Happy New Year!! Let's kick it off with the most Doomed body of water in America, The Salton Sea. What was once rich farmland and a Palm Springs-style paradise is now a salt-filled body of water surrounded by wasteland. What happened to change the landscape of The Salton Sea so quickly? Where will you be when the Water Wars start? This and more this week on Doomed to Fail!
Happy New Year!! Let's kick it off with the most Doomed body of water in America, The Salton Sea. What was once rich farmland and a Palm Springs-style paradise is now a salt-filled body of water surrounded by wasteland.
What happened to change the landscape of The Salton Sea so quickly? Where will you be when the Water Wars start? This and more this week on Doomed to Fail!
Hi Friends! Our transcripts aren't perfect, but I wanted to make sure you had something - if you'd like an edited transcript, I'd be happy to prioritize one for you - please email doomedtofailpod@gmail.com - Thanks! - Taylor
[Music] in a matter of the people of State of California versus orthal James Simpson case number ba09 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 2024 by the time this is released you have
any yours 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 G to pull 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 um I don't know I'm just going to keep at it cool so it's more of like a 23
resolution that worked so it's going to car on 24 yeah I think I did I think I was I was excited to like write
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 how about you do you have a you have
resolution my 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 whale my way
into things and I'm like I'm too old and I need to be a lot more deliberate about like what I do with my time what I do
with resources like all that it's just being a lot more mindful about things
whereas before I was just like I'll just do it because I feel like doing it now I'm like do I need that do I should I do
that like should I do something else instead 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 somebody 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 in
money and there's a way to actually be deliberate about it and I'm trying to be a lot more deliberate about things so I
love that but I'll also say Taylor that I'm pretty proud of us as well so we
didn't quite hit our goal for the year in total downloads but we got like 90%
to attainment and we did we got really close we got really close and I will say like % attainment in any 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 5 hours and 19
minutes all the volcano episodes in a row we're like Dan Carling car I'm gon
it Dan Carini and I'm going to submit it for my dissertation for your volcanology degree
yeah I said that in the intro but it's also still funny to say too um and 20 people have downloaded it which is exciting and yeah I want to put our I'm
going to put some things um on Instagram today so we already be up but you know
our top 10 episodes of the year and everything but um yeah we have 8,882 downloads our goal was 10,000
that's not bad that's not bad at all that's not bad at all um really proud of us for what we've done so far this year
and that we kept with it and we're accountability buddies for each other so that's always great
and it's been nice hanging out with you every week it's been nice yeah we have like a weekly friend check- in like which we didn't have before so that
that's great um cool well I I haven't even announced the show okay so we're dooming a fail oh God we're in our first
first to the conclusion of our first year anniversary I think we released our first episode dece January 16th or 13th
or something I think um of last year so we're coming up on one year and we're
going to keep going because it's fun and we like doing it so and hopefully youall like it as well and if yall have any
suggestions for 2024 New Year's resolutions you want to share whatever is please don't hesitate to write to us at doelp pod gmail.com or doelp pod on
Instagram or the Facebook socials so uh that being said we'll go ahead and kick
things off I'm fars Taylor and Taylor who goes first today me I think you yeah
I think me okay so why don't I start by I'm going to do th this one might be
a little little lengthy but it's good information so I think people will be
happy about it so I'm going to go ahead and take things off and well 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 that's go ahead yeah totally so so I wanted to be a little
bit more upbeat today with with my topic given that it's the new year um so nobody dies there is an engineering
disaster at fault actually there are several engineering disasters at fault but weirdly enough Nobody ends up dying
great I actually got 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 used to feed livestock you just fill with water and
you call it a cowboy pool it's like a hipster thing it's kind of cool it's kind of cute it's whatever so I have to treat this thing every every now and
then so I got to like shock treatment where I like pour a bunch of chemicals in there and then I had this like tank
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 the [ __ ] out of my nose and
my lungs I was like oh my godor like breathing chlorine gas is super super bad and so it basically like I was
basically suffering from that most of yesterday and last night was just like the fact that I inhal all of 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 I the dogs are here so if anything
goes wrong they'll hopefully hopefully take care of me and so anyway that wait real quick can I buy you we'll talk
about getting you a Life Alert but they keep going I 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 p
PIR it's a it's 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 Rock it went down
like, 1300 feet it was like a deep it sounded terrifying anyways so that's
what was what turned out to be like the mining operation underneath this Lake while they wereing this mining operation
there was still a lake on top and everything was fine if people were using it there was 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 pierc this salt Dome and turn
this 10t deep freshwater lake into a 100 ft deep saltwater lake because yeah
because they ended up reversing the flow of the water from out to the ocean and so 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 just started showing up outside of it sounds terrifying that sounds
terrifying but as I was again doing my chlorine shock treatment I was like I
was like hey 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 preent 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 I will have you say it but I'm thinking that I don't know okay
so it's not chlorine related it's just chemical okay is it turnable no okay
okay I'm just gonna tell should I tell you it is the salancy oh interesting I
