When Alexis Rodriguez laughs too much, he has a cough so strong that he wants to use his inhaler. This has been the case for the 29-year-old since being diagnosed with asthma as a child. His symptoms recur regularly in the spring, when the upper desert around the Salton Sea in California begins to warm and the dust begins to blow.
But Covid-19 anything else.
“It’s the worst breathing challenge I’ve ever had,” Rodriguez said. The virus spread to her lungs and caused pneumonia, which sent her to the hospital. “It’s like you’re in so much pain. Just to breathe a new air.
Covid-19 struck his family circle in June, moving from his older brother, his sister and young son, his father and, despite everything, Rodriguez. She had the worst.
Respiratory diseases are no stranger to Latin American communities living around California’s largest lake, the Salton Sea. Asthma rates are among California’s, and air quality does not consistently meet federal and state standards. Thanks, in part, to the invasive water wars in the state, the water of this ancient and desolate holiday destination dries up quickly, salinizes the lake and releases decades-old pollutants in the air.
The network that is already experiencing an environmental crisis is now facing a pandemic of the worst proportions. Residents and activists, who have long fought for more investment and pollutant mitigation, say the region is already at a significant disadvantage for health care. Now, the agricultural network has largely been discovered in the midst of a typhoon of environmental abandonment, poverty and coronavirus.
While Covid-19 instances reappear in the United States, the numbers have been in the Golden State. Announced for immediate closures that helped thwart hospitals to the max at the start of the crisis, California is now breaking records for one-day cases.
Communities near the Salton Sea are among the hardest hit in the entire state. To the north, east of the Coachella Valley has the highest number of coronavirus cases and deaths from any district in Riveraspect County, and Riveraspect has the highest number of Covid-19 cases in the state, apart from Los Angeles. On the other side of the lake to the south, adjacent Imperial County also has a Covid-19 access point, with the highest mortality rate in California. The main hospital is so overrun that they resorted to the use of portable military-style tents in the three-digit heat. Almost all inpatients have Covid-19.
“Covid is a leech. It thrives in those conditions, so you’ve noticed the peak here,” said Luis Olmedo, executive director of the Valley Civic Committee, a veteran environmental justice organization founded in Imperial Valley. “We enjoy it every day. People die, have poor health and have permanent scars.”
Oasis and Mecca, two of the brave cities that dot the shores of the Salton Sea, once took its name. Created by a twist of fate in 1905 after a faulty dam tossed new water from the Colorado River into the once-dry basin, the sea is a true wonder of the desert. In the mid-20th century, it became a resort of the circle of relatives, attracting citizens looking for a break from the hustle and bustle of Los Angeles, a three-hour drive from the west. The holidaymakers arrived for water sports and fishing the sown corvina.
In the 1970s, there was a radical change. The runoff from nearby farmland that flowed untreated into the sea, combined with dirty water due to a new limited water supply, has led to the deaths of large fish. The algae in the lake, feeding on decomposition, have reshaped the strange shades of green and red water. Then a stinking smell began.
But nothing exacerbated the challenge more than the 2003 approval of a multi-million dollar water move to San Diego: the largest water deal between the farm and the city in U.S. history. He diverted water from the Colorado River that was once available for use in the valley, cutting off runoff into the lake. Critics say the benefits of the deal have not materialized. The region’s water barons, the wealthy farmers who hold the original water rights in the valley, also opposed the measure. Approximately 500 farms perform the tasks on approximately 3.1 million acres-feet of water in line with the year on the Colorado River. By contrast, nearly a quarter of inconsistent internal county lives in poverty. The per capita source of income in 2018 was around $17,500, according to the most recent census figures.
Many citizens of the Imperial Valley are connected to a large agricultural sector that is dedicated to the production of most of America’s winter crops.
“I like to call it the last plantation. There are incredibly wealthy white farmers and poor people,” said Malissa McKeith, a lawyer for the nonprofit citizens United for Resources and the Environment. He has fought for years by opposing the water movement agreement, pushing for at least $250 million to set aside at least $250 million to build hospitals and build medical facilities for long-term environmental effects on residents, without success.
The loss of water, now exacerbated by increasingly warm temperatures due to climate change, has practically decided on the fate of the Salton Sea. It will continue to shrink and the poisonous powder containing arsenic and fertilizer will be increasingly exposed. The lake has already receded in portions of a football field, revealing crumbling banks made from petrified percebs and dead fish exoskeletons. It is riddled with dead birds, recognizable only through their residual feathers.
For McKeith, it’s not unexpected how much Covid-19 has hit the community, given the debris that continues to come out of the sea.
