Zara Abrams

Special to The Desert Sun

Nancy Johnson has lived near the Salton Sea her entire life. Her grandparents originally moved to the area at the behest of their doctors, who said the hot, dry desert was the perfect antidote for their emphysema.

Now, as the principal of Westmorland Union Elementary School, Johnson faces an entirely different set of circumstances. She’s responsible for 380 of Imperial County’s most vulnerable residents — children between the ages of 5 and 11 — and 17 percent of her student body has asthma. The air quality is so poor that the county ranks first in California for asthma-related emergency room visits for children.

Contrary to the doctor’s orders her grandparents received, “it’s no longer a good place to live if you have asthma and allergies,” she said.

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Growing up near the Salton Sea during the 1960s, Johnson, now 59, remembers a healthy lake with a flourishing tourism industry. Southern Californians flocked to the shores of nearby Bombay Beach and Salton City to sun, sail and waterski. The sea, created by a major Colorado River outpouring caused by an engineering accident in 1905, had become a boon for the Imperial Valley.

Its glory days have come and gone. Today, the primary driver of change is a water transfer deal, the Quantification Settlement Agreement, that’s redirecting Colorado River water away from the Imperial Valley agriculture and toward the growing cities of San Diego County and the Coachella Valley. Intermittent periods of drought, and changing global climate patterns, have complicated and exacerbated the problem.

The result is that the sea has begun to shrink. Most importantly for local residents, the Salton Sea’s receding waterline exposes vast stretches of lakebed, which releases tiny particles of airborne dust. The dust triggers asthma and allergies, especially in children, and can exacerbate cardiovascular conditions in older adults.

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If left alone, the receding sea could leave 84,000 acres of dusty lakebed exposed by 2047, according to the Imperial Irrigation District’s estimates. Combined with local air pollution from vehicle emissions and agricultural burning, the dust represents a serious threat to respiratory health.

The public health costs could climb as high as $37 billion in the next three decades, according to a report released by the Pacific Institute. Treating chronic respiratory conditions is costly — the average hospitalization in Imperial County comes with a $16,000 price tag. Even if efforts are taken to minimize the blowing dust, annual public health costs will continue to grow as the sea shrinks.

In 2003, the Imperial Irrigation District began paying farmers to fallow part of their land and send the excess “mitigation water” into the sea to slow the shrinkage. But this preventive measure ends after 2017, and California lawmakers, having failed to act during most of the 15-year interim period, have recently been scrambling to preclude the impending public health disaster.

A 10-year, $383 million plan was announced in March and designed to manage the situation. The plan details the proposed creation of thousands of acres of wetlands and ponds, which will both restore disappearing wildlife habitat and cover some of the lakebed that would otherwise be emitting dust.

Nearly 80 percent of the funding needed to enact the plan remains unsecured. But the state Legislature recently passed a $4 billion bond proposal, and if that measure is approved by voters next year, it would funnel an additional $200 million toward projects at the Salton Sea.

The initial $80 million that California has budgeted so far "shows how seriously the state takes the problem,” said Bruce Wilcox, an appointed state official responsible for coordinating Salton Sea policy. “It isn’t enough to finish the project, but it’s enough to get started.”

“But this is not just a state or local problem,” he said, citing the vast number of regions making claims on Colorado River water. “We need to learn how to manage water, period. Not just here — everywhere.”

At the heart of the issue are groups of competing stakeholders: farmers fighting for less regulation, public officials constrained by budgets and constituencies and the 180,000 primarily poor and Latino residents of Imperial County.

Battle has already ensued over a flag program intended to help local schools monitor daily air quality, and local youth have begun to mobilize and advocate for their communities. What remains to be seen is whether the promised collaboration between stakeholders will yield a solution for the impending public health emergency as residents continue to inhale toxic air on a daily basis.

Pesticides, other materials in dust raise concerns

The worsening air quality in the Salton Sea basin has already impacted Nancy Johnson’s family. She herself has allergies, and her late father, who made his living on a small farm, often said he was allergic to everything he grew. Meanwhile, her adult children have moved out of the Imperial Valley, and limit their trips back home because the polluted air aggravates their allergies.

“They say that every time they come home, they get sick,” she said.

