Life on the Shores of California's Shrinking Lake

SALTON CITY, CALIF. — When Debbie and Joe Bird first moved into a spacious mobile home on the western shore of California’s saltiest lake in 2004, they thought that was it. After growing up in industrial Norwalk, about a dozen miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles, and spending five years in rural Texas, the Birds saw their new gated property in Salton City, a small desert town lapped by the waves of the Salton Sea , as the last chapter in their lives. Their retirement place. Their waterfront dream.

Both of them had seen California's desert riviera in its glory days. Debbie, now 66, was only 10 years old the first time she visited the Sea. It was 1961, and her parents had taken her on holiday to what was then a popular destination that attracted more annual visitors than Yosemite. Joe had similarly spent many of his summers at the lake. He loved water skiing and he still remembers how, when the Salton Sea was an ample body of water, he would cross it from west to east, spend a few hours in Bombay Beach, then return, at dusk, the same way he’d come.

But it wasn’t just their familiarity with the area that brought the couple to Salton City decades later. Although in their separate life journeys the Birds had always contemplated an existence on the shores of a lake that had been the background of many of their childhood vacations, their move was dictated only partially by choice. Mostly, the Birds had selected the small town out of necessity, after a fall down a ladder trapped Joe into early retirement and forced the couple to leave behind a suddenly unaffordable home with a garden in Texas, where they had moved after ending their respective marriages to start a life together at the break of the millennium. For a moment, the Birds had considered Norwalk again. But by then, it was out of reach. “Salton City was the only place in California we could afford,” says Debbie.

The first few years blended into an inebriating haze of boat trips around the Sea, dinners at inexpensive restaurants on the town’s beaches, and fishing competitions with other retirees. For the Birds, it felt like being young all over again. But soon the corvinas began to disappear from the lake. The water became too low for the boat to go in. Then, one day, Debbie woke up and she couldn’t breathe. It was the first sign something wasn’t right.

For the past decade and a half, Salton City has attracted people in search of better luck, bigger spaces and a cheaper way of life. From retirees on modest pensions to underpaid migrants working in the vineyards and the fields of kale and alfalfa of the Salton Sea basin, wannabe renters and homebuyers flocked to the area, escaping the rising cost of living in nearby Palm Springs, Los Angeles and San Diego. In the early 2000s Salton City was a sparsely inhabited center of only 978 people. By 2010, according to census data, the population had increased to 3,763, and it’s estimated to have grown to 5,217 in 2016.

This phenomenon mirrored the rest of the country’s journey through the 2008 recession. Attracted by the possibility of achieving the American dream of home ownership, people flocked to Salton City when it was still easy to get a mortgage and property values seemed promisingly on the rise. When the economy crashed, the influx of people slowed down, but it never stopped.

“The community is growing,” says Kerry Morrison, Salton City’s 30-year-old honorary mayor, a videomaker and self-taught musician who first came to the area to film a music video and decided to stay. “Just in the last couple of years, I’ve seen a lot more traffic, I’ve seen the housing prices triple, and it’s starting to boom.”

Realtor Wilder Perez says the average price for a three-bedroom, two-bathroom, 1,300-square-foot home, which at the height of the market would have been around $200,000 and dropped down to $45,000-to-$60,000 post-2008, is now $145,000.

In the first business investment in years, an Arco gas station on Highway 86, which cuts through Salton City on its way to Calexico, will soon be refurbished with a Starbucks, a bar and a KFC.

However modest, even to Morrison, this growth is surprising. “It’s been happening without addressing some of the major concerns of the Sea,” he says.

For decades, the Salton Sea has been shrinking, exposing vast stretches of lakebed. The process was accelerated in 2003, when one of the biggest water transfer deals in history provided for 280,000 acre-feet of Colorado River water a year (enough to satisfy the annual water needs of almost 625,000 American families) to be diverted from the fields around the lake to drought-stricken San Diego. At the time, there were concerns that the transfer would condemn the Sea to a state of eternal decline, and expose local communities to unprecedented levels of dust pollution in a county where asthma-hospitalization rates are already three times higher than in the rest of the state. To partially contain the problem, the Imperial Irrigation District, which controls the Colorado River water that flows into the lake after running through the fields, committed to providing mitigation flows for another 15 years, giving the state of California some time to come up with a longer term solution to save the Sea.

