Pod Insights Stuff You Should Know Eco-Disasters 101: The Salton Sea About this episode In 1905, an engineering mistake created a brand new 400-square-mile sea (lake?) in the California desert. People made the most of it at first, but it didn’t take long to become a toxic brew that now threatens the health of anyone in breathing distance.
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Transcript 9,636 words · 12 speakers
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1:36 Speaker 00 Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.
1:46 Josh Clark? Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here, too. And this is Stuff You Should Know. It's a little bit of a Jazzy Earth Science edition, I think.
1:57 Speaker 05 Yeah, and I mean, we might as well get into it, because I just told Jerry the name of this was Salton Lake.
2:05 Speaker 05 And even though it's called the Salton Sea.
2:08 Josh Clark? Right.
2:09 Speaker 05 Which is a, it's an inland lake in Imperial and Coachella Valleys in Riverside and Imperial County in California, Southern California, but, and I said, it's not really a sea. And you said, it's an endless sea. Then you said, save it.
2:24 Josh Clark? And so this is gold. I didn't say save it like that.
2:28 Speaker 05 Well, no, I mean, I'm not gonna do my Josh impression.
2:32 Josh Clark? You just did a really mean Josh impression. Save it.
2:35 Speaker 05 Uh, no, no, no. So I guess we need to determine this. Why do they call it a sea?
2:41 Josh Clark? I mean, it's an inland sea. I don't know. I just know that most people call it that. I failed to go look up whether it is a sea or a lake.
2:49 Speaker 05 I mean, I don't think it has any outlet to the ocean anymore, right?
2:54 Josh Clark? No, not anymore. We're gonna talk about that.
2:56 Speaker 05 Well, that makes it a lake.
2:57 Josh Clark? Save it.
2:58 Speaker 05 I think that's, see, I nailed it. I think that's the difference between a sea and a lake. I think a lake has no outlet to the, to the ocean and a sea does.
3:07 Josh Clark? Oh.
3:08 Speaker 05 If I'm not mistaken. I might be wrong about that. I didn't look it up, but.
3:12 Josh Clark? I think California has a lot of work to do. They need to go rewrite all of their pamphlets and update their websites and all that stuff. It's now the Salton Lake.
3:20 Speaker 05 Well, now all their pamphlets just say, don't even bother coming here.
3:24 Josh Clark? Right.
3:25 Speaker 05 To the Salton Sea, that is, not California. I love California.
3:27 Josh Clark? Exactly. And the reason that they would have pamphlets that say, don't come here, is because the Salton Sea is a genuine ecological disaster.
3:37 Speaker 05 Yeah.
3:38 Josh Clark? Human made it every step of the way. And it's got a really interesting history, too. It's just a good all around topic, if you ask me. Plus, it was a so-so movie starring Val Kilmer back in the, you know, late 90s or early 2000s.
3:54 Speaker 05 I think it was early 2000s. It was okay. I saw it.
3:57 Josh Clark? The, the extra supporting character was Meth.
4:01 Speaker 05 Yeah. It was very messy. Uh, yeah, I've been here, by the way.
4:07 Josh Clark? I was wondering that.
4:08 Speaker 05 Yeah, on, on my big out west trip many years ago after college where I spent several months driving around with my best friend Brett. We went through the Salton Sea and it wasn't great back then. I imagine it's, well, it sounds like it's even worse now, but when did we talk about this before? Was it desertification?
4:27 Josh Clark? Oh, maybe.
4:29 Speaker 05 Cause I know we've talked about.
4:30 Josh Clark? That doesn't ring a bell.
4:32 Speaker 05 But I mean, so much so that I was convinced we did a whole episode, but it, it could have been one of our ill conceived videos that we used to do.
4:40 Josh Clark? That's possible too, because I think I could see us taking the angle that there were ghost towns there.
4:46 Speaker 05 Oh, okay.
4:47 Josh Clark? You know?
4:47 Speaker 05 Maybe it's ghost towns.
4:48 Josh Clark? There are. There's a lot of ghost towns there. As we'll see, the area was once quite developed and for good reasons, again, as we'll see, people largely abandoned this area. But let's, let's talk about how the Salton Sea even came to be because that is an interesting story in and of itself.
5:05 Speaker 05 Yeah, it totally is. Uh, it's in the Salton Basin and that's S A L T O N, by the way.
5:11 Josh Clark? Right.
5:11 Speaker 05 And that is a, a very large trough, uh, just sort of a natural geological trough that, that led into at one point, the Gulf of California, but it was, it was, there were other seas before this sea or lakes, if you want to go that route.
5:27 Josh Clark? Yeah. From the oldest I saw is that we have geological evidence of inland seas or lakes, depending on your definition, um, going back at least 40,000 years and that it was almost cyclical. There'd be a, a lake that was there for a few hundred years and it would dry up or flow out to the Gulf of California. And then it would happen again a couple of centuries later. And the thing that made it happen was the Colorado River, which flows to the east along the border of California, Nevada and California and Arizona down into, uh, I guess the Gulf of California, right?
6:03 Speaker 05 Are you asking me?
6:04 Josh Clark? I think so. So that would make the Colorado River a sea. But it flows into there and every once in a while, there's a lot of snow melt. There's a lot of rain and the Colorado River will flood its banks so much that a bunch of it gets diverted into the Salton Basin, forming one of the Salton Seas over time.
6:23 Speaker 05 Yeah, for a while, like you said, you know, it could be there for a while. Eventually it's out in the middle of the desert, so eventually it's going to evaporate.
6:30 Josh Clark? Right.
6:31 Speaker 05 But as the river flowed in there, it carried a lot of silt with it.
6:36 Speaker 05 And eventually that silt gummed up the outlet, so it couldn't get anywhere. So there was a natural dam that was formed.
6:42 Josh Clark? Right.
