California’s largest lake is turning to dust

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Transcript:

SFX asthma inhaler

Michelle Dugan-Delgado: I know that it’s not safe for me to go outside. I know that if I’m outside and a dust storm hits, there’s a very, very, very high chance I’m gonna catch something, which means I will end up in the hospital.

Michelle Dugan-Delgado lives in southern California, in the Coachella Valley – not far from the border with Mexico. Out here, the land is dry. Dust storms are pretty common.

Michelle: It’s a desert. So any small wind that comes from, you know, the mountains, San Diego, Palm Springs. The dust is going to pick up. It’s going to blow right into the homes. It’s a daily thing.

Michelle is 35, and she’s had asthma for as long as she can remember.

The dust is enough to trigger an attack. So when she does leave her house, she has to be prepared.

Michelle: So always carry an inhaler. I have a mask with me at all times.

It’s like I live in a bubble. I have to really protect myself just because I keep seeing more lung infections. Of course, I have nasal sprays to help keep my nose clear. Um, because any small bacteria that goes in it could be pretty fatal for me.

It started when she was a baby. At six months, Michelle was having breathing difficulties and ended up in hospital.

Michelle: And they right away told my mom, ‘you know what? She has respiratory issues. We’ll see along the way.’ Um, along the way came, and I’ve been hospitalized way too many times. They ended up diagnosing me with asthma when I was pretty young, so I always lived with that diagnosis. I was asthmatic and that’s all I knew.

Michelle believes the air she grew up breathing made her sick – and science increasingly backs her up. About a 20-minute drive away is the Salton Sea. It lies between the Coachella and Imperial Valleys, an important agricultural hub.

It’s California’s biggest lake. But it’s rapidly drying up. And when winds sweep over the exposed lakebed, they pick up the parched sediment, producing dust storms that are harming the lungs of people living nearby. For Michelle, asthma was just the start…

Michelle: … throughout my life, a lot of hospitalizations, a lot of, you know, fungal infections, bacterial infections, viruses, pneumonias, um, whatever you want to name. I’ve had it. Um, so it’s been rough. It’s been 35 years of living with that.

Asthma has also taken a deadly toll on her family.

Michelle: It is painful to talk about it because I have a lot of survivor’s guilt. It should have been me, not her…I always carry that with me.

In 2009, Michelle was driving with her mum and brother to her college orientation when she got a call about her younger sister Marie. She’d also been diagnosed with asthma as a child.

Michelle: She had an asthma attack while at home … they called 911, they took her in and she passed away on the way to the hospital.

The sisters were close. Marie was 16 – a year an a half younger than Michelle. Her death came as a shock to the family.

Michelle: It wasn’t anything, you know, that we thought would take her life away.

Now that I’m older, I’ve done my research. I’ve come to realize like, wow, like this is a big reason why the Imperial Valley, the Coachella Valley has such high asthma rates when it comes to children. We’re one of the highest out there, and that’s one of the reasons why, you know, this dust is blowing left and right, left and right. There’s schools nearby. And what do kids do during school time? They go outside, they’re playing outside.

Dust storms are driving an air quality crisis that comes with a big cost – for human health and the economy.

When dust is whipped up by the wind, it can spread bacteria and toxic chemicals.

Major dust storms can last days and cause millions of dollars in damage. They can engulf entire cities, arriving suddenly and without warning. They can also ground flights and cause deadly traffic accidents.

And climate change is making them more common. Things like overgrazing and deforestation are only adding to the problem.

Dust storms are a deadly climate risk. So what’s being done about it?

This is Living Planet. I’m Neil King.

Amato Evan: As the wind starts, the first thing you start seeing are these… we call them Aeolian streamers… It almost looks like the surface is moving or it’s like filled with these little snakes, but these little snakes are actually these sand particles that are bouncing along the surface. And as the wind speed increases, those tiny little particles… they pick up other particles that are a lot finer. And these are the ones that then start to lift up into the atmosphere.

When it looks like a dust storm might be on its way, Amato Evan heads into the desert.

Amato: We kind of refer to it as dust storm chasing.

SFX dust storm, roaring

Amato: You start to see off in the distance this cloud of dust forming, and that just is rapidly approaching…

Amato is a professor of climate science at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, which is part of the University of California, San Diego.

Amato:… And as soon as that cloud of dust – or it’s almost a wall of dust – hits you, immediately with that, there’s a very large increase in the wind speeds. It gets very noisy… yeah, definitely hear grains pinging off equipment, pinging off of goggles.

Amato studies dust storms in California’s southeastern corner, near the evaporating Salton Sea.

