic needs. Now wages are going up for workers, people are concerned about air pollution and they are starting to value traditional culture again, meaning neighborhoods that are human-scale and not just a bunch of skyscrapers. That’s on top of pressure from international businesses whose employees care about environmental and climate issues and can decide whether they want to do business here.”
Not incidentally, some factories have been leaving Guangdong. Rising wages and threats of stiffer pollution standards have prompted less scrupulous manufacturers to move their businesses to countries like Vietnam and Cambodia, where regulations are weaker. In turn, those countries are repeating mistakes, related to climate change preparedness, that China is paying for now.
But this exodus, seeking short-term profits, has also created an opportunity for China. Planners and environmentalists here talk about a chance to rebrand Guangdong Province as a global leader in green, cutting-edge industrial technology and urbanism — to go beyond token green skyscrapers and really get ahead of climate change. To make China the leading green global superpower.
The opportunity has increased as the Trump administration has retreated on the environment, attacking clean energy, promoting outmoded coal, seeking to undo longstanding federal protections even for drinking water and air. China recently announced that it wanted to create a national market for greenhouse gas quotas, suggesting that it was increasingly persuaded by the financial argument for climate adaptation. A recent report by Bloomberg Philanthropies made just that case, citing billions of dollars in climate-related engineering and construction opportunities.
The neighborhood of Tangxia in Guangzhou.
Prosperity will ultimately belong to cities and nations around the world that find ways to capitalize on strategies of resilience against the inevitable impact of climate change. Those cities will retool themselves for new technologies and global businesses whose employees, reflecting a growing worldwide generational shift, want to walk, ride bikes and take mass transit.
China has demonstrated that it can be nimble and ingenious. Since 1997, Guangzhou has opened an entire new metro system with scores of stations, covering hundreds of miles; Shenzhen has done the same in only a dozen years. New York has barely managed to construct four subway stations in half a century.
But little of this infrastructure in China was conceived in anticipation of extreme conditions and climate change. Rising waters repeatedly reduced train traffic in the delta to a crawl last year, halting ferry service on the Pearl River and turning several of the new subway stations into swimming holes.
“What climate change says is that if you want to maintain the city as a good place to live and work for everyone, business as usual won’t do,” said Robert J. Nicholls, a professor of coastal engineering at the University of Southampton in England. He helped write the World Bank report that warned of the fiscal impact of climate change on the Pearl River Delta. “Disasters will become more likely. And the last thing the Chinese want is a Katrina event,” he added, referring to the hurricane that devastated New Orleans in 2005.
Flooding is not an insurmountable hurdle, he noted. The Chinese can build smarter cities — healthier, safer, more equitable and humane ones, with restored waterways and waterfronts, flood-proof buildings, wide-reaching air-pollution controls, earlier warning systems, levees that double as parks, retention ponds that provide recreation, neighborhoods less dependent on cars.
“The challenge for the Chinese, as it is for so many others,” he said, “is taking the long view.”
Which shouldn’t really be so hard, considering the recent past. The government estimated regional losses from last summer’s floods alone at $10 billion. For all of 2016, rainfall in China was 16 percent above average.
That was the highest level in recorded history.
Shenzhen was transformed in a few decades from a small fishing village into a city of millions.
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Jim Linwood/flickr
Welcome to Pleistocene Park.
In Arctic Siberia, Russian scientists are trying to stave off catastrophic climate change—by resurrecting an Ice Age biome complete with lab-grown woolly mammoths.
Nikita zimov’s nickname for the vehicle seemed odd at first. It didn’t look like a baby mammoth. It looked like a small tank, with armored wheels and a pit bull’s center of gravity. Only after he smashed us into the first tree did the connection become clear.
We were driving through a remote forest in Eastern Siberia, just north of the Arctic Circle, when it happened. The summer thaw was in full swing. The undergrowth glowed green, and the air hung heavy with mosquitoes. We had just splashed through a series of deep ponds when, without a word of warning, Nikita veered off the trail and into the trees, ramming us into the trunk of a young 20-foot larch. The wheels spun for a moment, and then surged us forward. A dry crack rang out from under the fender as the larch snapped cleanly at its base and toppled over, falling in the quiet, dignified way that trees do.
I had never seen Nikita happier. Even seated behind the wheel, he loomed tall and broad-shouldered, his brown hair cut short like a soldier’s. He fixed his large ice-blue eyes on the fallen tree and grinned. I remember thinking that in another age, Nikita might have led a hunter-gatherer band in some wildland of the far north. He squeezed the accelerator, slamming us into another larch, until it too snapped and toppled over, felled by our elephantine force. We rampaged 20 yards with this same violent rhythm—churning wheels, cracking timber, silent fall—before stopping to survey the flattened strip of larches in our wake.
“In general, I like trees,” Nikita said. “But here, they are against our theory.”
Behind us, through the fresh gap in the forest, our destination shone in the July sun. Beyond the broken trunks and a few dark tree-lined hills stood Pleistocene Park, a 50-square-mile nature reserve of grassy plains roamed by bison, musk oxen, wild horses, and maybe, in the not-too-distant future, lab-grown woolly mammoths. Though its name winks at Jurassic Park, Nikita, the reserve’s director, was keen to explain that it is not a tourist attraction, or even a species-resurrection project. It is, instead, a radical geoengineering scheme.
“It will be cute to have mammoths running around here,” he told me. “But I’m not doing this for them, or for any other animals. I’m not one of these crazy scientists that just wants to make the world green. I am trying to solve the larger problem of climate change. I’m doing this for humans. I’ve got three daughters. I’m doing it for them.”
Pleistocene Park is named for the geological epoch that ended only 12,000 years ago, having begun 2.6 million years earlier. Though colloquially known as the Ice Age, the Pleistocene could easily be called the Grass Age. Even during its deepest chills, when thick, blue-veined glaciers were bearing down on the Mediterranean, huge swaths of the planet were coated in grasslands. In Beringia, the Arctic belt that stretches across Siberia, all of Alaska, and much of Canada’s Yukon, these vast plains of green and gold gave rise to a new biome, a cold-weather version of the African savanna called the Mammoth Steppe. But when the Ice Age ended, many of the grasslands vanished under mysterious circumstances, along with most of the giant species with whom we once shared this Earth.
Nikita is trying to resurface Beringia with grasslands. He wants to summon the Mammoth Steppe ecosystem, complete with its extinct creatures, back from the underworld of geological layers. The park was founded in 1996, and already it has broken out of its original fences, eating its way into the surrounding tundra scrublands and small forests. If Nikita has his way, Pleistocene Park will spread across Arctic Siberia and into North America, helping to slow the thawing of the Arctic permafrost. Were that frozen underground layer to warm too quickly, it would release some of the world’s most dangerous climate-change accelerants into the atmosphere, visiting catastrophe on human beings and millions of other species.
In its scope and radicalism, the idea has few peers, save perhaps the scheme to cool the Earth by seeding the atmosphere with silvery mists of sun-reflecting aerosols. Only in Siberia’s empty expanse could an experiment of this scale succeed, and only if human beings learn to cooperate across centuries. This intergenerational work has already begun. It was Nikita’s father, Sergey, who first developed the idea for Pleistocene Park, before ceding control of it to Nikita.
The Zimovs have a complicated relationship. The father says he had to woo the son back to the Arctic. When Nikita was young, Sergey was, by his own admission, obsessed with work. “I don’t think he even paid attention to me until I was 20,” Nikita told me. Nikita went away for high school, to a prestigious science academy in Novosibirsk, Siberia’s largest city. He found life there to his liking, and decided to stay for university. Sergey made the journey to Novosibirsk during Nikita’s freshman year and asked him to come home. It would have been easy for Nikita to say no. He soon started dating the woman he would go on to marry. Saying yes to Sergey meant asking her to live, and raise children, in the ice fields at the top of the world. And then there was his pride. “It is difficult to dedicate your life to someone else’s idea,” he told me.
But Sergey was persuasive. Like many Russians, he has a poetic way of speaking. In the Arctic research community, he is famous for his ability to think across several scientific disciplines. He will spend years nurturing a big idea before previewing it for the field’s luminaries. It will sound crazy at first, several of them told me. “But then you go away and you think,” said Max Holmes, the deputy director of Woods Hole Research Center, in Massachusetts. “And the idea starts to makes sense, and then you can’t come up with a good reason why it’s wrong.”
Of all the big ideas that have come spilling out of Sergey Zimov, none rouses his passions like Pleistocene Park. He once told me it would be “the largest project in human history.”
As it happens, human history began in the Pleistocene. Many behaviors that distinguish us from other species emerged during that 2.6-million-year epoch, when glaciers pulsed down from the North Pole at regular intervals. In the flood myths of Noah and Gilgamesh, and in Plato’s story of Atlantis, we get a clue as to what it was like when the last glaciation ended and the ice melted and the seas welled up, swallowing coasts and islands. But human culture has preserved no memory of an oncoming glaciation. We can only imagine what it was like to watch millennia of snow pile up into ice slabs that pushed ever southward. In the epic poems that compress generations of experience, a glaciation would have seemed like a tsunami of ice rolling down from the great white north.
One of these 10,000-year winters may have inspired our domestication of fire, that still unequaled technological leap that warmed us, warded away predators, and cooked the calorie-dense meals that nourished our growing brains. On our watch, fire evolved quickly, from a bonfire at the center of camp to industrial combustion that powers cities whose glow can be seen from space. But these fossil-fueled fires give off an exhaust, one that is pooling, invisibly, in the thin shell of air around our planet, warming its surface. And nowhere is warming faster, or with greater consequence, than the Arctic.
Every Arctic winter is an Ice Age in miniature. In late September, the sky darkens and the ice sheet atop the North Pole expands, spreading a surface freeze across the seas of the Arctic Ocean, like a cataract dilating over a blue iris. In October, the freeze hits Siberia’s north coast and continues into the land, sandwiching the soil between surface snowpack and subterranean frost. When the spring sun comes, it melts the snow, but the frozen underground layer remains. Nearly a mile thick in some places, this Siberian permafrost extends through the northern tundra moonscape and well into the taiga forest that stretches, like an evergreen stripe, across Eurasia’s midsection. Similar frozen layers lie beneath the surface in Alaska and the Yukon, and all are now beginning to thaw.
If this intercontinental ice block warms too quickly, its thawing will send as much greenhouse gas into the atmosphere each year as do all of America’s SUVs, airliners, container ships, factories, and coal-burning plants combined. It could throw the planet’s climate into a calamitous feedback loop, in which faster heating begets faster melting. The more apocalyptic climate-change scenarios will be in play. Coastal population centers could be swamped. Oceans could become more acidic. A mass extinction could rip its way up from the plankton base of the marine food chain. Megadroughts could expand deserts and send hundreds of millions of refugees across borders, triggering global war.
“Pleistocene Park is meant to slow the thawing of the permafrost,” Nikita told me. The park sits in the transition zone between the Siberian tundra and the dense woods of the taiga. For decades, the Zimovs and their animals have stripped away the region’s dark trees and shrubs to make way for the return of grasslands. Research suggests that these grasslands will reflect more sunlight than the forests and scrub they replace, causing the Arctic to absorb less heat. In winter, the short grass and animal-trampled snow will offer scant insulation, enabling the season’s freeze to reach deeper into the Earth’s crust, cooling the frozen soil beneath and locking one of the world’s most dangerous carbon-dioxide lodes in a thermodynamic vault.
To test these landscape-scale cooling effects, Nikita will need to import the large herbivores of the Pleistocene. He’s already begun bringing them in from far-off lands, two by two, as though filling an ark. But to grow his Ice Age lawn into a biome that stretches across continents, he needs millions more. He needs wild horses, musk oxen, reindeer, bison, and predators to corral the herbivores into herds. And, to keep the trees beaten back, he needs hundreds of thousands of resurrected woolly mammoths.
Video: The Russian Scientists Bringing Back the Ice Age
As a species, the woolly mammoth is fresh in its grave. People in Siberia still stumble on frozen mammoth remains with flesh and fur intact. Some scientists have held out hope that one of these carcasses may contain an undamaged cell suitable for cloning. But Jurassic Park notwithstanding, the DNA of a deceased animal decays quickly. Even if a deep freeze spares a cell the ravenous microbial swarms that follow in death’s wake, a few thousand years of cosmic rays will reduce its genetic code to a jumble of unreadable fragments.
You could wander the entire Earth and not find a mammoth cell with a perfectly preserved nucleus. But you may not need one. A mammoth is merely a cold-adapted member of the elephant family. Asian elephants in zoos have been caught on camera making snowballs with their trunks. Modify the genomes of elephants like those, as nature modified their ancestors’ across hundreds of thousands of years, and you can make your own mammoths.
The geneticist George Church and a team of scientists at his Harvard lab are trying to do exactly that. In early 2014, using crispr, the genome-editing technology, they began flying along the rails of the Asian elephant’s double helix, switching in mammoth traits. They are trying to add cold-resistant hemoglobin and a full-body layer of insulating fat. They want to shrink the elephant’s flapping, expressive ears so they don’t freeze in the Arctic wind, and they want to coat the whole animal in luxurious fur. By October 2014, Church and his team had succeeded in editing 15 of the Asian elephant’s genes. Late last year he told me he was tweaking 30 more, and he said he might need to change only 50 to do the whole job.
When I asked Beth Shapiro, the world’s foremost expert in extinct species’ DNA, about Church’s work, she gushed. “George Church is awesome,” she said. “He’s on the right path, and no one has made more progress than him. But it’s too early to say whether it will take only 50 genes, because it takes a lot of work to see what each of those changes is going to do to the whole animal.”
Even if it takes hundreds of gene tweaks, Church won’t have to make a perfect mammoth. If he can resculpt the Asian elephant so it can survive Januarys in Siberia, he can leave natural selection to do the polishing. For instance, mammoth hair was as long as 12 inches, but shorter fur will be fine for Church’s purposes. Yakutian wild horses took less than 1,000 years to regrow long coats after they returned to the Arctic.
“The gene editing is the easy part,” Church told me, before I left for Pleistocene Park. Assembling the edited cells into an embryo that survives to term is the real challenge, in part because surrogacy is out of the question. Asian elephants are an endangered species. Few scientists want to tinker with their reproductive processes, and no other animal’s womb will do. Instead, the embryos will have to be nurtured in an engineered environment, most likely a tiny sac of uterine cells at first, and then a closet-size tank where the fetus can grow into a fully formed, 200-pound calf.
