Doomed to Fail - Ep 73: Disaster in the Desert: Saga of the Salton Sea

Episode Date: January 1, 2024

Happy New Year!! Let's kick it off with the most Doomed body of water in America, The Salton Sea. What was once rich farmland and a Palm Springs-style paradise is now a salt-filled body of water surrounded by wasteland.What happened to change the landscape of The Salton Sea so quickly? Where will you be when the Water Wars start? This and more this week on Doomed to Fail!  Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

In a matter of the people of the state of California, first is Hortonthall James Simpson, case number B.A.019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. There we go. We're recording, Taylor, on a lovely sunny Sunday. It is going to be the 20, it's going to be 20, it's going to be 2024 by the time this is released. Do you have any New Year's resolutions? I don't know. I guess I have this like really cool book that I used all last year. So it's called The Artist of Life Workbook. I'm going to hold it up for you. I used it all year. Like I doodled in it, but I also, it has like goals and questions and like charts and all these things. And I really liked using it. And I got a new one. So I'm going to start that up again. I don't know. I'm just going to keep at it.

Cool. So it's more of like a 23 resolution that it worked. So it's going to carry. on it's 24 yeah I think it did I think I was I was excited to like ran everything down and like track some things and you know a lot of it is like our milestones which is super cool because I'm super proud of what we did this year so yeah it's super fun so how about you do you have a resolution my main thing it's not really a resolution it's more just a generic like time and resource management thing like I've mostly gone through life with like I'll just use root force and just like wail my way into things and I'm like yeah too old and I need to be a lot more deliberate about like what I do with my time yeah do with resources like all that it's just being a lot more

mindful of all things whereas before I was just like I'll just do it because I feel like doing it and now I'm like do I need that do I should I do that like yeah also said you know that's why I was talking to Taylor before we started recording about how productive I've been this week because like nobody's around and I'm like usually it'll be like oh cool I'll just call some up and go to a bar and I'm like right my house is falling apart in front of my eyes and like there's a way to waste time and money and there's a way to actually be deliberate about it and I'm trying to be a lot more deliberate about things so I love that but I'll also say Taylor that I'm pretty proud of us as well so we didn't quite hit our goal for the year in total downloads but

we got like 90% to attainment and we did we got really close we got really close and I will say like 90% attainment by any metric set by an organization is like you're right no you're totally right and it is we should do stretch goals all the things did you see what i what i released late last night no i did a volcano omnibus it's five hours and 19 minutes all the volcano episodes in a row we're like dan carling it carlinian i'm going to submit it dan carlinian i'm going to submit it for my dissertation yeah for your volcanology degree yeah i said that in the intro but it's also still funny to say to you um and 20 people have downloaded it which is exciting and yeah i want to put our i'm going to put us some things um on

instagram today so we'll already be out but you know our top 10 episodes of the year and everything but um yeah we have 8 000 88082 downloads our goal was 10 000 that's not that that's not bad at all that's not bad at all um really proud of us for what we've done so for this year and that we kept with it and we're accountability buddies for each other so that's always great and it's been nice hanging out with you every week it's a nice yeah we have like a weekly friend and check-in like which we didn't have before so that that's great um cool well i haven't even announced the show okay so we're doing to fail oh god we're our first first conclusion of our first year anniversary i think we released our first episode

december january 16th or 13th or something i think um of last year so we're coming up on one year and we're going to keep going because it's fun and we like doing it so and hopefully you all like it as well and if you all have any suggestions for 2024 in years resolutions you want to share whatever it is please don't hesitate to write to us at dimmedafelpod at ginawola.com or dumifl pod on instagram or the facebook socials so uh that being said we'll go ahead and kick things off on far as taylor and taylor who goes first today me i think you yeah i think me okay so why don't i start by i'm going to do this one might be a little little lengthy but it's good information so i think people will be happy about it so i'm going to go ahead and take things off

and we'll talk about what i'm going to drink today it's basically just going to be brine water because that is going to be the topic of discussion today which i'm going to give a little bit of hints and then taylor's going to take her guess and she's probably going to nail this one actually so oh my god i know that's last lecture go ahead yeah totally so who So I wanted to be a little bit more upbeat today with my topic, given that it's the new year. So nobody dies. There is an engineering disaster at fault. Actually, there are several engineering disasters at fault.

