The Lake That's Poisoning Its Children

The children of California's Imperial Valley breathe air that is, by some measures, more damaging to their lungs than living next to a roaring freeway. The culprit isn't traffic. It's a dying lake.

From Celebrity Playground to Toxic Wasteland

In the 1950s and '60s, the Salton Sea was California's unlikely glamour spot — a vast inland lake where celebrities water-skied and families packed the beaches. Stretching across 340 square miles, it sat in a sun-baked basin about 150 miles southeast of Los Angeles, drawing tourists to its warm, shimmering shores.

That world is gone. What remains is a shrinking, increasingly hostile body of water surrounded by exposed, cracked earth — and the communities that never left.

The Salton Sea was never entirely natural to begin with. It formed accidentally in the early 1900s when a break in a Colorado River irrigation canal flooded the desert basin. For decades, agricultural runoff from the fertile Imperial Valley kept the water level stable. But in 2003, Imperial County's irrigation district — the largest single user of Colorado River water — agreed to redirect billions of gallons annually toward urban areas. When that agreement took full effect in 2018, the lake began losing its lifeline.

The math was brutal. Over the past two decades, 36,000 acres of lakebed have been newly exposed. One estimate projected the water diversion would add 40 to 80 tons of windblown dust per day. Satellite images confirm it: the pale scar of exposed sediment has expanded rapidly, year after year.

What's in the Dust

If it were just dust, the story might be different. But the Salton Sea's lakebed is not ordinary dirt.

Decades of agricultural runoff carried fertilizers, pesticides, heavy metals, and salts into the lake. With nowhere to go, those chemicals concentrated in the sediment at the bottom. As the water retreats, that sediment dries out and becomes airborne every time the desert wind picks up. The result is a cocktail of toxic particles drifting across one of the poorest communities in California.

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Researchers from the University of Southern California and UC Irvine began tracking what that meant for local children in 2017. Their study — called AIRE, or Assessing Imperial Valley Respiratory Health and the Environment — enrolled more than 700 elementary school-age children across five cities in the northern Imperial Valley. They measured lung function, tracked respiratory symptoms, and followed the children over several years.

The findings, published in new research, are stark. Children living closest to the Salton Sea showed greater impairment in lung function and lung growth than studies have found in children living near heavily trafficked urban roads. Nearly 1 in 5 children in the region have asthma — a rate significantly higher than the national average. Even children without asthma showed symptoms: wheezing, coughing, reduced lung capacity.

This matters beyond childhood. Lungs continue developing through adolescence, and damage sustained early can set the trajectory for a lifetime. Poor lung function in youth raises the risk of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), recurring pneumonia, and other respiratory illness in adulthood. The kids who enrolled in AIRE as first-graders are now in high school. Their lungs have already absorbed years of this.

The People Left to Pay the Price

The communities south of the Salton Sea are predominantly low-income and Latino. For years, residents say, they have been absent from the rooms where decisions about the lake's future were made. The 2003 water agreement was negotiated to serve the growth of distant cities. The health consequences landed on people who had little say in the matter.

This is the structural pattern that environmental justice advocates have documented repeatedly: the benefits of a policy decision flow to those with political power, while the costs accumulate in communities with the least capacity to resist them. Local nonprofit Comité Cívico del Valle has spent years pushing for dust suppression projects, expanded asthma education, and improved healthcare access — work that now has scientific backing but still lacks the funding and urgency it demands.

The situation is about to get more complicated. Beneath the Salton Sea's lakebed lies one of the world's significant lithium deposits. Lithium — essential for electric vehicle batteries — has drawn major industrial interest to the region. The clean energy transition, in other words, may bring new industrial activity to an area already struggling with air quality. The same lake that is making children sick could become a hub for mining the materials that power the cars marketed as a climate solution.

That tension is not lost on local advocates, who are asking pointed questions about who bears the burden of a green economy.

What Comes Next

Scientists are careful to note that questions remain about the full long-term trajectory — how much worse air quality will get, whether dust suppression efforts can make a meaningful difference, and what additional industrial development will mean for the region's health.

But the evidence no longer leaves much room for inaction. The children in the AIRE study are living proof that water policy, climate change, and environmental neglect are not abstract problems. They are measurable, in liters of air a child's lungs can hold.

Researchers at USC and UC Irvine are calling for children's health to be placed at the center of any future planning around water rights, lithium extraction, and development near the Salton Sea — not treated as an afterthought once the economic decisions have already been made.