As the economy collapsed and the drought worsened, priorities shifted in Sacramento. Fifteen years later, the mitigation water has stopped, and the Salton Sea is shrinking faster than ever. As salinity continues to increase, tilapia die-offs have become the norm, and the toxic dust of the dry lakebed, nourished for years by the chemical runoff of the country’s winter salad bowl, is exasperating respiratory issues in the area.

For Morrison, the fact that people are moving to Salton City and the West Shores is proof that there’s life in this oft-forgotten part of Southern California, about 50 miles away from Mexico and only a dozen north of the first border checkpoint. “People will be affected by what’s happening here,” he says. “It’s time for the state to step up.”

IT WAS A DAY like any other when a sense of suffocation took hold of Debbie as she got out of bed one morning in 2010, about six years after first arriving in the area. It wasn’t the smell of rotten egg and decay coming from the lake that made her chest feel tight. She was mostly used to the stench. It was a different feeling, a general breathlessness, as if someone had stuffed her nose and mouth with cotton. “I couldn’t catch a breath, my head was hurting, I was coughing and choking and I felt like I was dying,” says Debbie. “Like when they put the goldfish out and it doesn’t have any water. That’s how I felt.”

At first, the doctors gave her an inhaler. It initially helped her breathe, but soon it was no longer enough. After a particularly intense coughing fit that left her feeling exhausted and fearing for her life, her doctor diagnosed her with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), for which there is no cure, and gave her a nebulizer that would open up her lungs in case of need. Now, Debbie uses the inhaler every morning to start her day, and when her oxygen level goes down and she feels dizzy, about two or three times a week, she’ll gasp into the machine and let the medicinal mist disperse into her lungs for 5 to 10 minutes—until she can breathe again.

Aside from a slight allergy a few years back, Debbie had never suffered from lung disease before moving to Salton City. Even her first few years in this dusty town nestled between the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park and the Salton Sea didn’t give her any problems. It wasn’t until the shoreline started receding visibly that her health began to deteriorate. Then, two years ago, Joe was diagnosed with COPD too. “Everybody we know is coughing and wheezing around here,” says Debbie. “We've had some people die of respiratory problems—emphysema, COPD, pneumonia—and it’s only gonna get worse. It’s ridiculous that they ever let it get this bad. We need the water back.”

At the local clinic, open only two days a week and managed by Clinicas de Salud del Pueblo, a non-profit corporation that provides healthcare for underserved communities across Imperial Valley, Dr. Victor Ruiz has seen an increase in respiratory issues—particularly during the winter months, when the wind picks up. “I’ve been prescribing a lot of inhalers and steroids,” he says. “Patients have been coming in with bronchoconstriction and asthma.” It’s difficult for Ruiz to link these afflictions to any one cause with absolute certainty, because, he says solemnly, there’s no 100 percent in medicine. Sometimes, however, he tells Salton City residents that if they were to live in a less polluted place, depending on whether their airways have been irreversibly scarred by infections, their condition would likely improve.

“I have patients tell me, ‘When I lived in San Diego, when I lived in LA, I didn’t have so many issues,’” says Ruiz. Does he ever advise them to leave? “If they’re able to,” he says. “I tell them this is not the best living situation for them. But many patients cannot afford to move. They come to this area because it’s inexpensive to live here. The rents are pretty cheap, the houses for sale are pretty cheap. People who are down on their luck and have little money end up here.”

OUTSIDE A MODEL HOME not too far from the shoreline, a three-legged dog is barking on the other side of the fence. The neighborhood is Vista del Mar, Salton City’s newest addition, which rose from nothingness in the seemingly booming years before the crash. A young boy with deep blue eyes approaches the gate. He fiddles knowingly with the makeshift lock, until it clicks open.

