Salton sea features heavily, and you’ll learn the whole American West is on as fragile a water setup with similar health, civil and economic problems to follow as what this Salton sea example, but imagine it applying LA-wide, central Oregon-wide, Salt Lake valley-wide.
Water issues out west will be a major issue of USA’s next 70 years. Very scary stuff.
I watched a documentary a while back on the Salton Sea. It touched on the local residents that live in the area and how the dust affected the children. There were even plans of tapping into Mexico’s Laguna Salada to help keep the Salton Sea from drying up.
Although it’s not a natural sea and its full of chemicals from agricultural run off the residents that live in the area are suffering from the dust and fears of great dust clouds plumbing and going west to San Diego were also insensitives from keeping the hazardous Salton Sea from drying up.
Beautiful place to visit…just not during summer when it smells from all the Dead Sea life.
burning man dust is definitely an irritant (alkaline), but salton sea dust seems to contain many additional contaminants (pesticides, metals, biologicals)
I spent a few days in Bombay Beach, a small town right on the Salton Sea. There's a community of people that call this place home, most seem to be artists, outcasts or just people drawn to the ability to purchase an entire house for $20,000.
The air is clearly toxic, you smell it the second you get there. To live there means living in olfactory mental ignorance in exchange for affordable housing and community.
It seems it's presently only still here because of previous inefficient irrigation (from the Colorado River) and that farmers restricting their water usage is actually leading to the Salton's decline.
Not just inefficient, it was a large scale industrial accident. A canal wall was breached and not repaired for two years and the runoff all collected in this low lying area. It’s a very odd place to visit now though for marketing reasons they tried to make it into a resort destination before it became a place you can only tolerate for a very short time.
I was visiting Palm Springs one year, late summer. I had assumed that since it was in the middle of the desert, that water use would be regulated.
But as I drove around over there, I was shocked to see massive lawns being watered in the middle of the day, and large amounts of water just flowing out from these lawns into the drains. Sometimes the giant sprinklers were watering the sidewalks and roads too.
What a waste of water! Speaking to a local, they claimed that due to some old water rights agreement, Palm Springs gets its water for really cheap and there is no incentive to conserve it. Sad state of affairs.
The whole system is a mess. As wasteful as it can be, all residential use is only a small fraction of water consumption in this region. An order of magnitude more is used to grow water intensive crops in the SW deserts, and those farmers are only paying on average 1/10th the price per gallon for that same water as people pay for their home use. In many cases the farmers are incentivized to not be more water efficient, because the old water rights can be use it or lose it. They are essentially being paid to waste obscene amounts of water.
Municipal use and waste get the most attention because they are by far the most visible use, but most policies there are just tinkering around the edges and hardly move the overall numbers.
Not Palm Springs but close enough, reporting in for the curious. I've been wastelanding for a few years now in an unincorporated rural township, lucky to be close to allegedly sweet aquifers, but the utility is definitely mismanaged to the extent that it's pretty doubtful if anyone really knows how much water there is. Gold-mining interests are not far away (hello arsenic?), lithium interests are probably looking for an angle. I'm no geologist but maybe an endorheic basin that collects the sweet stuff is good for that too. Anyone think any of this water is being tested with a dismantled EPA?
Anyway a water bill is about $40/month up to 8000 gallons, $3 extra per 1000g overage. About half of the base rate is claimed as "upgrade surcharge". Since it's practically unlimited for free, does that sound right to anyone? The neighbors seem to be feral ghouls about 200 years old, they definitely don't care much about any poisons or the town drying up and blowing away, so they are always YOLOing a honking great deluge of whatever juice is still left into all different kinds of stupid inappropriate leafy greens but fuck it, you know? The pentagon is looking to restart nuclear testing in the backyard anyway so those of who still aren't irradiated yet can look forward to that!
The Salton Sea is drying up due to _decreased_ agricultural water consumption in the area; it was formed by agricultural run-off, which is why it's so toxic, and now there's less runoff to fill it up.
No, its lifespan was extended by agricultural runoff offsetting the natural drying out which would have otherwise occurred after the event which formed it was corrected, but it was formed by a breach in an irrigation canal that occurred in 1905 and wasn't repaired until 1907.
Readit News
Salton sea features heavily, and you’ll learn the whole American West is on as fragile a water setup with similar health, civil and economic problems to follow as what this Salton sea example, but imagine it applying LA-wide, central Oregon-wide, Salt Lake valley-wide.
Water issues out west will be a major issue of USA’s next 70 years. Very scary stuff.
Although it’s not a natural sea and its full of chemicals from agricultural run off the residents that live in the area are suffering from the dust and fears of great dust clouds plumbing and going west to San Diego were also insensitives from keeping the hazardous Salton Sea from drying up.
Beautiful place to visit…just not during summer when it smells from all the Dead Sea life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TjGAWxL23c
I watched this 20 years ago. It's a really interesting and funny documentary about the Salton Sea and the area around it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagues_%26_Pleasures_on_the_S...
The air is clearly toxic, you smell it the second you get there. To live there means living in olfactory mental ignorance in exchange for affordable housing and community.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/10/us/utah-great-salt-lake-dust-...
https://www.google.ca/maps/@33.6867973,-116.2608676,25994m
It's clear to me as an outsider that California has serious water sustainability problems. I mean, how long can this last?
It seems it's presently only still here because of previous inefficient irrigation (from the Colorado River) and that farmers restricting their water usage is actually leading to the Salton's decline.
https://xkcd.com/1739/ - but with "terraforming"
But as I drove around over there, I was shocked to see massive lawns being watered in the middle of the day, and large amounts of water just flowing out from these lawns into the drains. Sometimes the giant sprinklers were watering the sidewalks and roads too.
What a waste of water! Speaking to a local, they claimed that due to some old water rights agreement, Palm Springs gets its water for really cheap and there is no incentive to conserve it. Sad state of affairs.
Municipal use and waste get the most attention because they are by far the most visible use, but most policies there are just tinkering around the edges and hardly move the overall numbers.
Anyway a water bill is about $40/month up to 8000 gallons, $3 extra per 1000g overage. About half of the base rate is claimed as "upgrade surcharge". Since it's practically unlimited for free, does that sound right to anyone? The neighbors seem to be feral ghouls about 200 years old, they definitely don't care much about any poisons or the town drying up and blowing away, so they are always YOLOing a honking great deluge of whatever juice is still left into all different kinds of stupid inappropriate leafy greens but fuck it, you know? The pentagon is looking to restart nuclear testing in the backyard anyway so those of who still aren't irradiated yet can look forward to that!
No, its lifespan was extended by agricultural runoff offsetting the natural drying out which would have otherwise occurred after the event which formed it was corrected, but it was formed by a breach in an irrigation canal that occurred in 1905 and wasn't repaired until 1907.