6:43 Speaker 05 And, you know, it was, like you said, it was, it was a lake for a long time. Sometimes it was a saltwater lake. Sometimes the heat would dry it out and evaporate it and it would just become a dry bed once again. And it just, it was this kind of weird geological cycle. I mean, I'm sure this has happened elsewhere, but this seems particularly noteworthy for this area.
7:06 Josh Clark? It does. It seems kind of unique, you know?
7:09 Speaker 05 Yeah, I think so.
7:10 Josh Clark? Uh, it, uh, there's also one of these lakes or seas, you'll like this one because they call it a lake. Lake, Lake Kahuluiwa, which formed about 1,300 years ago, as well as geologists can tell. And it stuck around for hundreds of years, possibly up into the 1500s. And at one point in the 1500s, it flooded, so it was already there and it grew to about 26 times the size of the Salton Sea.
7:37 Speaker 05 Oh, wow.
7:37 Josh Clark? Which in and of itself, that sounds pretty impressive, but I came up with a few comparisons for some of our listeners around the world, if I may.
7:45 Speaker 05 Sure.
7:46 Josh Clark? For our northern listeners, that is larger than the size of Lake Erie.
7:50 Speaker 05 Okay.
7:51 Josh Clark? For our Canadian listeners, it's four times larger than the capital city of Ottawa. Uh, for our European listeners, that's larger than Belgium.
8:01 Speaker 05 Okay.
8:01 Josh Clark? In the UK, that's bigger than Wales. In Australia, that's two times the greater Sydney metro area. And for our friends in California, that's 26 times the size of the Salton Sea.
8:15 Speaker 05 Wow. You did your homework.
8:17 Josh Clark? I did.
8:18 Speaker 05 Is there a program that you use, like just like joshconverts.com?
8:23 Josh Clark? There are, yeah, I make like $12 a month on web ads.
8:28 Speaker 05 That's great.
8:29 Josh Clark? No, there's, there's websites that says like, they're called like the size of or something like that. So usually it's type in what's the size of 10,000 square miles, which is what that would be.
8:40 Speaker 05 Is the landing page just a banana?
8:43 Josh Clark? Yes.
8:43 Speaker 05 It starts from there?
8:45 Josh Clark? Yeah. Where did that come from, using a banana for scale? Do you know?
8:49 Speaker 05 Oh, I don't know. I never, I mean, who starts any of these things?
8:52 Josh Clark? Okay. I didn't know if it was something that you had kind of brought up or something. Cause I know the stuff you should know, Army is crazy for that.
8:58 Speaker 05 No, it's just an internet thing, you know?
9:00 Josh Clark? Okay.
9:01 Speaker 05 It's Ron, Ron's doing all of that stuff.
9:03 Josh Clark? Get all Ron. He comes up with the best memes.
9:08 Speaker 05 All right. So that was the, the cycle for thousands of years, depositing that silt. One of the byproducts of that is it made that soil very rich and, and stuff could really grow on it if it rained ever, which it doesn't. So that was a problem and irrigation is going to solve that problem. So in the early 1900s, the Imperial Canal was built to say, hey, let's divert some of that Colorado river toward us. So we can have drinking water and so we can irrigate this rich, rich soil that lies beneath our feet.
9:42 Josh Clark? Mm hmm.
9:42 Speaker 05 And they completed it and you know, it was, uh, pretty good, but that same silt is going to keep clogging up even, you know, kind of any moving body of water. And that eventually happened to the canal, like in a bad way, not too long after they opened it.
9:56 Josh Clark? No, just in a couple of years. And this one clog was so bad that they were like, we're not going to get rid of this anytime soon. So they dug a bypass around it, you know?
10:06 Speaker 05 Yeah.
10:07 Josh Clark? Which makes sense, it's smart, and they just expected it to last like a couple of months until they cleaned that silt deposit out and could go back to the original canal. The problem was, because they thought it was going to be temporary, they didn't install the proper headgates. Headgates control the flow of water in a canal. So that means that the water in that bypass was literally out of control, which was fine. They dug it well enough that, under normal circumstances, the water was flowing normally. But the year after they dug that bypass, it stayed around longer than expected. And the year after, there were some genuinely abnormal circumstances that caused a huge problem for everybody.
10:50 Speaker 05 Yeah, it rained a lot. A big rainy season, and then, you know, snow melt in the Rockies can always be a problem if it was extra, and that year it was extra coinciding with those rains. The Colorado River swol up again, and it, you know, did what water does. It goes downriver in a pretty impactful way, and really overwhelmed that temporary channel that they were using to divert around the Clog Canal.
11:16 Josh Clark? Yeah.
11:17 Speaker 05 It carved it, it just made it bigger and deeper, and eventually it started overflowing into that Salt and Sink, and just became one big body of water.
11:27 Josh Clark? Yeah, so essentially, the Colorado River decided, "I'll go this way instead." So it actually changed its course from the way that it had been going for millennia to this way directly into the Salt and Sea. And it started flowing so fast that 90,000 cubic feet of water per second was flowing into the Salt and Sea, right? That is the size of an Olympic-sized pool, that much water flowing in every second.
11:56 Speaker 05 Yeah, and for our friends in the north, that's an Olympic-sized pool.
12:01 Josh Clark? Right.
12:03 Speaker 05 I'm not gonna keep going.
12:04 Josh Clark? Well, what about our friends who like McDonald's?
12:06 Speaker 05 Oh, I mean, if you did a Big Mac conversion, that's really going the extra mile.
12:11 Josh Clark? It is exactly 2,295,918 Big Macs all flowing into the Salt and Sea per second.
12:20 Speaker 05 So delicious.
12:21 Josh Clark? It does seem delicious, but imagine them all kind of flowing at once and smacking into one another and probably get kind of gross.