don't know anything about it I live really close to salancy you live super close to saltan I was like there's no way that Taylor doesn't know the ins and
outs of this like back no you're right I I know nothing about it which is interesting also because
yeah as you remember I used to go to linta like yeah all the time and the all
and SE like right there and I never went and now now that I'm in Texas I'm like
ah man I really what a what a missed opportunity to like just see this thing
yeah just to check it out because it seems like a a really wild exper 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 salancy how far I from it let's see you are crazy
close to it yeah which is probably gonna make you nervous somewh I talk about this okay so I'm sorry about that it's
one I'm sorry actually he's probably going to listen this so one I'm sorry it's funny so on your way there and
again Taylor and I have been through this area a million times Taylor lives there currently on the way there you're
basically going to see some of the most popular and beautiful parts of California that are not ocean related
this is basically the beautiful desert part of California that is incredibly it is it is a desert scape
that Rivals New Mexico Arizona and all these places you're going to pass places like
Palm Springs l Indio where Taylor lives and Joshua tree
and Coachella Valley which is obviously famous for the Coachella Festival all these places are massively populated
hubs for people that live either in San Diego or in Los Angeles to Vacation it's like a really convenient two three hour
drive to just be in a totally different Universe essentially yeah it's um an
hour and a half for 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 I as the crow flies it's probably not
that far absolutely yeah yeah you 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 Tru you'll um hit 340 square miles in a 43t
deep body of water that's called the salt and sea and umos 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 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 so in the 1950s surveyors were
basically exploring this part of California this is the southern part of California right around Mexico to find
ideal southern railroad routes to go further north what they ended up finding
was that the soil in this part of the country is super fertile there's a whole
history of like what happened and what rocks eroded in the Cambrian Period that
like ended I'm not going that far 1950s they find this stuff the soil is crazy fertile and they realize 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 sers
his name was Charles Rockwood and he decided that he would Source water to this area by diverting water from the
Colorado River towards it so I couldn't tell you know what we were just talking
about as the crow flies I can't tell how far the Colorado is from where the sutan sea currently is it's about 160 Mile
Drive yeah I mean the Colorado River is really fighting the Lords 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 when you look at like the center of Austin and you have
downtown Austin 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
aquafers and aqueducts that are in this part of what what is what later became
known as the Imperial Bley it wasn't known as that now it's known as Imperial Valley but that's what this part is also
I was going to say like if anybody actually does know how far the Colorado is to the suany like can you write to us
and let us know because I dug so many different ways trying to 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 to this thing so like
there's gotta be Tri whatever yeah yeah yeah so if anybody knows please do let us know so anyways they ended up digging
this canal in 1901 and then what ended up happening was this unpopulated unused
but extremely fertile untouched land had fresh water for the first time ever and so obviously this is like the you know
this early 1900s this are is unpopulated people are going to do land claims and start staking their claim in this land
and so that's what ended up happening all these Farmers flocked to this part of the country to take advantage of this
incredibly fertile land before digging had begun Rock would had 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 this land so all these people coming to this
area and trying to buy this land from 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 [ __ ] 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 buil built this canal was 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 what they hadn't anticipated is that the
amount of silt the Colorado would produce for 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 aquafers
again what what ended up happening that wasn't expected was basic basically a once in a 300E 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 and 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 headgate 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 M 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 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 ended up happening it was basically impossible so all this Farmland was essentially
underwater right as this this breach ended up continuing in 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 um rocks and things
like that into this breach until it 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 2600 feet like half a mile long so this tiny 16t
thing ended up because it would keep flooding so after two years they finally got this thing sealed so it's 1907 so
now this body you now have this huge fresh water body of water completely cut
off from the Colorado but the surrounding area is still full of incredibly fertile soil so farming again
begins on the outskirts while at the same time a buring city starts sprouting up around the lake for basically
vacation and relaxation and stuff like that M it basically was then what Palm
Springs or linta or Indio are now so B like again yeah I feel like I've seen
like ads for it right or like 50s style like come relax for the saltan sea you know yeah they called it the um desert
Riviera or the sultan Riviera uh it was 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 um a lot of celebrities were there there's a huge deal made and a lot of the um the content I read about this
around how Frank Sinatra always went there and like Desi Ares and Lucille Balo constant like it was one of those
they loved it down here yeah yeah it is again it's just like India Palm Springs L right right now so like anybody who's
well off in in La also has like a desert place in in these spots and they just
vacation back and forth that's the exact same concept here one thing I wrote here Taylor and like I totally would
understand if you don't get this also you probably won't get it because you live there and also because you're from NADA so actually it's kind
of [ __ ] on everything so let me bring it up real quick cool