But weirdly enough, nobody ends up dying. Great. I actually got the inspiration for today's episode because I have this little cowboy pool, which if you're not in Texas, is basically like a stock tank use of feed livestock. And they just fill with water and you call it a cowboy pool. It's like a hipster thing. It's kind of cool. It's kind of cute. It's whatever.

So I have to treat this thing every, every now and then. So I got to, like, use shock treatment where I, like, pour a bunch of chemicals in there. And then I had this, like, tank, really, like a canister full of these little chlorine tablets in the backyard. And I don't open it very much, right? Because you only got to treat, like, once a month or once every six weeks. And so I opened it, and I breathed, which was a horrible mistake. And it just singed these shit. Oh, no.

nose in my lungs. I was like, oh, my God. Like breathing chlorine gas is super, super bad. And so it basically, like, I was basically suffering from that most of yesterday. And last night was just like the fact that I inhaled all this chlorine gas. And so. Maybe you shouldn't be alone. I know you're talking about how being alone has been great for you, but also it sounds like you almost died. I know. Well, the dogs are here. So if anything goes wrong, hopefully, hopefully take care of me. And so anyways, that, wait, but, but we'll talk about getting you a life alert. but they keep going i probably need one at this stage yeah but all that got me thinking

about a different a topic for today's episode because i was already doing a topic on today's episode and then i realized it was kind of boring so so i'll literally give you and also i was like there's just not enough material here like i could stretch it into like maybe 20 minutes but like what was it really not that much material so i'll just tell you what i was going to originally do i I originally did the outline on this thing. It's called, it's a lake. So there's a lake in Louisiana called Lake Pignoir. It's a French name.

And basically, a long story short of it is that in the early 1900s, people discovered that if you go super, super deep into this lake, there's a vast reserve of salt rock in there. And so all these companies showed up, they started mining all this salt rocking. It went down like 1,300 feet. It was like a deep, it sounded terrifying. anyways so that's what was what turned out to be like the mining operation underneath this lake while they were doing this mining operation that were still a lake on top and everything was fine we were using it there's barges there it would flow out to the ocean um or the gulf of mexico and

all that good stuff in the 1980s texico discovered that there's oil deeper deeper underneath that and so what they did is they set up some oil rigs on the outside of this mining operation and sort of drilling downward but apparently their calculations were off what basically ended up happening was they pierced this salt dome and turn this 10-foot deep freshwater lake into a 200-feet deep saltwater lake because they ended up reversing the flow of the water from out to the ocean and so it was just flooding back inwards and that's what ended up happening. Yikes. Well that's terrible but yeah that's basically it crazy crazy enough nobody died this thing this thing took like three or four days of flooding from the ocean before it was actually filled up and the pressure

neutralized. And then at that point, all these barges started showing up outside of it sounds terrifying. That sounds terrifying. But as I was, again, doing my chlorine shock treatment, I was like, I was like, wait, there's a better story here than this and a lot more interesting, a lot more content around it. And it's a lot more prescient to like modern times. So, Taylor, would you have any idea what this convergence of things is leading me towards? I feel like I don't know anything about like a big chlorine disaster. Maybe people will have to you say it, but I'm thinking that I don't know. Okay, so it's not chlorine related.

It's just chemical related. Okay. Is it turnable? No. Okay. Okay. I don't know. Should I tell you?