Daniel is 9 years old. Just like his sister Ashley, 12, he was born in this town at the edge of the desert, and that's all he's ever known, says Yesenia Espinoza, his mother. Espinoza moved to the area when she was pregnant with her daughter, accompanied by her husband and older son. It was 2005, and life in nearby Coachella Valley, where she had been working as a grape picker, had become unaffordable. With a baby on the way and the need for more space, she looked for a solution beyond the towns of Indio and Coachella, away from the luxury resorts of Palm Springs, past the northern end of the Sea. In Salton City, Espinoza found that she could finally be a homeowner and offer her family a better quality of life.

Initially, she purchased a house not too far from Joe and Debbie Bird, but it didn’t take her long to move up the property ladder, into one of the shiny new homes in Vista Del Mar. Around the same time she began to notice many of the town’s residents were developing allergies, dry cough and other respiratory issues.

The first time Ashley had an attack, it was 2015. She was running at school during fitness hour when her chest tightened and she fainted. Shortly after, she was diagnosed with asthma at the El Centro hospital—one of the closest emergency rooms, 50 miles south of Salton City. Back then, her condition was still manageable: She only needed a nasal spray to feel better. Then came the inhalers, nebulizers, steroids and syringes, until one day, Daniel started developing the same symptoms, and the sprays, the inhalers, the steroids and syringes multiplied in the family’s new home on the shores of the Salton Sea. “It starts little by little, but then the problem grows,” says Espinoza. “You don’t realize it because this is not something that gets you sick right away. It takes years. But now, all these medications are adding up.”

On most days, Ashley will play baseball among the tumbleweeds with her brother, go for bike rides and walk along the half-paved roads around the house. “I like it here sometimes,” she says. “But I’m worried. What if my allergies get worse, if I have to carry more medicines with me and always depend on different things?”

Espinoza asked her doctor for advice. “What do you recommend that I do?” she said. “Why don’t you sell and move?” the doctor suggested. For a while, the mother-of-three entertained the thought. Had the time come to leave behind the peace, space and quiet of Salton City? The home she had worked hard for? The only kind of residential bliss she could ever hope to afford? Her family’s slice of American dream? Or should she just wait a little bit longer, because the Salton Sea is big anyway, the biggest lake in California, and there would be hundreds, if not thousands, of other residents in her same situation, from Mecca all the way to the Mexican border at least. Surely, someone would do something about it? “I think they have to,” says Espinoza.

There are mornings at West Shores High, Ashley’s middle school, when most students will have allergies and stuffy noses, and you can hear they’re struggling to breathe. Inside a medicine cabinet in the school’s administration office, there’s a stack of inhalers and EpiPens. “These are just the ones that parents have registered with us,” says Richard Pimentel, the school’s principal, who occasionally finds children using undeclared inhalers that belong to another family member with better health insurance.

At Sea View Elementary, where Daniel goes to school, principal Tim Steele is dealing with an increase in asthma cases. Heeding the advice of a member of the neighboring Torres Martinez tribe, whose child attends the school, he developed a color-coded flag system to let students know when it’s safe to run outside or if it’s better to stay indoors. He uses the Environmental Protection Agency’s air quality app to establish which banner to fly. On a good day, a green flag signals clean air; when the wind picks up, usually, a yellow flag invites children to make wise choices.

Every Monday morning, after reciting the pledge of allegiance, students and teachers discuss the meaning of the flags, which are flown in front of the school to warn the wider community. “Recently, we’ve also participated in letter writing to our government officials to make our voice heard,” says Mr. Steele. “They told them that they live here, that their families are here. Our students are proud to be from the area, as they should be. I think that the answer on how to save the Sea is out here somewhere, and perhaps among them.”