No one has yet brought a mammal to term in an artificial environment. The mammalian mother–child bond, with its precisely timed hormone releases, is beyond the reach of current biotechnology. But scientists are getting closer with mice, whose embryos have now stayed healthy in vitro for almost half of their 20-day gestation period. Church told me he hopes he’ll be manufacturing mice in a lab within five years. And though the elephant’s 22-month gestation period is the longest of any mammal, Church said he hopes it will be a short hop from manufacturing mice to manufacturing mammoths.
Church has been thinking about making mammoths for some time, but he accelerated his efforts in 2013, after meeting Sergey Zimov at a de-extinction conference in Washington, D.C. Between sessions, Sergey pitched him on his plan to keep Beringia’s permafrost frozen by giving it a top coat of Ice Age grassland. When he explained the mammoth’s crucial role in that ecosystem, Church felt compelled to help. He told me he hopes to deliver the first woolly mammoth to Pleistocene Park within a decade.
Last summer, I traveled 72 hours, across 15 time zones, to reach Pleistocene Park. After Moscow, the towns, airports, and planes shrunk with every flight. The last leg flew out of Yakutsk, a gray city in Russia’s far east, whose name has, like Siberia’s, become shorthand for exile. The small dual-prop plane flew northeast for four hours, carrying about a dozen passengers seated on blue-felt seats with the structural integrity of folding chairs. Most were indigenous people from Northeast Siberia. Some brought goods from warmer climes, including crops that can’t grow atop the permafrost. One woman held a bucket of grapes between her knees.
We landed in Cherskiy, a dying gold-mining town that sits on the Kolyma River, a 1,323-mile vein of meltwater, the largest of several that gush out of northeastern Russia and into the East Siberian Sea. Stalin built a string of gulags along the Kolyma and packed them with prisoners, who were made to work in the local mines. Solzhenitsyn called the Kolyma the gulag system’s “pole of cold and cruelty.” The region retains its geopolitical cachet today, on account of its proximity to the Arctic Ocean’s vast undersea oil reserves.
Cherskiy’s airstrip is one of the world’s most remote. Before it became a Cold War stronghold, it was a jumping-off point for expeditions to the North Pole. You need special government permission to fly into Cherskiy. Our plane had just rolled to a halt on the runway’s patchy asphalt when Russian soldiers in fatigues boarded and bounded up to the first row of the cabin, where I was sitting with Grant Slater, an American filmmaker who had come with me to shoot footage of Pleistocene Park. I’d secured the required permission, but Slater was a late addition to the trip, and his paperwork had not come in on time.
Nikita Zimov, who met us at the airport, had foreseen these difficulties. Thanks to his lobbying, the soldiers agreed to let Slater through with only 30 minutes of questioning at the local military base. The soldiers wanted to know whether he had ever been to Syria and, more to the point, whether he was an American spy. “It is good to be a big man in a small town,” Nikita told us as we left the base.
Nikita runs the Northeast Science Station, an Arctic research outpost near Cherskiy, which supports a range of science projects along the Kolyma River, including Pleistocene Park. The station and the park are both funded with a mix of grants from the European Union and America’s National Science Foundation. Nikita’s family makes the 2,500-mile journey from Novosibirsk to the station every May. In the months that follow, they are joined by a rotating group of more than 60 scientists from around the world. When the sky darkens in the fall, the scientists depart, followed by Nikita’s family and finally Nikita himself, who hands the keys to a small team of winter rangers.
We arrived at the station just before dinner. It was a modest place, consisting of 11 hacked-together structures, a mix of laboratories and houses overlooking a tributary of the Kolyma. Station life revolves around a central building topped by a giant satellite dish that once beamed propaganda to this remote region of the Soviet empire.
I’d barely stepped through the door that first night when Nikita offered me a beer. “Americans love IPAs,” he said, handing me a 32-ounce bottle. He led us into the station’s dining hall, a warmly lit, cavernous room directly underneath the satellite dish. During dinner, one of the scientists told me that the Northeast Science Station ranks second among Arctic outposts as a place to do research, behind only Toolik Field Station in Alaska. Nikita later confided that he felt quite competitive with Toolik. Being far less remote, the Alaskan station offers scientists considerable amenities, including seamless delivery from Amazon Prime. But Toolik provides no alcohol, so Nikita balances its advantages by stocking his station with Russian beer and crystal-blue bottles of Siberian vodka, shipped into Cherskiy at a heavy cost. The drinks are often consumed late at night in a roomy riverside sauna, under a sky streaked pink by the midnight sun.
Nikita is the life of the station. He is at every meal, and any travel, by land or water, must be coordinated through him. His father is harder to find. One night, I caught Sergey alone in the dining room, having a late dinner. Squat and barrel-chested, he was sitting at a long table, his thick gray rope of a ponytail hanging past his tailbone. His beard was a white Brillo Pad streaked with yellow. He chain-smoked all through the meal, drinking vodka, telling stories, and arguing about Russo-American relations. He kept insisting, loudly and in his limited English, that Donald Trump would be elected president in a few months. (Nikita would later tell me that Sergey has considered himself something of a prophet ever since he predicted the fall of the Soviet Union.) Late in the night, he finally mellowed when he turned to his favorite subjects, the deep past and far future of humankind. Since effectively handing the station over to his son, Sergey seems to have embraced a new role. He has become the station’s resident philosopher.
Nikita would probably think philosopher too generous. “My dad likes to lie on the sofa and do science while I do all the work,” he told me the next day. We were descending into an ice cave in Pleistocene Park. Step by cautious step, we made our way down a pair of rickety ladders that dropped 80 feet through the permafrost to the cave’s bottom. Each time our boots found the next rung, we came eye to eye with a more ancient stratum of chilled soil. Even in the Arctic summer, temperatures in the underground network of chambers were below freezing, and the walls were coated with white ice crystals. I felt like we were wandering around in a geode.
Not every wall sparkled with fractals of white frost. Some were windows of clear ice, revealing mud that was 10,000, 20,000, even 30,000 years old. The ancient soil was rich with tiny bone fragments from horses, bison, and mammoths, large animals that would have needed a prolific, cold-resistant food source to survive the Ice Age Arctic. Nikita knelt and scratched at one of the frozen panels with his fingernail. Columns of exhaled steam floated up through the white beam of his headlamp. “See this?” he said. I leaned in, training my lamp on his thumb and forefinger. Between them, he held a thread of vegetable matter so tiny and pale that an errant breath might have reduced it to powder. It was a 30,000-year-old root that had once been attached to a bright-green blade of grass.
For the vast majority of the Earth’s 4.5 billion spins around the sun, its exposed, rocky surfaces lay barren. Plants changed that. Born in the seas like us, they knocked against the planet’s shores for eons. They army-crawled onto the continents, anchored themselves down, and began testing new body plans, performing, in the process, a series of vast experiments on the Earth’s surface. They pushed whole forests of woody stems into the sky to stretch their light-drinking leaves closer to the sun. They learned how to lure pollinators by unfurling perfumed blooms in every color of the rainbow. And nearly 70 million years ago, they began testing a new form that crept out from the shadowy edges of the forest and began spreading a green carpet of solar panel across the Earth.
For tens of millions of years, grasses waged a global land war against forests. According to some scientists, they succeeded by making themselves easy to eat. Unlike other plants, many grasses don’t expend energy on poisons, or thorns, or other herbivore-deterring technologies. By allowing themselves to be eaten, they partner with their own grazers to enhance their ecosystem’s nutrient flows.
Temperate-zone biomes can’t match the lightning-fast bio-cycling of the tropics, where every leaf that falls to the steamy jungle floor is set upon by microbial swarms that dissolve its constituent parts. In a pine forest, a fallen branch might keep its nutrients locked behind bark and needle for years. But grasslands are able to keep nutrients moving relatively quickly, because grasses so easily find their way into the hot, wet stomachs of large herbivores, which are even more microbe-rich than the soil of the tropics. A grazing herbivore returns nutrients to the soil within a day or two, its thick, paste-like dung acting as a fertilizer to help the bitten blades of grass regrow from below. The blades sprout as if from everlasting ribbon dispensers, and they grow faster than any other plant group on Earth. Some bamboo grasses shoot out of the ground at a rate of several feet a day.
Grasses became the base layer for some of the Earth’s richest ecosystems. They helped make giants out of the small, burrowing mammals that survived the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs some 66 million years ago. And they did it in some of the world’s driest regions, such as the sunbaked plains of the Serengeti, where more than 1 million wildebeests still roam. Or the northern reaches of Eurasia during the most-severe stretches of the Pleistocene.
The root between Nikita’s thumb and forefinger was one foot soldier among trillions that fought in an ecological revolution that human beings would come to join. We descended, after all, from tree-dwellers. Our nearest primate relatives, chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas, are still in the forest. Not human beings. We left Africa’s woodlands and wandered into the alien ecology of its grassland savannas, as though sensing their raw fertility. Today, our diets—and those of the animals we domesticated—are still dominated by grasses, especially those we have engineered into mutant strains: rice, wheat, corn, and sugarcane.
“Ask any kid ‘Where do animals live?’ and they will tell you ‘The forest,’ ” Nikita told me. “That’s what people think of when they think about nature. They think of birds singing in a forest. They should think of the grassland.”
Nikita and I climbed out of the ice cave and headed for the park’s grassland. We had to cross a muddy drainage channel that he had bulldozed to empty a nearby lake, so that grass seeds from the park’s existing fields could drift on the wind and fall onto the newly revealed soil. Fresh tufts of grass were already erupting out of the mud. Nikita does most of his violent gardening with a forest-mowing transporter on tank treads that stands more than 10 feet tall. He calls it the “mama mammoth.”
When I first laid eyes on Pleistocene Park, I wondered whether it was the grassland views that first lured humans out of the woods. In the treeless plains, an upright biped can see almost into eternity. Cool Arctic winds rushed across the open landscape, fluttering its long ground layer of grasses. On the horizon, I made out a herd of large, gray-and-white animals. Their features came into focus as we hiked closer, especially after one broke into a run. They were horses, like those that sprinted across the plains of Eurasia and the Americas during the Pleistocene, their hooves hammering the ground, compressing the snow so that other grazers could reach cold mouthfuls of grass and survive the winter.
Like America’s mustangs, Pleistocene Park’s horses come from a line that was once domesticated. But it was hard to imagine these horses being tamed. They moved toward us with a boldness you don’t often see in pens and barns. Nikita is not a man who flinches easily, but he backpedaled quickly when the horses feinted in our direction. He stooped and gathered a bouquet of grass and extended it tentatively. The horses snorted at the offer. They stared at us, dignified and curious, the mystery of animal consciousness beaming out from the black sheen of their eyes. At one point, four lined up in profile, like the famous quartet of gray horses painted by torchlight on the ceiling of Chauvet Cave, in France, some 30,000 years ago.
We walked west through the fields, to where a lone bison was grazing. When seen without a herd, a bison loses some of its glamour as a pure symbol of the wild. But even a single hungry specimen is an ecological force to be reckoned with. This one would eat through acres of grass by the time the year was out. In the warmer months, bison expend some of their awesome muscular energy on the destruction of trees. They shoulder into stout trunks, rubbing them raw and exposing them to the elements. It was easy to envision huge herds of these animals clearing the steppes of Eurasia and North America during the Pleistocene. This one had trampled several of the park’s saplings, reducing them to broken, leafless nubs. Nikita and I worried that the bison would trample us, too, when, upon hearing us inch closer, he reared up his mighty, horned head, stilled his swishing tail, and stared, as though contemplating a charge.
We stayed low and headed away to higher ground to see a musk ox, a grazer whose entire being, inside and out, seems to have been carved by the Pleistocene. A musk ox’s stomach contains exotic microbiota that are corrosive enough to process tundra scrub. Its dense layers of fur provide a buffer that allows it to graze in perfect comfort under the dark, aurora-filled sky of the Arctic winter, untroubled by skin-peeling, 70-below winds.
Nikita wants to bring hordes of musk oxen to Pleistocene Park. He acquired this one on a dicey boat ride hundreds of miles north into the ice-strewn Arctic Ocean. He would have brought back several others, too, but a pair of polar bears made off with them. Admiring the animal’s shiny, multicolored coat, I asked Nikita whether he worried about poachers, especially with a depressed mining town nearby. He told me that hunters from Cherskiy routinely hunt moose, reindeer, and bear in the surrounding forests, “but they don’t hunt animals in the park.”
“Why?,” I asked.
“Personal relationships,” he said. “When the leader of the local mafia died, I gave the opening remarks at his funeral.”
Filling pleistocene park with giant herbivores is a difficult task because there are so few left. When modern humans walked out of Africa, some 70,000 years ago, we shared this planet with more than 30 land-mammal species that weighed more than a ton. Of those animals, only elephants, hippos, rhinos, and giraffes remain. These African megafauna may have survived contact with human beings because they evolved alongside us over millions of years—long enough for natural selection to bake in the instincts required to share a habitat with the most dangerous predator nature has yet manufactured.
The giant animals that lived on other continents had no such luxury. When we first wandered into their midst, they may have misjudged us as small, harmless creatures. But by the time humans arrived in southern Europe, we’d figured out how to fan out across grasslands in small, fleet-footed groups. And we were carrying deadly projectiles that could be thrown from beyond the intimate range of an animal’s claws or fangs.
Most ecosystems have checks against runaway predation. Population dynamics usually ensure that apex predators are rare. When Africa’s grazing populations dip too low, for instance, lions go hungry and their numbers plummet. The same is true of sharks in the oceans. But when human beings’ favorite prey thins out, we can easily switch to plant foods. This omnivorous resilience may explain a mystery that has vexed fossil hunters for more than a century, as they have slowly unearthed evidence of an extraordinary die-off of large animals all over the world, right at the end of the Pleistocene.
Some scientists think that extreme climate change was the culprit: The global melt transformed land-based biomes, and lumbering megafauna were slow to adapt. But this theory has weaknesses. Many of the vanished species had already survived millions of years of fluctuations between cold and warmth. And with a climate-caused extinction event, you’d expect the effects to be distributed across size and phylum. But small animals mostly survived the end of the Pleistocene. The species that died in high numbers were mammals with huge stores of meat in their flanks—precisely the sort you’d expect spear-wielding humans to hunt.
