(soft guitar music) ♪ (Luis) It’s beautiful, huh?

It looks like we’re on the ocean.

(Shane) Yeah, it really does.

I feel like this is the kind of scene where you’d expect to see, like, beach umbrellas and beach towels and people splashing around in the water.

♪ (barbecue-sound collage) This is Luis Olmedo.

(sizzling) When he isn’t making mouthwatering BBQ, his family’s secret recipe, Luis carries forward another of his father’s legacies, advocating for the people who call the Valley home.

♪ (Luis) My father was a farm worker.

Through a lot of the leadership lessons from the farm worker movement, organizations like Comite Civico were born.

(Shane) In the Imperial Valley, food is grown and harvested by thousands of migrant and seasonal workers.

And Luis’s nonprofit, Comite Civico del Valle, works to advance these workers’ rights and protections.

But there’s another issue that looms large here.

♪ (Luis) Yeah, this, uh, this looks like the Gulf of California.

♪ It’s just peaceful, like, it reminds me of that.

(newsreel announcer) Here in the desert, the new recreational capital of the world.

(Shane) Once known as the California Riviera, the Salton Sea boasted an inland coastline thronged by beachgoers.

(energetic music) Its idyllic shores drew celebrities like Frank Sinatra and The Beach Boys, and more tourists than Yosemite.

But this desert paradise... (ominous rumble) ...was a mirage.

(haunting music) (Luis) Over a hundred years of materials, chemicals, pesticides.

You know, anything that is being used by the agriculture industry, every time we flush our toilets, all water ends up in the Salton Sea.

Some of it treated, some of it not treated.

(Shane) It seems like a regular beach, but then, when you get close, you look at... like, the sand doesn’t look quite right.

The smell isn’t quite right, and then, of course, there’s, like, nobody.

(eerie music) By some accounts, the Salton Sea is an "accident" of infrastructure, formed when floodwaters breached a canal in 1905 and flooded an existing sump, or low point in the landscape.

(slide carousel-like click) But others argue that the Salton Sump was always the intended destination for agricultural runoff.

(Luis) I can’t think that the top engineers, top scientists, top geologists, top agronomists of their time, and investors of their time, made a mistake, and somehow, the Salton Sea became a sump for agriculture.

(waves softly breaking) (Shane) Whatever the engineers’ intent was, the Salton Sea has become something else.

(uneasy music) With no outlet to the ocean, its shallow waters evaporate into the desert air, concentrating mineral salts, fertilizers, and other agrochemicals.

♪ As water use in the valley dwindles, the lake is shrinking and exposing toxic sediments left behind by decades of runoff.

♪ And in the Valley’s notorious winds, those sediments take to the sky.

(gauge’s blades whirring) (soft, tense music) Data from these stations have prompted Luis and colleagues to sound the alarm on some concerning trends.

The rate of pediatric asthma here is among the highest in the U.S. (faint traffic noises) ♪ (Luis) People are being assaulted persistently by toxic particulates that are attacking their bodies, their lungs, the cardiovascular system.

(Shane) People living near the Salton Sea also experienced the highest death rate in California from COVID-19.

(Luis) This is a health crisis.

This is an environmental crisis.

(birds calling) (Shane) Thousands of birds have died of avian cholera, and fish suffocate en masse in stifling, nutrient-clogged waters.

♪ (Luis) And we live in the best country, you know, of the world.

That’s what we say, right?

-We believe that.

-Mm.

(Luis) But if we’re that, well, what happened here?

(sorrowful music) (Shane) The abandoned lakeshore, the putrid smell, the health disaster.

It’s apocalyptic.

♪ And it’s not the only place that our grand aspirations of taming the Colorado River have transformed.

♪