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 there's something off about how uninhabitable
this part of the country actually is so you you go through like linta 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 it just seems like and and also again like air conditioning 247 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 like so overthe toop frivolous I mean I
definitely feel that way about Palm Springs like there's no reason for Palm Springs to be green at all they have you
know what I mean and like they're they're like 10 15 degrees hotter than we are but 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 was like a podcast to listen to and somebody called it I I don't know but there was I I I looked up
how he has just basically resettled from wherever he was to linta the city I was
just referencing and he ended up building this palacial house in linta
and it was documented and reported on by architectural digest so there's tons of
beautiful pictures of this house it is amazing as it probably should be since he's like a gazillionaire yeah
and I have nothing against Ray I like he he's allowed to live we we are okay with
rayano 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 or concrete which requires a shitload of water it is Lush
grass it is you can see in the living room that there's a beautiful golfer next to it and it's just like all this
is in a 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 salt and C 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 and realistically that is exactly what the soleny was it was just like an India or whatever it was just builtup
luxury over the top like yeah it's like Veil for people in Colorado like it's
just it's where you go basically yeah and this like the 19 that that was really happening mostly in the 40s after
the war through like the 70s or so is when it was really really popping
so let's pivot real quick to the fun topic of ecology so after the lake was
formed the California 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 sutan 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 court to se of Cortez and they basically
are it's south of the sutan sea it's right above the Gulf of Mexico and
Mexico um and they go out there and say basically C catch any fish you could get
anything you can 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 Lobster 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 chocked full of fish
and its height it was estimated that about 100 million fish populated the lake
so that made that made it incredibly popular with fishermen so people be recreationally fishing but also there
was another industry added to it which was fishing and with all that comes
migratory birds so again staying on with the ecology aspect of the salt and sea
Taylor this is incredible like I 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 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 [ __ ] love a bird show unbelievable so there's a thing called a
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 of this story is the one that goes from
California up through Oregon and Washington um 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 salt and 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 uni hemispheric slow wve sleep it's it's it's us SWS for short
because I'm never going to say that word again because I took all my brain power just to [ __ ] 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 focus on staying in flight and navigating in the right direction cool
isn't that crazy that is so cool I don't know what that is unbelievable can I
tell you a a quick story about birds yeah I don't I don't have the details of this but um 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 cuz 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
[ __ ] this bird's been to Africa so crazy so crazy yeah yeah and and it's
interesting because you look at old pictures of the salt and sea and you just see like like it could be Africa it
could be the Savannah it could be any it is so it was so Lush it was was so green
I mean it made me think a lot of like how big of a deal water is like when water's there like everything revolves
around that water and that's what ended up happening in this area as well so you're probably wondering where's this
going far there's no Doom to fail here is that what you're asking yourself where is this going fars no I I just assume that everything is lovely and
it's still a beautiful Oasis so that that's the end of our show thank you for
listening fars is here to say assume to fail so we had one massive
disaster these guys were again starting this project just to get irrigation it
ended up flooding the entire Valley which is now called the Imperial Valley so what could go wrong because now you
have this amazing body of water you have all this ecology you have all this industry popping up you have people shelling out their entire life savings
buying Lakeside housing and all that stuff um so what could go wrong is then
the 1970s Army Corps of engineer started of recording the Sal salinity levels uh
and toxins in the water and Taylor I was thinking to myself there is no chance
everyone did not see this coming I me it sounds like it was a surprise to people
but how could it yeah there was obviously a document hidden somewhere that all these
companies that were selling property and doing whatever just hid from everyone
actually knew somebody whose grandfather bought a plot of land on the sultan 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 sultany what's amazing is one is being sold for $11 million it's it's
120 Acres on the sultan 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 million you're asking you're asking a lot so yeah
anyways the disaster part of what ends up happening the suany is entirely dependent on the kind of body of water
the suany actually is which is why I said somebody had to know the body of water
itself is called a en Endor Endor
basic it is called an Endor basic 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 for that ever ends up in it with no outflow so there
is no connection to any tributor 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
saltan 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 slity seems to be the biggest issue as of today so right now the sultan 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 chalk full of the army Corp Engineers would take measurements and they started noting the cyinder 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 weekly or monthly
basis and so just like that that killed the fishing industry they were like
what's the point why am I even doing this I going to put a disclaimer on my fish when I sell it in the market potentially poison yeah so as time went
on locals and tourists would start experiencing um Mass waves of die offs
of fish in marine life because salt levels were getting so high they couldn't survive and they would just
