The Salton Sea: An inland ocean of massive fish kills, rotting resorts, and 120 degree nights located just minutes from | dG1fM29UWmtEakFIM00
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🎥
Short filmTranscript
00:00 [Splashing]
00:07 Let me tell you about a place.
00:09 [Music]
00:11 Far beyond the sprawl of suburban America,
00:14 where success and failure collide,
00:17 and where utopia and the apocalypse meet to dance a dirty tango.
00:22 It's a special place, a bit closer than you might think,
00:27 that draws a unique group of outsiders,
00:30 looking for an awfully beautiful life
00:33 on the edge of a beautifully awful paradise.
00:37 You know what, there's very few people that know about the Salton Sea.
00:42 Very few.
00:44 If they don't know where it's at, you tell them 50 miles south of Palm Springs.
00:48 That's how you use the reference point.
00:50 [Music]
00:54 California's version of the French Riviera,
00:57 with beautiful weather, water available for boating,
01:01 and as a place for recreation and fishing and so on.
01:06 Fishing in the summer is great. Great.
01:10 The hotter the water, the better the fishing.
01:13 That's not edible fish.
01:15 If they're eating those fish, and they eat very much of them,
01:17 they'll get botulism poisoning.
01:20 That sea is filthy.
01:22 Dead fish, dead birds, dead everything over there.
01:25 We have the odor problem. We have the insect problem.
01:29 Namely, the common housefly.
01:31 When it gets hot here in the summer, it's 120 degrees here.
01:34 100 degrees at midnight, you know it's warm.
01:37 But that's what we got air conditioning for.
01:40 We do even go swimming in the water.
01:43 It's more saltier than the ocean.
01:45 And it heals your skin.
01:48 If you have a skin problem, it heals your skin.
01:51 Why clean up a most useful sewer?
01:55 It's the greatest sewer the world has ever seen.
01:57 Leave it that way. It's perfect for that purpose.
02:00 If it had been handled correctly,
02:03 it would have been another Palm Springs right now.
02:06 Smell.
02:12 It's the smell a lot.
02:15 And then the fact that we don't have anything here.
02:18 It is rather bleak.
02:20 Bleak is the word.
02:22 The most beautiful body of water in California.
02:27 You can go boating, you can go fishing, you can go jet skiing.
02:30 You have beautiful rock formations.
02:32 You have the mountains where you can see,
02:34 in the summertime you can see snow caps in the mountains.
02:37 You have everything.
02:39 You have everything that you can find nowhere else.
02:41 There's no fast foods here.
02:46 There's no recreation for youngsters, kids or anything.
02:51 I mean, there ain't nothing here. You can't get nothing.
02:54 The stores close at 6 o'clock.
02:56 So you can't buy booze after 6 o'clock.
02:58 I like it here. I'll die here.
03:01 I mean, come on, we ain't even got a mall or nothing out here.
03:04 We're away from everything.
03:06 But it's just a super, super wonderful place.
03:10 [music]
03:17 [music]
03:20 [BLANK_AUDIO]