Johnson partially filled the void with a school full of children, whom she worries about on a daily basis. They’re one of the groups hit hardest by the dust problem, with a rate of 18.9 asthma hospitalizations per 10,000 people in Imperial Valley, compared with a rate of 7 hospitalizations per 10,000 people in the state of California.

“We already know that the kids have a very high prevalence of asthma and hospitalizations, which is concerning from an epidemiological standpoint,” said Shohreh Farzan, a public health researcher at the University of Southern California.

Her group is analyzing the dust around the Salton Sea to understand exactly what it contains and how far it travels. They also conduct health surveys in local schools, including Westmorland Union Elementary, to assess how best to intervene and treat asthmatic children.

“Kids’ lungs are developing, and exposure to particulate matter can hinder their lung development and cause a number of respiratory issues,” Farzan said.

She worries that her study’s results will reveal compounds in the blowing dust that are particularly problematic, for instance pesticides and heavy metals from agricultural runoff.

Imperial County is one of California’s agricultural leaders, and its economy relies heavily on the success of the farming industry, which generates nearly $2 billion of revenue annually. Agriculture also employs nearly one-third of wage workers in the area. In a troubling conundrum, the community is financially bound to an industry that may also be making people sick through dust emissions.

“Most everybody’s going to be pro-agriculture because a lot of jobs will be farming-related,” Johnson said. “But the downside is that now with the sea is drying up, we have all these pesticides and chemicals blowing around every time the wind picks up.”

Though researchers have yet to confirm conclusively what’s in the dust, one clue to its toxicity is the unexpectedly high number of respiratory problems in the area.

“It’s actually unusual to see such a high prevalence of asthma in a primarily Mexican population, because in general people of Latino descent tend to have lower rates of asthma,” Farzan said.

She hopes her team’s research will answer key questions about the dust, and serve as an impetus for action.

Green flags and red flags

On a Friday morning in late February, Johnson looked up from her desk to see plumes of black smoke rising from a nearby farm. She started to panic, thinking of the 65 children at her school who suffer from asthma. Johnson picked up the phone and dialed Esther Bejarano, an educator from Comite Civico del Valle (CCV), a local advocacy group focused on environmental justice issues.

“Our flag is green, but the farm next to the school has been burning their fields all morning,” Johnson told Bejarano, who promptly placed a called to the Imperial County Air Pollution Control District (APCD) to check whether the incident constituted a violation.

While agricultural burning is legal in the area, each quadrant of the valley is restricted to torching 500 acres per day, and must adhere to scheduling and permitting laws. Combined with airborne dust, burning fields can exacerbate asthma and even cause breathing problems in healthy people.

Speaking an hour later from her office, Bejarano expressed her frustration with the APCD. “It’s alarming in this day and age that the county isn’t giving the principal the resources she needs to succeed,” she said. “I’m happy to take Nancy’s call; I do this because I’m passionate about it. But it’s APCD’s obligation, not mine.”

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Bejarano has two young children with asthma, and constantly worries about their well-being, which she cites as a major motivation for her work with CCV. She also feels her community is neglected by California lawmakers, who haven’t prioritized dust mitigation or pollution regulation — partly because of their ethnicity.

“We’re a Hispanic community, and we’re vulnerable to polluters. It’s driven by a lack of respect. They come and take advantage of us. They’ve been doing it forever,” Bejarano said. She feels that the APCD often favors agricultural giants and factories over the health of farm workers and families in the area.

Now close to tears, Bejarano recounted the history of the school flag program: the APCD partnered with the American Lung Association in 2009, at which point they delivered green, orange and yellow flags to a handful of nearby schools. The intention was for schools to monitor air quality internally, post the appropriate flag color based on current conditions and adjust student activity accordingly.

Kids can play freely on green days, but asthmatic children must stay inside when the flag is yellow. Even healthy students modify their outdoor activities, for example walking instead of running. On orange days, everyone stays inside. Westmorland Union has a multipurpose room where children can play during recess, but the school has no full gymnasium, meaning there’s limited indoor space for exercise.

Bejarano says the APCD barely scratched the surface in their halfhearted attempt to implement the flag program.