12:28 Speaker 05 Yeah, pretty gross. So, I mean, that happened for a couple of years and they tried to redirect the river. It was a pretty expensive proposition. It was a pretty frantic thing. The US government got involved. The Southern Pacific Railroad got involved. They fully sealed it in 1907, but that's like, what, three years later? And, you know, by that point, it's too late. They're like, all right, now we got a 400 square mile inland sea or lake, depending on who's podcasting many years from now.
12:57 Josh Clark? Yeah, the way that they sealed it, the Union Pacific Railroad, because their lines were threatened, they were like, we better do something because these government yokels have no idea what to do. And so apparently it took two, they built a trestle across the river to install a dam made of 2,057 carloads of rock, 221 carloads of gravel, and 203 carloads of clay, all dumped into one spot to finally fill that breach. That's what it took. That's how big of a breach it was.
13:26 Speaker 05 How many Big Macs?
13:28 Josh Clark? A lot. I didn't do that one. Sorry.
13:32 Speaker 05 It's okay.
13:35 Speaker 05 Should we take a break now or is that a, should we, it seems like a good time for a break?
13:39 Josh Clark? Yeah, the Salt and Sea is now there. The breach has been sealed and people are saying, what the heck are we gonna do with this?
13:47 Speaker 05 Yeah, we're gonna water ski eventually. So we'll come back and talk about that right after this.
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15:04 Speaker 06 First thought is like, wow, how are we going to do all this?
15:07 Josh Clark? Hey, this is Josh and Chuck from Stuff You Should Know.
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15:25 Speaker 06 It was going to rival anything that was already built. And that takes quite a bit of people and different teams to all be on the same page.
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16:59 Speaker 09 Wayfair, every style, every home. Lately, I've been learning some stuff about insomnia or aluminia. How about the one on borderline disorder? Better yet, reporter. Heard that one before, but it was so nice. I learned it twice. Everybody listen up. Oh, it's Charles and Josh and all. It's stuff, it's stuff, it's stuff. You should know.
17:35 Speaker 05 All right, so when we last left you, human experimentation and sort of error and rain and snow melt caused a 400-square-mile, almost 35-mile-long and 15-mile-wide, about 30-foot-deep-on-average lake to form in the middle of the California desert.
17:56 Josh Clark? Yeah.
17:57 Speaker 05 Because it's where it was, eventually, if humankind had not intruded once again, it probably would have eventually just completely evaporated, like it had been doing for millennia.
18:07 Josh Clark? Mm-hmm.
18:08 Speaker 05 But like we mentioned, that soil is good stuff. So they started to build farmland out there and irrigate that land. And what do you do when you irrigate stuff? You've got to have runoff. And so they're running this irrigation water off into the lake, which basically, it's like, hey, we're putting at least as much water as you're evaporating, so you're not going anywhere.
18:32 Josh Clark? No, yeah, that's right. So it stabilized the lake indefinitely, just the agricultural runoff.
18:39 Josh Clark? One of the other things that the other impacts that this had, because they started doing that in the 20s, is that agricultural runoff is chock full of salt, which I didn't realize, but irrigation produces a lot of salt. And that stuff is flowing right into the Salton, and it turned it salty. Today, I saw anywhere between one-third or 50% more salty than the Pacific Ocean. The Salton Sea has become because of all that introduction. So it started freshwater, and then because of agricultural runoff, it turned into a saltwater inland sea slash lake.
19:14 Speaker 05 That's right. And because it's located along the Pacific Flyway, which is a great migratory bird route, the birds were like, hey, this is great. Now there's water here. The locals were like, we should put some fish in here. So they stocked it with tilapia, a lot of tilapia, and sport fish for sport fishing. And of course, the birds love that even more. So all of a sudden, by the 1930s, you have a sort of a brand new wildlife refuge forming, such that the US Fish and Wildlife Service even created the Salton Sea Wildlife Refuge to protect all the stuff that was there now.
19:51 Josh Clark? Yeah. So when the Salton Sea first formed, everybody's like, this is actually kind of great. This is a mistake that turned really wonderful for everybody. We turned river water into lemonade, in other words.
20:03 Speaker 05 That's right.
20:04 Josh Clark? So there were some other weird things that didn't make it, but that were introduced. Flamingos, which I guess aren't that weird, but a guy introduced sea lions too. At one point, and they were accused of stealing pigs in the area. But the guy who introduced sea lions and flamingos, he had a legendary restaurant out on an island in the middle of the Salton Sea called Mullet Island, which is actually just sitting atop a dormant volcano. It's very important to remember this for later. It's a dormant but not extinct volcano. It's just kind of sitting there chilling, waiting to go up.
20:41 Speaker 05 That's right. And, you know, once you have flamingos, you're gonna have people because people want to go see those flamingos. So by the 1950s, developers had come along and turned it into what they called the California Riviera, or the Salton Riviera, or Palm Springs by the Sea. And it's exactly what you think. It's tiki bars, it's restaurants, had a very Palm Springs-y vibe. Like, you know, Elvis performed there, Frank Sinatra performed there. They had, you know, I wasn't kidding about the water skiing. They, people yotted, people swam. It was just a big recreation area out there in the middle of the desert in, you know, Southern California. They were like, yeah, we'll take another one of these. We got plenty of people around.
21:22 Josh Clark? Right.
21:22 Speaker 05 And Palm Springs gets a little crowded. So now we have this, this beautiful inland sea lake.
21:28 Josh Clark? Yeah, people started building vacation homes there. There were very famous speedboat races that were held there every year. At one point, some developers sunk $2 million in 1960 money into building the North Shore Beach and Yacht Club, which became basically the crown jewel of the Salton Sea area. There were postcards that said, greetings from the Salton Sea. There was a Bombay Beach resident who's quoted-
21:53 Speaker 05 Wait, they had postcards?
21:54 Josh Clark? They had postcards. Swear to God.
21:56 Speaker 05 Did they sell shot glasses?
21:57 Josh Clark? I, uh, yes. There was, there was a Spencer's Gifts on, on the Salton Sea in the 60s.