For the principal, these initiatives inspire children to stay vigilant no matter their background. He knows that in Salton City, sometimes, a child will win an award for student of the month and the parents will be unable to attend the ceremony because they don’t have money for gas. He knows that Sea View is the only school in the Coachella Valley Unified District that consistently exceeds all expectations for usage of free and reduced meals, as many of the children are hungry and school is the only time they get to eat. He also knows parents of students who suffer from asthma who tell him about their concerns with the area, when they feel there’s no way out. “Some of them are trapped,” says Steele. “They can’t say, ‘I didn’t realize the air quality was bad out here. Now let’s go find somewhere else to live.’”

But despite the many struggling families living in Salton City and the rising number of children who have enrolled at Sea View after first moving into town from all over California and the United States, Steele is confident that more people would attempt to leave if they had a better sense of the potential damage that the area could cause. “I think we don’t have a real understanding. I think we need to let people know.”

For the past couple of years, Jill Johnston, a researcher and professor at the USC Keck School of Medicine, has been trying to do just that: Understand what is myth and what’s reality, what is cause and what’s correlation. Johnston first started the project because she noticed how the conversation in California tended to revolve exclusively around what the degradation of the Salton Sea meant for the plants, the fish and the birds, and not on its impact on human health. But it takes time to establish causation, says Johnston, who’s now working with four schools on the southern edge of the Sea to understand the composition of the dust that reaches their communities, observe how the young students’ respiratory conditions evolve, and analyze any changes that may happen over time.

In 2014, environmental nonprofit Pacific Institute had already estimated that by 2045, the exposed lakebed would release as much as 100 tons of fine dust into the air per day. What worries Johnston the most, however, is what she’s finding while testing the soil of the lakebed. “The Salton Sea was essentially used as a waste water holding area for all the agricultural runoff in the region,” she says. “As a result of that, in the sediment you see a lot of chemicals like DDT, DDE and PCT, some really persistent chemicals that have largely been banned but are still around because they don’t degrade. There are also other metals like arsenic and manganese, which can be used as pesticides.” These chemicals don’t dissolve and prefer to stick to dust. When the wind blows, they are lifted up and can be inhaled by anyone in the Salton Sea air basin. The problem with the dust, then, may not just be how far away and how deep into people’s lungs the finer particles—usually referred to as PM2.5 and PM10—can travel, but also their level of toxicity, which would have the potential to disrupt respiratory health in the region for decades to come.

Johnston doesn’t believe the shrinking lake is the only reason asthma rates in Imperial Valley are so high. Fields are burned at each turn of the crop and season, there are off-roading vehicles mobilizing the desert dust and dirt roads that were never fully paved, as well as the traffic fumes of the cars and trucks gathering day and night along the US-Mexico border. “You’re already starting with a very vulnerable population that needs to be protected,” says Johnston.

DOWN BY THE WATER, Geri and Jack Palmer’s house rises over one of Salton City’s Venice-like canals, two landlocked slivers of water where it was once possible to launch boats. Back in the day, an old deck offered the Palmers privileged access to the Sea; now, the floating structure lies stranded in their parched backyard, connected to their patio by a long stairway that leads to what is left of the mostly foamy, brown water.

It was Jack’s parents, two San Diego residents, who bought the seafront property when the area was still a prime holiday destination, with bars, crowded dancing nights at the yacht club, lakeside fish fries and jet skiing expeditions. When the Palmers, now some of the town’s longest residents, retired into Jack’s inherited home in Salton City 25 years ago, it was to enjoy a middle class life on $700 per month of Social Security in the only place they could afford, a few feet away from the water.

Geri had experienced regular bouts of bronchitis and asthma long before moving to the Salton Sea. For the first couple of decades in her new desert home, however, she didn’t have any trouble breathing. It was when the water went down and her backyard deck began to sink that she started wheezing again. Since then, Geri has watched her health deteriorate by the day. She now has to use a nebulizer and inhaler four times a day, and can no longer leave the house. “I can’t open my doors and windows,” she says. “It’s like being a prisoner in here.”

Sometimes, Geri will daydream about moving back to San Diego. Her home was recently appraised at $59,000, about one-tenth of the median price of a San Diego County home. “We’re stuck,” she says. “We could sell and get a trailer, but we wouldn’t be able to afford a space for it.”