Climate change may have played a supporting role in these extinctions, but as our inventory of fossils has grown, it has strengthened the case for extermination by human rampage. Most telling is the timeline. Between 40,000 and 60,000 years ago, during an ocean-lowering glaciation, a small group of humans set out on a sea voyage from Southeast Asia. In only a few thousand years, they skittered across Indonesia and the Philippines, until they reached Papua New Guinea and Australia, where they found giant kangaroos, lizards twice as long as Komodo dragons, and furry, hippo-size wombats that kept their young in huge abdominal pouches. Estimating extinction dates is tricky, but most of these species seem to have vanished shortly thereafter.
It took at least another 20,000 years for human beings to trek over the Bering land bridge to the Americas, and a few thousand more to make it down to the southern tip. The journey seems to have taken the form of an extended hunting spree. Before humans arrived, the Americas were home to mammoths, bear-size beavers, car-size armadillos, giant camels, and a bison species twice as large as those that graze the plains today. The smaller, surviving bison is now the largest living land animal in the Americas, and it barely escaped extermination: The invasion of gun-toting Europeans reduced its numbers from more than 30 million to fewer than 2,000.
The pattern that pairs human arrival with megafaunal extinction is clearest in the far-flung islands that no human visited until relatively recently. The large animals of Hawaii, Madagascar, and New Zealand disappeared during the past 2,000 years, usually within centuries of human arrival. This pattern even extends to ocean ecosystems. As soon as industrial shipbuilding allowed large groups of humans to establish a permanent presence on the seas, we began hunting marine megafauna for meat and lamp oil. Less than a century later, North Atlantic gray whales were gone, along with 95 percent of North Atlantic humpbacks. Not since the asteroid struck have large animals found it so difficult to survive on planet Earth.
In nature, no event happens in isolation. A landscape that loses its giants becomes something else. Nikita and I walked all the way to the edge of Pleistocene Park, to the border between the grassy plains and the forest, where a line of upstart saplings was shooting out of the ground. Trees like these had sprung out of the soils of the Northern Hemisphere for ages, but until recently, many were trampled or snapped in half by the mighty, tusked force of the woolly mammoth.
It was only 3 million years ago that elephants left Africa and swept across southern Eurasia. By the time they crossed the land bridge to the Americas, they’d grown a coat of fur. Some of them would have waded into the shallow passes between islands, using their trunks as snorkels. In the deserts south of Alaska, they would have used those same trunks to make mental scent maps of water resources, which were probably sharper in resolution than a bloodhound’s.
The mammoth family assumed new forms in new habitats, growing long fur in northern climes and shrinking to pygmies on Californian islands where food was scarce. But mammoths were always a keystone species on account of their prodigious grazing, their well-digging, and the singular joy they seemed to derive from knocking down trees. A version of this behavior is on display today in South Africa’s Kruger National Park, one of the only places on Earth where elephants live in high densities. As the population has recovered, the park’s woodlands have thinned, just as they did millions of years ago, when elephants helped engineer the African savannas that made humans into humans.
I have often wondered whether the human who first encountered a mammoth retained some cultural memory of its African cousin, in song or story. In the cave paintings that constitute our clearest glimpse into the prehistoric mind, mammoths loom large. In a single French cave, more than 150 are rendered in black outline, their tusks curving just so. In the midst of the transition from caves to constructed homes, some humans lived inside mammoths: 15,000 years ago, early architects built tents from the animals’ bones and tusks.
Whatever wonderment human beings felt upon sighting their first mammoth, it was eventually superseded by more-practical concerns. After all, a single cold-preserved carcass could feed a tribe for a few weeks. It took less than 50 millennia for humans to help kill off the mammoths of Eurasia and North America. Most were dead by the end of the Ice Age. A few survived into historical times, on remote Arctic Ocean outposts like St. Paul Island, a lonely dot of land in the center of the Bering Sea where mammoths lived until about 3600 b.c. A final group of survivors slowly wasted away on Wrangel Island, just north of Pleistocene Park. Mammoth genomes tell us they were already inbreeding when the end came, around 2000 b.c. No one knows how the last mammoth died, but we do know that humans made landfall on Wrangel Island around the same time.
The mammoth’s extinction may have been our original ecological sin. When humans left Africa 70,000 years ago, the elephant family occupied a range that stretched from that continent’s southern tip to within 600 miles of the North Pole. Now elephants are holed up in a few final hiding places, such as Asia’s dense forests. Even in Africa, our shared ancestral home, their populations are shrinking, as poachers hunt them with helicopters, GPS, and night-vision goggles. If you were an anthropologist specializing in human ecological relationships, you may well conclude that one of our distinguishing features as a species is an inability to coexist peacefully with elephants.
But nature isn’t fixed, least of all human nature. We may yet learn to live alongside elephants, in all their spectacular variety. We may even become a friend to these magnificent animals. Already, we honor them as a symbol of memory, wisdom, and dignity. With luck, we will soon re-extend their range to the Arctic.
“Give me 100 mammoths and come back in a few years,” Nikita told me as he stood on the park’s edge, staring hard into the fast-growing forest. “You won’t recognize this place.”
The next morning, I met Sergey Zimov on the dock at the Northeast Science Station. In winter, when Siberia ices over, locals make long-distance treks on the Kolyma’s frozen surface, mostly in heavy trucks, but also in the ancestral mode: sleighs pulled by fleet-footed reindeer. (Many far-northern peoples have myths about flying reindeer.) Sergey and I set out by speedboat, snaking our way down from the Arctic Ocean and into the Siberian wilderness.
Wearing desert fatigues and a black beret, Sergey smoked as he drove, burning through a whole pack of unfiltered cigarettes. The twin roars of wind and engine forced him to be even louder and more aphoristic than usual. Every few miles, he would point at the young forests on the shores of the river, lamenting their lack of animals. “This is not wild!” he would shout.
It was early afternoon when we arrived at Duvanny Yar, a massive cliff that runs for six miles along the riverbank. It was like no other cliff I’d ever seen. Rising 100 feet above the shore, it was a concave checkerboard of soggy mud and smooth ice. Trees on its summit were flopping over, their fun-house angles betraying the thaw beneath. Its aura of apocalyptic decay was enhanced by the sulfurous smell seeping out of the melting cliffside. As a long seam of exposed permafrost, Duvanny Yar is a vivid window into the brutal geological reality of climate change.
Many of the world’s far-northern landscapes, in Scandinavia, Canada, Alaska, and Siberia, are wilting like Duvanny Yar is. When Nikita and I had driven through Cherskiy, the local mining town, we’d seen whole houses sinking into mud formed by the big melt. On YouTube, you can watch a researcher stomp his foot on Siberian scrubland, making it ripple like a water bed. The northern reaches of the taiga are dimpled with craters hundreds of feet across, where frozen underground soil has gone slushy and collapsed, causing landslides that have sucked huge stretches of forest into the Earth. The local Yakutians describe one of the larger sinkholes as a “gateway to the underworld.”
As the Duvanny Yar cliffside slowly melts into the Kolyma River, it is spilling Ice Age bones onto the riverbank, including woolly-rhino ribs and mammoth tusks worth thousands of dollars. A team of professional ivory hunters had recently picked the shore clean, but for a single 30-inch section of tusk spotted the previous day by a lucky German scientist. He had passed it around the dinner table at the station. Marveling at its smooth surface and surprising heft, I’d felt, for a moment, the instinctive charge of ivory lust, that peculiar human longing that has been so catastrophic for elephants, furry and otherwise. When I joked with Sergey that fresh tusks may soon be strewn across this riverbank, he told me he hoped he would be alive when mammoths return to the park.
The first of the resurrected mammoths will be the loneliest animal on Earth. Elephants are extremely social. When they are removed from normal herd life to a circus or a zoo, some slip into madness. Mothers even turn on their young.
Elephants are matriarchal: Males generally leave the herd in their teens, when they start showing signs of sexual maturity. An elephant’s social life begins at birth, when a newborn calf enters the world to the sound of joyous stomping and trumpeting from its sisters, cousins, aunts, and, in some cases, a grandmother.
Mammoth herds were likewise matriarchal, meaning a calf would have received patient instruction from its female elders. It would have learned how to use small sticks to clean dirt from the cracks in its feet, which were so sensitive that they could feel the steps of a distant herd member. It would have learned how to wield a trunk stuffed with more muscles than there are in the entire human body, including those that controlled its built-in water hose. It would have learned how to blast trumpet notes across the plains, striking fear into cave lions, and how to communicate with its fellow herd members in a rich range of rumbling sounds, many inaudible to the human ear.
The older mammoths would have taught the calf how to find ancestral migration paths, how to avoid sinkholes, where to find water. When a herd member died, the youngest mammoth would have watched the others stand vigil, tenderly touching the body of the departed with their trunks before covering it with branches and leaves. No one knows how to re-create this rich mammoth culture, much less how to transmit it to that cosmically bewildered first mammoth.
Or to an entire generation of such mammoths. The Zimovs won’t be able to slow the thawing of the permafrost if they have to wait for their furry elephant army to grow organically. That would take too long, given the species’s slow breeding pace. George Church, the Harvard geneticist, told me he thinks the mammoth-manufacturing process can be industrialized, complete with synthetic-milk production, to create a seed population that numbers in the tens of thousands. But he didn’t say who would pay for it—at the Northeast Science Station, there was open talk of recruiting a science-friendly Silicon Valley billionaire—or how the Zimovs would deploy such a large group of complex social animals that would all be roughly the same age.
Nikita and Sergey seemed entirely unbothered by ethical considerations regarding mammoth cloning or geoengineering. They saw no contradiction between their veneration of “the wild” and their willingness to intervene, radically, in nature. At times they sounded like villains from a Michael Crichton novel. Nikita suggested that such concerns reeked of a particularly American piety. “I grew up in an atheist country,” he said. “Playing God doesn’t bother me in the least. We are already doing it. Why not do it better?”
Sergey noted that other people want to stop climate change by putting chemicals in the atmosphere or in the ocean, where they could spread in dangerous ways. “All I want to do is bring animals back to the Arctic,” he said.
As Sergey and I walked down the riverbank, I kept hearing a cracking sound coming from the cliff. Only after we stopped did I register its source, when I looked up just in time to see a small sheet of ice dislodge from the cliffside. Duvanny Yar was bleeding into the river before our very eyes.
In 1999, Sergey submitted a paper to the journal Science arguing that Beringian permafrost contained rich “yedoma” soils left over from Pleistocene grasslands. (In other parts of the Arctic, such as Norway and eastern Canada, there is less carbon in the permafrost; if it thaws, sea levels will rise, but much less greenhouse gas will be released into the atmosphere.) When Beringia’s pungent soils are released from their icy prison, microbes devour the organic contents, creating puffs of carbon dioxide. When this process occurs at the bottom of a lake filled with permafrost melt, it creates bubbles of methane that float up to the surface and pop, releasing a gas whose greenhouse effects are an order of magnitude worse than carbon dioxide’s. Already more than 1 million of these lakes dot the Arctic, and every year, new ones appear in nasa satellite images, their glimmering surfaces steaming methane into the closed system that is the Earth’s atmosphere. If huge herds of megafauna recolonize the Arctic, they too will expel methane, but less than the thawing frost, according to the Zimovs’ estimates.
Science initially rejected Sergey’s paper about the danger posed by Beringia’s warming. But in 2006, an editor from the journal asked Sergey to resubmit his work. It was published in June of that year. Thanks in part to him, we now know that there is more carbon locked in the Arctic permafrost than there is in all the planet’s forests and the rest of the atmosphere combined.
For my last day in the Arctic, Nikita had planned a send-off. We were to make a day trip, by car, to Mount Rodinka, on Cherskiy’s outskirts. Sergey came along, as did Nikita’s daughters and one of the German scientists.
Rodinka is referred to locally as a mountain, though it hardly merits the term. Eons of water and wind have rounded it down to a dark, stubby hill. But in Siberia’s flatlands, every hill is a mountain. Halfway up to the summit, we already had a God’s-eye view of the surrounding landscape. The sky was lucid blue but for a thin mist that hovered above the Kolyma River, which slithered, through a mix of evergreens and scrub, all the way to the horizon. At the foot of the mountain, the gold-mining town and its airstrip hugged the river. In the dreamy, deep-time atmosphere of Pleistocene Park, it had been easy to forget this modern human world outside the park’s borders.
Just before the close of the 19th century, in the pages of this magazine, John Muir praised the expansion of Yellowstone, America’s first national park. He wrote of the forests, yes, but also of the grasslands, the “glacier meadows” whose “smooth, silky lawns” pastured “the big Rocky Mountain game animals.” Already the park had served “the furred and feathered tribes,” he wrote. Many were “in danger of extinction a short time ago,” but they “are now increasing in numbers.”
Yellowstone’s borders have since been expanded even farther. The park is now part of a larger stretch of land cut out from ranches, national forests, wildlife refuges, and even tribal lands. This Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is 10 times the size of the original park, and it’s home to the country’s most populous wild-bison herd. There is even talk of extending a wildlife corridor to the north, to provide animals safe passage between a series of wilderness reserves, from Glacier National Park to the Canadian Yukon. But not everyone supports Yellowstone’s outward expansion. The park is also home to a growing population of grizzly bears, and they have started showing up in surrounding towns. Wolves were reintroduced in 1995, and they, too, are now thriving. A few have picked off local livestock.
Sergey sees Pleistocene Park as the natural next step beyond Yellowstone in the rewilding of the planet. But if Yellowstone is already meeting resistance as it expands into the larger human world, how will Pleistocene Park fare if it leaves the Kolyma River basin and spreads across Beringia?
The park will need to be stocked with dangerous predators. When they are absent, herbivore herds spread out, or they feel safe enough to stay in the same field, munching away mindlessly until it’s overgrazed. Big cats and wolves force groups of grazers into dense, watchful formations that move fast across a landscape, visiting a new patch of vegetation each day in order to mow it with their teeth, fertilize it with their dung, and trample it with their many-hooved plow. Nikita wants to bring in gray wolves, Siberian tigers, or cold-adapted Canadian cougars. If it becomes a trivial challenge to resurrect extinct species, perhaps he could even repopulate Siberia with cave lions and dire wolves. But what will happen when one of these predators wanders onto a city street for the first time?
