California’s Salton Sea is disappearing. So why isn’t the government doing more to stop it?

Kay Brown talks with Susan St. Louis of the Salton Sea Coalition about the growing environmental and public-health crisis—and the political roadblocks standing in the way of a real solution.

Who is responsible? Who has the power to act? And what will it cost California if the government continues to do nothing?

California’s Salton Sea isn’t just shrinking — it’s unspooling a public-health and climate mess right in front of us. I sat down with Susan St. Louis from the Salton Sea Coalition and she walked me through what’s happening: a once-vast inland sea fed by the Colorado River is evaporating, leaving behind toxic playa that blows into neighborhoods, stinks like rotten eggs, and worsens asthma, nosebleeds, cardiovascular and pulmonary issues. We laid out the science plainly — methane emissions from exposed lake bed, filthy inflows, and a salt concentration that turns the Sea into something closer to a chemical stew than a habitat. You’ll get why this isn’t just an ugly smell; it’s a regional public-health emergency and a climate accelerator that’ll bite more people if nothing changes. So what’s the fix? Susan argues — and we pretty much agree — that patchwork mitigation (hay bales, shallow polluted ponds) is a Band-Aid on a hemorrhage. The coalition’s big ask: import ocean water (Sea of Cortez or Pacific), desalinate it, and refill the lake — build canals, reuse geothermal infrastructure, and even leverage lithium extraction to offset costs. We also dug into the money talk: vendor proposals once estimated $1–4 billion, but a state panel ballooned that to $70 billion without clear basis. That mismatch, plus an alphabet soup of agencies and appointed decision-makers, is why the project isn’t moving. Bottom line for you: this is solvable technically, but it’s getting strangled by politics and short-term thinking.

Companies mentioned in this episode:

• Salton Sea Coalition
• Salton Sea Conservancy
• California Natural Resources Agency
• California Department of Water Resources
• California Department of Fish and Wildlife
• California State Water Resources Control Board
• U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
• Salton Sea Management Program
• U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
• United America Network

Mentioned in this episode:

Leigh McGowan UAN Promo Stinger - Short -[2026]

So we have this situation where everyone is relying on a river that is dying, and no one will acknowledge that just dividing up that water in smaller and smaller increments is going to solve the problem.

They won't admit that.

We just need a new source of water.

Welcome to Democracy on Fire, Kay.

I'm Kay Brown, and the topic today is the Salton Sea Crisis.

And my guest is Susan St. Louis.

She's a member of the Salton Sea Coalition, which is a group of concerned citizens who want to see the Salton Sea restored by importing and desalinating ocean water.

And she's a resident here of the Coachella Valley.

And welcome, Susan.

I am so appreciative that you could be with me today.

Well, thank you, Kay.

I'm so glad to be here.

So Susan started educating me about this issue several months ago, and it is kind of complicated.

So we're going to start at the beginning.

What is the Salton Sea and why is this a crisis right now?

The Salton Sea is an inland ocean.

It is very heavily saline at this point.

It comes from an outflow of the Colorado river system across the Salton Basin, and it has existed for thousands and thousands of years in some form or another.

And currently it's in a crisis because the water is evaporating.

The dust that's being exposed is toxic and is making people around the boundaries of the lake sick.

It creates terrible odor.

And it's also a climate issue because as the sea evaporates, the dry playa is emitting methane in huge amounts.

So we have to address this problem of a drying lake that's causing illness, that's causing.

It's accelerating climate change.

And the only way to do it is to import ocean water.

So what is your coalition trying to achieve?

Well, we feel that California runs on canals, on water transportation.

There are many, many canals that were built earlier in this century.

And we need to do that again.

We need to build a system to import water from the ocean, either in the Sea of Cortez or the Pacific Ocean, and bring it into the Salton Sea.

We need to desalinate it.

We need to clean.

There are a few rivers that provide some input into the Salton Sea, but they're extremely dirty.

We need to clean those and we need to refill the Salton Sea to cover all the toxic dust and prevent the health problems and prevent methane emissions to make our area viable over the next century.

So did this area, this lake used to be fed by the Colorado river, but it was diverted to meet Other urban needs.

Yes.

That's partly why it's dried up.

Yes.

And there are seven states, a bunch of tribal nations, and Mexico who all depend on this water.

So there are a lot of agencies and governments.

And one of the ways that I'm trying to understand this problem is who's in charge?

Who could fix it?

Well, that is an interesting question and a very difficult one because it's a total Alphabet soup of agencies.

