Boiling Point: Living in Death Valley

Welcome to Boiling Point. I’m Melody Petersen, a reporter on The Times’ climate team, writing the newsletter this week to fill in for my colleague Sammy Roth.

California’s Death Valley is famous for being the “hottest place on Earth.” Even without this month’s heat waves, temperatures in July in the national park frequently top 120.

Tourists seldom spend more than 24 hours here in the summer, but park rangers, tourism staff and Native Americans live in the park full-time, and conditions can easily kill those who are careless.

My colleague Noah Haggerty recently traveled to Death Valley and talked to residents about how they deal every day with extreme heat in the summer.

One park ranger measured her tap water at 105 degrees because the underground pipes were so hot. In order to avoid being scalded while showering, rangers sometimes turn off their hot water heaters, which gives the water a chance to cool down to a more reasonable 80 degrees.

“My first summer here, it was a learning experience,” said Jennette Jurado, who works as a park spokesperson and supervisory ranger. “I started to learn to tentatively touch a metal surface before just grabbing a doorknob to open it.”

Stephen Peterson works in the general store in the small tourist town of Stovepipe Wells. He moved to Death Valley in the spring because the concession company that manages Stovepipe Wells for the federal government offered a sweet deal: cheap on-site housing, subsidized food and modest pay.

The heat, he says, can feel like a blow dryer in your face. And sweat evaporates so fast that the skin doesn’t seem to get wet.

Not far from Stovepipe Wells, tucked away on 300 acres within the park, members of the Timbisha Shoshone Tribe live through it all, as visitors come and go.

“This is our homeland — we’ve lived here all our lives,” said Cathy Cottonwood, a maintenance worker from the tribe. “We just hunker down, try to stay cool, do things in the morning and evening, just deal with it.”

Read much more in Noah’s story and make sure to visit the park — especially when the weather cools down.

Mandi Campbell, the tribal historic preservation officer, hopes people understand that the area has more to offer than the hottest temperatures on Earth. “That isn’t all that Death Valley is about,” she said. “You just have to come out and see it.”

On that note, here’s what else is happening around the West:

TOP STORIES

Another bout of prolonged heat has kicked off across California and much of the West, with expectations that it will again bring several days of triple-digit temperatures to most inland areas, writes Grace Toohey.

July’s second major heat wave isn’t forecast to be as extreme as the first one, but officials are bracing for an increased threat of wildfire.

A pair of fast-burning fires ignited Sunday in Riverside County, rapidly scorching more than 2,000 acres of brush, causing evacuations and burning multiple structures.

South of downtown Riverside, the Hawarden fire had burned about 500 acres by late afternoon Sunday. Video from the scene showed several homes burned and residents fleeing the area.

“It’s a scary day here in Riverside,” Mayor Patricia Lock Dawson said on Sunday. “It’s going to be a very long night.”

Arson investigators were probing reports that the fire was caused by children setting off fireworks.

Meanwhile, about 175 firefighters were battling the Eagle fire, which erupted about 2:15 p.m. Sunday at Cajalco and Eagle Canyon roads, east of Corona. The fire burned out of control for several hours, blackening about 500 acres. The blaze continued to grow Monday morning, with more than 1,600 acres burned.

And in new research related to wildfires, a study found that millions of people are living in close proximity to oil and gas wells that are in the potential path of flames, writes Hayley Smith.

More than 100,000 wells in 19 states west of the Mississippi River are in areas that have burned in recent decades and face a high risk of burning in the future, with the vast majority in California, according to a study published in the journal One Earth.

Nearly 3 million Americans live within 3,200 feet of those wells, putting them at heightened risk of explosions, air and water pollution, infrastructure damage and other hazards.

CHEMICALS IN TAP WATER

California’s drinking water comes from more than 2,900 different community water systems, according to the Environmental Working Group’s Tap Water Database.

And the water delivered by each of those systems can have surprisingly different trace levels of arsenic and other harmful chemicals. That’s because each draws from different water sources.

In 2023, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power — which serves about 4 million people — sourced its tap water from the L.A. Aqueduct, the California Aqueduct and the Colorado River Aqueduct as well as from local groundwater, according to its most recent drinking water quality report.

How do you find out what chemical traces might be in your tap water?

Staff writer Deborah Vankin detailed how readers can use their ZIP Code to look up what chemicals are in their home’s tap water and then buy the right filter to help remove them.

Water agencies say the levels of chemicals in our drinking water are too low to be harmful. Yet officials are continuing to find ways to improve water quality.

For example, Hayley Smith writes about how state regulators, scientists and tech companies are trying to keep agricultural weed killers and pesticides out of our water supplies and the rest of the environment.

Last year, the California Department of Pesticide Regulation released a road map for sustainable pest management that aims to transition the state away from harmful chemicals and toward safer, organic alternatives by 2050.

On a recent summer morning, nearly 200 farmers, academics and engineers gathered to witness the future of automated agriculture.

Thirteen hulking machines with names like “Weed Spider” and “Mantis” crawled through rows of romaine. One used artificial intelligence cameras to scan the crops and spray them with herbicides. Another zapped weeds with lasers. Yet another deployed robotic arms to cultivate and pick through the foliage.

And in some good news about water, which is always in short supply in California, residents are using about 8 fewer gallons of water per day than they did during the last drought emergency.

For the 12 months that ended April 30, urban water users consumed an average of 77 gallons per person per day. That is a 9% decrease since the drought emergency ended March 2023, according to an analysis by Sean Greene, assistant editor for data and graphics.

THE ENERGY TRANSITION

Sales of electric vehicles are a key statistic in determining whether California can meet its goal of banning new gas-powered cars by 2035. And recent numbers will disappoint those who have been pushing for that transition, writes my colleague Russ Mitchell.

After years of rapid expansion, electric vehicle sales growth in California trended down in the middle of last year and now has turned negative. In this year’s second quarter, 101,443 all-electric cars were registered in the state, down from 102,730 in the second quarter of 2023, a drop of 1.2%.

As recently as last summer, that growth rate was positive at 55%. It fell to 16% growth in the fourth quarter last year, 2% in the first quarter this year, and now has gone negative.

Tesla, once the darling of California car buyers, was hit hard. It’s still by far the EV sales leader, but Tesla’s California sales plunged 24.1% in the second quarter. Nationally, according to Kelley Blue Book, Tesla sales dropped 6.3% for the second quarter, even as total EV sales climbed 7.3%.

“Tesla’s allure seems to be wearing off, signaling potential trouble for the direct-to-consumer manufacturer,” the car dealers group said in a news release.

ONE MORE THING

The annual celestial spectacle of the Perseid meteor shower is now on and will reach its peak in mid-August.

The Perseids are caused by Earth passing through debris left by the comet Swift-Tuttle, which completes its orbit around the sun every 133 years.

From mid-July to early September, the Earth’s orbital path crosses that of the comet. And those grain-sized debris become “falling stars” as they enter the Earth’s atmosphere at high speed, burning up and producing spectacular streaks of light.

The Times’ Jirah Deng lays out the steps experts suggest you take to enjoy the meteor light show.

This is the latest edition of Boiling Point, an email newsletter about climate change and the environment in California and the American West. You can sign up for Boiling Point here. And for more climate and environment news, follow @Sammy_Roth on X.