22:04 Speaker 05 All right.
22:05 Josh Clark? You could also get a bitchin' Grateful Dead poster and a Latoya Jackson and lingerie poster.
22:11 Speaker 05 Right. Is she in a Lambo?
22:16 Josh Clark? No, that's Garfield.
22:17 Speaker 05 Oh, okay.
22:18 Josh Clark? So there was this Bombay Beach resident, which is one of the little party towns on the Salton Sea. And it's still there. There's something like 350 people that live there. But he said back in the day, it was like a spring break party all the time. The problem was the Salton Sea, as much fun as people were having on it, it was this ticking environmental time bomb just growing underneath there, water skis essentially, day by day. Until finally in around the 70s, it became clear that the Salton Sea's glitz was starting to wear off and there was rotten Big Macs underneath.
22:54 Speaker 05 You know, I thought you were gonna lead it in with when you said the problem is, I thought you were gonna say, is it spring break is not meant to last forever?
23:01 Josh Clark? Oh, that's a great one. Yeah, let's go back and edit that in.
23:04 Speaker 05 Just a, just a note.
23:05 Josh Clark? Okay, what we, there'll be no context. You'll just add it in and then we'll leave the part where you suggested into.
23:11 Speaker 05 I agree. Uh, yeah. So, yeah, things would go downhill pretty quickly. Uh, you know, I hope we've hammered home enough that this thing just sort of appeared because of people. And it's out in the middle of the desert and it's not supposed, it wasn't supposed to be there really. So obviously it's not gonna rain. Um, so that's not gonna fill that thing back up. They had that agricultural runoff for many years, but as we'll see, that would end up being a big part of the problem. Developments would flood, uh, you know, cause they were building, you know, lakeside properties and stuff like that. So, uh, you know, whenever you try to intrude, I feel like and build a big natural thing out where there probably wasn't supposed to be one. I feel like it usually goes south like this in some way.
23:53 Josh Clark? Yeah, it's hubris.
23:54 Speaker 05 Yeah.
23:55 Josh Clark? So, yeah, that runoff would sometimes flood the lake. There'd be so much of it and those developments would flood like you were saying. The other problem with the runoff is that it not just salt, it brings lots of pesticides and fertilizers with it. And remember that there was no outlet for this lake, which made it a lake in the first place. So all of this toxic water didn't have anywhere to go, right? It just stayed in the lake.
24:19 Speaker 05 Yeah.
24:19 Josh Clark? And anytime you have a lot of, um, fertilizers introduced into a body of water, especially a warm one, you get algae blooms. You also get bacteria blooms. And when the algae decays, the microbes that eat it also suck up a lot of the oxygen in the water. And that kills off all the stuff that needs that oxygen. So it creates dead zones. And then even worse, that bacteria that blooms, um, some kinds of it actually produce toxins that can do things like damage humans' livers or their DNA or cause respiratory failure. So all this stuff is starting to like happen in the Salton Sea, starting in the seventies and eighties.
25:03 Josh Clark? And it's, it's just becoming clear that there's problems that are starting to brew, like literally brewing within the Salton Sea.
25:10 Speaker 05 Yeah, it's a, it's called eutrophication and there are some pretty staggering and very sad statistics that we're gonna kind of run through here as far as the die off because. Uh, you know, the fish die off and then eventually because of the fish die off, the bird die off. It was really massive. Um, this one is, is fairly staggering. Just over a five month period from December 91 to April 92, 150,000 uh, little small water birds are called, what are those? Eared grebs?
25:39 Josh Clark? Yeah.
25:41 Speaker 05 Is that what, is that how we're pronouncing that?
25:43 Josh Clark? I was gonna say grebby's, but I think you nailed it.
25:46 Speaker 05 I'm not really sure, but they're little, small water birds and 150,000 of them died over five months.
25:50 Josh Clark? Wow.
25:51 Speaker 05 On the Salton Sea. Another 20,000 uh, in 94, um, 10,000 white and brown pelicans, uh, died out in 1996, uh, about 10,000 other fish eating birds. And this is the really sad one, even though it was, I say only a thousand, that's a lot. But they were endangered brown pelicans and apparently that was the largest sort of single die off of an endangered species to ever happen.
26:17 Josh Clark? Yeah. Yeah. And all this is going down on the Salton Sea.
26:21 Speaker 05 Or the tilapia, man. How about that stat?
26:23 Josh Clark? Yeah. The most eye popping stat that I've found is that eight million, eight million tilapia died in one single day in August of 1999.
26:36 Speaker 05 How do they figure that, you know?
26:38 Josh Clark? I don't know. They must've counted one in like a square foot and then multiplied it by Big Macs or something.
26:44 Speaker 05 Yeah. But well, in this case, fish tacos, maybe.
26:47 Josh Clark? Gross.
26:50 Speaker 05 That was probably insensitive.
26:52 Josh Clark? What? Fish tacos?
26:53 Speaker 05 Well, I mean, tilapia is good for, I don't eat tilapia much, but it's pretty good for a fish taco.
26:57 Josh Clark? Aren't they the rats of the sea?
26:59 Speaker 05 Yeah, I think so. I, I used to eat it more.
27:02 Josh Clark? I'll eat tilapia. I'm not that fancy.
27:05 Speaker 05 Oh, oh, yeah?
27:07 Josh Clark? Yeah. I'll eat tilapia right in front of you.
27:10 Speaker 05 Uh, well, I'll, I'll be dining on my Chilean sea bass.
27:13 Josh Clark? Nice.
27:14 Speaker 05 What was that called? It was something toothfish, right? Didn't they rename it for marketing?
27:18 Josh Clark? Patagonian toothfish. I forgot about that. That's the real name for sea bass.
27:22 Speaker 05 That's right. Suckers.
27:24 Josh Clark? So, yes, again, I think it's worth restating. Eight million tilapia died in a single day in 1999. The previous record before that had been set the summer prior. And that was 500,000 that died on a single day. So clearly, things are getting worse by the year at the Salton Sea by the time the 90s roll around.