One of the things Geri misses most is being able to sing on Saturday nights at Johnson’s Landing, the town’s diner by the Sea’s white, balding beaches. It’s here that Debbie Bird sets up her karaoke machine once a week , against a wall at the far end of the impermanent sheet-metal structure, as the lake outside glistens briefly like an aquamarine gemstone before darkening the night. It’s a community’s moment of respite, and Debbie’s chance to earn something. This way, she could continue to feed the cottontails, doves and roadrunners that populate her backyard—her “bird sanctuary,” as she calls it—and give back to the place she always loved, whose present and destiny now bring her to tears.

More than anything, Geri feels betrayed by the state and blames Gov. Jerry Brown for the lack of any significant progress on the issue. Recently, she learned how to use Google so she could write a letter to President Trump to let him know about how they took the water from the lake, and how everyone’s now ill. A long-time Obama voter in a predominantly Democratic county, Geri swears by Donald Trump—“I feel that I know him personally, that he’s a friend,” she says—and is hopeful that he’ll be the one to change the fate of the Salton Sea.

Assemblyman Eduardo Garcia, D-Coachella, represents Riverside and Imperial, the two counties across which the 350-square-mile body of water stretches. He is confident that attitudes are finally shifting in Sacramento. “There’s a tremendous public health problem that is occurring in this region as we speak,” he says. “Seven out of 10 kids suffer from asthma. I think it’s now resonating that this is a state liability.” Later this year, a bond measure sponsored by state Sen. Kevin De León, D-Los Angeles, and Garcia himself will appear on the California ballot, freeing up $200 million for air quality mitigation and habitat restoration programs in the area. If approved by voters June 5, it will constitute the state’s first direct attempt to take control of the situation.

It’s doubtful that the Salton Sea of the future will ever look again the way it used to in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Likely, there will be no boat races, fish fries or seaside resorts, but a patchwork of initiatives aimed at preserving a fragile ecosystem while remembering what’s already been lost.

For Frank Ruiz of the National Audubon Society, an environmental organization that focuses on birds and conservation, the lake will be a smaller, more sustainable version of its former self, a system of wetlands around which both wildlife and humans can prosper, since the body of water is also located along the Pacific Flyway, a major route for migratory birds that extends from Patagonia all the way to Alaska. More than anything, however, the Sea will be a lesson for future generations on what it means to have limited resources in a state where water is scarce.

Recently, Ruiz placed a few billboards along the busy I-10 freeway that connects Los Angeles to Palm Springs. There’s a photo of a white pelican on one side, and a child with an inhaler on the other. It warns: “The Salton Sea crisis is real.”

AT JOHNSON’S LANDING, it’s karaoke night again . Nicole, the waitress, brings a basket full of fried chicken and onion rings to the Birds’ table. Joe starts eating slowly as he waits for Debbie to finish her song. He has spent the day cleaning the small doughboy pool in their backyard, which he added to the property a few years back, to get a break from the humid summer heat. Pool cleaning is a common, repetitive task in Salton City around this time of year. It’s off-roading season, and sometimes out-of-towners will pass at speed in their dune buggies a few inches away from the couple’s fence, not too far from the shrubs where Debbie’s cottontails hide, sending the dust spinning into the air and onto the surface of the Birds’ pool water.

“I miss being able to come down here and just walk in the water,” says Debbie, remembering the old days, while pointing at the diner’s windows that face the Sea, in the direction of the steep incline that was once washed by the lake and is now covered in salt crystals, dead barnacles and fish bones .

They’ve decided to move, she says. They’ve been looking at a house with a big garden in Texas, on the shores of another faraway lake. It’s $79,000, just like the home they purchased in Salton City over a decade ago, and perhaps one day they can afford a boat again. “We had an investment here after 14 years,” says Debbie. “It’s home. We built a sunroom and a pool, we made it nice. I thought I’d live here for the rest of my life, then someone decided to pull the plug on my dream.”

But the house should go quickly, the real estate told them. They always do.