Damien Lopez, age 4, has symptoms that many people who live near Southern California’s Salton Sea also have.
“His cough gets very wheezy. I try to control him,” his mother Michelle Lopez said.
“Control” often means visiting pediatric nurse Christina Galindo at Pioneers Memorial Hospital.
State Assemblymember Eduardo Garcia, D-Coachella, Riverside County Supervisor V. Manuel Perez and other local leaders revealed a plan Saturday for a recreation and restoration project at the Salton Sea using $19.25 million in state funds.
The Salton Sea North Lake Pilot Demonstration Project is slated to be an approximately 156-acre marina that will be located near the current North Shore Beach and Yacht Club Community Center in the community of North Shore.
“The North Lake Pilot Demonstration Project is an important habitat and dust suppression project and a major investment in state funding to revitalize the northern end of the Salton Sea as well as the community of North Shore,” Perez said in a statement.
When Lucas Zucker talks about sea level rise in California, his first thoughts aren’t about waves crashing onto fancy homes in Orange County, nor the state’s most iconic beaches shrinking year after year.
What worries him most are the three power plants looming over the Oxnard coast, and the toxic waste site that has languished there for decades. There are also two naval bases, unknown military dumps and a smog-spewing port. Just one flood could unleash a flow of industrial chemicals and overwhelm his working-class, mostly Latino community.
From 1963 to 1985, aerospace manufacturing company Senior Aerospace Ketema (formerly Ametek) in El Cajon dumped thousands of pounds of a chemical degreaser into a shallow redwood-lined pit that sat on its property.
This resulted in a toxic groundwater plume of trichloroethylene, which travels through the soil by a process called soil vapor intrusion into the three large mobile home parks surrounding the facility — Greenfield, Starlight and Villa Cajon — as well as Magnolia Elementary School.
This caused related illnesses among residents and students alike. The air in one mobile home at the school had more than twice the amount that triggered an immediate closure of Magnolia Elementary in the 2015-16 school year due to health concerns. TCE is known to cause a variety of cancers, cause reproductive harm, damage the immune system, and can cause dizziness, headaches, and confusion.
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