“Start with other people whose respiratory formula is so compromised,” he says. “This scenario can simply, in spite of everything, awaken other people to the environmental Chernobyl they created, allowing so much water to pass to rich communities without tackling the Salton Sea.”
Nearly 50% of Riverside County and 84% of Imperial County are Hispanic, according to state and census estimates. Many Latin American communities in counties do not have access to basic physical fitness care and suffer from physical fitness disorders such as asthma, high blood pressure, diabetes and obesity. Sometimes families live together in multigenerational homes. Many also have essential jobs such as farm collectors, criminal staff and nurses. Most cannot take a license for poor physical condition, let alone move elsewhere.
Research has linked contaminated air, which Latinos are more likely to breathe in the United States than whites, with a higher likelihood of death by Covid-19. Exposure to poor or tight living situations and comorities is also an idea to worsen infection rates and get worse results. In California, the threat to Latin American communities is clear. Latinos account for a disproportionate percentage of Covid-19 instances, accounting for 55.6% of the instances and 45.2% of deaths in the state, accounting for approximately 39% of the population.
Anna Rosas, 34, a registered practical nurse who works the night shift at The Center Regional Medical Center in Imperial, feels guilty about the death of her husband (and great school lover) Luis Rosas.
“I can’t help but, you know, maybe it’s my fault,” he said.
As a fitness professional for thirteen years, Rosas is more aware of the spread of Covid-19 in his community. She took her hands, wore a mask and limited her exits. “My husband wouldn’t mind. It would be like, “Oh, well, when you get home from work, I’ll have to warn you, ” he said.
But during the time she joined her sister-in-law’s Mother’s Day birthday party on May 10, along with six other members of her close circle, she felt sick.
When Rosas later tested positive, he walked away from home, pressuring Luis and his 8-year-old son to move in with his sister, who at the time lived with his girlfriend, his parents and his brother of three. one bedroom apartment. In a week, almost the entire circle of family members had symptoms.
While Rosas was able to avoid the hospital, his sister-in-law and stepmother were admitted and intubated. Rosas’ brother-in-law, 33, died at his home. After 3 weeks in intensive care, her husband also died. He’s 37. Her husband had weight and center problems, as did other members of her family.
“I would have liked to definitely isolate myself, come and paint and not move from home. Because, as a hospital painter, I would have liked to do it,” Rosas said. “However, it is difficult. I’ve never separated myself from my husband in my life.”
“Riverside County knows East Coachella Valley just because it’s on a map,” said Maria Pozar, an unincorporated north shore community housewife. Located just across the sea, the domain is largely made up of cell homes. At least 84 other people contracted Covid-19.
Pozar is considered the unofficial mayor of the city, a role she played when the mothers of the sewing categories she taught began to express her considerations about her children’s common nosebleeds, due to the sea. Now, she is involved in building Covid-19 instances, which she attributes to the county’s resolution to reopen too soon. Riverside County voted unanimously on May 12 to pass a commercial reopening plan, even though case trials have been developed in the eastern Coachella Valley. Two weeks later, the cases tripled. Imperial County will also reopen in early June, despite the highest rate of Covid-19 cases in the state at the time.
The virus in desert communities in Southern California has poured salt into the purulent wounds of inequality.
“The government has a duty to take care of everyone,” said Olmedo of the Valley Civic Committee, who grew up in Imperial Valley. “We want to stabilize the exposed domain [around the sea]. We’re not talking about undisturbed domain weed dust. This has been a sinkhole for commercial waste and municipal waste. There’s no way to produce sugar. It’s a site of the army experiment. We don’t know what’s under the sea. What we do know is that we do not want it to be exposed”.
Governor Gavin Newsom visited Salton Sea’s dominance in 2018 and agreed that the domain is at its “tipping point.” In June, the state legislature allocated $47 million to help the Salton Sea. Some, adding Olmedo, come to the moment with a ray of hope.
For the population to plunge into the dreary lake, Olmedo said that he and others will have to abandon the resentments of the past, settle for water being sold, and focus on mitigating the two major crises the region now faces: climate change. and Covid19. This means working together with some of the government officials in whom the population has long thought of opposing them, as staff and little else.
“We have here a 100-year playbook in which the pioneers came here and ‘founded’ Imperial. Clearly, those of us who are Latinos, Mexicans and Native Americans never had power. They took it from us. Then we have those emotions deferred. But now we have those bigger disorders than all, ” said Olmedo. “This crisis, which is here, is at the center of our network and nothing else matters.”
This article is supported by the Draft Economic Difficulties Reports.