27:45 Speaker 05 Yeah, and so, I mean, they were running incinerators around the clock, around town, because, you know, the smell of fish carcass was everywhere. And you had all these, very sadly, all these animal bodies all over the place. I guess you could call them carcasses, but I'm gonna say bodies.
28:03 Josh Clark? So there's another, there's an explanation for this too, and it's actually pretty simple. In addition to those, the eutrophication dead zones that are produced by those algae blooms, just simple summertime heat in a really saline body of water can kill fish en masse. And that's exactly what was going on. As the Salton Sea warmed, as summer started to kind of get going, and there's like 105-degree August temperatures, hot water, warm water, carries less oxygen than cooler water. And salt water carries less oxygen than fresh water. So when you have warm, briny water, fish can suffocate, and that's what was happening.
28:47 Josh Clark? And so fish die-offs are just an annual part of life around the Salton Sea.
28:53 Speaker 05 Yeah, and I mean, not only that, it's just losing surface area. It's shrinking. So 10% has been lost in recent years. They're projecting 40% by 2030. And when that's happening in a really salty area, and all those pesticides and metals and everything that have been, you know, deposited over the years due to the agriculture all around, it just makes it more concentrated. And it's just, you know, it's a bad scene. It's getting just saltier over the years. It's getting more, you know, chock full of more densely packed pesticides and things. And they're saying that the salinity is probably gonna increase another, maybe three times in the next 10 years, basically kind of taking care of anything else that might still be living there.
29:35 Josh Clark? Right. And just from the fact that it's shrinking too, I saw that there's houses that were built along the shoreline back in the heyday that are now like a football field away from the shoreline now. That's how much it's shrunk. And they expect it's going to shrink another 40% by 2030. So things are getting dire here, right? And you can kind of imagine that as things started to go downhill, tourism dropped off. And that happened exactly as you'd think. That North Shore Beach and Yacht Club, that was the crown jewel. It closed down in 1984 because there was a flood from agricultural runoff. And then I saw a really cool eerie picture, Chuck.
30:18 Josh Clark? There's a drive-in movie theater, again, from back in the day. It's in Bombay Beach. And for some reason, the cars are all parked, like they're there to see the movie, but they're all junked and abandoned, mostly missing wheels. And they're just, they just got put there like that. And it looks like everybody just kind of left the Salton Sea mid-movie. It's really cool to see. I would strongly suggest looking up that picture. I don't remember where I saw it.
30:47 Speaker 05 Well, I'll do you even better. There's a video on YouTube because that's a very, I mean, people aren't tourism wise. They're not flocking there. But people like me and people that are the same kind of people go to like abandoned
31:03 Speaker 05 roller coaster parks, amusement parks. We'll still go to the Salton Sea to kind of check things out.
31:09 Josh Clark? Right.
31:09 Speaker 05 And one of these videos, it's from the gnarly speed shop. And I think if you just look up abandoned cars at drive-in on YouTube, gnarly speed shop. They do a cool video sort of walkthrough of the drive-in and the surrounding area. There's this very, like every picture you see of this, there's a very kind of striking old orange Maverick car sitting in the front of frame because I guess it's, you know, kind of closest to the road.
31:35 Josh Clark? Right.
31:36 Speaker 05 And there was graffiti on it and I could never tell what it said from the pictures, but on the video I was able to pause it. And it says, "You infected me in a way I didn't know was possible." Which is very creepy. I don't know if that was like a message to a a long lost love, or if it was, you know, relating to the Salton Sea and what happened there, but it's a pretty cool video and there were boats in the parking lot too. So I don't think like, it just looks like everyone got up in the movie. I think people just like went and like parked their cars in this abandoned lot is what happened.
32:05 Josh Clark? Sure, sure. Yeah, I know that they didn't do that. It didn't happen that rapidly, but that's what it looks like. I think it's so cool. You know?
32:12 Speaker 05 I didn't think you thought. I didn't think you thought that.
32:14 Josh Clark? So I remembered where I saw it, Chuck. I saw it on a slideshow on All That's Interesting.
32:20 Speaker 05 Great.
32:21 Josh Clark? Okay, so do you want to take a second break and come back and talk about how it has gotten even worse than what we've said so far?
32:28 Speaker 05 Yeah, let's do it.
32:29 Josh Clark? Okay.
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35:39 Josh Clark? Okay Chuck, so the Salton Sea has really gone downhill. There's no denying it. People have decamped from there, not just vacationers, but people who lived there too, just moved away because it's gotten so gross. We didn't mention it, but one of the things that happened, I think, I don't remember what year it was, there was a sulfur dioxide cloud that wafted basically all across Southern California, all the way to Los Angeles. And it stunk like rotten eggs and they traced it back to the Salton Sea. It was all of the decomposition of all the muck, all the dead fish, all the everything. It was so bad that you could smell it all over Southern California. So this is the state of the Salton Seas.
36:23 Josh Clark? People are like, we need to do something about this. And for years and years, starting in the early, late 90s, early 2000s, the idea was, let's just restore it to its former glory. And that idea became a non-starter essentially for the next couple of decades because it's just a bad idea. You can't do it now. It's too late. But it took a while for the California government to figure that out.
36:52 Speaker 05 Yeah, we'll talk about a bunch of the stops and starts over the years. In 2003, the water districts of Southern California signed off. There was this deal that they had been negotiating for years called the Quantification Settlement Agreement, or the QSA. And basically what they were trying to get done was say, hey, let's once again take some of that Colorado River water. And the stuff that they had been using for irrigation is now being redirected to like, you know, a lot of that area was then built up into more urban areas in the Coachella Valley and like San Diego. And they're like, well, we want that water now.
37:29 Josh Clark? Right.