Amato: The visibility drops way down… it can be extremely hard to see even five metres in front of you…Anyway, so we’ve been in a lot of dust storms.

Amato is the director of a new Dust center at his university. Every time his team is in a dust storm, their goal is to take a series of measurements. They want to figure out how dust storms come about, how we can better predict them… and how to limit the damage they can do.

Amato says, this much is clear:

Amato: So dust storms are definitely becoming more frequent over time

The main reason for that: climate change.

Rising temperatures and prolonged drought are drying out the land, making it harder for plants to grow and leaving soils exposed. This is a trend happening across the US southwest – not just in California, but other states like Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.

That makes it easier for winds to whip up soil and dust into the air – creating massive clouds that roll across the land.

Amato: We run climate models forward in time and they tell us, you know, if we keep… putting greenhouse gases into our atmosphere, we’re going to keep warming. Climate models also tell us that arid regions, regions where we have dust storms, as the planet is warming, those arid regions are becoming more arid. And so then that stresses vegetation, um, that stresses water resources. And both of those things combine to increase the amount of dust that can be produced.

Amato says that at the same time, the way humans are using land and water in many parts of the world is only making things dustier.

Amato: So taking landscapes that maybe didn’t produce dust and altering those landscapes in a way so that they now do produce dust.

Dust storms have some benefits though. They’re important for keeping eco-systems healthy around the world.

Dust from the Sahara carries essential nutrients like phosphorous to fertilize trees in the Amazon rainforest. It also delivers iron to the oceans. Dust storms are a natural phenomenon, but…

Amato: The problem is that they’re increasing in frequency…To the best of our understanding, in looking at different types of records and trying to stitch them together, we think that over the last 100, 120 years, the amount of dust in Earth’s atmosphere has been steadily increasing.

Globally, at least a quarter of the dust in the air comes from human activities. Things like agriculture and tilling land, overgrazing by cattle, deforestation and rapid urbanization can all deplete the soil and create more dust.

Open desert areas are typical spots for dust storms. Lakes that are drying up because of water being diverted are also a major dust generator – From California’s Salton Sea to Utah’s Great Salt Lake, to Iran’s Lake Urmia. It’s happening all over the world. Researchers say the drying up of the Aral Sea, for example, has made Central Asia 7% dustier over the last 30 years.

Amato: And it’s just as populations increase as more people live in arid regions, right? We just keep putting more and more demands on water. And, you know, like here in the southwestern US, we’ve been just having increasing periods of drought. And so not only is there more demand for water, but there’s less water for everyone to use.

The World Meteorological Organization says sand and dust storms impact about 330 million people every year.

More than half of the world’s dust emissions come from the Sahara Desert in North Africa. And when that dust gets moving, and the wind is strong enough, it can rise up to 5 miles into the sky and be carried over vast distances – across the Atlantic towards the Americas, or over the Mediterranean to Europe.

SFX news medley

Blowing dust can make global heating worse.

When it settles on snow or ice, it darkens the surface and leads to heat and sunlight being absorbed, rather than reflected. The result: speeding up snow melt and glacier loss.

It can also hamper renewable energy production by obscuring solar panels and clogging wind turbine machinery. In the US, that amounts to an annual cost of approximately $4 billion dollars.

In fact, dust storms can cause a lot of damage. One study found dust costs the US 154.4 billion dollars each year—more than other disasters like hurricanes, wildfires and floods.

SFX news medley from the US

Dust storms can decimate crops, causing an estimated $10 billion loss in American agricultural productivity each year. They can also disrupt aviation and cause deadly traffic accidents – when visibility on roads drops to zero.

And then there’s the toll on health.

Amato: If I was going to say, hey, this is the number one kind of adverse impact, it’s humans breathing in dust… So folks that are breathing in the air that’s containing high concentrations of this particulate matter.

When you breathe in tiny dust particles, they can get lodged deep in the lungs and cause serious respiratory illnesses and heart disease. Particles that are smaller than 10 micrometers in diameter are the most dangerous… because they’re so tiny they can get into the bloodstream, causing inflammation, organ damage and raising the risk of heart attack.

Exposure to dust particulate matter accounts for about 721,000 deaths worldwide each year.

Children, the elderly and people with lung conditions are most at risk.

And even if you don’t live in an especially dusty area… far-away deserts can still pose a risk. Studies show that dust carried from the Sahara accounts for more than 40 percent of deaths linked to fine particulate matter in Spain and almost 30 percent in Italy.

Dust plumes can also carry invisible fungal spores, bacteria and viruses.

