Doomed to Fail - Re-Release: Paradise Lost - The Salton Sea

Episode Date: September 17, 2025

Remember the 1950s? We don't either, and it wasn't like, ideal for women and minorities... but there WAS this idea of a place you could go to get away - think Palm Springs now (if you ignore all the unhoused people, which you should not, someone should do something about Palm Springs). ANYWAY - here's a re-release of a time when men tried to create a paradise by changing nature, and they absolutely did not. 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 percent

to attainment and we did we got really close we got really close and i will say like 90 entertainment 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 Balkanology degree.

Yeah, I said that in the intro, but it's also still funny to say to you. And 20 people have downloaded it, which is exciting. And yeah, I want to put our, I'm going to put us some things on Instagram today. So we'll already be out, but, you know, our top 10 episodes of the year and everything. But yeah, we have 8,882 downloads. Our goal was 10,000. That's not bad at all. That's not bad at all.

I'm really proud of us for what we've done so far this year and that we kept with it. 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 we think we're great 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 gonna keep going because it's fun and we like doing it. So and hopefully you'll like it as well. And if you all have any suggestions for 2024 in years resolutions, you wanna share, whatever it is, please don't hesitate to write to us at Dummedafelpod at ginawold.com or Dummedafel pod on Instagram or the Facebook socials.

So that being said, we'll go ahead and kick things off on Farr's Taylor and Taylor, who goes first today, me? I think you, yeah. I thank me. Okay. So why don't I start by, I'm going to do, this one might be a 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'm nervous. That's laugh. yeah yeah totally so so i wanted to be a little bit more upbeat today with my topic given that it's the new year um so nobody dies there is an engineering disaster in fault actually there's several engineering disasters at fault but weirdly enough nobody ends up dying

great i actually got today's um the inspiration for today's episode because i was i have this like 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 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 was 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 it 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

out of my nose and my lungs i was like oh my god 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 and well the dogs are here so if anything goes wrong hopefully hopefully take care of me and so anyways that wait well quick can i be able to be able to

talk about getting you a life alert but they keep going i probably need one at this age 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 it's really not that much material so i'll just tell you what i was going to originally do i originally did the outline on this thing it's called um it's a lake so there's a lake in louisiana called lake pinyuar it's a french name um and basically a long story short of it is that in the early 1900s people discovered that um 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 1300 feet it was like a deep it sounded of 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 started 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 yeah because they ended up reversing the flow of the water from out to the ocean and so yeah it was just flooding back inwards and that's what ended up happening so 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 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 pricient to like modern times. So, Taylor, would you have any idea if 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 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. I don't know. 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 C. You live super close to Solentz. I was like, there's no way that Taylor doesn't know the

ins and outs of this, like that. No, you're right. I know nothing about it. Which is interesting also because, yeah, as you remember, I used to go to Lakeinta, like, yeah, all the time. And the Solon C is 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. out because it seems like a really wild thing 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 to ferment let's see you are crazy close to it. Yeah. Which is probably going to make you nervous someone I talk about this. Okay. So I'm sorry about that. It's all one. I'm sorry. Actually, he's probably going to listen to this. So one, I'm sorry. That's funny. So on your way there, and again, Taylor and I've been through this area a million times. Taylor lives there currently. On the way there, you're basically going to see some 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 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 cochella valley which is obviously famous for the cocella festival all these places are massively populated hubs for people that live either in san diego or in los angeles to vacation at 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 track, 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, Fars, how does such a huge lake end up in such a dry and remote area? area, isn't that unnatural, Mr. Fars? 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. 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 in 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 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 fighting 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 you're 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 um this the colorado to um 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 the 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 write 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. like a tributary or whatever 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 the same incredibly fertile land. Before digging had begun, Rock would have established 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 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 that kind of screwed everything up. So one thing that they hadn't accounted for when they built this canal was as water moves, underneath it is silt. And silt is just like sediment, crap like that that's underneath it. That ends up moving with the rush of the water. 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 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 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 and 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 steel 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 and a lot of 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 off in L.A. also has, like, a desert place in these spots and they just vacationed 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 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 for a

I mean, I definitely feel that way about Palm Springs. Like, there's no reason for Palm Springs to be green at all. 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 shout out. 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 i looked up how he has just basically resettled from wherever he was to lequinta the city i was just referencing and he ended up building this palatial house in lakinta and it was documented and reported on by architectural digest so there's tons of beautiful pictures of this house is amazing as it probably should be since he's like a gazillionaire yeah and i have nothing against ray romana i think 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, of concrete, which requires a shitload of water. It is lush grass. 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 Salton 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 Salton 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 so 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 Cortes 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, can't catch any fish. you could get anything you can capture catch it let's dump it in this leg and see what happens and that's what they 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 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 California or 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 to 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 it's it's us w s 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 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 is that crazy that is so cool i don't know what That is unbelievable. Can I tell you a quick story about birds?