37:29 Speaker 05 And in exchange, those areas would say, all right, now what we're going to do is pay the farmers there a lot of money to upgrade their old equipment. It was really inefficient irrigation equipment. The newer versions won't have nearly as much wastewater. And so they're like, let's do a trade off here. We'll pay you to upgrade your stuff. And in return, you give us a lot of the water that we need.
37:55 Josh Clark? Right. So the problem as far as the Salton Sea is concerned, that agricultural runoff, remember, was keeping it going.
38:03 Speaker 05 Yeah.
38:03 Josh Clark? So since there's less irrigation runoff, because these irrigation techniques have been vastly updated, there's no, not really any agricultural runoff coming and feeding the Salton Sea any longer. And part of that quantification settlement agreement was we need to take some of this water that the Imperial Valley farmers used to use and feed it into the Salton Sea for 15 years.
38:29 Speaker 05 Yeah.
38:29 Josh Clark? They even paid the farmers to leave some of their land fallow so they could direct that water to the Salton Sea. In retrospect, that seems like total madness.
38:38 Speaker 05 Yeah.
38:39 Josh Clark? They were essentially wasting all of that water. But it actually turned out to be prescient, even though they didn't quite realize that it was a good thing for there to be water there until we figure out what to do.
38:51 Speaker 05 It's sort of like leaving the water on in your tub with the drain slightly open.
38:56 Josh Clark? Yeah.
38:56 Speaker 05 And just being like, we're just going to leave the tub water on for 15 years so we can keep this body of water.
39:02 Josh Clark? Yes, but your tub you got from an abandoned house.
39:06 Speaker 05 Right.
39:06 Josh Clark? And it had, it has bath water that's 100 years old and full of pollutants and algae. And you're just running your water into it.
39:15 Speaker 05 Yeah. So it's a horror movie tub.
39:16 Josh Clark? It's a, yes, exactly. That's exactly what it is.
39:19 Speaker 05 Yeah. So you might be asking like, hey, if this thing wasn't supposed to be there to begin with, if the whole idea of a body of water out in the middle of the desert like that is just going to dry up naturally, like just let it dry up naturally. And like, what's the big deal? Um, one of the big deals is, is that there's still a lot of biodiversity there. It's not like it killed everything. It seems like that eventually might happen, but it's still a habitat, it's still a migratory stop for birds on that, that fly route.
39:48 Josh Clark? Right.
39:49 Speaker 05 Uh, and it's because, you know, Southern California has been developed so much, a lot of the other natural habitats for them have gone away. So the Salton Sea was, as sad as it was, was like a, an oasis for them almost.
40:02 Josh Clark? Right, yeah. Um, that, that is sad because if the Salton Sea is the more attractive option because that's all that's left.
40:08 Speaker 05 Yeah.
40:09 Josh Clark? Those poor, poor birds are in trouble.
40:11 Speaker 05 Yeah.
40:11 Josh Clark? Uh, it's not just the birds that are in trouble, there are people that still live around there. Uh, in fact, I was really surprised to find the Salton City, uh, which I believe is the biggest town along the Salton Sea. It's on the Northwest Shore. Their population actually increased since the 2020 census by almost a thousand people.
40:29 Speaker 05 Oh, wow.
40:29 Josh Clark? A thousand people, who cares? Well, they were less than 6,000 in population, uh, at the time of the 2020 census. So people are moving there because the housing is so affordable, it's insane. Um, so there's people there, there's, there's, in the whole region, there's something like 650,000 people. And all of those people are at tremendous risk right now of a, a cornucopia of health hazards that are starting to develop because of the Salton Sea evaporates more and more and more because the runoff isn't sustaining it anymore and it's so hot. That exposed seabed or lake bed that's so chock full of toxins that you can barely
41:11 Josh Clark? look at it is turning to dust that's getting blown off into the surrounding areas and causing all sorts of problems.
41:20 Speaker 05 Yeah, um, asthma, they've already found an uptick in asthma. Um, there's a, a doctor named Jill Johnson, a PhD. Who's an assistant professor of preventative medicine at, uh, Southern Cal. And she's working on a research project called the Salt and Sea in Children's Health, colon, assessing Imperial Valley respiratory health and environment, and the environment, along with partner Shoray Farzan, another PhD. And they're basically following elementary school children in that area and seeing how their health is advancing. And right now, pretty bad asthma rates and they haven't proved causation yet, but it seems like it's probably headed that way.
42:02 Josh Clark? Yeah, apparently they just, like this month, published an article on their findings from this in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, you know, that rag.
42:13 Speaker 05 Yeah.
42:13 Josh Clark? And it basically is like, this is, yes, this is causing asthma, at the very least, in little kids. There's all sorts of other stuff to worry about, too, because there's metals, pesticides, DDT's been found in there. There's just so much crud in there that now that it's drying up, is turning into dust and getting carried as particulate matter, that you don't, you don't want to breathe that stuff in, and yet it's just blowing around. Because again, now that's turned into desert, but it's toxic desert.
42:45 Speaker 05 Yeah. And that's, that's just like health issues. There's also like a financial impact. There was a study about, oh, 11 years ago or so, from the Pacific Institute, they're a think tank in Oakland that deals with water policy. And they said the financial toll could be as much as $70 billion over the next 30 years.
43:05 Josh Clark? Right.
43:06 Speaker 05 Like property values, like you said, going south, public health, which we've mentioned, the continued loss of recreational revenue and natural habitat. So, you know, there's a big financial burden. So, you know, obviously because of that, California, over the past, like, you know, 25 years, has had various stops and starts with funding for different projects that'll get approved, and then the money just gets diverted or never shows up.
43:31 Josh Clark? Yeah, and especially before that 2014 study from the Pacific Institute, people are like, this $8 billion seems like a little much to restore the Salton Sea. One of the reasons why is because the area that the Salton Sea is in, the people who live around it are fairly low income, it's a very rural area, and a lot of the people who are affected live in Mexico. So back in Sacramento, the capital of California, which is pretty far away from the Salton Sea.