Yeah. It is the saltoncy. Oh, interesting. I don't know anything about it. I live really close to salt and sea. You live super close to solentate. I was like, there's no. no way that taylor doesn't know the ins and outs of this like that no you're right i i know

nothing about it which is interesting also because yeah as you remember i used to go to lakinta like yeah all the time and it's all in c's like right there and i never went and now now that i'm in texas i'm like oh man i really what a what a missed opportunity to like just see this thing yeah just to check it out because it seems like a really wild experience a wild that was going on there but that's what we're going to discuss again nobody directly died as a result of the multiple multiple disasters that took place there but it took a lot of disasters for it to turn into what it currently is so let's get into it um let's start with geography first so if you drive about 150 miles south of los angeles you will reach the salt and sea how far i want

from it let's see you are crazy close to it yeah which is probably going to make you nervous someone I talk about this. I'm sorry about that. It's all Juan, I'm sorry. Actually, he's probably going to listen to this. So, Juan, I'm sorry. That's funny. So on your way there, and again, Taylor and I have been through this area a million times.

Taylor lives there currently. On the way there, you're basically going to see some of the most popular and beautiful parts of California that are not ocean related. This is basically the beautiful desert part of California that is incredibly, it is a desertscape that rivals New Mexico, Arizona, and all these places. You're going to pass places like Palm Springs, Lakinta, Indio, where Taylor lives in Joshua Tree, and Coachella Valley, which is obviously famous for the Coachella Festival.

All these places are massively populated hubs for people that live either in San Diego or in Los Angeles to vacation. It's like a really convenient two, three-hour drive to just be in a totally different universe essentially yeah it's um an hour and a half from me yeah which i'm shocked that it's that you know what i bet it is i bet you have to go around the national park that's what it is yeah yeah yeah yeah as the pro flies it's probably not that far absolutely yeah yeah you definitely have to go around it i guess you could go through it anyway keep going so basically that's what this is this is a giant desert landscape but if you end up making that 150 mile truck

you'll hit 340 square miles in a 43-foot deep body of water that's called the Salton Sea and unbeknownst to me until like literally earlier yesterday this is the biggest lake in California wow yeah so you're probably asking yourself far as how does such a huge lake end up in such a dry and remote area isn't that unnatural how does such a big lake end up in this area there you go thank you so if you ask yourself that question the answer is yes you are correct it is incredibly unnatural and it is the subject of multiple disasters converging to create something that is now currently a disaster so let's get into it we're going to start with the formation so in the 1950s surveyors were basically exploring this part of California, this is the southern part of California, right around Mexico, to find ideal southern railroad routes to go further north. What they ended up finding was that the soil in this part of the country is super fertile. There's a whole history of

like what happened and what rocks eroded in the Cambrian period that like ended up, I'm not going that far. 1950s, they find this stuff. The soil is crazy fertile. And they realized that if you just had a water source in this vast desert, you could do a lot with this land. So one of these guys, one of these surveyors, his name was Charles Rockwood, and he decided that he would source water to this area by diverting water from the Colorado River towards it. So I couldn't tell, you know, what we're just talking about as the pro flies, I can't tell how far Colorado is from where the Salton Sea currently is. It's about 160 mile drive. Yeah, I mean, the Colorado River is really fight in the Lord's fight because it is keeping all of Nevada and like all of Arizona and like

all of Southern California with water. I think Taylor, Taylor, I think it's keeping Texas too because when you look at like the center of Austin and you have downtown Austin and you have this body of water there, I'm pretty sure that's the Colorado. Yeah, it could be. Which is crazy. Like all of this is from the Rocky Mountains. Like it's right. It is unbelievable. what the Colorado River has done for humanity. Yeah. I hope it doesn't go away. So basically what they ended up doing

was they ended up digging a canal from the Colorado to connect the Colorado to aquifers and aqueducts that are in this part of what later became known as the Imperial Valley. It wasn't known as that. Now it's known as Imperial Valley, but that's what this part is. Also, I was going to say, like, If anybody actually does know how far the Colorado is the Salton Sea, like, can you buy it to us and let us know?

