Qualla: Carrizo Impact Area

Carrizo Impact Area: Introduction

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

From 1942 to 1959, the United States Navy used 45 square miles of the Carrizo Badlands in Imperial County as a bombing range. Aircraft dropped ordnance ranging from 3-pound practice bombs to 1,000-pound weapons across terrain that was remote enough to be considered expendable. When the Navy finished, they left. The bombs didn't. Today the Carrizo Impact Area carries the highest hazard classification for unexploded ordnance in the federal inventory — a designation that reflects both the density of what was dropped and the depth to which some of it has settled over the intervening decades.

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Carrizo Impact Area: Seventeen Years of Bombing

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Navy established the Carrizo Bombing Range in 1942, as wartime training requirements drove the military to acquire large tracts of remote western land for live ordnance practice. The range operated through the war years and into the Cold War period, providing naval aviation t...

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Carrizo Impact Area: What Got Left Behind

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The ordnance that failed to detonate — duds, practice bombs that malfunctioned, munitions that hit soft ground and buried themselves — represents the range's legacy. Bombs were dropped in sizes from 3 to 1,000 pounds over seventeen years, and federal investigators have determined...

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Carrizo Impact Area: Too Remote to Clean

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Carrizo Impact Area's location in one of the most remote corners of Anza-Borrego Desert State Park has paradoxically protected it from remediation rather than exposing it to cleanup. Federal priority for unexploded ordnance cleanup is driven partly by proximity to populated a...

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Carrizo Impact Area: The Carrizo Badlands Context

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The terrain the Navy chose for its bombing range was already one of the most geologically interesting areas in Southern California. The Carrizo Badlands are carved from the same Imperial Formation marine sediments that appear in the Coyote Mountains to the south — ancient seabed ...

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Carrizo Impact Area: Adjacent to History

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Carrizo Impact Area abuts the Carrizo Creek Station site — the nineteenth-century Butterfield Overland Mail station that served Gold Rush emigrants heading toward California's goldfields. The juxtaposition is characteristic of the American West's layered history: Kumeyaay ter...

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