“This is a part of the world where there is very little agriculture, and very few humans,” Sergey told me. He is right that Beringia is sparsely populated, and that continuing urbanization will likely clear still more space by luring rural populations into the cities. But the region, which stretches across Alaska and the Canadian Yukon, won’t be empty anytime soon. Fifty years from now, there will still be mafia leaders to appease, not to mention indigenous groups and the governments of three nations, including two that spent much of the last century vying for world domination. America and Russia often cooperate in the interest of science, especially in extreme environments like Antarctica and low-Earth orbit, but the Zimovs will need a peace that persists for generations.
Sergey envisions a series of founding parks, “maybe as many as 10,” scattered across Beringia. One would be along the Yentna River, in Alaska, another in the Yukon. A few would be placed to the west of Pleistocene Park, near the Ural mountain range, which separates Siberia from the rest of Russia. As Sergey spoke, he pointed toward each of these places, as if they were just over the horizon and not thousands of miles away.
Sergey’s plan relies on the very climate change he ultimately hopes to forestall. “The top layer of permafrost will melt first,” he said. “Modern ecosystems will be destroyed entirely. The trees will fall down and wash away, and grasses will begin to appear.” The Mammoth Steppe would spread from its starting nodes in each park until they all bled into one another, forming a megapark that spanned the entire region. Humans could visit on bullet trains built on elevated tracks, to avoid disturbing the animals’ free movement. Hunting could be allowed in designated areas. Gentler souls could go on Arctic safari tours.
When Sergey was out of earshot, I asked Nikita whether one of his daughters would one day take over Pleistocene Park to see this plan through. We were watching two of them play in an old Soviet-military radar station, about 100 yards from Rodinka’s peak.
“I took the girls to the park last week, and I don’t think they were too impressed,” Nikita told me, laughing. “They thought the horses were unfriendly.” I told him that wasn’t an answer. “I’m not as selfish as my father,” he said. “I won’t force them to do this.”
Before I left to catch a plane back to civilization, I stood with Sergey on the mountaintop once more, taking in the view. He had slipped into one of his reveries about grasslands full of animals. He seemed to be suffering from a form of solastalgia, a condition described by the philosopher Glenn Albrecht as a kind of existential grief for a vanished landscape, be it a swallowed coast, a field turned to desert, or a bygone geological epoch. He kept returning to the idea that the wild planet had been interrupted midway through its grand experiment, its 4.5-billion-year blending of rock, water, and sunlight. He seems to think that the Earth peaked during the Ice Age, with the grassland ecologies that spawned human beings. He wants to restore the biosphere to that creative summit, so it can run its cosmic experiment forward in time. He wants to know what new wonders will emerge. “Maybe there will be more than one animal with a mind,” he told me.
I don’t know whether Nikita can make his father’s mad vision a material reality. The known challenges are immense, and there are likely many more that he cannot foresee. But in this brave new age when it is humans who make and remake the world, it is a comfort to know that people are trying to summon whole landscapes, Lazarus-like, from the tomb. “Come forth,” they are saying to woolly mammoths. Come into this habitat that has been prepared for you. Join the wolves and the reindeer and the bison who survived you. Slip into your old Ice Age ecology. Wander free in this wild stretch of the Earth. Your kind will grow stronger as the centuries pass. This place will overflow with life once again. Our original sin will be wiped clean. And if, in doing all this, we can save our planet and ourselves, that will be the stuff of a new mythology.
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Changing Climate, Changing Cities
Mexico City, Parched and Sinking, Faces a Water Crisis
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Climate change is threatening to push a crowded capital toward a breaking point.
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN, Photographs by JOSH HANER
FEB. 17, 2017
MEXICO CITY — On bad days, you can smell the stench from a mile away, drifting over a nowhere sprawl of highways and office parks.
When the Grand Canal was completed, at the end of the 1800s, it was Mexico City’s Brooklyn Bridge, a major feat of engineering and a symbol of civic pride: 29 miles long, with the ability to move tens of thousands of gallons of wastewater per second. It promised to solve the flooding and sewage problems that had plagued the city for centuries.
Only it didn’t, pretty much from the start. The canal was based on gravity. And Mexico City, a mile and a half above sea level, was sinking, collapsing in on itself.
It still is, faster and faster, and the canal is just one victim of what has become a vicious cycle. Always short of water, Mexico City keeps drilling deeper for more, weakening the ancient clay lake beds on which the Aztecs first built much of the city, causing it to crumble even further.
MOUNT
TLALOC
Grand
Canal
Extent of underlying
ancient lake sediments
SIERRA DE
GUADALUPE
CITY
CENTER
National
Palace
MEXICO
CITY
MOUNT
TLALOC
Colored areas show how quickly the ground
sank from October 2014 to May 2015
Grand
Canal
Missing
data
5 INCHES/YEAR
SIERRA DE
GUADALUPE
7 INCHES/YEAR
SANK AT A RATE OF
9 INCHES PER YEAR
IZTAPALAPA
NEIGHBORHOOD
CITY
CENTER
National
Palace
MEXICO
CITY
Missing
data
Source: Subsidence rate data from Dr. Andy Sowter at Geomatic Ventures Limited.
It is a cycle made worse by climate change. More heat and drought mean more evaporation and yet more demand for water, adding pressure to tap distant reservoirs at staggering costs or further drain underground aquifers and hasten the city’s collapse.
In the immense neighborhood of Iztapalapa — where nearly two million people live, many of them unable to count on water from their taps — a teenager was swallowed up where a crack in the brittle ground split open a street. Sidewalks resemble broken china, and 15 elementary schools have crumbled or caved in.
Much is being written about climate change and the impact of rising seas on waterfront populations. But coasts are not the only places affected. Mexico City — high in the mountains, in the center of the country — is a glaring example. The world has a lot invested in crowded capitals like this one, with vast numbers of people, huge economies and the stability of a hemisphere at risk.
Changing Climate, Changing Cities
The first in a series of articles about how climate change is challenging the world’s urban centers.
One study predicts that 10 percent of Mexicans ages 15 to 65 could eventually try to emigrate north as a result of rising temperatures, drought and floods, potentially scattering millions of people and heightening already extreme political tensions over immigration.
The effects of climate change are varied and opportunistic, but one thing is consistent: They are like sparks in the tinder. They expose cities’ biggest vulnerabilities, inflaming troubles that politicians and city planners often ignore or try to paper over. And they spread outward, defying borders.
That’s what this series is about — how global cities tackle climate threats, or fail to. Around the world, extreme weather and water scarcity are accelerating repression, regional conflicts and violence. A Columbia University report found that where rainfall declines, “the risk of a low-level conflict escalating to a full-scale civil war approximately doubles the following year.” The Pentagon’s term for climate change is “threat multiplier.”
And nowhere does this apply more obviously than in cities. This is the first urban century in human history, the first time more people live in cities than don’t, with predictions that three-quarters of the global population will be urban by 2050. By that time, according to another study, there may be more than 700 million climate refugees on the move.
For many cities around the world, adapting to climate change is a route to long-term prosperity. That’s the good news, where societies are willing to listen. But adaptation can also be costly and slow. It can run counter to the rhythms of political campaigns and headlong into powerful, entrenched interests, confounding business as usual. This is, in effect, what happened in New Orleans, which ignored countless warning signs, destroyed natural protections, gave developers a free pass and failed to reinforce levees before Hurricane Katrina left much of the city in ruins.
Unlike traffic jams or crime, climate change isn’t something most people easily feel or see. It is certainly not what residents in Mexico City talk about every day. But it is like an approaching storm, straining an already precarious social fabric and threatening to push a great city toward a breaking point.
As Arnoldo Kramer, Mexico City’s chief resilience officer, put it: “Climate change has become the biggest long-term threat to this city’s future. And that’s because it is linked to water, health, air pollution, traffic disruption from floods, housing vulnerability to landslides — which means we can’t begin to address any of the city’s real problems without facing the climate issue.”
There’s much more at stake than this city’s well being. At the extreme, if climate change wreaks havoc on the social and economic fabric of global linchpins like Mexico City, warns the writer Christian Parenti, “no amount of walls, guns, barbed wire, armed aerial drones or permanently deployed mercenaries will be able to save one half of the planet from the other.”
Buildings now undulate where once the area was flat.
Sprawl and Subsidence
An element of magical realism plays into Mexico City’s sinking. At a roundabout along the Paseo de la Reforma, the city’s wide downtown boulevard, the gilded Angel of Independence, a symbol of Mexican pride, looks over a sea of traffic from the top of a tall Corinthian column.
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Tourists snap pictures without realizing that when Mexico’s president cut the ribbon for the column in 1910, the monument sat on a sculptured base reached by climbing nine shallow steps. But over the decades, the whole neighborhood around the monument sank, like a receding ocean at low tide, gradually marooning the Angel. Fourteen large steps eventually had to be added to the base so that the monument still connected to the street.
Deeper in the city’s historic center, the rear of the National Palace now tilts over the sidewalk like a sea captain leaning into a strong headwind. Buildings here can resemble Cubist drawings, with slanting windows, wavy cornices and doors that no longer align with their frames. Pedestrians trudge up hills where the once flat lake bed has given way. The cathedral in the city’s central square, known as the Zócalo, famously sunken in spots during the last century, is a kind of fun house, with a leaning chapel and a bell tower into which stone wedges were inserted during construction to act more or less like matchbooks under the leg of a wobbly cafe table.
Volcanic soil safeguarded the water supply for centuries.
Loreta Castro Reguera is a young, Harvard-trained architect who has made a specialty of the sinking ground in Mexico City, a phenomenon known as subsidence. She pointed down a main street that stretches from the Zócalo and divides east from west, following the route of an ancient Aztec dike.
The whole city occupies what was once a network of lakes. In 1325, the Aztecs established their capital, Tenochtitlán, on an island. Over time, they expanded the city with landfill and planted crops on floating gardens called chinampas, plots of arable soil created from wattle and sediment. The lakes provided the Aztecs with a line of defense, the chinampas with sustenance. The idea: Live with nature.
Then the conquering Spaniards waged war against water, determined to subdue it. The Aztec system was foreign to them. They replaced the dikes and canals with streets and squares. They drained the lakes and cleared forestland, suffering flood after flood, including one that drowned the city for five straight years.
“The Aztecs managed,” Ms. Castro said. “But they had 300,000 people. We now have 21 million.”
An 18th-century engraving. Historical Picture Archive/Corbis, via Getty Images
Mexico City today is an agglomeration of neighborhoods that are really many big cities cheek by jowl. During the last century, millions of migrants poured in from the countryside to find jobs. The city’s growth, from 30 square miles in 1950 to a metropolitan area of about 3,000 square miles 60 years later, has produced a vibrant but chaotic megalopolis of largely unplanned and sprawling development. Highways and cars choke the atmosphere with heat-inducing carbon dioxide — and development has wiped out nearly every remaining trace of the original lakes, taxing the underground aquifers and forcing what was once a water-rich valley to import billions of gallons from far away.
The system of getting the water from there to here is a miracle of modern hydroengineering. But it is also a crazy feat, in part a consequence of the fact that the city, with a legacy of struggling government, has no large-scale operation for recycling wastewater or collecting rainwater, forcing it to expel a staggering 200 billion gallons of both via crippled sewers like the Grand Canal. Mexico City now imports as much as 40 percent of its water from remote sources — then squanders more than 40 percent of what runs through its 8,000 miles of pipes because of leaks and pilfering. This is not to mention that pumping all this water more than a mile up into the mountains consumes roughly as much energy as does the entire metropolis of Puebla, a Mexican state capital with a population akin to Philadelphia’s.
Even with this mind-boggling undertaking, the government acknowledges that nearly 20 percent of Mexico City residents — critics put the number even higher — still can’t count on getting water from their taps each day. For some residents, water comes only once a week, or once every several weeks, and that may mean just an hour of yellow muck dripping from the faucet. Those people have to hire trucks to deliver drinking water, at costs sometimes exponentially higher than wealthy residents pay in better-served neighborhoods.
Some residents rely on “pipas,” large trucks with hoses that deliver water from aquifers.
A pipa in the San Andrés Totoltepec neighborhood.
Overseeing the city’s water supply is a thin, patient man with the war-weary air of an old general: Ramón Aguirre Díaz, director of the Water System of Mexico City, is unusually frank about the perils ahead.
“Climate change is expected to have two effects,” he told me. “We expect heavier, more intense rains, which means more floods, but also more and longer droughts.”
If it stops raining in the reservoirs where the city gets its water, “we’re facing a potential disaster,” he said. “There is no way we can provide enough trucks of water to deal with that scenario.”
“If we have the problems that California and São Paulo have had,” he added, “there is the serious possibility of unrest.”
The problem is not simply that the aquifers are being depleted. Mexico City rests on a mix of clay lake beds and volcanic soil. Areas like downtown sit on clay. Other districts were built on volcanic fields.
Volcanic soil absorbs water and delivers it to the aquifers. It’s stable and porous. Picture a bucket filled with marbles. You can pour water into the bucket, and the marbles will hardly move. Stick a straw into the bucket to extract the water, and the marbles still won’t move. For centuries, before the population exploded, volcanic soil guaranteed that the city had water underground.
Mexico City’s water crisis today comes partly from the fact that so much of this porous land — including large stretches of what Mexico City has supposedly set aside for agriculture and preservation, called “conservation land” — has been developed. So it is buried beneath concrete and asphalt, stopping rain from filtering down to the aquifers, causing floods and creating “heat islands” that raise temperatures further and only increase the demand for water. This is part of the sprawl problem.
Now, picture layered sheets of plastic. On a molecular level, clay acts sort of like that. It doesn’t really absorb water. Instead, water settles between the sheets. When the water is drained, the sheets can collapse and crack. If all of Mexico City were built on clay, it would at least sink at the same rate and “subsidence would be an anecdote,” Mr. Aguirre said.
But because the city is built on a mix of clay and volcanic soil, it sinks unevenly, causing dramatic and deadly fissures. In Iztapalapa, Pedro Moctezuma Barragán, director of ecological studies at the Metropolitan Autonomous University, climbed down into what felt like a ravine where a street had given way. He’s been tracking the problem for years. Fifteen thousand houses in the area, he said, had been damaged by sinking ground.
The Grand Canal was meant to solve flooding and sewage problems that had plagued the city for centuries.
‘The Center of Women’s Lives’
Deep below the historic center, water extracted from aquifers now can end up just beyond the city limits, in Ecatepec, at one of the largest pumping stations along the Grand Canal. The pump, completed in 2007, was built to move 11,000 gallons per second — essentially water that now needs to be lifted up from where the canal has collapsed, just so that it can continue on its way.