Because I dug so many different ways to try and find this, because the Colorado apparently has, like, all these different, like, turnoff points. And, like, it's super craggy in terms of, like, how it kind of splinters off. And so it's super hard to figure out exactly where it stops. There's no chance they dug 160 miles to this thing. So, like, there's got to be some. Like a tributary or whatever, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So if anybody knows, please do let us know.

so anyways they ended up digging this canal in 1901 and then what ended up happening was this unpopulated unused but extremely fertile untouched land had fresh water for the first time ever and so obviously this is like the you know that's early 1900s this area is unpopulated people are going to do land claims and start staking their claim in this land and so that's what ended up happening all these farmers flocked to this part of the country to take advantage of this incredibly fertile land before digging had begun rock would establish a company called the california development company to manage the project and that company was basically selling shares of itself and its product which was namely this this land so all these people coming to this area

and trying to buy this land from this company ended up making the company incredibly valuable and obviously as things are with every company in america value can never go down it has to always go up if it goes down you're a horrible piece of shit basically not my saying that's just capitalism so that comes in handy later so as this canal was running and everyone was happy and profiting an unexpected thing happened they kind of screwed everything up so one thing that they hadn't accounted for when they built built this canal was as water moves underneath it is silt and still just like sediment crop like that that's underneath it that ends up moving with the rush of the water What they hadn't anticipated is that the amount of silt of Colorado would produce

to this canal was enough to block the canal. So all of a sudden, you have all these farmers, all this crop, all this industry built up here with, again, no access to water. That kills the value of your company because all that land is now incredibly devalued. So they determined that it would take about a year and a ton of money that the company doesn't have to end up to dredge this canal. so they could actually get the Colorado flowing again at this point this company is basically insolvent it's almost bankrupt because the value had gone down so

significantly and so what they ended up doing in 1905 was they asked another company southern pacific which is a railroad company that was that was staking out the land to begin with for a loan so they could basically build dredge this thing and get the water flowing again part of the condition of giving this loan was that southern pacific would take over ownership of this company so rockwood was not happy about that but ended up taking the deal anyways what they did to solve the silt problem was they cut an inlet upstream of the original canal where the silt had built up to get water flowing back in these aquifers again what what ended up happening that wasn't expected was basically a once in a 300 year storm

hit the colorado when they ended up cutting this inlet so it ended up being a pretty small six 16 foot wide inlet quickly caved in it was breached by rushing water from the Colorado River typically this wouldn't be a huge problem because what you'd have is what's called a head gate which is basically like a remote operated dam and that had not been approved for construction by the time they built this bypass so that that was not an option so the only option they really had was just throw bags of sand and debris or whatever to try and try and cut the breach off, basically. Yeah.

Yeah, what I wrote here was the scale of this was kind of hard to imagine. I looked at pictures of this. So there's pictures of this initial canal. There's pictures of this breach. There's pictures of where the breach ended up happening. It was basically impossible. So all this farmland was essentially underwater as this breach ended up continuing. So it took two years of constant flooding for this thing to finally be sealed.

off and the way it was sealed off was a Pacific company built a railroad parallel to where the breach happened and we're lining up railroad cars day and night for two years and just dump granite or not granite but like rocks and things like that into this breach until finally closed up I didn't write the number down yeah I didn't write the number down but it was something like the breach ended up becoming 2,600 feet like half a mile long so this tiny 16 foot thing ended up because it would keep flooding so after two years they finally got this thing sealed so it's 1907 so now this body you now have this huge fresh water body of water completely cut off from the Colorado but the surrounding area is still full of incredibly fertile soils so farming again begins on the outskirts while at the same time a burgeoning city starts sprouting up around the lake for basically vacation and relaxation and stuff like that it basically was then what Palm Springs or Lakinta or Indio are now. So like again.