wash ashore like millions of fish that would just stink the entire place to High Health and obviously that wasn't
good for tourism that wasn't good for there any of that stuff so out goes of Tourism
essentially again people had bought homes here like this was a huge not just
like an environmental issue it was a huge economic issue um yeah because as
dead fish are floating up as the solidity level is getting to the point where you physically shouldn't be
touching the water yourself given that it just going to SLO your skin off and the fact that all this water is
basically receding anyway through evaporation the city itself and like the surrounding communities became ghost
towns and you look at pictures of it now look at Bombay Beach for example there's actually a new sign up
there somebody it's turning into 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 that kind of an
atmosphere so obviously the economic part of this and the lost money and all
that is a huge issue um that ended up happening as well as all these industries basically going into complete
decline the other part was that as the lake bed ex 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 B and just kicking up into the into the atmosphere
it's not even just that it's not like there's I mean there's a host of other things that are going on that are
causing health issues asthma's the biggest one that's been reported um because it also seems to be like asthma's 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 NeverEnding 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 out again this is the largest um body of water in California so oh my
God there's I am a little worried thank you there you go I KN I knew sorry I
knew that was coming apologies um so obviously there is a super super simple
solution to this you know what it is drain it well that would that would definitely
exacerbate the massive dust storm that's going to kick up over your house but uh 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 in 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 India all that stuff
all those are really rich lucrative spots so there's a tax base there people care about but I just learned that this
District the Imperial Valley area it is actually splitting a representative with
um San Diego so that that's how wide this area stretches and so obviously
they're stting 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 was the last 2020 census so it's
probably gone down every year it's gone down so this this place went from half a million visitors a year to now there's
34 something people living there by the way back then when it was measured a half million people per year that was
the same amount of people that were visiting yosan oh good good good good yeah so it was huge it was a big big deal that time
huh 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 salt and sea is and so all they would need is a ditch to
funnel water that way and so that was that's the other idea that's being floated around that has been pending for
like four or five years I think long story short is that with a project of
this size of magnitude there are so much bureaucracy involved in it you have to get approval from the government of
Mexico the US 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 engineer like it is
thousands of different organizations that have to come together to give you it is it is never going to happen like
they're like it'll be faster if they just go open their F and try and 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 no nothing that's going to help it and then by all estimates the
environmental impact once it dries out to the health and wellbeing 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 to1 billion dollar 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 the federal government or one of those super funds I
don't know but that's kind of where the state of things is right now wow I have a question I don't know if
you know the answer I'm sure that like why is it so hard to take salt
out of water because there is so much water like why isn't desalinization the
answer I don't know I I I do know that 99% invisible or the daily or one of those podcasts they did an episode of
this when I was still living in Los Angeles because there was so many wildfires happening 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 water but I 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 if
you're I mean if you think about it if you're on the coast where desalinization makes sense then you are already
prioritized the tax pay to get water right so you don't have to so you
don't have to you really need it for the non-represented class and like they
don't they generally don't have that totally checks out because then you have to then take the water and then transfer
it to them which is also a massive engineering problem because you have to cut through mountains and whatever else
I know actually this is this is Def 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 bad yeah I super regret never visiting it um when I was there like but
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 rubbing through there yeah I mean like Palm Springs is so windy obviously they
have all those like um wind like wind energy things yeah it's crazy windy
there now 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 uh interesting super fun um hopefully youall enjoyed
that um Taylor do we have any thing we want to shout out yeah I have a little
bit I have a couple things of mail um one is our friend naen wrote in and she said that there are tulips that you can
um that come back every year in case you wanted them fun um I
know that you were um we had talked about um like you at the end of the Tulip episode you're like I'm going to
go to Home Depot and get some plants and um I don't know if you ever did I did
get plants but they're not tulips yeah um so yeah so if you ever wanted to there are some that come back you could
probably grow them there I feel like um and then also our friend Beth bought some merch she bought a shirt and mug uh
wedding Beth yeah Beth I know thank you so much Beth that's so nice that's so
nice I know she's a so thank you Jay's gonna be so excited when he gets a
picture with my face on it oh my God I'm so excited I've heard Jay wear that all the time I'm sure he's show the t-shirts for Jay and I can't wait I love it I
love it um cool um yeah cool it's what I got happy New Year everyone um thank you
again for listening this in in 2023 um please find us on all the socials at
Doom to filp pod and if you have any suggestions or questions we are available at Doom tood gmail.com yeah we
we are constantly looking to iterate so like if you have any like far as your story suck just tell us whatever like
what whatever the suggestion is we want to put out content that people are actually interested in and like so um
yeah don't be posted posted sweet thanks all thankss bye Taylor
[Music]
bye