The man in charge of this herculean undertaking is Carlos Salgado Terán, chief of the department of drainage for Zone A in Mexico City, a trim, no-funny-business official in a starched bright green shirt. According to Mr. Salgado, the Grand Canal today is working at only 30 percent of capacity because of subsidence. He admitted that it was a Sisyphean struggle to keep up with the city’s decline. Parts of the canal around Ecatepec have sunk an additional six feet just since the plant was built, he said.
He showed me around one morning. The canal is wide open, a stinking river of sewage belching methane and sulfuric acid. Apartment blocks, incongruously painted cheerful Crayola colors, hug the bank. A lonely tricycle sat in a parking lot near where the station’s giant, noisy engines churn out greasy white foam that coats the black water.
Today, the canal operates at only 30 percent of capacity.
A stretch of canal that runs under a road.
Mr. Salgado asked if I wanted a tour of the filters. “The smell can be unbearable, and it’s very unhealthy,” he cautioned.
The district of Tlalpan is on the opposite side of Mexico City. There, Claudia Sheinbaum, a former environment minister who developed the city’s first climate change program, is now a local district president. She has the slightly impatient, defensive mien of someone wrestling with an impossible mission.
“With climate change, the situation will only get much worse,” she said. A warming climate will only increase the city’s problems with pollution, specifically ozone. Heat waves mean health crises and rising costs for health care in a city where air-conditioning is not commonplace in poor neighborhoods. She seconded what Mr. Aguirre had said about the threat of drought. “Yes,” she said, “if there is drought we are not prepared.”
For the time being, Well 30 helps supply Tlalpan with drinking water. One recent morning, large trucks, called “pipas,” some with neat lettering that promised “agua potable,” crowded a muddy turnoff beside the highway. From a low cinder-block building, painted red, scrawled with graffiti and crowned in barbed wire, sprouted two long, angled pipes connected to dangling hoses. The arrangement of the pipes and hoses looked something like the gallows in a game of hangman.
These pipes plunge 1,000 feet down to reach an aquifer. Trucks, endlessly, one after another, wait their turn to fill up, positioning themselves beneath the hoses.
This is where residents of Tlalpan get water when they can’t get it from their faucets. It takes more than 500 trips a day to satisfy the parched citizens of the district. Juan José López, the district representative at the well, distributes assignments from a desk in the red building piled with stacks of orders that residents file. Drivers wait at his window, as at a fast-food drive-through, to pick up their assignments.
“The pump is always working,” Mr. López said. “At least it is still good water.”
To the east, in Iztapalapa, some wells tap into a noxious stew contaminated by minerals and chemicals. Angry residents wait in lines overnight to plead with pipa drivers, who sometimes pit desperate families against one another, seeing who pays the bigger bribe.
Fernando González, who helped manage the water supply for Iztapalapa for 32 years, said the health effects of contaminated water were clear to residents whose infants regularly broke out in rashes and whose grandparents suffered colitis.
In some cases, the wait for water trucks can make the cable guy look punctual: Deliveries may be promised in three to 30 days, forcing residents to stay home the whole time, because orders are canceled if there’s no one in the house when the trucks arrive.
“Water becomes the center of women’s lives in places where there is a serious problem,” points out Mireya Imaz, a program director at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. “Women in Iztapalapa can spend all night waiting for the pipas, then they have to be home for the trucks, and sometimes they will ride with the drivers to make sure the drivers deliver the water, which is not always a safe thing to do.”
“It becomes impossible for many poor women to work outside the home,” she said. “The whole system is made worse by corruption.”
That’s pretty much what I heard talking to women in Iztapalapa. Virginia Josefina Ramírez Granillo was standing in the courtyard of a community center in San Miguel Teotongo, a hilly neighborhood on the edge of the district, next to a wishful mural showing a woman washing clothes in her sink with a running faucet.
“We line up at 3 in the morning for the pipa,” Ms. Ramírez said, pointing toward a distant spot where the trucks arrive. “We wait for hours to get water that doesn’t last a week, and usually there aren’t enough pipas. Sometimes there is violence. Women sell their spaces in the line. If you’re from the wrong political party, you don’t get water. You have to show your party affiliation, your voting ID.”
People in rich neighborhoods on the other side of town, “they don’t have to think about water,” she added. “But for us it is something we think about all day, every day.”
A boy in Xochimilco washes a machete in pipa water.
One Pipa, Two Donkeys
Finally, there are places in Mexico City that even pipas can’t reach, where the precariousness of the entire water system, and by extension the whole city, is epitomized in a few scruffy acres.
Diana Contreras Guzmán lives in the highlands of the district of Xochimilco, where the roads rise almost vertically and dirt byways lead to shanties made of corrugated tin, cinder block and cardboard. A young single mother, she lives with nine relatives in a one-room shack. Ms. Guzmán’s father and three brothers are janitors. Her sister works in an office. To reach a bus to get to work, more than a mile down the hill, they set out at 4:30 a.m., leaving Ms. Guzmán, most days, to care for four small children — and to deal with water.
Once a week, a pipa delivers water farther up the hill, where the road is paved. When that happens, Ms. Guzmán, a small, thin woman, spends two hours climbing up the hill and back down again, seven times in all, lugging 90 pounds of water on each return trip. Sometimes Josué and Valentina, two of the children, try to help, dragging half-gallon bottles. Ms. Guzmán can’t leave the house for long, she said, in case someone steals water from her cistern.
Diana Contreras Guzmán and her family spend over 10 percent of their income on water.
For 100 gallons from the pipa, she pays 25 cents. But this doesn’t begin to supply her family with enough water. So every day she also pays Ángel, a neighbor in his 70s who owns a pair of donkeys named Reindeer and Rabbit. The donkeys trudge plastic containers of water, four at a time, from a well down the hill.
Ms. Guzmán’s family earns $600 a month. They ultimately have to spend more than 10 percent of that income on water — enough to yield about 10 gallons per person per day.
The average resident in a wealthy Mexico City neighborhood to the west, nearer the reservoirs, consumes 100 gallons per day, experts note. The wealthy resident pays one-tenth what Ms. Guzmán does.
Donkeys deliver water in some areas not served by pipas.
“Is there any clearer indication that everything about water in this city comes down to inequity?” said David Vargas, whose company, Isla Urbana, produces a low-cost rainwater-harvesting system.
I put this question to Tanya Müller García, the city’s secretary for the environment. “We’re constantly breaking records for the warmest months,” she said, handing over a report on Mexico City’s sustainability plans. There are predictions that by 2080 the city’s average temperature will have risen several degrees and that annual rainfall will have decreased 20 percent.
Ms. Müller was defensive about the city’s inability to supply every resident with clean water, insisting that the numbers of those unserved were exaggerated. She listed progressive new programs intended to combat pollution, preserve green spaces and reduce the demand for cars by improving mass transit. This city is full of brilliant people with good ideas, including a plan to create a water fund into which corporations drawing heavily on the water supply would pay — to help improve services in less advantaged areas. Another plan envisions a public park that would double as a rainwater collection basin. And there’s a long-term agenda to turn the airport into a green, mixed-use district.
Meanwhile, the Mexican federal government envisions constructing a giant new airport on a dry lake bed, exactly the worst place to build. It recently cut to zero federal money budgeted for fixing the city’s pipes, Metro and other critical infrastructure. Partly this is just politics. The mayor of Mexico City has talked about running for president. The current administration doesn’t want to do him any favors. At the same time, the federal government has its own agenda, promoting highways, cars and sprawl.
The disconnect between local and federal officials is not unique to Mexico. Often big cities find themselves undermined by state and federal politicians catering to a different electorate, as if in the end the consequences won’t be ruinous for everyone.
“There has to be a consensus — of scientists, politicians, engineers and society — when it comes to pollution, water, climate,” Ms. Sheinbaum, the former environment minister, stressed. “We have the resources, but lack the political will.”
It turns out Ms. Sheinbaum herself lives in a house that can count on water from the tap only twice a month.
So she, too, orders pipas to come to fill her cistern.
A warming climate will accelerate the effects of pollution.
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A remote Canadian lake and its people: Protecting a last refuge.
Great Bear Lake, which straddles the Arctic Circle, is the first Unesco Biosphere Reserve led by an indigenous community. They guard it as if it were the last hope for humanity. They may have a point.
Thousands of years ago, every lake was like Great Bear Lake. So pure you could lower a cup into the water and drink it. So beautiful that people composed love songs to it. So mysterious that many believed it was alive. Today, of the 10 largest lakes in the world, it is the last one that remains essentially primeval.
Great Bear Lake straddles the Arctic Circle in the remote Northwest Territories of Canada. At just over 12,000 square miles, the lake is the eighth largest in the world. It is bigger than Belgium and deeper than Lake Superior, and it is covered in ice and snow most of the year. The surrounding area is wilderness too — a sprawling land of untouched boreal forest and tundra, rivers and mountains.
The only human settlement on its shores is the town of Deline, population 503. This isolated community is mostly Sahtuto’ine, meaning the Bear Lake People. They are as connected to the lake as the name implies, and for practical, cultural, historic and even prophetic reasons, they are determined to keep it pristine.
Their efforts paid off in 2016. In March, the Great Bear Lake watershed was declared a Unesco Biosphere Reserve. Called the Tsá Tué Biosphere Reserve, it is the largest in North America, and the first in the world to be led by an indigenous community. Several months later, the Canadian government granted Deline self-government, ensuring local control in areas like language and education. It is the first time that an aboriginal government in Canada will represent everyone in the community, aboriginal and nonaboriginal alike. Taken together, the Unesco and self-government announcements reinforce Deline’s ability to control what happens to Great Bear Lake.
David Livingstone, now retired after decades of working on environmental issues for the Canadian government in the far north, helped Deline apply for Unesco designation. To the Sahtuto’ine, Great Bear Lake is “not just a body of water; it’s fundamental to their culture,” he said. “The folks in Deline consider the lake to be a living thing.” Great Bear Lake is important to Mr. Livingstone as well. “It is the last great lake of its size and quality on the planet,” he said. “It’s like the Mona Lisa — a world treasure.”
I had spent an hour or two in Deline back in 2014, as an American diplomat posted to Canada. It was July and the lake was ice-free, endless and flat to the horizon. During my three-year tour, it was the sole time I needed a translator, because many Deline elders speak only their own language, North Slavey.
This past November, I returned to Deline to learn more about the community’s relationship with the lake, to witness the interplay of culture, language, wilderness and isolation that makes this area so distinct.
It was late afternoon when the small plane dipped through a thick, low-lying cloud layer and I saw boreal forest — part of a vast biome that stretches across northern North America and Eurasia — as far as the eye could see. The plane descended toward a slender strip covered in white, Deline’s single runway. It was a short drive from the airport to the hotel where I was staying, the community-owned Grey Goose Lodge. For such a tiny community, Deline has more tourist infrastructure than I expected, including a small handicrafts store in the hotel and an ambition to welcome the growing number of tourists who travel to Canada’s north for a winter and wilderness experience.
The evening I arrived, I met with Morris Neyelle, a member of the new governing council, the K’aowedo Ke, as well as Danny Gaudet, a local businessman who was Deline’s lead negotiator for self-government. Sworn in on Sept. 1, the new Deline Got’ine Government is responsible for delivering an array of local programs and services. Mr. Neyelle, 65, tall and soft-spoken, switches easily between English and North Slavey. He said self-government allowed the residents of Deline to preserve their way of life and to use these traditions to tackle modern problems. In the past, Mr. Gaudet added, people would look only to the national and provincial government for help. Now, Deline would decide what was best for its people. This included making their own decisions about economic development, such as elevating cultural tourism through the community-run Destination Deline program. “Just on tourism alone, we think we can probably put everyone to work in this town,” Mr. Gaudet said.
Protecting the lake, however, is not just about self-preservation and increased tourism. For the Sahtuto’ine, Mr. Neyelle and Mr. Gaudet explained, the lake was a powerful force in the world: a place critical to the survival of the human species. This belief is based on the prophecies of a Sahtuto’ine elder named Eht’se Ayah, who died in 1940. Some believe Mr. Ayah’s prophecies are literal, others believe they are allegory.
Mr. Ayah foretold that in the future, people from the south would come to Great Bear Lake because it would be one of the few places left with water to drink and fish to eat. He said so many boats would come that you could walk from one to another without entering the water. Simply put, Great Bear Lake would be a last refuge for humanity.
Mr. Gaudet said the predictions were a big reason the new government pushed to have authority over everyone in the area, aboriginal and nonaboriginal alike. If “hundreds of thousands of people” come because of the prophecies and because “we have the freshest water in the world,” he said, then “you have to live under our rules.”
People in Deline told me that the weather had been changing in recent years, and that the summer season was getting longer. The lake is taking longer to freeze, and it’s melting earlier. Mr. Neyelle said climate change added a note of urgency to the prophecies; they may come true sooner than expected.
“Maybe we’re in that era now where everything is changing,” he said, and people from the south “are going to come.”
Late that evening, I walked along Deline’s main street and tried to imagine hundreds of thousands of people coming to the area. It was hard to do. The night sky was overcast, and the temperature had dipped to minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 23 Celsius). Specks of ice from the freezing-up of Great Bear Lake filled the air. The flecks caused outdoor lights to reflect upward, creating optical illusions called light pillars that made it seem as if each light had become a searchlight aimed at the sky.
I walked off the road and into a thicket of boreal forest. Hoarfrost from the lake clung to every surface of the trees and bushes. It covered even the undersides of spruce needles. I was hundreds of feet from the shoreline, yet Great Bear Lake was everywhere — in the air, on the ground and in the trees.
At 8 the next morning, I awoke to darkness. From November until January, Deline gets less than five hours of sun each day, although it makes up for that between May and July, when it gets over 22 hours daily. Eventually, I saw a glimmer of predawn on the horizon, but it was not until 10:30 a.m. that the first rays of sun peeked out. I walked outside and headed toward the church for Sunday Mass.
The round, yurt-shaped structure was in town, on the shore of Great Bear Lake. Chunks and shards of ice lay heaped on the shoreline, while farther out, the surface of the lake was pancake-flat, alternately skimmed white with snow or glistening with ice that froze overnight. A wedge of open water was visible just offshore. It looked turbulent, straining and frothing where it encountered the surface ice, as if it were determined not to freeze.