Yeah, I think I've seen like ads for it, right? Or like 50s style like come relax for the Salton Sea, you know. Yeah, they called it the desert Riviera or the Salton Riviera. It was it was propped up at the time as basically the next big thing. So all these people would buy property here, businesses would sprout around this place. A lot of celebrities were there. There's a huge deal made. a lot of the, um, the content I read about this around how Frank Sinatra always went there

and like Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ballo constantly. It was one of those spots. I loved it down here. Yeah. Yeah. It is again, it's just like India Palm Springs Lake Tina right now. So like anybody who's well often in LA also has like a desert place in in these spots and they just vacation back and forth. That's the exact same concept here. One thing I wrote here, Taylor, and like I totally would understand if you don't get this. Also, you probably won't get it because you live there and also because you're from the bottom so actually it's kind of shitting on everything so let me bring it up real quick i'm ready there's there's something i was dwelling about and i've always felt this way again i've been this this area a million

times i've always felt this way that there's something off about how uninhabitable this part of the country actually is so you You go through, like, Lakinta and you see how, like, there's these multi-million dollar estates with these amazing lawns. You have some of the best golfing in the country in this part of, in this part of the world. And all just seems like, and also, yeah, like air conditioning 24-7, because, as you know, Taylor in the summertime, it's like almost, it's impossible to be inside without air conditioning. It's just all is, like, so over-the-top frivolous. I mean, I definitely feel that way about Palm Springs. Like, there's no reason for Palm Springs to be green at all.

They have one, you know what I mean? And, like, they're like 10, 15 degrees hotter than we are, but it's so much greener. And you're like, how do you have grass here? Like, you have to just be pumping unbelievable amounts of water into this. So this is a strange celebrity shoutout. But I recently, like, came across, somehow Ray Romano came into my periphery. I don't know how. I think it was like a podcast to listen to and somebody called it.

I don't know. But there was, I looked up how. he has just basically resettled from wherever he was to Lakeinta, the city I was just referencing, and he ended up building this palatial house in Lakeinta, and it was documented and reported on by Architectural Digest, so there's tons of beautiful pictures of this house. It is amazing, as it probably should be, since he's like a gazillionaire. Yeah. And I have nothing against Ray Romano. He's allowed to live. We are okay with Ray Romano. But I will say, When you look at this house and you look at like where it is, you're like, this thing is like half built out of cement.

Yeah. Concrete, which requires a shitload of water. It is lush grass. It is, you can see in the living room that there's a beautiful golfer next to it. And it's just like all this to the desert that has no water. I know. I mean, that's like literally all of Las Vegas. Oh my God.

You know, like all of those things for sure. Like I, not to sound like an old timey guy, but like eventually the chickens are going to come home to roost yeah you can't keep doing that and it not pay a price and really the sultan sea is a really good example of that like that just happens to be like ground zero for the kind of price that societies and communities pay when things like this end up happening and realistically that is exactly what the sultan sea was it was just like an india or whatever it was just built up luxury over the top like yeah it's like veil for people in colorado like it's just where you go basically yeah and there's like the 19 that that was really

happening mostly in the 40s after the war through like the 70s or so is when it was really really popping so let's pivot real quick to the fun topic of ecology so after the lake was formed the California Fish and Wildlife Commission looked at other bodies of water with similar ecology and they settled on the sea of Cortez as being pretty similar to the Salton Sea so they could figure out like how do we end up actually building more building it out more essentially and so they go to the Sea of Cortez and they basically are it's south of the Salton Sea it's right above the Gulf of Mexico and Mexico and they go out there and say basically catch any fish you could get anything you can capture catch it let's dump in this lake and see what happens and that's what

end up doing so over time they ended up catching around catching and releasing about 200 species of aquatic animals including lobsters shrimp tilapia carb catfish bass there's a ton of other stuff on here that like i i've never heard of so i'm not even going to name it but it is it was chalked full of fish at its height it was estimated that about 100 million fish populated the lake so that main that made it incredibly popular with fishermen. So people would be recreationally fishing, but also there was another industry added to it, which is fishing. And with all that comes migratory birds. So again, staying on with the ecology aspect of the Salton Sea, Taylor, this is incredible. Like I was, like, I was researching the migratory pattern of birds. I was like, we need to like do,

we need to change the topic of this podcast, it's just birds. Like, I love birds. I would totally do a bird podcast with you because I would love to talk about them. We can go to bird shows at zoos across the country and rate them because I love a fucking love a bird show. It's unbelievable. So there's a thing called the Pacific Flyway, which is a north-south route from Canada all the way down to South America. And it's broken down to like four main corridors.