44:04 Speaker 05 Yeah.
44:04 Josh Clark? The political will just hasn't been there. And one of the things you could do, if you were a senator, a congressperson, a governor, you could fully go after a bunch of funds to save the Salton Sea and remediate the area and get it back to its former glory. And then your legislature would say, no, we're not funding that. And you'd be like, oh, man, I tried. And that seems like what the pattern was for the first, like about 20-ish years, maybe a little more than that, that people started coming up with ideas to do something about this.
44:37 Speaker 05 Yeah, Gray Davis, when he was governor in 2003, signed the Salton Sea, sorry, Restoration Act and the Salton Sea Restoration Fund, but that didn't receive funding. So a fund without funding is not a fund.
44:49 Josh Clark? No.
44:51 Speaker 05 Just like a sea without an outlet is a lake.
44:55 Speaker 05 Right?
44:56 Josh Clark? Yes, absolutely.
44:57 Speaker 05 All right, in 2007, the Corps of Engineers, the Army Corps of Engineers, got authorization to spend up to 30 million on projects. The money was finally appropriated in 2015. And the Obama administration spent a couple of hundred grand is all on a study, another study even.
45:16 Josh Clark? That was the 30 million, that's what it turned out to be from what I can tell. It went from $30 million to $200,000 and it was for another study. Isn't that crazy?
45:25 Speaker 05 Yeah, I mean, none of this, though, is going to make any difference. I mean, even a $30 million thing, or I think. There was one plan, uh, yeah, a 10-year Salt and Sea Plan, uh, to cost 383 million. But that's not even for restoration because like you said, that ship has sailed. Um, it, it is a multi, multi-billion dollar thing if they want to get this thing back to the California Riviera.
45:50 Josh Clark? So Right.
45:50 Speaker 05 It, it doesn't seem like that's just ever going to happen. It's not even possible.
45:53 Josh Clark? No. So now they're looking at restoring parts of it to turn it back into wetlands for birds.
45:59 Speaker 05 Right.
45:59 Josh Clark? And that 10-year plan, it was, um, estimated to cost 383 million dollars just to do that.
46:07 Speaker 05 Yeah.
46:07 Josh Clark? And it looked like it was just going to be another, another pie in the sky, a proposal that would never get funding. Uh, but California came up with something like 200 million dollars of that. They're under, um, Gavin Newsom, uh, in the last couple of years, there's been huge, crazy movements compared to what had been done in the last couple of decades. And California came up with 200 million dollars, uh, out of nowhere, mind bogglingly, the federal government shipped in another 240 million dollars, 245. So now this project that needed 383 million has almost half a billion. So not only are they now on the Salt and Sea saying like, you know, when, when are we ever going to be able to do anything about this to?
46:51 Josh Clark? We can actually do more than we wanted to do in our 10-year plan. The things are starting to pick up and they're starting to restore wetlands and, um, it, it actually looks like it's going to not be quite the ecological disaster that it would have been had California just sat on its hands.
47:09 Speaker 05 Yeah. I think, uh, between 2003 and 2016, um, just a few dozen acres of the wetland were restored. Uh, since then, about 2,000 more. And, uh, the Species Conservation Habitat Project has a plan over the next decade to restore another 9,000 acres. So that'd be. Like roughly 12,000 acres of restoration, which is pretty good. They also think that, you know, it's Southern California, so it's a moneyed area in general. Not that exact area, but they're saying like, hey, we can like, we've got this great land there that we can make money off still. Remember that mullet island that's on the dormant volcano? That means there's some hotspots there.
47:53 Speaker 05 And so some people are saying, hey, let's, let's put a few billion dollars toward a geothermal electricity plant.
48:00 Josh Clark? Yeah.
48:01 Speaker 05 Or maybe mine some lithium.
48:03 Josh Clark? Yes, I believe they're already building the plants there. And then the lithium, I don't know if they've actually started that, but there's a lot of lithium there. And that is like 21st century gold. Cause you use that in batteries for electric vehicles, for giant batteries to back up your power grid. And there's a push and pull over whether to lithium mine there. And of course they're going to end up lithium mining there because it's just so valuable. But some people are like, it's already an environmental catastrophe. Who cares if lithium mining makes it a little bit worse? It's better than mining in a more pristine area and really screwing that up. And other people are like, no, we're trying to restore it. So lithium mining is gonna not only undo that stuff, it's gonna make it even worse than it was.
48:48 Josh Clark? But my money is definitely on them lithium mining.
48:52 Speaker 05 Yeah, agreed.
48:54 Josh Clark? There's a couple of other things that are noteworthy about the Salton Sea. I guess we can leave that part that there's actually hope for it right now. But along the way, like you can imagine such a bizarre place generated some really interesting urban legends over the years, right?
49:11 Speaker 05 Oh, yeah.
49:11 Josh Clark? Some of them are actually true. The Navy used to use the Salton Sea to drop test bombs or dummy bombs to basically train their bomber pilots how to drop bombs. And they actually supposedly practiced for atomic bomb drops. And they are, so there's dummy bombs under the Salton Sea still. And of course locals are like, that's just a cover story. They actually lost an atomic bomb and that's what's hiding there. There's an undetonated atomic bomb under there.
49:40 Speaker 05 Oh.
49:40 Josh Clark? There are a bunch of Navy planes that did crash. I think 18 flyers died over the years, but there's 24 planes sunken in the Salton Sea right now. And then there's this one really weird legend that predates the Salton Sea.
49:56 Josh Clark? It's the lost ship of the desert. Have you ever heard of that?
50:00 Speaker 05 Never heard of it.
50:01 Josh Clark? Well, it's apparently this legend or lore that there was a, anything from a Spanish galleon to a Viking ship that sailed up the Gulf of California and eventually got stuck and that turned into desert and the ship was swallowed up. And some people are saying it was actually in the Salton Basin, which is now underneath the Salton Sea. So there's this whole idea that there's a Viking ship potentially under there, too.