Deline is predominantly Roman Catholic. Inside the church, I witnessed the community’s focus on preserving North Slavey. An elder was leading the congregation in the rosary. His call was in North Slavey, and the response was in a mix of Slavey and English. During the Mass, the Gospel and the homily were in English, followed by an on-the-spot translation into North Slavey. The language is spoken everywhere — in church, on the streets and at home — as part of a concerted effort to keep it alive. The 2011 Canadian census counted only 225 people who identified the language as their mother tongue. But North Slavey is an official language of the Deline Got’ine Government and of the Northwest Territories.
For the moment, North Slavey is not on the verge of extinction. It belongs to a family of North American indigenous languages that includes Apache and Navajo. Children in Deline’s primary school are taught the language; this year, an elder began to teach North Slavey to high school students. Mr. Neyelle said the new government wanted to make acquiring and passing on the language a priority because it believed speaking North Slavey was crucial to preserving the culture. “Slavey is ours,” he said. “That’s where our powers lay.” He said his descriptions in Slavey had more depth and color than those in English, even though he was fluent in both. Teenagers I spoke to echoed this thought. They said jokes were funnier in Slavey.
After Mass, I walked over to Great Bear Lake, curious about the little skein of open water I had seen hours earlier. To my surprise, it had disappeared. Thinking I was turned around, I kept searching, but saw only the reflective surface of new ice and beyond that, a large field of older, snow-covered ice. Mr. Neyelle confirmed that the water had frozen over during the time I was in church. He was not surprised it had happened so quickly. Sometimes, he said, you could actually see ice creeping across open water. His description made it seem like a fox or wolf stalking its prey.
We drove to Ski Hill, a gathering place for the community perched on top of a cleared rise near town. The sun had been up for three hours, but already it was getting dark. Several pickup trucks were parked close together, next to a recently built hut with a blazing fire pit in the middle. Children were sledding (despite the name of the hill, no one actually skis there), and some of the adults were test-driving a new snowmobile with a powerful engine. Strips of lake trout along with moose meat and hot dogs cooked on top of barrel grills. The atmosphere was festive, perhaps because it seemed as if Great Bear Lake was finally freezing over. This meant access to the entire lake, better fishing and, eventually, an ice road that would temporarily connect Deline to the outside world.
Or perhaps it was festive because these were friends gathering on a Sunday to enjoy the sunset, grilled food and conversation in North Slavey and in English. It reminded me that despite the groundbreaking nature of Deline’s self-government and Unesco status, it was still a small town. The type of town where the phone directory is a piece of paper taped to the wall.
One elder I met there was Charlie Neyelle, 72, Morris Neyelle’s older brother and the elders’ representative on the K’aowedo Ke. Charlie Neyelle is a spiritual and mental health guide for the community, and pushed for self-government and preservation of Great Bear Lake. I asked him a question I had posed to many people during my time in Deline: What does Great Bear Lake mean to you?
In response, Mr. Neyelle told me the water-heart story, about a Sahtuto’ine ancestor who lived around Great Bear Lake, in an area called Caribou Point. One day the fisherman set out four hooks. When the fisherman returned to check on them, a lake trout had broken one of the lines and taken the hook. This bothered the fisherman, because in those days, hooks were extremely valuable. So that night, he transformed himself into a losch, also known as burbot, a freshwater version of cod. The fisherman swam down to the middle of the lake to look for the hook and heard a booming sound. There, at the bottom, he saw a gigantic beating heart. All the species of fish — trout, whitefish, pickerel, herring, suckers — faced the heart, surrounding and protecting it. He swam back to shore after seeing this, and the following morning when he went to check on his three hooks, he found three trout. One of them had the hook he had lost the day before dangling from its mouth.
When the fisherman saw the water-heart, he realized Great Bear Lake was alive, Mr. Neyelle said. “The lake gives life to the universal: grass, insects, willow, everything.” Some in Deline believe that the water-heart at the bottom of the lake gives life to all of the lakes, oceans and rivers in the world. For the Sahtuto’ine, this belief underscores not only why Great Bear Lake must be protected, but also why its protection is of global importance.
Toward the end of our conversation, Mr. Neyelle also mentioned Eht’se Ayah’s prophecy. “When there is no food or water all around the world, many will come to Great Bear Lake,” he said. “It will be one of the last places that has both.” No matter how many times I heard this apocalyptic prediction, it was jarring to hear, especially when inserted into conversations about Great Bear Lake’s beauty and providence.
The regular evocation of this prophecy reminded me of what happened on the other side of the lake in the 1940s, in Port Radium. The site of a large uranium ore mine, it was the most significant industrial development in Great Bear Lake’s history. During World War II, uranium from Port Radium was sent to the United States for the war effort, where it provided much of the material for the Manhattan Project and the atomic bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Although it stopped producing uranium in 1960 and is now abandoned, Port Radium was at its peak larger than Deline.
Irene Kodakin was born near Port Radium in 1952, when the mine was still in operation. Now living in Deline, she describes Port Radium as a thriving community of aboriginal and nonaboriginal workers brought to work in the mines.
Ms. Kodakin has happy memories of her childhood, in stark contrast to her experience in a residential school in Inuvik, a town more than 400 miles away. For much of the 20th century, the Canadian government forced many aboriginal children into these schools, with the goal of assimilating them into Canadian culture. “They would put their hand in our mouths and just press our bottom lips to our teeth until it bleeds” if you speak Slavey, she said. When she returned home, she could no longer speak North Slavey. Her older sister had to translate when Ms. Kodakin spoke to her own father.
A generation of Sahtuto’ine lived and worked at Port Radium. Although it was known at the time that exposure to uranium was dangerous, this warning did not reach them. Long after the mine closed, Sahtuto’ine who had been in Port Radium began to die of various cancers. Ms. Kodakin’s father, George Kodakin, who had become a respected pro-self-government chief in Deline, died of cancer at age 64. Ms. Kodakin’s older sister, aunts and uncles also died of it, and she believes the mine was the cause.
Ms. Kodakin’s belief is shared by many in the community, including Gina Beyha, a coordinator for the Unesco Biosphere Reserve who was a nurse in Deline for 15 years. While researching links between cancer and Port Radium, Ms. Beyha and others discovered that uranium taken from the sacred Great Bear Lake was most likely used in the bombs that detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Many people, especially the elders, were aghast, Ms. Beyha said. In 1998, Deline sent a delegation to Japan for the annual Hiroshima Peace Memorial Ceremony. It was a gesture of atonement as well as a way to start healing, particularly for the widows of men who had worked at Port Radium, who made traditional gifts that the delegation presented to the Japanese.
During my time in Deline, the legacies of Port Radium and the residential schools were among many reasons people gave for protecting Great Bear Lake and for negotiating self-government. The others: to preserve Sahtuto’ine culture, to develop tourism, to honor elders and ancestors, and to prepare for the realization of Eht’se Ayah’s prophecies. After a week of talking with many Deline residents, these reasons all seemed tightly connected and at the core of the community’s identity.
Those not living on Great Bear Lake, however, gave another reason that was perhaps the simplest of all. The lake, like the Mona Lisa, is magnificent.
It draws the gaze as an ocean does. The slate blue ice and white snow merge seamlessly into the sky so that when you leave the shoreline, with brittle tiles of ice cracking underfoot, it feels like stepping into a cloud. And in the brief moments when the wind dies down, the silence is as deep and enormous as the lake itself.
During my last days in the area, I went exploring with a Deline resident, Leeroy Andre, his wife, Diane, and his 18-year-old daughter, Whitney. We would leave at sunrise and plunge into the boreal forest, following trails and old seismic lines. In the distance lay the frozen sheet of Great Bear Lake, and beyond, thick rolls of mist rose toward the sun, evidence of open water at the edge of the horizon. In North Slavey, this mist is called tah-tzeleh.
It is a land of ptarmigan and marten, musk ox, caribou, moose, wolf and bear. One day, after we had been out four hours, we came across a huge abandoned beaver lodge at least six feet high and twice as long. Around then, despite my wearing several layers, a parka and other gear, the cold started after me. It crept up from the ground onto my snowmobile. It cracked the rubber of my boots and shouldered inside. If I concentrated, I could feel ice crystals forming in my toes. When we started moving again, the cold took on the shape of a blanket and patiently tried to cover my shoulders and back.
At sunset, the moon appeared like a slender comma above the trees, glowing in the blue-black sky. We drove through marshmallow mounds: berry bushes covered in snow and hoarfrost for most of the year before they emerge in the summer and grow leaves and berries as fast as they can.
Dark came quickly, and we sped across yet another small lake connected to Great Bear Lake. The snowmobile’s headlight illuminated a blizzard of snowflakes as shiny as diamonds, as if the land were showing what true wealth looked like.
The northern lights appeared like a hallucination across the star-filled sky. For hours they moved in slow motion above me, as the land seemed to recede and I faced the cosmos. If a recent scientific theory proves correct, somewhere out in space is the origin of the earth’s water, which fills Great Bear Lake and gives us life.
This connected with something I was told when I first arrived in Deline. To the Sahtuto’ine, Great Bear Lake is not just a lake. They are part of it and it is part of them. No longer does this seem like a belief unique to their culture — it sounds like a universal truth. The water from Great Bear Lake flows in our veins, too.
Peter Kujawinski is a novelist and freelance journalist. He is a co-author of “Nightfall” and the forthcoming middle-grade novel “Edgeland.”
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Brian Bienkowski
Straits of Mackinac 'worst possible place' for a Great Lakes oil spill.
Two 63-year-old pipes lie exposed at the bottom of the current-whipped Straits of Mackinac, determined by one expert to be "the worst possible place" for a spill in all the Great Lakes.
It seemed like a no-brainer at the time.
Instead of using tankers to haul crude oil across the treacherous open waters of the Great Lakes, in 1953 a Canadian pipeline company determined it would be easier and cheaper to take that oil off the lakes, put it in a pipe, and pump it hundreds of miles overland to Midwestern refineries.
The pipeline builders had two choices to get the oil to market from a terminal in far northern Wisconsin on the western shore of Lake Superior.
They could tunnel down the length of Wisconsin, around the southern shore of Lake Michigan and across Michigan’s Lower Peninsula to the refinery city of Sarnia, Ontario. Or they could take a more northerly route, digging through Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and then southward across the Lower Peninsula.
The northern route was shorter, but there was one mighty obstacle, the Straits of Mackinac — a channel, four to five miles wide, between Lakes Michigan and Huron that is whipsawed by currents unlike anywhere else in the Great Lakes.
Engineers figured they could solve the problem by splitting the pipeline into two narrower pipes where it reached the water’s edge, then doubling the thickness of the steel on the smaller pipes and coating them with an enamel skin.
INTRODUCTION:
OIL AND WATER
PART ONE:
PATH OF LEAST RESISTANCE
It was all protection enough, the builders figured, to allow the twin tubes to be laid across the lake bottom. Nothing like it had ever been tried: “It is the longest and deepest job we’ve done since we started this sort of work in Arabia some 15 years ago,” the project’s lead engineer said at the time.
The plan was to initially run about 120,000 barrels of oil through the Straits per day and gradually ramp that up to 300,000 barrels per day. Over time the volume grew.
The pipes were not expanded, replaced or thickened to increase the oil and natural gas they carry; the capacity was largely added by increasing pressure on the steel tubes. In 2013, the pipeline owner ratcheted up the maximum capacity on the lines to 540,000 barrels per day.
That is a volume far greater than the 470,000 barrels per day planned for the state-of-the-art Dakota Access Pipeline, which drew thousands of protesters to the Great Plains this fall. Many were upset over the risk the Dakota line poses to the Missouri River, though engineers never planned to drape the pipe across the river bottom. Instead, they prepared to tunnel the pipe as deep as 115 feet below the riverbed to protect the waters above.
Given the age of the Mackinac lines, and the fact that they were laid in what one prominent hydrodynamics expert now calls the “worst possible” place for an oil spill in the Great Lakes, environmentalists, politicians and Michigan regulators are taking a new look at the old pipes.
Many still see the idea of running oil lines through the heart of the Great Lakes, home to 20% of the world’s fresh surface water, as a no-brainer. But from the opposite perspective.
“Certainly, the Straits pipelines would not be built today,” Michigan’s Republican Attorney General Bill Schuette has said. “So how many more tomorrows (they) should operate is limited in duration.”
The State of Michigan has ordered a study of the environmental and economic risks the pipes pose to the Great Lakes, as well as an analysis of other ways to deliver the 23 million gallons of crude and natural gas they are capable of carrying each day.
One obvious alternative would be to move that oil along a pipeline route that runs the length of Wisconsin and wraps around the southern shore of Lake Michigan. It is operated by the same oil pipeline giant, Enbridge Energy Company Inc.
Both studies, funded by Enbridge but not overseen by the company, are expected to be completed later this year.
In the meantime, resolutions calling for closing the Michigan pipes or vastly restricting them have been passed by more than 60 Michigan local governments, including Detroit, Lansing, Ann Arbor, Traverse City and Kalamazoo.
Enbridge complains it has become the victim of fearmongering. Company executives say the Mackinac lines were built for the ages and that regular inspections using side-scan sonar, remote cameras and MRI-like devices placed inside the carbon steel tubes prove they are basically as good as new. They argue there is no reason to talk about scrapping or rebuilding them — now or in the foreseeable future.
MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL FILES
Workers ready a cathode inspection device to check the coating in the western oil pipeline at Enbridge's North Straits Station in St. Ignace, Mich. The collective capacity of the two pipelines is 540,000 barrels per day.
“We know from the many levels of inspections and diagnostics that the line is in very good condition and can continue to safely operate indefinitely so obsolescence is not a factor,” company officials wrote in a 2015 memo to Schuette, the attorney general, and to former Michigan Department of Environmental Quality Director Dan Wyant.
Wyant and Schuette’s response, which came in a report prepared by the Michigan Petroleum Pipeline Task Force: “This is not a reasonable position.”
As Enbridge assured the public its pipelines were highly unlikely to leak, the company also announced in June it would invest $7 million in oil spill cleanup equipment designed for the Arctic-like environment of the Mackinac Straits.
“Hopefully, we’ll never need it, but it’s there,” said Enbridge spokesman Ryan Duffy.
Enbridge also has stationed a half dozen employees in a garage-like building tucked behind the Family Fare grocery store in St. Ignace, on the northern shore of the Straits. The crew’s job, beyond basic daily maintenance work, is to be ready around the clock — and around the calendar — if the pipelines crack.