In Africa, dust blown from the Sahara has been linked to the spread of bacterial meningitis in the continent’s so-called “meningitis belt” that stretches from Senegal to Ethiopia.

Amato: Then we also have the issue of, for example, uh, fungi that might be in the soil that then it’s not the dust particles themselves, it’s the fungi or bacteria that are carried with the dust particles and leading to disease like valley fever.

Valley fever. It’s spread by fungal spores traveling in dust. And cases in the southwestern US are surging. Most people don’t get sick, but in 5 to 10% of cases it can lead to long-term lung issues – or in rare cases even death. Infections are rising in Arizona, California and other western states – the same areas that are seeing an increase in dust storms. Some research suggests there may be a link, but there’s no definitive evidence, and more work is needed.

Dust can also be laced with toxic chemicals, like pesticides and heavy metals. When they accumulate in the body, they can affect brain development and lead to endocrine disruption and increased cancer risks.

Amato: In some areas we think that the dust is more toxic than in a normal desert environment, and we think this is just because of human activity. One example would be if you’re in a low lying area surrounded by agricultural lands, lands that have been cultivated for decades, there’s a good chance that DDT or some of these highly toxic legacy pesticides, pesticides that are long lived in the environment, are actually in the soil. And some early work that we’re doing right now is suggesting that is the case.

His team is currently studying the materials in the dust around the Salton Sea, where chemicals from nearby farms have been flowing for decades.

Amato: So those dust storms might also bring potential exposure to these types of really, really deadly toxins. And that is actually just a really large unknown right now.

The Salton Sea was actually formed by accident in 1905 when the Colorado River burst an irrigation canal gate and flooded the area. Since then, it’s mainly been maintained by agricultural runoff.

It became a popular holiday spot in the 1950s, with lakeside resorts drawing tourists and celebrities. But then the water levels started to drop – due to a hotter, drier climate, and policies that diverted water away. In the last 30 years, the lake has shrunk by around 20% or 70 square miles.

Amato: I can see that body of water, the shoreline, getting longer and longer and longer.

The more the lake shrinks, the more dust is exposed, along with the pesticides and other contaminants from nearby farms. And all that gets picked up by the wind, worsening air quality for the mainly Latino and low-income residents in this region.

Amato: And really what I’d say is when I look at that, I know that… in some of those areas where the shoreline has just been exposed, probably not going to be emitting dust, but in five years and ten years, it probably will.

SFX asthma inhaler

This is something Michelle Dugan Delgado worries about. We heard from her at the start of the episode.

Michelle: So I do have to wake up every morning at five.

She gets an alert on her phone every day, so she can check the weather and the air quality.

Michelle: That’s one of the first things that I do when I wake up. Um, because I want to make sure that when I go out, I’m prepared.

And then she starts the treatments to clear her lungs.

Michelle: I do start off with three breathing treatments, all different treatments that, you know, they, it loosens up the, um, the mucus inside my lungs. And then of course, I have medication that’s going to open the airways, help me breathe throughout the day. So the first hour and a half, I am spent doing medications, breathing treatments.

She does these treatments four to five times a day. It’s time consuming, but it’s necessary for her to stay alive. Michelle’s health status has gotten more complicated over the years. About eight years ago, on top of her asthma, she was diagnosed with atypical cystic fibrosis. It’s a rare genetic illness that causes mucus to build up in your organs. She also contracted a fungal infection called aspergillosis, which she breathed in with the dust. She was hospitalized in January because of it.

Michelle: It’s a fungal infection that everyday people can breathe in and out and it wouldn’t affect them. But because I have cystic fibrosis, it just does something completely different to me. So I am currently on fungal medication to help me treat this fungus… I do live in an area where the dust is very common, that the minute it goes away, I could inhale and it’s back in. So I think that’s been the really difficult part, is me trying to get rid of it while living normal here in the valley.

Michelle’s doctors have told her she may need a lung transplant if her lungs continue to deteriorate.

Michelle: We are seeing a decline in my lung function. There’s a lot of things that I can’t do. I can’t do grocery shopping. I can’t walk more than 15 minutes without being short of breath. Um, even talking sometimes gets me pretty tired…It’s difficult. If anything, it’s more difficult for my kids because, um, you know, mom’s not there to do all these fun things because, you know, I’m sick or I’m too tired to do anything.

Michelle has two kids – a 13-year-old girl and an 11-year-old boy. Her daughter has asthma, and her son has allergies. She says that’s pretty normal here.