There's the California agency is the California Natural Resources Agency, the Department of Water Resources, its Fish and Game Service, the Salton Sea Conservancy, State Water Resources Control Board.

It goes on and on.

There are so many agencies and elected officials who can influence this, but.

But it prevents there being a clear primary person or agency to convince of the need for water importation.

Very hard.

And what do you want these agencies and governments to do?

I want them to face up to the fact that we don't have enough water.

What's going on right now is that the water has been diverted from the Salton Sea to go to big urban areas, which I understand, because those are residential needs.

But in doing that, the water has been taken out of the Colorado river system.

Now it's causing huge problems for Southern California, not just the Coachella Valley, but.

But for larger regions around us, because this is gonna create a huge health issue.

It already has created a huge health issue for the people who are closest to the lake.

What are some of the health concerns that have come up?

Oh, cardiovascular disease, pulmonary diseases, huge incidences of childhood asthma.

Children are regularly sent home because they have nosebleeds that can't be stopped.

And how many people live around this area that are directly infected?

You know, again, that depends on what you consider the area.

I think the whole Coachella Valley is something like 350,000.

It's a little bit lighter on the population around the Salton Sea because that's getting further away from the urban areas.

But it still is going to affect everyone here in the valley.

And you said there's odor that transmits through the valley?

Yes, like rotten egg odor, sulfurous smells that, you know, everyone who lives in the Coachella Valley and the Imperial Valley know when it's a Salton Sea day, because, you know, you step outside your door and you're assaulted by the smell.

And that smell also carries a lot of impurities.

The air quality is very poor.

So the attempts to get Something done about this have been going on quite a long time.

And I know there's been studies.

There's been issues raised with the studies.

And where does things stand now in terms of the attempts of the agencies and the governments to try to figure out what to do?

Well, the state of California put out an RFP years ago for plans to import ocean water to see if it would be feasible.

Unfortunately, this study was very flawed.

The committee on this panel decided to disqualify all of the plans without ever undergoing a scientific analysis of them.

Now we have various agencies.

They are now trying to achieve some sort of restoration of Salton Sea.

They call it a restoration by building shallow impoundment ponds around the edges, the dry edges of the lake bed.

But to do that, they're using filthy water, not clean water.

And they're creating this for natural habitat for birds and animals and recreation for people.

But the water that's being put into that is terribly dirty and polluted, full of heavy chemicals, fecal matter, all kinds of things.

So has that actually started or.

That's.

That's been going on.

Another way that they're trying to deal with it is plowing furrows into the dry lake bed and then sticking hay bales out there to try to stop the dust from blowing so much.

But that doesn't work.

Really.

That doesn't work.

And there's a great example that we have of different mitigation attempts at Owens Lake north of here in California, which was emptied out to send all of the water to LA many, many years ago, about 100 years ago.

And it is a dry lake bed that they have filled with gravel, and they have to keep on knocking mountainsides apart and getting more gravel and putting it to cover so the dust won't be blowing.

So they've already spent about, I believe, a billion and a half on mitigation to create a dead lake.

And we have this opportunity with the Salton Sea to bring in ocean water and create a living lake.

And it's not going to be that much more expensive to do that.

What's the estimated cost of doing it?

Depending on various proposals that were put forth by the vendors who submitted up to the RFP process somewhere from a billion to 4 billion.

And the government panel, or the panel that the government put together inflated those costs to 70 billion with giving no reason why they were inflating the cost.

They said this is going to cost 70 billion, and then they said it's too expensive.

But the problem with this whole situation is that there isn't enough water in the western states, we don't have a source of water.

Snowfall, the snowpack is going away.

With climate change, it's been reduced greatly over the last 30 or 40 years.

The water in the river is dropping very low.

The dams in California at Glen Canyon and at Lake Meadow, those dams are starting to go dry.

Those are reservoirs that not only provide water to seven states, drinking water and residential water, but they also provide power.

So we have this situation where everyone is relying on a river that is dying and no one will acknowledge that just dividing up that water in smaller and smaller increments is going to solve the problem.

They don't, they won't admit that we just need a new source of water and the technology exists to do it.

We know it can be done.

It's already been done in California.

The desalinization, desalination is happening all over the world and becoming more automatic.

But it's more expensive than traditional water sources, but still could be done right.

Who would ultimately pay for this?

Would it be federal, would it be state?

Would it be a combination?

It would have to be a combination of all of those things.

Potentially private funding, grants from various agencies.