Enbridge officials insist the Mackinac pipes are different from any other section in their vast network of North American pipelines because the Mackinac pipes were specifically engineered to withstand the Straits’ brutal underwater environment.
Even some of the company’s staunchest critics concede the twin lines, old as they may be, remain an engineering marvel.
But that doesn’t mean the risk the pipes pose to the world’s largest freshwater system is small.
“Risk is an equation, P times C — probability times consequence,” says Traverse City attorney Jim Olson, founder of the environmental group FLOW, which is calling for the pipes to be shut down.
“If the magnitude of the consequence is high, the probability doesn’t really matter. That is the case here. This is like the ammunition plant in the middle of a city. You just wouldn’t build an ammo plant in the middle of a city.”
Better than boats
In 1950, Enbridge’s predecessor, Interprovincial Pipe Line Company, built a pipeline linking the newly developed Alberta oil fields to the western shore of Lake Superior. The first barrel of oil took 26 days to make the 1,150-mile trip from Edmonton to Superior.
The oil that flowed across the continent that winter was stored in tanks near the lakeshore until the spring thaw. It was then loaded onto a specially built fleet of 620-foot-long tankers, each of which cost $4.5 million and could hold 6 million gallons of crude, then shipped across Lakes Superior and Huron to the refinery city of Sarnia.
Beyond the cost and time of loading and unloading the oil, and the risks involved with floating it across some of the stormiest freshwaters on the globe, the tankers could only operate for eight ice-free months each year. Nevertheless, that first season boats hauled nearly 600 million gallons across the lakes without incident — almost.
Near the end of the season one of the new ships exploded while docked in Sarnia, just after its hold had been emptied of 5 million gallons.
One person was killed and five were injured. It could have been far worse had the tanker not been empty; the explosion happened just 300 yards from a cluster of refinery tanks, and those tanks were only about 800 yards from Sarnia’s main business district.
In 1952, pipeline builders began to explore a safer option — laying a steel tube from Superior to Sarnia. After briefly considering routing the pipe through Wisconsin, the company opted to take the shortcut across the Upper Peninsula. The project required laying 645 miles of pipe, including crossing the Straits of Mackinac, which is nearly 250 feet deep in places.
The engineers wanted to split the line where it crossed the straits into two smaller pipelines because those would be easier to install, and if one of the twins needed to be turned off, oil could keep flowing through the other.
The configuration also allowed the pipes to operate well below the maximum pressure they were designed for, which was safer and increased their lifespan.
The pipeline builders traveled throughout the region in early 1953 selling the concept to residents as “essential to the defense of the United States and the whole North American continent.”
It cost the company just $2,450 to get an easement across the state-owned lake bottom to lay two pipes that were made of steel nearly 7/8-inch thick, about double the gauge of the pipe that would run over land.
COURTESY OF BRUCE TRUDGEN FAMILY
Images from 1953 by engineering student Bruce Trudgen show pipelines being constructed on the north shore of the Straits of Mackinac in St. Ignace, Mich. The pipelines were made from 27-foot-long sections that were welded together and dragged across the Straits, where Lakes Michigan and Huron meet. The bleachers were built so the public could watch the construction. The wood attached to the bottom of pipeline was to prevent abrasion as it was placed on the lake bottom.
The agreement said the pipes must be buried in the lakebed until the water reached a depth of 65 feet, to protect them from ice and anchor damage from freighters traveling the congested shipping corridor. Michigan also required that the pipes not stretch unsupported for more than 75 feet along the rolling lake bottom, to keep the pipes from swaying — and possibly cracking — in the swift, ever-changing currents.
The pipeline builder knew the stakes were high because of the pipes’ potential to break in the Straits, which the company noted would be financially disastrous.
“Not only would the construction of such a line be a very costly venture, which would have to be completed during the relatively brief period during late spring and summer when the Straits were not frozen over but the loss in revenue which would result from any possible break in the line and shutdown of the flow would be of the most serious importance,” a company report at the time stated.
The company added that the possible contamination of lake waters also was a concern, and that it would make “every effort” to ensure that this would not happen.
“Operation Big Pull” began the first week of August 1953.
It required hundreds of laborers and engineers to weld sections of pipes into tubes approximately 4 miles long. They were assembled by welding 27-foot sections, though each individual section has no seam running its length — a distinct safety feature of the lines. The pipes were then dragged into the lake with a cable attached to a specially built winch.
The $8.5 million project was hailed in the press as “the engineering feat of this generation” and bleachers erected along the lakeshore were packed with “petroleum men from all over the world.” The construction crews weren’t only concerned about doing the work right; they wanted to do it with flair.
COURTESY OF BRUCE TRUDGEN FAMILY
This 1953 photo shows engineering student Bruce Trudgen in a surveyor's shack near where two oil pipelines were being constructed on the north shore of the Straits of Mackinac in St. Ignace, Mich.
“Some 600 crewmen and engineers aimed for a speed record Friday as a second four-mile oil pipeline under the Straits of Mackinac was pulled underwater,” the Associated Press reported Sept. 19, 1953, noting that a construction spokesman was hoping the work could be trimmed to 60 hours. “The official said he knew of no other underwater project to ever be completed so quickly. The first Straits pipeline took 65 work hours.”
Bruce Trudgen, a retired automotive engineer, was a college student in the summer of 1953 working as a member of the survey crew that laid the route across the lake’s bottom.
He said the workers didn’t simply drop the pipe to the lake bottom.
“We had to do some dredging, because the bottom of the lake is hilly, and the pipes would get bent over those hills and valleys,” Trudgen, now deceased, recalled in an interview last summer.
So they dug trenches through the undulations on the lakebed to keep the pipes as snug as possible against the bottom, which is substantially clay, sand and pebbles.
Once the pipes were lowered into place, the engineers assumed they would stay there because all that dense material was stable.
It was a big assumption, and it was wrong.
Choppy waters
Lakes Michigan and Huron are actually two lobes of one giant lake connected at the Straits of Mackinac, but about 8,000 years ago the lakes were truly separate bodies of water. The old Lake Michigan outflow was a river that tumbled easterly, around today’s Mackinac Island and then plunged in a 100-foot waterfall into the old Lake Huron.
The lake levels gradually climbed and eventually swallowed both the falls and the old river channel. But in a sense, the old river never disappeared; water still flows through the Straits today at a rate equivalent to more than 10 Niagara Falls, depending on the day.
Unlike a river, water in the Straits doesn’t always flow in one direction. It can flow east or west, or north or south, changing directions not just over the course of several days, but by the hour. The randomness of the whooshing currents was first documented by French explorer Louis-Armand de Lom d'Arce, Baron Lahontan:
“In some seasons, it so falls out that the Currents run three days Eastward, two days to the West, one to the South and four Northward; sometimes more and sometimes less,” he wrote in 1688. “The cause of this diversity of currents could never be fathom’d, for in a calm, they’ll run in the space of one day to all points of the Compass; i.e. sometimes one way, sometimes another, without any limitation of time.”
The oscillations are driven by precipitation patterns, water temperatures, atmospheric pressure and winds. Those winds can be extraordinarily strong through the Straits, so strong that they can tip over trailer trucks on the Mackinac Bridge, another Straits-spanning engineering marvel built in the 1950s.
The winds whistling through the bridge cables and deck grating were considered a potential factor in the death of a woman who lost control of her blue Yugo in fall 1989. The car flipped over the bridge railing, dropping more than 140 feet to the water below, and then another 150 feet down to the lake bottom.
Bruce Trudgen helped survey the pipeline pathway across the Straits of Mackinac as a college student back in the early 1950s. In this video taken in 2016, Trudgen, who passed away last month at age 84, talks about the difficulty of the job -- and the wisdom of allowing the pipes to operate today.
But it is more than water and wind that rip through the Straits. So does the material on the lake bottom. The currents measured today can, at times, be double what the original pipeline engineers calculated. That rushing water has been inexorably scouring away the lakebed upon which the pipes were originally placed. This has created unsupported spans in the pipelines the design engineers never expected.
“The problem was, over time, the current flowing back and forth has eroded under the pipe,” pipeline construction worker Trudgen said. “The bottom is not stable.”
Enbridge executives contend that the pipes are so strong that even a 140-foot unsupported span is safe. Still, in late summer 2015, the company maintained it was “fully compliant” with the state requirement of no unsupported spans greater than 75 feet.
That confidence was gone the following summer. In August of last year, the company applied for a permit to install up to 22 new lake-bottom supports to fortify unsupported spans on the lines, including four locations the company acknowledged are in violation of the 75-foot span limit.
The company said the out-of-compliance spans were relatively new. But the company also made it clear that it was not just worried about complying with the 75-foot limit; it was worried about the integrity of the pipelines.
“The no-build option presents a future risk to the pipeline and is not a viable option,” the company stated in its permit application last summer, an application the State of Michigan has yet to accept or deny.
This was not the first time company engineers were concerned about the physical integrity of the pipelines.
Ten years after the pipes were installed, operators conducted an underwater inspection and reported no need to construct additional supports to keep them from spanning emerging gaps on the bottom. Trouble evidently started in 1975, when three spots were deemed in need of support, and the company responded by propping up the pipelines with sacks filled with cement-like grout.
ENBRIDGE
The sacks under the pipeline (left) were put in place by divers and are filled with cement-liked grout to provide support for sections of the pipe that span dips in the lake bottom. The bracket holding the pipe (right) is part of an improved support system Enbridge now uses.
In 1987, seven more grout-bag supports were added. In 1992, six more spots were fortified. An inspection in 1997 revealed no apparent problems, but four years later it was a disturbingly different story.
On a Friday in September 2001, Enbridge officials contacted Michigan environmental regulators and reported they needed to do “emergency preventative” work on the pipeline. The urgent tone of a memo contradicts the company’s insistence today that this has always been a pipeline built for the ages, one that can operate “indefinitely.”
By the following Monday, that application — written in pen — arrived on the desk of state environmental regulators.
“Project is to provide support underneath our pipelines in sections where the pipeline spans un-supported over too great a distance,” Enbridge staff wrote. “In order to maintain the integrity and safety — these maintenance repairs can wait no longer.”
Eight supports were placed that fall, but the job wasn’t done. Sixteen more were added in 2003. These were not sacks of grout, but steel brackets held in place by giant screws drilled into the lakebed.
The work still wasn’t done.
In 2004, 16 more of these brackets were placed. In 2005, 14 were added, along with another 12 in 2006. Another seven were installed in 2010, and another 17 in 2012. Two years later, the company installed an additional 40 supports, and reported that the “average” unsupported span would then be less than 50 feet, well within the easement limit of 75 feet.
Two years later — last summer — the company was back with plans to add the 22 new supports.
Pipeline critics worry that even though the pipes might now be more firmly anchored to the ever-eroding lakebed than they were a decade or two ago, the steel could have incurred invisible structural damage during the periods the pipes were left hanging in the swirling current, much like a prizefighter who has taken too many body blows.
“We don’t know how hard it got bent around in those earlier years, so without that data it’s hard to say what condition it is in,” said Ed Timm, a retired senior engineer and oil refinery expert who has become an outspoken critic of the Mackinac pipeline.
Earlier this year, the company, under pressure from Michigan politicians to be more transparent, released data showing that in places the 7/8-inch pipe is actually only about two-thirds that thick. This is something Enbridge attributes not to corrosion but to how the pipe was constructed. The company said these thin spots in no way compromise the safety of the pipe, and in June it released an analysis from an outside firm (using Enbridge data) that affirmed the company’s position that the pipeline remains in excellent shape.
Yet if something, somehow, someday does go wrong, Enbridge officials insist alarms would go off and that valves could be closed within minutes to stanch a spill.
But even if automatic shut-off valves work as designed, in 2015 Enbridge acknowledged a plume of some 200,000 gallons could be unleashed into the Straits.
Worst possible place
The National Wildlife Federation in 2016 hired the University of Michigan’s Dave Schwab to figure out where the Straits currents would drive the oil if a spill ever happened. Schwab, a renowned authority on hydrodynamics, concluded there is no worse place in all of the Great Lakes for a crude oil spill.
Schwab ran 840 simulations under various current, weather and spill scenarios and concluded that up to 152 miles of shoreline could be fouled by a single oil spill, and more than 700 miles of Great Lakes shorelines were vulnerable to a Straits pipeline spill.
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN GRAHAM SUSTAINABILITY INSTITUTE | SEE ALL SCENARIOS
Schwab’s models predicted the first oil bursting from the pipes could be washing onto the Straits’ southern shore, near the fudge shop-packed main street of Mackinaw City, in just three hours.
Within nine hours, it could be lapping at the shores of Mackinac Island, home to a colonial fort overlooking the Straits on a 3.8-square-mile patch of rolling forest so scenic it was second only to Yellowstone in being designated a national park. (Yellowstone was established in 1872, and Mackinac three years later, though the park was turned over to the State of Michigan in 1895.)
Schwab evaluated spill scenarios that involved 5,000 barrels, 10,000 barrels and 25,000 barrels. One scenario showed a spill could smother more than 620 square miles of open water and spread so far west it could soon be lapping at the shores of the U.P.’s Garden Peninsula, about 40 miles of open water north of Wisconsin’s Door County.
Timm, the retired engineer, is equally worried about the integrity of the land-based sections of Line 5, which is built of thinner steel.
Those sections have a history of leaking, and also could unleash a massive oil slick upon Lake Michigan were a significant breach to occur. The pipeline crosses some of northern Michigan’s most famous trout streams, all of which flow toward the Great Lakes and all of which, Timm contends, are as ecologically vulnerable as the Straits.
“What’s it worth to not have trout in the Au Sable River for generations?” he asked of the famously trout-rich river. “What I’m saying is every inch of the pipeline needs to be looked at.”
Enbridge has been harshly critical of the Straits study because it did not factor in efforts to contain and clean up a spill in the hours and days after it happened. The company also maintains emergency valves could cap a spill in a matter of minutes so its worst-case spill would be about 5,000 barrels. That’s well under Schwab’s worst-case scenario of 25,000 barrels, or more than 1 million gallons — a figure picked because it is roughly equivalent to Enbridge’s Kalamazoo River spill of 2010.
Steven Keck, the U.S. Coast Guard’s oil spill contingency preparedness specialist in the Upper Peninsula, says the agency has trained for years to respond to an oil break in the Straits.