Yeah. 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 an African arrow inside of it. It was still alive. 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 savanna. 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 of 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 just assume that everything is lovely. and it's still a beautiful oasis. So 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. Yeah, people shelling out their entire life savings buying lakeside housing and all that stuff. So what could go wrong is that in the 1970s, 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's obviously a document hidden somewhere that all these companies that were selling property and doing whatever just hid from everyone. I 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 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 a lot. So, yeah. Anyways, the disaster part of what ends up happening in the Salton Sea is entirely dependent on the kind of body of water the Salton Sea actually is, which is why I said somebody had to know.

the body of water itself is called an endorheic endoric basic 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 no connection to any tributaries, rivers, lakes, oceans, or anything like that. For the record, the Great Salt Lake in Utah, in Salt Lake City, that is also one of these lake types. That's what it is. So the surrounding areas of the Salt and 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 salinity seems to be the biggest issue as of today so right now the salt and sea is twice as salty as the Pacific Ocean and that's all because it's a closed system because right nothing goes in 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 engineers would take measurements and they started noting the salinity levels and the toxic levels of the fish. And they 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, local and tourists would start experiencing mass waves of die-offs of fish in marine life because the 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 not just like an environmental issue it was a huge economic issue yeah because as dead fish are floating up as the salinity level is getting to the point where you physically shouldn't be touching the water yourself given the those just gonna sloth your skin off and the fact that all this water is basically receding anyways from 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 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 that ended up happening as well as all these industries basically going into completely 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 3 to 4x higher amount of children having asthma issues in this part of the country than any other part of the country. Whoa. 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 um because it also seems to be like asthma is 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 there's- I'm a little worried. Thank you.

There you go. I knew, sorry, I knew that was coming. Apologies. So obviously, there is a super, super simple solution to this. Do you know what it is? Drain it? Well, that would definitely exacerbate the massive dust storm 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 San Diego. So 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 a million visitors a year to now there's 340 something people living there. By the way, back then when it was measured at half million people per year, that was the same amount of people that were visiting Yosemite.

Oh, good, 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

five years i think long story short is that with a project this 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 of 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 that's never going to happen like they're not like it'll be faster they just go open their faucet and just trying to fill it up themselves so that's kind of where things currently stand um 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 dollars 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's so much water like why isn't desalinization the answer i don't know i i do know i do

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 um i don't know if i ever got an answer to that like why it's so hard to do yeah because it feels like that's the answer because it does but it must be impossible or on you know maybe it's not that they're um maybe the expense has to do with transference so like 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. 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 death 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 not good yeah i'm super regret never visiting it um when i was there like what like should you visit it i mean if it's not if it's not windy it's probably not a big problem um but it's kind of always windy there isn't it like i remember like so many dust storms driving through there yeah i mean like palm springs is so windy obviously they have all those like um wind like wind energy thing yeah yeah it's crazy windy there you know yeah i was yeah i guess i was 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? 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 come back every year in case you wanted them. Fun. I know that you were, we had talked to about, 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. So, yeah, so if you ever wanted to, there are some that come back. You could probably grow them there, I feel like. And then also, our friend Beth bought some march. She bought a shirt and mug. A wedding, Beth? Yeah. Beth. I know. Thank you so much, Beth. That's so nice. That's so nice. I know. She's so thank you Jay's going to 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 I'm sure the t-shirts for Jay and I can't wait. I love it. I love it. Cool. Yeah, cool. It's what I got. Happy New Year, everyone. Thank you again for listening this in 2023. Please find us on

all the socials at Doom DeFielPod. And if you have any suggestions or questions, we are available at jimdefell pot at gmail.com. Yeah, we are constantly looking to iterate. So like if you have any, like far as your story suck, 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. Give us posted. Cool. Sweet. Thanks all. Thanks, Fires. Bye, Taylor. Bye.