“All they did was bring flags to the schools and drop them off. You do not just drop off a flag,” Bejarano said. “You have to educate the staff, the principal, the community.”

That’s where CCV jumped in. Bejarano and her colleagues visit schools to educate staff members about airborne dust particles, drive by to check that flags are posted correctly and provide replacement materials as needed. They also collect logs from each of the 10 participating schools, which serve as evidence of worsening air quality in the area.

“I’m basically working for the APCD, but they don’t pay me,” Bejarano said. “They’re worthless to me at this point because they’re not protecting our communities [from the dust and other threats to air quality].”

Belen Leon, an analyst for the APCD, defends her office’s actions, saying they delivered flags to 68 schools before funding ran out. When the Air Pollution Control District could no long afford to run the program, officials were grateful for CCV’s willingness to assist. But she admits the handoff might have been executed more smoothly.

“I think there has been a loss of communication with the schools," Leon said. "I don’t know if the Air District dropped the ball."

Leon also addressed a contentious aspect of the program: the lack of red flags. School administrators and members of CCV wondered why the county failed to provide materials to notify their community of the most dangerous air quality conditions: red days, which the Air Pollution Control District defines as “very unhealthy.”

“Red wasn’t really a color that we hit too often, so based on [budgetary restrictions], we chose green, yellow and orange to maximize what we could purchase,” Leon said.

CCV saw the district’s failure to provide red flags as an indication that they were unwilling to acknowledge the severity of the air quality issue. Though the new air pollution control officer, Matt Dessert, says he plans to collaborate with CCV on future initiatives, many community members still feel that their needs aren’t taken seriously.

Help and research

Imperial Valley communities aren’t completely on their own. In 2017, researchers —including Farzan of USC — launched new initiatives to better understand the health risks of the Salton Sea dust.

“Up until fairly recently, a lot of attention was paid to the ecological issues and the potential damage to migratory bird species, but not much attention has been paid to the human health impacts,” she said. “That’s what we’re really trying to draw attention to.”

Her team, which includes fellow USC professor Jill Johnston and several researchers from the University of Iowa, collected dust samples from the Salton Sea lakebed and sent them to a lab for analysis. They’ve also installed air monitors at Westmorland Union Elementary, Brawley Union High School and Calipatria High School, which border the lake. The devices collect air on filters, and the samples are being tested for bacteria, fungi and toxic metals.

“The goal is to see whether the dust looks different in different areas, and ultimately to identify a ‘signature’ of the dust coming from the Salton Sea,” Farzan said. “We want to know what’s mobilized into the air, and what people are breathing at the community level.”

In September, the Leonardo DiCaprio foundation donated $100,000 to CCV’s air pollution monitoring program. The funds will help maintain the group's network of 40 air monitoring devices and cover the installation of 20 new monitors. CCV hopes the donation will direct public attention toward the problems posed by the dust.

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Karol Ruelas, who graduated this year from Brawley Union High School, learned about Farzan’s research through CCV and is hopeful that it might provide some relief for young people like herself. She was recently diagnosed with chronic sinusitis; her airways frequently become blocked and irritated by the dust and pollutants she inhales.

“My doctor said the air is bad, and I should just stay inside as much as possible. He said, ‘I don’t recommend pets, plants or going near the sea. Just try to stay inside. And use a nebulizer,’” she said.

Her doctor also recommended that she get surgery and move out of the Imperial Valley as soon as possible. But Brawley is her home, and she doesn’t want to leave.

“I want to give back to my community. I want to be a nurse. Because I’ve seen how people can get with asthma, I’ve seen how they can get with allergies, I’ve experienced it myself,” Ruelas said. “And I want to help those people out, because it really helps if you can relate to a person.”

By Farzan’s estimation, Imperial Valley will need people like Ruelas to stick around, especially as the dust problem at the Salton Sea continues to worsen. Not only are children at risk, but airborne particles can contribute to the development of respiratory and cardiovascular disease in adults. The dust can also exacerbate conditions for those with chronic conditions, especially the elderly.

“Not to mention, there are many people who work outside in the Valley and spend most of their time outside,” Farzan said. “They are going to be heavily impacted by the dust.”