Obviously the one that's most relevant of this story is the one that goes from California up through Oregon and Washington. And basically all these birds that are doing this huge migration. some going as far as 16,000 miles need to stop occasionally and like get food and water and do all that stuff. And the Salton Sea ended up becoming an incredibly useful part of the migratory pattern of all these birds. Taylor, this part's crazy. So birds have a thing called unihemispheric slow wave sleep. It's, it's USWS for short, because I'm never going to say that word again, because I took all my brain power just to fucking read that right now.

Now, basically, what it means is that birds are able to go into full-on sleep with half their brains resting, and the other half focused on staying in flight and navigating in the right direction. Cool. Isn't that crazy? That is so cool. I don't know. What? That is unbelievable. Can I tell you a quick story about birds?

I don't have the details of this, but I do know that at one point in Europe they're trying to figure out where the birds went in the winter and they didn't know and there's no way to track them because it was like before technology and one bird came back with the African arrow inside of it it was still live and then they were like holy shit this bird's been to Africa so crazy so crazy yeah yeah and it's interesting because you look at old pictures of the Salton Sea and you just see like it could be Africa it could be the Savannah it could be any it was so lush it was so green I mean it made me think a lot of like how big of a deal water is like when water's there like everything revolves around that water and that's what ended up

happening in this area as well so you're probably wondering where's this going for us there's no doom to fail here is that what you're asking yourself where is this going for us no I'm I just assume that everything is lovely and it's still a beautiful oasis so that that's the end of our show thank you for listening Fars is here to say it's doomed to fail. So we had one massive disaster. These guys were, again, starting this project just to get irrigation. It ended up flooding the entire valley, which is now called the Imperial Valley.

So what could go wrong? Because now you have this amazing body of water, you have all this ecology, you have all this industry popping up, you have people shelling out their entire life savings, buying lakeside housing and all that stuff. So what could go wrong is, is that in the 1970s, the Army Corps of Engineers started recording the salinity levels and toxins in the water. And Taylor, I was thinking myself, there is no chance.

Everyone did not see this coming. I mean, it sounds like it was a surprise to people, but how could it have been a surprise? Yeah, there was obviously a document hidden somewhere that all these companies that were selling property, property and doing whatever just hid from everyone actually knew somebody who's grandfather to bought a plot of land on the Salton Sea and they still actually technically own it but it's like completely absolutely worthless I looked on Zillow and there's actually two properties for sale

that are on the Salton Sea what's amazing is one is being sold for $11 million it's a it's 120 acres on the Salton Sea it's like who's this for like the only thing I could think of was eventually for like lithium mining it could be useful but like man 11 billion you're asking you're asking a lot so yeah anyways the disaster part of what ends up happening in the salt and sea is entirely dependent on the kind of body of water the salt and sea actually is which is why I said somebody had to know the body of water itself is called a end It is called an endoric basic. And since all of us know what that is, let's move on.

Basically, what this essentially means is that it is a body of water. It is a catch basin for water and forever ends up in it with no outflow. So there is no connection to any tributaries, rivers, lakes, oceans, or anything like that. For the record, the Great Salt Lake in Utah, and Salt Lake City, that is also one of these lake types. That's what it is. So the surrounding areas of the Salton Sea continued farming after the flood of 1905, and the lake was the lowest part in the area, obviously. So whatever farming runoff they had ran down into the lake. Obviously, that's bad, but water slowly seems to be the biggest issue as of today. So right now, the Salton Sea is twice