Michelle: the majority of families that I know will have at least one child with respiratory illnesses. Um, and it’s very common. It is very uncommon to know of a child that doesn’t have, you know, a respiratory illness. So for me to know that, you know, one child in every family, you know, is, you know, asthmatic or has a respiratory illness, like that’s really heartbreaking. Um, and it’s really sad because we should be more conscious of those things. Because our kids are the future. We got to protect them.

Studies have shown that children living near the Salton Sea have disproportionately high rates of asthma. One project that followed more than 700 primary-school aged children over a number of years found that 24% reported having the condition – far higher than the national rate of about 7% for boys and 5.5% for girls. Over 70% had allergies – more than three times the national average

Michelle says she would love to move away. But it’s not so simple. She says she doesn’t have the financial resources to just up and leave.

Michelle: it’s something that I do think about is like, what am I doing? You know, if I know this area isn’t good. Like, why are we here? You know, but it’s really difficult for me to just grab my stuff and like, move somewhere else, you know, especially right now with the climate that we’re in in the United States.

Plus, relocating would mean leaving her wider family, getting a new medical team and her kids would have to change schools.

Michelle: It’s definitely something that I think about for them. I mean, I don’t want them to go through what I went through my whole life. It’s not a life that I want them to live.

Meanwhile, the Salton Sea is predicted to continue shrinking, releasing more particulate matter. For Michelle, it’s a frustrating situation.

Michelle: I feel like they have to find more permanent solutions to this I really don’t see anything happening. I think this has been an ongoing issue for years. Um, and if anything, it’s only gotten worse. So would I love for them to do just anything? Yeah, I would definitely love that. But I don’t see that happening.

So what can be done to get the upper hand over dust? That’s coming up after this short break.

SFX sound of cars on the highway

If you leave the Coachella Valley and the Salton Sea behind, heading east along the Interstate-10 you’ll eventually hit a deadly stretch of highway.

The Interstate-10 is the major road running along the bottom of the US… In southwestern New Mexico, just across the border with Arizona, it cuts through a dry lakebed called the Lordsburg Playa.

In the 1880s, this place was flourishing and covered in grasslands, but overgrazing and erosion over decades has depleted the soils. Now it’s a hot spot for dust storms. More than 40 people have died here in multiple-vehicle pileups since 1967 as a result. 21 of those deaths were in the last 15 years.

Mike Gaglio: Well, let’s see. What’s it like being in a dust storm? Viscerally in one word, it’s terrifying. Um, on the highway, you know, when you’re driving along at 80 miles an hour on the interstate highway and a dust cloud comes along and turns off visibility, it’s very confusing. And it’s scary because you really don’t know what to do…. what you’re supposed to do is get off the highway… and kind of wait it out.

When it happens you can’t see where you’re going. And so it’s very, it’s difficult just to even pull off the highway. And as you slow down on the highway. Of course, you’re worried about getting rear ended from, from the back by a vehicle who’s not slowing down.

Mike Gaglio has driven on the Interstate-10 many times. That’s because he’s part of the team trying to solve the dust problem at the Lordsburg Playa.

Dust storms have forced this highway to close dozens of times, causing productivity losses and business delays. Road fatalities caused by dust storms cost at least $250 million per year in the US.

And so the New Mexico Department of Transportation is leading a project there to plant native vegetation and stabilize the soil. They’ve fenced off thousands of acres and removed cattle from dust-prone areas so the ground has a chance to recover.

Mike is the owner of High Desert Native Plants – a nursery and environmental services company in El Paso, Texas. He started work at the site with a small team in 2018.

Mike: We’re self-proclaimed dustafarians, yeah

The drought and depleted soil hasn’t made their work easy. But he says they’re slowly changing the land so it can absorb water. Over the years, they’ve been imprinting the earth with a special plow, recontouring the soil so that water gets trapped, rather than being allowed to run off.

Mike: By slowing the water down, we keep the water higher in the landscape, which helps support vegetation. And then by slowing, spreading it and sinking it into the ground. That water becomes available to the root systems of plants… And then the vegetation itself serves as, um, a blanket, if you will, a protection factor for the wind erosion to protect the soil surface from the wind erosion.

They’ve treated about 3,200 acres so far, planting native grasses and shrubs, and laying rocks to prevent erosion.

Mike: There’s a grass called six weeks grama, and so that that one gets a really good response…(fade under)

It’s a work in progress, and it’s too early to say if their efforts have led to fewer crashes on the highway. But one study by the University of Texas in El Paso had some encouraging results. It used satellite imagery to show how the land changed after five years of their work.