And some of the plans that were put forth had a built in payment process, that payment ability that they would desalinate and sell the salt.

That would be one way they would be able to perhaps sell some water.

And that would be another way.

In addition, people may have heard that Salton Sea, the southern edge of the Salton Sea has one of the largest reserves of lithium in the world.

That is in the superheated, super salty brine below the surface of the lake.

And so if we built this project to bring water in and lithium mining is going to require water, then we could also get the lithium out of the deal.

There are already geothermal plants at the southern edge of the Salton Sea, so that can be used also to provide funding and power for this process.

How do you see this kind of quagmire, that things are bogged down, getting back on a positive track.

What actions do you hope to have happening to address where we're at, which you've explained why you don't think that is a good solution, what they're doing now, how's it gonna get out of that and into a different approach?

Well, first of all, we have to admit that using diminishing, dirty, diminishing amounts of dirty water to try to bring a lake back is not a good plan.

We have to admit that we need to spend money up front to build the infrastructure, to bring water in.

And to do that, we have to convince our legislators.

Unfortunately, the people who really are at the top of the pecking order to make the decision about what happens with policy on the lake are some agencies that aren't.

Are not run by elected officials.

They're run by appointed officials, people who are appointed by the governor of California.

And so those people are not.

We don't have a way to influence them because they're not elected officials.

So all we can do is put pressure on our elected officials to put pressure on them.

And that would include the governor and his office, federal congresspeople and senators, state senators and assembly members, county supervisors, city council members and mayors.

Anyone that you can think of to.

I'm asking people to make noise to say this issue is critical for the survival of this area.

And we need to.

Everybody needs to take a hand in being the squeaky wheel here so that we can get the issue resolved.

Because.

So the first thing we need is a new study.

Oh, sorry.

The first thing we need is a new reassessment of the data that's been gathered to date and looking at the feasibility of what's possible and what it would cost and who's going to do that work.

Is that a corps of engineers?

I read that they were already doing some kind of a study.

The Army Corps of Engineers has been asked to do a feasibility study on the Salton Sea Management program plans, but the only plans they have currently are plans that don't involve ocean water import.

So they're not going.

They're not set up right now to investigate the feasibility of ocean water import.

So the only thing that we can do is try to reverse the process and say this isn't acceptable to try to divide water that's disappearing.

Why would people be opposed to it?

I mean, what interests would be.

You got me, Kay.

I don't know why they think that.

Okay, here is one possible thing.

It's expensive.

Okay, it's going to be expensive.

But what is the expense going to be of allowing seven states to go dry, to lose their electricity, to have agriculture fail in the western states, which are pretty important for agriculture?

What's the cost of that?

You see this project to restore the Salton Sea affecting The broader water shortage in the western states and in Southern California.

Absolutely, absolutely.

Because that kind of construction would go to the Salton Sea initially, but then the impetus is there for other parts of the state, other parts of the western United States, to do something similar.

How did you get interested in this or how did you get involved in this issue?

Well, I have been climate.

I've been very anxious about the climate for many years now.

I started doing a little bit of research on solar power, on single use plastics, and I was trying to figure out what I could do in my little corner of the world to make a difference.

Because so many of these problems cross borders, national borders, and how can you as a single citizen affect that?

But in this valley, this is something I could do.

And what can other people do to help who are concerned?

Well, I would love it if you would, as I said, call the governor's office, call your elected officials, call your city council, or even better still, go to a city council meeting and say you're concerned about this because your property values are all based on viability of living here.

And if we don't have water, if we have dirty air, we're not going to be able to live here anymore.

And write to the editors of the paper, send off letters to the federal government, to the epa, whatever you can do, and talk to your neighbors, whatever you can do to raise the profile on this issue, on this problem would be great.

Well, thank you so much, Susan, for everything that you've done to help expose the issue.

And I know it's a huge challenge to try to round up all these people who are responsible for it and to get them into alignment about what to do.

But we know that changing course begins with awareness, awareness of the problem, awareness of the possible solutions and of the consequences of failing to do anything.

So I agree and support your efforts and wish you the best luck in your advocacy to find a solution and encourage our listeners and watchers to join in and raise your voice.

Because our voices matter.

And here in a democracy, we have the power to change things.

When we get organized and get focused,.

It's our responsibility to do it.

It is indeed.

So thank you so much and thanks to you for listening and watching.

This is Democracy on Fire with Kay Brown, and you can find us on United America Network or wherever you get your podcasts.

See you next.

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