Activism around the Salton Sea

Israel Cruz, CCV’s communications coordinator, grew up in the Valley and always knew he wanted to help his community. But the issue of air quality didn’t grip him until his cousin was diagnosed with asthma.

“Even when he was so little, just four or five years old, he understood his disease and knew how to nebulize himself. He put everything in place. To me it was so moving to see him struggling at that age,” said Cruz.

Since then, the boy has been hospitalized many times, including a stay in the ICU for an extended period last year. Cruz said his cousin, now 15, has been worn down by the disease.

“He’s so tired, he says he can’t do it anymore. It’s like his system is shutting down,” he said. “He’s so tired that he’s giving up.”

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Cruz, now entering his second year with CCV, sees his work as a way to help other families as they scramble to protect sensitive members from the dust.

The organization hosts educational seminars, assists local schools and even conducts home interventions to help eliminate potential asthma triggers around the house. CCV has also installed 40 air monitors throughout Imperial Valley, placing them close to vulnerable groups and known sources of pollution with the help of residents from each town. And the group keeps data from the school flag program as evidence of the worsening air quality in the region.

CCV sees itself as a voice for the communities around the Salton Sea, many of whom live below the poverty level and only speak Spanish. Members of these communities, which are decentralized and located at the southernmost tip of California, said they often feel that legislators don’t prioritize their needs.

“We’re all the way at the edge of California,” Cruz said. “The asthma rates, the bad air quality — that’s something we struggle with every day, and [legislators] are not informed about it. Since they are not informed, they don’t see it as a problem.”

CCV is taking a strategic approach to getting the attention of Sacramento: mobilizing the younger generation. When state legislators traveled to the area for the Imperial Valley Renewable Energy Summit in March, high school students met with them to speak about their struggles with the dust around the sea.

Students have traveled to Oakland and Sacramento to march, and have spoken in state Senate meetings. One of the organization’s former volunteers, a high school senior named Christian, even got a job in Assemblymember Eduardo Garcia’s office after meeting the politician at CCV’s office.

“We want to spark that green mentality, that community mentality. We want to put young people in those seats of power to make the right decisions and look after the community. Soon, they are the ones who will take care of us,” said Cruz.

Looking to the future

Wilcox, the Salton Sea czar, operates out of a Department of Fish and Wildlife office in the Coachella Valley, north of the lake.

His position was created to, as he puts it, “cut through the red tape and bureaucracy to move forward with Salton Sea policy.” The idea is that with such a complex and potentially disastrous issue, he can coordinate multiple agencies and expedite processes that typically take years to yield results.

He acknowledges that part of his job is to mediate between competing stakeholders, such as Comite Civico and the Air Pollution Control District, who often butt heads during negotiations.

“I think they’re working to solve the same problem, but to some extent they represent the interests of two different groups,” Wilcox said. “There’s a certain amount of tension built into the system, and we just have to work around it. That’s one of the reasons positions like mine exist.”

If these groups can learn to compromise, he says, it’s much more likely that meaningful progress will be made.

But a lurking pessimism, fostered by the government’s slow action thus far, still plagues many Imperial Valley residents.

“In my opinion, it’s going to get worse before it gets better,” Cruz said.

In the meantime, sensitive individuals like Ruelas are living a daily existence plagued by sickness and worry.

“I’m hoping that action will be taken,” Ruelas said. “If they don’t want to bring back the sea to its former glory, I’m OK with that. But at least do something to cover up the exposed area, so that we can actually live life to the fullest, instead of having to worry that in the next hour, I won’t be able to breathe.”

Johnson, the elementary school principal, also tries to stay rational about what a solution might look like.

“Nobody wants to waste water, and nobody can survive without it,” she said. But if the Salton Sea continues to shrink, she worries about the long-term impacts — both environmentally and economically — on a population that’s already struggling.

Despite never knowing when airborne dust might suddenly block her airways, Ruelas is adamant that she doesn’t want to move. CCV’s Cruz backs her up.

“Why do we have to move? Why should we have to change our lifestyle?” he said. “It just doesn’t seem fair.”

Zara Abrams graduated from the University of Southern California’s Master of Specialized Journalism program, where she wrote this story as part of an environmental reporting collaboration between USC and the Desert Sun. She now works as a freelance science writer.