is salty as the Pacific Ocean and that's all because it's a closed system because nothing goes in and water just goes out it evaporates so that's obviously not good for freshwater fish which is what this thing was chock full of the army corps of engineers would take measurements and they started noting the salinity levels and the toxic levels of the fish it basically started by saying anybody who's pregnant like should not be touching this fish and if you're not pregnant, then you should have very little of it on like a week, three, or monthly basis. And so just like that, that killed the fishing industry. They're like, what's the point? Why am I even doing this? What am I going to put a disclaimer on my fish when I sell

in the market? Potentially poison. Yeah. So as time went on, locals and tourists would start experiencing mass waves of die-offs of fish in marine life because salt levels were getting so high they couldn't survive and they would just wash ashore like millions of fish that would just stink the entire place to high health and obviously that wasn't good for tourism that wasn't good for living there or any of that stuff so out goes to tourism essentially again people had bought homes like this was a huge not just like an environmental issue it was a huge economic issue um yeah because as dead fish are floating up as the soliloly level is getting to the point where you physically shouldn't be touching the water yourself

given that those just going to sloth your skin off and the fact that all this water is basically receding anyways through evaporation the city itself in like the surrounding communities became ghost towns and you look at pictures of it now look at bombay beach for example there's actually a new sign up there somebody is it's trying to like an art installation essentially but that area was an incredibly populous thriving part of the city like that was kind of like the central hub that you would go to it looked like a malibu like it looked like that kind of an atmosphere so obviously the economic part of this and the lost money and all that stuff is a huge issue um that ended up happening as well as all these industries basically going into complete decline the other part was

that as the lake bed is exposed the lake bed contains all this agricultural runoff it contains all this salt and that is an issue for the people in the surrounding areas so there is a roughly three to four x higher amount of children having asthma issues in this part of the country than any other part of the country well and all this is just from dust storms kicking up all this crap from the ground from the lake bed and just kicking up into the into the atmosphere it's not just that it's not like There's, I mean, there's a host of other things that are going on that are causing the health issues. As was the biggest one that's been reported because it also seems to be like asthma was a good indicator of like other things that could be going on with that health system.

And so that's what's being reported on the most. So in terms of what to do about this, so this thing is going to keep going down until completely evaporates, leaving behind it a never-ending future dust storm that's going to keep kicking up this stuff and harming people and growing in size based on how much the lake goes down again this is the largest body of water in california so oh my god there's i'm a little worried thank you there you go i knew sorry i knew that was coming apologies to you know so obviously there is a super super simple solution to this do you know what it is drain it well that will that would definitely exacerbate the massive dust one that's going to kick up over your house

Fill it with more water. Fill it with more water. The obvious solution is to divert fresh water to it. The problem is nobody wants to do that who can actually has the power to do that. Because right now, as long as I lived in Los Angeles, as long as Los Angeles is going to exist, it is in a perpetual drought. Like, it is always drought season in Los Angeles, and it's becoming more and more obvious. That's the case also in place like San Diego. So all excess water is being diverted into those two main hubs.

the reason is basically that there isn't really anybody that cares about this part of the country like the salt and sea area yes indio all that stuff all those are really rich lucrative spots and so there's a tax base that people care about but i just learned that this district the imperial valley area it is actually splitting a representative with um san diego so that that's how why this area stretches and so obviously they're starting to get prioritized and frankly the tax base in san diego in los angeles is a lot more imperative important to the state than it is there right there's probably even not that many people there and they're not doing well no in total i think there's about still 340 people who are outliers i think that was the last 2020 census so it's

probably gone down every year it's gone down so this place went from half million visitors a year to now there's 340 something people living there by the way back then when it was measured a half million people per year that was the same amount of people that were visiting yosemite oh good good good yeah so it was huge it was a big big deal at that time so the other solution that remaining residents are basically considering is going to mexico so their idea was let's go ask permission from the government of mexico to basically dig a dish from the sea of cortez to funnel water. Essentially, the Sea of Cortez is higher in elevation than the Sultan Sea is. And so all they would need is a ditch to funnel water that way. And so that's the other idea that's

