WI: Salton Sea never forms

WI the accident (and the events leading up to it) that led to the formation of the Salton Sea never occurred? Would there be any major long-term effects? Would the communities around there (such as Indio, Mecca, Coachella, Palm Springs, etc.) be more or less developed than they are today?

And the POD will ideally not be major -- i.e. no Bryan winning in 1896 leading to the ATL.

And a sub-WI: How could, with a POD no earlier than the POD that leads to the Salton Sea never forming (in the same TL), how could the area now encompassed by Indio, Coachella, Palm Springs, etc., coalesce into a single city about the size of Glendale, CA (i.e. about a quarter of a million people or more) by modern-day?
 
Salton Sea doesn't form

That's actually trickier than it sounds, because the Salton Sink basin regularly (every few hundred years) floods and forms a lake when the Colorado changes course. Usually, in fact, it's far larger than the current Salton Sea, but railroad owners put a lot of effort into moving the Colorado back to its normal route because the flooding threatened to take out all the rail lines through the area.

Basically, by 1905, a flooding of the area was almost inevitable.

The time between the last dry-out of Lake Cahulla and the flooding of the Salton Sea was an unusually long period to go without flooding (over three hundred years), so one way might be to have the lake flood in, say, the 1600s when it "should" have, then dry up by the late 1800s, late enough the area is still dry today, but not so late as to majorly affect history in the area (unlike my Lake Cahuilla timeline, which kinda covers your sub-WI, though not in the way you meant).

Another way may be to simply stall for time. The flooding happened when very heavy run-off broke through the silted up Imperial Canal and basically overwhelmed all the barriers between the Colorado and the basin. So say the California Development Company has better luck keeping the canal silt-free (no sudden burst of flood waters then, but a slow - controllable rise), or it doesn't finish the canal until after the 1905 floods, or it doesn't finish the canal at all, and goes belly-up like its predecessors.

Then with a lot of luck, things might hold together until Hoover Dam is finished thirty years later. Assuming there is a dam, of course - the flooding was one of the reasons used for building it!

Still, that suggests there's one change from OTL - no Salton Sea, no Hoover Dam (at least, until much later)...and all the knock on effects of water and power availability in Southern California.
 
Wait...would the Hoover Dam only be potentially butterflied away in the second scenario (where the California Development Company has a better time keeping the canal silt-free), or in both scenarios? :confused:

Thanks.
 
I think that the formation of the Salton Sea would have had little effect on the building of the Hoover Dam. The water control, hydroelectric power and irrigation purposes of the dam would have remained.

As for the entire Coachella Valley being one municipality, I consider that relatively unlikely. For one thing, the area was thinly settled until well into the 20th Century. For another, it is a lot larger area than a lot of people think. It's 30+ miles from Palm Springs to Coachella. The population is already in excess of 300,000 people.
 
The water control, hydroelectric power and irrigation purposes of the dam would have remained.

What's the elevation into the Salton Sink, could they build a dam there where the Colorado flows into it?

Would that change the need for Boulder, or would you get two dams?
 
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