A salty home away from home? I hope not

A cloud of rolling dust, thick and yellow, smelling of sulfur and tasting of salt, enveloped downtown Salt Lake City, and in a brief second I imagined a very nasty future for the Imperial Valley.

The grit was on our teeth and in our mouths, a light dusting uncomfortable on the skin, and an unmistakable stink that didn’t clear for about 20 minutes as some co-workers and I cut a path through the chalky air.

It was the handiwork of Utah’s Great Salt Lake.

Hypersaline and supporting almost no life except for the brine shrimp that scoot along its murky depths, dust storms do happen on occasion in the areas surrounding the lake. Yet the dust storm we got caught in last Friday afternoon was apparently on a scale not seen in several years.

It reminded me of the Salton Sea, and what could be in store for the Valley if the salt- and compound-powdered playa revealed by the continued receding of the shoreline worsens.

The Salton Sea and the Great Salt Lake are similar in a lot of ways, but the reality is the Salton Sea is much worse off. It’s not inconceivable that a dust storm like last week’s would make me sick if it were in the Valley.

Like the Salton Sea, the Great Salt Lake started out as a freshwater lake, but unlike the Salton Sea, it still has a source of fresh water flowing into it from the Uinta Mountains, according to a professor of geology from California State University, Los Angeles.

The Great Salt Lake, like our sea, has no outlets to filter and replenish it, but it also does not have its sole supplier of water containing pesticides and chemical fertilizers, wrote professor Ivan Colburn.

For the most part, that dust cloud I was caught in was pure salt, with possibly a dash and pinch of a few benign compounds thrown in for flavor. The Salton Sea’s playa, or exposed shoreline, is known to contain magnesium and some residual selenium, as well as the identified residue of pesticides and fertilizers.

Local advocates for the sea have shown us the photos of the playa-fueled dust clouds kicked up, small-scale versions of the rolling wall of salt I experienced in downtown Salt Lake.

In limited areas locals have done some admirable work to deal with that through wetlands and by testing out pilot projects to mitigate the dust. But the playa problem has the potential to worsen and on a much bigger scale as inflows to the Salton Sea decrease as part of the water transfer to San Diego.

This transfer lasts for 75 years, for crying out loud. If the sea continues to lose elevation, we’re looking at a very uncomfortable and unhealthy environment on our hands.

What a coincidence that the Imperial County Air Pollution Control District officer would call in his Great Basin counterpart earlier this week to talk about the past and present of Owens Lake, another California lake depleted due to thirsty urban interests.

Exposed playa on the southern end of Owens Lake registered some of the highest air-pollution measurements ever recorded in the United States. Even now, as something like 80 years of dust storms have been brought to a manageable level through dust-control efforts that have cost billions of dollars, air-pollution levels still exceed all federal standards.

I’m not saying anything anyone around here doesn’t already know. We’ve heard it before, we’ve written it before. It was just shocking to be in the middle of something that very well could be a daily occurrence if all of that political will to fix the sea dries up, if all the big plans don’t pan out and an honest-to-goodness source of revenue to do the work never materializes.

I’ve got strong lungs, and so do my children. We are among the fortunate people to be raised in the Valley who have dodged the childhood asthma bullet that all too often is the rule and not the exception.

I couldn’t imagine being an asthmatic and walking through that wall of Utah salt if it was also laced with magnesium and selenium. Neither are cancer-causing agents and don’t purport to have any health effects other than being breathing irritants, but that is more than enough to trigger a potentially deadly asthma attack.

This column first appeared in the Imperial Valley Press, Sept. 13, 2013.