being floated around. That has been pending for like four or five years, I think. Long story short is that with a project, the size of magnitude, there are so much bureaucracy involved in it. You have to get approval from the government of Mexico, the U.S. government, the government, the government to California, every single one of those individual agencies, all the wildlife commissions, all the environmental agencies, the engineering commissions, the Army Corps of Engineers. Like, it is thousands of different organizations that have to come together to give you a... That's never going to happen. It is, it is never going to happen. Like, it'll be faster, they just go open their faucet and try and fill it up themselves. So that's kind of where things currently stand. It is

eventually obviously going to dry out. Like, there's nothing that's going to help it. And then by all estimates, the environmental impact once it dries out to the health and well-being and all the other stuff that comes with it, once this thing dries out and kicks up 340 square miles of toxins, agricultural runoff, and salt is somewhere in the range of $70 to $100 billion, what's going to end up ultimately costing. I don't know who, but it's going to cost somebody, either the state of California or the federal government or one of those super funds, I don't know, but that's kind of where the state of things is right now. Wow. I have a question. I don't know if you know the answer. I'm sure that like why is it so hard to take salt out of water? Because there is so much water. Like why isn't desalinization the answer? I don't know. I do know that 99% invisible or the daily or one of those podcasts. They did an episode of this when I was still living in Los Angeles because there was so many wildfires happening. I don't know if I ever got an answer to that. Like why it's so hard to do.

do. Yeah. Because it feels like that's the answer. It does. But it must be impossible. Or on, you know, maybe it's not that they're, maybe the expense has to do with transference. So like if you're, I mean, if you think about it, if you're on the coast where desalimization makes sense, then you are already prioritized the tax base to get water.

Right. So you don't have to. So you don't have to. You really need it for the non-representing class. And like they don't, they generally don't have. That totally checks out. Because then you have to then take the water and then transfer it to them, which is also a massive engineering problem because you have to cut through mountains and whatever else. I know. Actually, this is, this is, water is definitely our through line of our two episodes today. I'm going to talk a little bit about how hard it is to move water.

Good. Yeah, we'll discuss it then. But that's my story. Again, you have engineering disaster on top of environmental disaster. And yeah, not good. Yeah, that sounds bad. Yeah, I super regret never visiting it when I was there. Like, should you visit it? I mean, if it's not, if it's not windy, it's probably not a big problem. But it's kind of always windy there, isn't it? I can't remember like so many dust storms driving through there. I mean, like Palm Springs is so windy. Obviously, they have all those like wind, like wind energy thing. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's crazy windy there. You know, yeah, I was, yeah, I guess I was just there even like this, or I guess last year I went to Palm Springs again. But yeah, super interesting, super fun.

Hopefully you all enjoyed that. Taylor, do we have any thing we want to shout out? You, I have a little bit, I have a couple of things of mail. one is our friend Nadine wrote in and she said that there are tulips that you can that come back every year in case you wanted them fun I know that you were um we had talked about um like you at the end of the tulip episode you're like I'm going to go to Home Depot and get some plants and I don't know if you ever did I did get plants but they're not tulips yeah um so yeah so if you ever wanted to there are some that come back you could probably grow them there i feel like um and then also our friend beth bought some march she

bought a shirt and mug uh wedding beth yeah beth i know thank you so nice that's so nice that's so nice so thank you jay's gonna be so excited when he gets a picture with my face on it oh my god i'm so excited for jay to wear that all the time i'm sure he's came sure the t-shirts for jay and i can't wait i love it i love it um cool um yeah cool Cool. It's what I got. Happy New Year, everyone. Thank you again for listening this in in 2023. Please find us on all the socials at Doom DeFielPod. And if you have any suggestions or questions, we are available at jimdifelpod.com. Yeah, we are constantly looking to iterate. So, like, if you have any, like, as far as your story sucks, just tell us whatever.

Like, whatever the suggestion is, we want to put out content that people are actually interested in and like. So, yeah, don't be sure. Cool. Sweet. Thanks all. Thanks, Mars. Bye, Taylor. Bye.