But he says that the Coast Guard is not the primary party responsible for a cleanup; the agency would coordinate a response but would only augment boats and equipment brought in by Enbridge and its contractors.
Still, if a spill were to happen in winter, the Coast Guard response would be essential, because it owns the ice breakers that could be needed to get recovery equipment to an oil spill.
Keck said no ice breakers are idled near the Straits in case of such a disaster. Rather, they are out doing their job — breaking ice at ports around the Great Lakes or freeing stuck freighters. It could take days for them to respond.
“If they happen to be in the Straits breaking ice, they’re going to be on the scene immediately, obviously. But let’s say they’re down in Chicago. It’s going to take them probably 24 to 48 hours to get up there,” he said. “It really depends on where they’re at, what the ice conditions are and what they are doing."
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That doesn’t mean the Coast Guard couldn’t adequately respond to a spill, he said.
“Absolutely we’re confident we can respond. What the ice creates is a challenge, that’s all.”
In some cases, he said, the ice could even help corral the oil, or keep it from drifting on currents and spreading to shorelines.
In fact, Keck said waves at any time of year pose just as big of a problem, if not bigger, because they can keep even the Coast Guard’s biggest ships from responding. Keck wouldn’t put a number on the size of waves it would take for a captain to call off a response, though he said swells of 6 feet could meet that threshold, and waves that size on the lakes are not uncommon.
“You’re going to hope for the best-case circumstance, where you have calm seas, and calm winds and a slow current and open water where you can get at it quickly,” he said.
Anything less than a spill under best-case conditions, particularly if it happens in winter, is going to be rough.
In February 2013, the Coast Guard conducted a four-day spill response exercise in which peat moss and orange peels were used to simulate the crude oil carried by the Mackinac pipes. Here are some highlights of what was learned:
“Operation in cold, low-visibility and high-wind environments are hazardous and require special care and awareness.”
“Ensure onboard heating resources are available to defrost frozen pumps and fittings.”
“Icebreaker may be necessary to ‘break out’ and assist other vessels to make way through ice.”
“Cellphones were not reliable when operating from an open deck while underway due to cold effects on batteries and freezing of electronics. They are also difficult to handle and make calls without removing gloves.”
“More personnel may be required to manage equipment in harsh conditions but may result in increased safety and supervision complexities.”
“Frequent crew rotations are necessary in cold weather.”
Scientists studying previous open water oil disasters at sea have said that a recovery effort is lucky to capture 15% of the oil released in a spill. Crews typically use booms to corral the oil and then skimmers to suck it off the surface and onto barges or other vessels for disposal.
In some cases, if the oil is thick enough, cleanup crews will light it on fire. Usually, the bulk of a spill is left to drift on currents, disperse into the water column and decay. But the Great Lakes are a vastly different environment from the areas of ocean where high-profile spills have historically happened.
“It goes without saying a major spill in the Great Lakes would be a disaster of epic proportions given the fact that we are one of largest bodies of fresh water in the world and millions of people drink the water,” U.S. Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich) told the U.S. Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Paul F. Zukunft during a hearing of the Subcommittee on Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries and Coast Guard in spring 2015.
ANDRE J. JACKSON / DETROIT FREE PRESS
Enbridge workers skim oil off the Kalamazoo River in July 2010 after a pipeline ruptured, creating the largest inland oil spill in U.S. history.
“With pipelines usually it’s just a matter of time before they leak and a 60-year-old pipe going across five miles of Great Lakes is a frightening prospect for me, particularly coming from Michigan, where we had the largest oil spill, pipeline spill, in history just a few years ago in the Kalamazoo River.”
The Coast Guard’s Zukunft said nothing that day that indicated he was confident his agency could handle such a disaster, or that the lakes would quickly heal themselves.
Heavy crude remains contentious issue for Enbridge, Michigan
In 2015, the State of Michigan pushed Enbridge to go on record that it has no plans to transport heavy sands oil — called bitumen — through its pipelines running under the Straits of Mackinac.
The state and Enbridge ended up signing a memorandum to clarify the issue, though the agreement did anything but that.
In the memorandum, Michigan stated that it wanted heavy crude banned from the Straits after a state pipeline task force report “found that because heavy crude oil has different properties from light oil, it is more likely to sink if released into open water.” That report also noted that the Coast Guard had gone on record that it had no effective means to capture that sinking heavy crude.
Enbridge balked.
“Enbridge does not agree with the task force report’s conclusions regarding the properties of heavy crude oil and notes that the issue of whether the transport of heavy crude oil raises any unique safety or environmental concerns is currently being studied by the National Academy of Sciences,” reads the memorandum signed by both sides. “Enbridge does not concur that transporting heavy oil raises any unique safety or environmental concerns.”
A National Academies report, released in late 2015 after the memo was signed, concluded that heavy oil is indeed more likely to sink — and that oil on the bottom of an ocean or a Great Lake is harder to clean up than oil floating on the surface.
As for shipping heavy crude across the Straits of Mackinac, the memo between Enbridge and Michigan states that Enbridge has never run heavy crude through the Straits. Though the company has no plans at the moment to change that, the memo says Enbridge does reserve the right to pursue pumping heavy crude through the Straits, provided the company appropriately fortifies the lines and meets all relevant laws.
If Enbridge does one day decide to pump heavy crude through the Straits, the memo states Enbridge will give the state 180 days’ notice of its intentions, and that it will not start pumping the oil until it gets the state’s approval — or until it gets a “final resolution” if there is a dispute.
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“That is a very pristine environment and so you don’t have some of the microbes that you do in the Gulf environment that will normally decay what oil remains,” Zukunft said.
One of the reasons the Kalamazoo River disaster was so costly was it wasn’t just a run-of-the-mill spill; it was heavy crude from the Alberta tar sands called bitumen, a peanut butter-thick product that has to be infused with chemicals so it can flow in a pipe.
In the case of a heavy crude spill into a body of water, much of it sinks to the bottom. The Mackinac pipeline has not been used to carry bitumen like the Kalamazoo line but instead runs a lighter crude, which is more likely to float.
Last June, the State of Michigan, using Enbridge money, commissioned a firm to evaluate what the financial costs would be of a Straits spill. The study isn’t expected to be finished until later this year at the earliest, but it’s already clear the costs could be astronomical, given the $1 billion price tag for the Kalamazoo River spill, which started in Marshall, Mich., near a creek shallow and narrow enough to walk across.
A 2015 pipeline report by a task force overseen by Attorney General Schuette revealed that at one point Enbridge acknowledged a wintertime Straits response could cost up to $900 million, roughly equal to the amount of insurance an Enbridge spokesman said the company holds for its entire pipeline network. Enbridge later said that was an overestimate, and that the actual cost would be about half that. Whatever the actual response price tag is, it is a figure that only covers the cost of trying to recapture the spilled oil.
“Notably, these estimates did not include any damages to persons, property, or natural resources for which Enbridge would be liable,” the pipeline report stated.
Michigan political leaders clearly recognized long ago that the Straits are a distinctly valuable economic and environmental resource; under terms of the 1953 easement with the State of Michigan, the pipeline owners were specifically required to carry an insurance policy just to cover spill costs in the Straits.
The state set the minimum value of that policy at $1 million.
Pipeline pressures
The pressure to remove, replace or change the way the twin pipelines operate is coming from many levels of Michigan politics.
Grass-roots groups in northern Michigan continue their campaign to press local governments to pass resolutions opposing the pipeline. The state-commissioned studies evaluating the pipelines’ risk and alternative routes to carry the Mackinac oil are well underway. The National Wildlife Federation has filed a lawsuit to force a shutdown of the lines based on what it says is the federal government’s improper approval of a spill cleanup plan.
MARK HOFFMAN / MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL
A sign opposing Enbridge's pipeline under the Straits of Mackinac in St. Ignace, Mich.
Pipelines are regulated by the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, though the State of Michigan also has authority over the Straits section because the state owns the lake bottom.
Enbridge has responded with its own campaign to convince the public of the safety and value of the line, which beyond moving crude oil also delivers about 65% of the propane used to heat homes in the Upper Peninsula.
Enbridge also notes that not all of the Canadian oil running through the Straits ends up back in Canada; the company reports about 30% of the crude it carries is refined by U.S. workers in the Detroit area. Enbridge also wants people to know that it has 250 employees and contractors in Michigan and that in recent years it has paid more than $22 million in property and sales taxes.
Pipelines vs. railways
There is little debate that pumping crude through a steel tube is, gallon for gallon, far more efficient — and often safer — than rolling oil down rails and roads.
A 2013 Canadian study determined about 80% of crude oil in the United States between 2000 and 2010 moved through pipelines. Trains accounted for barely a sliver of the oil moved — a volume that has risen in recent years with the increased production of the North Dakota Bakken oil fields.
But the report said trains have quadruple the rate of accidents compared with pipelines.
While rail spills tend to be smaller in volume than pipeline accidents, they can be more menacing in terms of property damage and human injury because they are more likely to combust.
The most notorious oil train accident in recent years occurred in the summer of 2013 in the eastern Canadian hamlet of Lac-Megantic.
The engineer, pulling 111 cars of North Dakota crude, stopped for the night about 7 miles from the little town. He applied the brakes after he stopped the train, but those brakes failed later that night and the unmanned train started to lurch toward the sleeping community. It picked up speed along the 1.5% grade and by the time it hit town it was screaming along at 65 miles per hour.
Sixty-three cars hopped the track, unleashing some 1.6 million gallons of the highly combustible oil. Subsequent explosions and fires killed 47 people, and another 2,000 were forced from their homes.
Other recent high-profile tanker train accidents — dubbed “bomb trains” by safety advocates — include a 42,000-gallon spill in Oregon last summer that ignited a raging blaze in the Columbia River Gorge, and a 13-car derailment in Watertown in late 2015.
Though refined petroleum products, including gasoline, are commonly carried by tankers traveling on the Great Lakes, there are no crude oil shipments. Yet.
In 2013, the Indiana-based operators of Calumet Superior Refining in the city of Superior announced they were seeking a partner to bring crude oil shipping back to the Great Lakes.
The Calumet refinery operators in 2013 saw a potential glut of oil headed to Superior as an opportunity to get into the tanker business on the Great Lakes. Not long after the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources held up plans for a waterfront tanker-loading facility on Lake Superior, Calumet announced it would not pursue its shipping plan.
There are no laws explicitly banning crude shipment on the lakes, though Michigan lawmakers have pushed for such a measure.
The idea of shipping oil on the lakes is controversial because, unlike gasoline and other lighter fuel products that float to the surface and can be scooped up, spilled crude can sink, making cleanup difficult if not impossible.
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And Enbridge points out that pipelines, regardless of their history of chronic leaks, are still much safer than shipping oil on boats, rolling it on trains or putting it on trucks. The company says it would take some 668 loaded rail cars or more than 2,500 semis to match the daily capacity of the Mackinac lines.
This is a point that resonates with many people who live closest to the Mackinac Bridge — and the pipelines — who are growing weary of what they see as outside opposition based on emotion rather than facts.
“You want them taking it across the bridge in trucks?” asks St. Ignace City Manager Les Therrian, who has been critical of the anti-pipeline resolution campaign. “You want it in boats?”
He is pleased his own city council has so far declined to pass an anti-Mackinac Straits pipeline resolution, unlike Mackinaw City, on the other side of the Straits, and many counties in the northern Lower Peninsula.
Connie Litzner, mayor of St. Ignace, says it is not her job to be in the business of regulating pipelines or any other form of oil transport.
“Obviously we all know how devastating a break or leak would be,” she said. “We are all surrounded by water in one of the most beautiful places in the country. But from a political perspective, the federal government is supposed to be on top of this.
“I think we should let them do their job, and it is their job.”
Others in St. Ignace say it is mostly people in far-away cities who are pushing hard for a pipeline removal, and that these people would have a different opinion of the pipeline and its owner if they were aware how much maintenance and monitoring Enbridge staff do at the Straits.
“We’ve worked for Enbridge, and those people are A-1, as far as doing the job right. They’re right on top of everything,” said 69-year-old Larry Belonga, owner of Belonga Plumbing and Heating Inc. in St. Ignace.
He also wonders why anyone would think it is appropriate to pass the inherent risk of moving all the oil in Line 5 onto someone else.
“They say they could pipe this through Wisconsin,” he said. “Well, if they’re concerned about it leaving Michigan, why pass it onto Wisconsin?”
Chris Shepler, president of a Mackinac Island ferry line that bears his family name, says the difference is that Line 5 runs under the Great Lakes, a natural resource like none other on the planet — and through a place so well known that the bridge and Straits are on state license plates under the slogan Pure Michigan.
Shepler said he always knew the pipelines existed — his family used to sell postcards of their construction in the ferry gift shop — but he never really pondered their significance until the Kalamazoo disaster.
Now the third-generation ferry operator can’t stop thinking about the need to shut down the lines, even though he acknowledges Enbridge is working harder to keep a spill from happening.
“I know they’ve upped their game and I thank them for doing that, but there is going to be a time when that thing is not working anymore,” he said. “So do we wait to see something happen?”
Shepler knows he is in a precarious spot, criticizing a business that supplies a product that his own business cannot survive without.
“Our boats need diesel,” he said on a hot July afternoon, a time of year when his fleet may ferry 3,000 to 4,000 people out to Mackinac Island each day. “I know that, but I also know there are other ways to get that oil to refineries than going under the world’s largest freshwater basin.”
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Dennis Mikus, a 58-year-old owner of a hardware store in Mackinaw City, on the other side of the Mackinac Bridge from St. Ignace, is less convinced than both plumber Belonga and ferry operator Shepler.
When asked what he thinks about the pipeline, Mikus reached into a garbage can next to his cash register and pulled out a stack of blue pamphlets opposing the pipelines. They were in his store because he took them from a friend as a favor, but after a few weeks of keeping them stashed under his cash register he decided to toss them.
“I don’t have Trump posters and I don’t have Hillary posters,” he said last summer. “I’m not in business to sell political viewpoints. I’m trying to sell hardware, but I do have mixed feelings about this.”
Mikus figures there needs to be an alternative to Line 5. Until he sees that plan, he’s not willing to say plug the pipeline.
“I’d rather see Pipeline 5 go away, “ he said, “but I also realize it can’t go away right now.”
His cashier Don Heukels was even more circumspect.
“I have no opinion,” he said. “As long as it doesn’t break."
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