50:29 Speaker 05 Wow.
50:30 Josh Clark? Yeah.
50:31 Speaker 05 There's a great dive bar.
50:33 Josh Clark? The Ski Inn, right?
50:35 Speaker 05 Yeah, that's in that video. They go to Ski Inn and play creepy old piano and have some beer.
50:40 Josh Clark? Yeah, they call it the lowest dive bar in the Western Hemisphere.
50:44 Speaker 05 It is.
50:45 Josh Clark? 237 feet below sea level, I think.
50:48 Speaker 05 Yeah, right there at, I don't know if they still call it Bombay Beach or if they took that name away, but Bombay Nonbeach, because a beach without water is not a beach.
50:57 Josh Clark? Right. There's also, it's attracted a lot of artists, too. Like Slab City is essentially a taken over military installation. There's a folk art installation called Salvation Mountain. There's another whole like outdoor gallery called East Jesus, I believe is what it's called. So there's a lot of art that's being made there. It's kind of turning it into a really neat, weird, decrepit art place.
51:27 Speaker 05 Cool.
51:27 Josh Clark? Yeah.
51:29 Josh Clark? You got anything else?
51:30 Speaker 05 I got nothing else.
51:32 Josh Clark? Okay, well, that's it for the Salton Sea, everybody. We'll have to keep an eye on it and see what happens. And in the meantime, I think it's time for Listener Mail.
51:41 Speaker 05 Well, speaking of art, before I read Listener Mail, I want to give a plug to dear old Ben, our comrade here at Stuff You Should Know, our colleague. He is a producer, along with Jerry. And Ben is a musician, Ben Hackett, and he put out a great piece of art. He put out a record called Songs For Sleeping Dogs not too long ago. And Ben's awesome. Songs For Sleeping Dogs is great. It's very vibey, instrumental. I think you'd dig it, actually. And so, yeah, go check it out.
52:16 Josh Clark? Yeah.
52:16 Speaker 05 Wherever you get music, basically.
52:18 Josh Clark? Yes, Ben is our, probably our most beloved Stuff You Should Know member because he's just so cool and chill and nice.
52:25 Speaker 05 Whoa.
52:26 Josh Clark? Yeah.
52:27 Speaker 05 You say that in front of Jerry?
52:28 Josh Clark? Mm-hmm.
52:29 Speaker 05 Okay. All right, listener mail time. We've got a couple of, in the next couple of episodes on MTV and VH1 because we got great response. And it was also another one of those weird things where we did an episode and then something in real life happened and we had no idea that when we did our MTV episode, that like the next week MTV would fold, basically.
52:50 Josh Clark? Yeah.
52:51 Speaker 05 It's music channels. It was just one of those strange Stuff You Should Know things that happen sometimes.
52:55 Josh Clark? I didn't quite understand. So like it was just its music channels. I didn't know that it had any music channels left.
53:03 Speaker 05 Yeah, I think we talked about that, that there was still some, some music happening. Well, Jerry just buzzed in and said it's just in Europe, so I don't know what to believe now.
53:11 Josh Clark? Well, they definitely did something and it was right after our episode, for sure.
53:16 Speaker 05 Yeah. All right, so this is about MTV. Hey, guys, hoping that you would touch on this, especially toward the end, when Josh is talking about the social impacts of MTV. But I'm talking about the MTV Cut. Before MTV, the average shot in a film or television show lasted an average of eight seconds. And the MTV Cut whittled that down to two seconds.
53:36 Josh Clark? Wow.
53:37 Speaker 05 In college circa 2000, it was called the MTV Cut. Now, the MTV Cut is the norm. You'd be hard pressed to find a show that stays on one shot for eight seconds consistently anymore. I wonder if people changed or if the MTV Cut changed people
53:53 Speaker 05 and the way we watch.
53:54 Josh Clark? I believe, I'll bet that's one of those things where if you saw it now, you'd be like, wow, this is really weird. And not quite put your finger on why, but it'd just be almost unsettling to see an eight-second cut.
54:06 Speaker 05 Maybe. I mean, I remember people talking about like quick cut because of music videos. Like, it was a thing. That is from Chris Singleton, who is an ops manager for Independence Rock Media.
54:18 Josh Clark? Very nice, so Chris knows what they're talking about.
54:21 Speaker 05 I think so.
54:21 Josh Clark? Well, thanks a lot, Chris. That was very interesting and we want to hear from you too. If you've got anything interesting to say, you can email.
54:28 Speaker 05 From you too?
54:29 Josh Clark? Yeah. You can, yes, we want to hear from Bono and The Edge and the other guys.
54:34 Speaker 05 Oh, boy.
54:35 Josh Clark? Um, what?
54:37 Speaker 05 Adam and Larry, come on.
54:38 Josh Clark? There you go. Thank you. I could have come up with those, given a couple of months, for sure.
54:43 Speaker 05 Sure.
54:44 Josh Clark? So, yeah, if you want to be like the band U2, you can email us at [email protected] .
54:54 Speaker 00 Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
55:10 Josh Clark? Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability. And it starts with a great deal on an off-road-ready Tacoma or half-ton Tundra, two of Toyota's longest-lasting trucks, combining power for work, tech for adventures, and style in between. And they're built on a reputation for quality and reliability, which is why Toyota trucks are known for holding their value, which could mean big savings when it's time for your next Toyota. So get a great deal today and a great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for more. Toyota, let's go places.
55:45 Speaker 11 Welcome to the Haunted Library. Have you come in search of a tale? This podcast invites you to browse the shelves and find stories that will linger long after you've left this place. From Gothic masterpieces to poppy penny dreadfuls, join me, Colin Morgan, with new episodes twice a week. Find the Haunted Library wherever you get your podcasts.
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