Salton Sea Documentary 2015: California's Sea: A Date With Destiny

here is truly a miracle in the desert a whole new outlet for the crowded millions in big cities a palm springs with water here is where you can find the good life in the Sun today the Salton Riviera beside the blue Salton Sea is the place for you to take charge of your future at the Salton Riviera there is never let up in progress this unusual City has a date with destiny here you can get away from the crowds the hustle and bustle of the big city a planned community without the hodgepodge of big-city growth with an average smog free temperature of 70 degrees you can enjoy your life more fully both mentally and physically at the Salton Riviera you a lot of people don't know or don't want to learn about what they don't understand or what they're afraid of a lot of people have seen some pictures of dead fish on the shore and completely turned off in their mind and I was ever going to be something of interest when what when that is actually what needs the most help in the most loved a lot of it is a lack of education and I suspect that a good amount of it could have been tried to be covered up by different agencies that don't want to pay for that want us to overlook this gigantic health issue if a lot of people interstate don't know what the biggest lake in the state is we need to focus heavily on our educational system it's something that's been begging to be done and just needs the political will to to look into it perhaps you've heard about the complaints in Southern California skepticism and impatience are growing in the Imperial Valley time is not over action another year from now maybe too late I think it's time for a bipartisan Congress to prove that will finally get serious here and clean up the Salton Sea Salton Sea is a place unlike any where most people have ever seen it's a ocean like Lake in the middle of the desert so you wouldn't necessarily expect it to be here but when you come down and see it it's it's huge it's 13 by 33 miles it it's beautiful different times of day and night there's every kind of color you can imagine in the sky and it's absolutely breathtaking it supports over 425 bird species that's more than anywhere else in North America except for maybe the Everglades but it's immensely important for birds all over the world from Asia to South America they stop here and they need this place but it's getting very close to a kill point most biologists who have studied this a figure that when the sea gets to be six percent salt most of the fish in the sea will die we're now at five and a half percent when I started working here ten years ago where were at four and a half percent so it's rising and it's getting really close to a critical point when the millions of fish that the Salton Sea now supports will not be able to make it there is less water going into the Salton Sea these days and so it is shrinking and there is not going to be new water as one of the the largest remaining wetlands in California and very important to bird life we absolutely have a responsibility to maintain those values one of the driving forces in this whole discussion is what's called the quantification settlement agreement decades ago the amount of water in the Colorado River was divided between all the states adjacent to it it became quite apparent that that the numbers used in that early distribution were too large and it this whole formula had to be revisited so in about 2002 there was a quantification settlement agreement quantifying the amount of water in the river settling where it's going to go and everybody agreed to it one of the impacts of that was that less water could be used for agriculture in certain areas and that agricultural runoff particularly from the Imperial Valley was what was keeping the Salton Sea at the level it had been at for some time the quantification settlement agreement had a 15 year time frame that's coming to an end in 2017 the final allocations then become effective and it's at that point that less water will begin to flow into the salt sea at current trends and with current agreements if the Salton Sea doesn't find a new water source soon about a third to half of the water going into it now would be transferred to other parts of the state quickly and what would happen is the shoreline would recede quickly and what that does is it really concentrates the salts it concentrates the nutrients from fertilizers and from farming and it makes it an area that will no longer be able to support a lot of environmental life the fish would go in a few years most of the birds be you wouldn't be able to make it here we lose the beautiful wildlife refuges we'd lose the State Parks and we would create some absolutely mammoth dust storms we've seen this happen in a couple different areas of the world in Aral Sea in Kazakhstan we saw a gigantic body of water shrink really rapidly caused a bunch of dust storms decimate the economy and the average life expectancy went down 10 to 15 years in the immediate area Owens Lake dried up because la took their water for drinking water back in the 1920s and as a result the dust storms that have come from that lake bed have been just tremendous they're just unbelievable they look like giant tidal waves of dust when the winds blow and the problem with the Salton Sea is it's three times bigger than Owens like it has a lot of nitrates and phosphates from agriculture that have gone into it and left in a watered State they're heavy metals a lot of them sit on the bottom and it's still okay to swim and a lot of people do but if these things become airborne it's really bad for our health and it would affect us in asthma lung cancer emphysema this will affect all the way to LA in San Diego on the coast when the wind blows that way and to northern Mexico Arizona the time for action is now we don't have any more time the air quality in eastern Riverside County and Imperial County are some of the worst in the state because of all the dust that blows up in the air people who live in Coachella and Imperials do not have the means or resources to leave those places and find other work or other housing necessarily and so many times they're stuck with the environment that they have and if that environment happens to be really dusty and poor for their health then that's the lot that they're stuck with there's so many people like getting asthma like actually dying of like these severe respiratory illnesses because it's on sea and because like the pollution here their quality things that are causing asthma right here I mean even people say that does like it's kind of dialing down and it's actually being stable that's a lie because right here there's a lot of them I guess legal immigrants you know they can't really speak out because if they do then they're getting they're getting deported there's a lot of families that don't have papers and they don't really go to the hospital when they get sick they don't go nowhere they just you know try to like deal with in themselves so I can honestly say that those numbers are wrong and there's more people being affected because we actually have some students that have lost like mum family members this is a due to this due to the fact that people don't care about it because it's brown people you know people of color we obviously what it just is what we always knew what oppression was this isn't anything noodle growing up here I've lived here on my life there's I don't want to move elsewhere I don't want to move where the air is pretty where everything is so pretty all the time I want this to be pretty all the time I want where I live to be pretty all the time we already have children parents families struggling to breathe what's going to become of them after the song feed dries up one of the main aspects that we're focusing on is getting people to understand that there are viable solutions to fix this place there are solutions that can pay for themselves to be fixed and a lot of that revolves around clean power generation so we do have the geothermal resource that can clean up the water and power that we also have an option to provide hydro power inline hydro systems can be installed in a pipeline for example that create power and so if you were to pipe water from the ocean downhill 230 feet because we're below sea level here you can actually create power in that piping process we need to stop arguing about whose particular solution is going to make it because we need to choose a lot of them so people need to start putting these bids in to the state right away they need to put these bids in to the counties they need to put these bids into the salt and sea Authority and be a lot louder about it what we have seen here is a lot of apathy we've seen a lot of people not believing that this can be done but it's a challenge and this is a challenge that we can become an example for the rest of the world and a way to provide for our future in a clean sustainable way and this is up to us this is up to all of us to save our sea you

Channel: California's Sea

Views: 289,001

Rating: 4.4290557 out of 5

Keywords: Pitzer College, Salton, Sea, Issues, Birds, Environmental, QSA, California, Drought, Ecomedia COmpass, Dust, Public, Health, 2017

Id: PGb5viMIAfI

Length: 11min 0sec (660 seconds)

Published: Tue May 19 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/PSteak]

Yup, there's a Huell on it.

[u/ChidoChidoChon]

70 degrees?? that can't be right.

[u/introvertextrovert17]

Since 7th grade I thought it looked.. dick-ish..