Mike: Ground cover has increased in some areas by at least 30%, which is a dramatic increase for desert landscapes…. We’ve definitely seen an increase in the amount of vegetation on many of the areas that we’ve worked on, for sure.

Mike says in the areas where they’ve planted native vegetation, the soil seems to be staying put.

Mike: And we hope it stays that way. I drive this stretch of road frequently, and I’ve seen dust storms off in the distance and kind of watched how things are moving across the landscape and, and stopped and looked at our site and seeing that it’s not producing dust and it’s very rewarding and exciting to see that… so feels good.

But he admits what they’re doing is a drop in the bucket. They’re solving the problem in isolated pockets that are particularly dusty, but cattle grazing is still damaging the ground in other parts of the playa. He says what could really make a difference is protecting the whole area from these kinds of activities.

Mike: Personally, it makes me frustrated and angry because I know that we’re working to make a change on this and the work just can’t be done fast enough. And the land management practices that contribute to these conditions are not changing at all in many ways. And so it gets a little bit frustrating.

He hopes that the state will keep investing in maintaining the site over the long-term, so that the work they’ve been doing isn’t undone. Even better, he says he’d like to see their work scaled up.

Mike: Oh, that’d be great. I’d love it. I’d love, I’d love to have ten tractors running all over out there. But I mean, you know, this problem is present throughout the West. It’s huge.

Tackling dust at specific problem areas – like Mike’s team is doing at the Lordsburg Playa – is going to be necessary to limit the damage from dust storms. But the scale of the problem – in the southwestern US and in many other parts of the world – means the job is far from straightforward. And it likely won’t be enough.

As for the Salton Sea in California…

Authorities there are also planting native vegetation in parts of the exposed lakebed to stabilize the soil. They’ve laid out thousands of hay bales to interrupt the wind and hold down dust. And they’ve also pumped in water to make artificial wetlands for wildlife. It’s all part of a 10 year plan to restore 30,000 acres of the lake’s dusty shoreline by 2028.

Amato Evan, the dust researcher from the University of California, says planting native vegetation can work well in some sites. But he points out that it needs a lot of investment, as well as time, money and water.

Amato: And all of those things are resources that are not in infinite supply.

But he does have an idea for something that he thinks could make more of an immediate difference for people living near the Salton Sea. Something that would also be cheaper and faster to set up.

Amato: Just like you get a weather forecast, you should be able to get a forecast for dust.

Amato and his team at the dust center are working on developing an early warning system to alert communities before a dust storm happens.

Amato: Those types of resources just don’t exist. I can’t go somewhere and find out for three days from now: Is there going to be a dust storm? When is it going to start? Where is it going to be? How do I plan my day around that?

The other thing is when there actually is a dust storm, to try to identify, hey, there’s a dust storm happening and it’s traveling this way, you are going to be impacted in an hour, or 30 minutes, or 15 minutes. And that’s a type of early warning system that does not exist.

The problem is, he says it’s been a challenge to secure funding.

Amato: So that has not really moved into a testing phase yet…As somebody that wants to do science that helps people, you know, our goal is… to create something that is useful for the community, that’s helpful for the community, and particularly a lot of folks who have been overlooked or whose needs have been overlooked for a really long time.

SFX nebulizer, inhaler

As long as the nearby lake continues to recede, all locals like Michelle can do is take matters into their own hands, as best they can. She says when the wind picks up, her family makes sure all the windows and doors are shut to keep the dust out. They also have an air purifier in every room.

Michelle: You must have an air purifier out here. And those are not cheap. It’s really expensive. But these are things that we have to do in order for us to, you know, protect ourselves from these dust storms.

Michelle makes sure her kids have a packet of face masks in their school bags every day. Just in case the dust gets really bad.

Besides the apps she uses to check the air quality every morning, Michelle says she’d welcome some kind of early warning system specifically for dust storms.

Michelle: Oh yeah. I think it would be really good– just the way we have like earthquake alerts on our phones. Because you just never know when it’s going to hit you. And it would be really great for us to have some sort of system that alerts us and lets us know like, hey, this is what’s going to happen. You have to protect yourself or stay home. It would definitely be very beneficial to a lot of people.

Michelle has had to stop working and largely put her life on pause because of her health. But she says what she does try to do is raise awareness about the risks of living with dust pollution, so that others know how to protect themselves and their kids.

Michelle: Every time I do this, I always think about my sister. That’s the one reason why I do this, I don’t want other families to go through what we went through by losing our sister. Because her death was preventable.

I think families need more education, not just about the respiratory illnesses here in the Valley and what it could do to your health. One death is too many and we just got to find a way to stop that.