Tijuana River: ‘on the level of the Flint water crisis,’ warn advocates

Photo: The Tijuana River sewage crisis has forced some beaches to close for the past 800 days and counting.

For most of the past two years, residents of Imperial Beach have not been able to open their windows. Nor spend the day at the beach with their family. Nor send their children to a playground. A series of converging factors, including an increase in storms brought about by climate change, have caused raw sewage to spill into the Pacific Ocean.

“Every day is hit or miss — is this [a] day I am going open [to] the door and be hit by that unbearable stench?” said Imperial Beach Mayor Paloma Aguirre, an avid but frustrated surfer who made this her signature issue. “An entire generation of children here are growing up not knowing if it is safe to go outside.”

Outdated sewage treatment plants on both sides of the border have fallen into disrepair, bringing a host of deleterious public health, environmental, and economic challenges. It’s so bad that beaches have been closed for the past 800 days and counting. Imperial Beach is not alone, as the sewage has moved as far north as Coronado, just south of San Diego.

A crisis like this should never happen in California, with the fifth largest economy in the world,” said Aguirre. “We are living with conditions parallel to that of a developing nation.”

This crisis is a classic example of a local issue that requires a bipartisan regional, state, and federal response. When crises of this size impact cities — whether they be threats to the local water supply, a wildfire, an earthquake, or catastrophic flooding — no community can respond to an emergency and manage its impacts alone. Indeed, further east, local officials in Imperial County are struggling with a similar problem in the New River. While not as severe as the Tijuana River crisis, officials there are trying to contain another surge of cross-border pollution, chemicals, and sewage made worse by climate change.

Cities near the Tijuana River have collaborated with county and federal elected officials, nonprofits, and residents to pressure the state and federal governments into action. Their efforts began to pay off in March when Congress allocated $103 million — about a third of what’s needed — to upgrade a key waste treatment plant in San Ysidro. It also included a provision that allows additional federal agencies, local and state governments, and nonprofits to contribute funding to repair and operate the treatment facility. 

Such a collective effort can serve as a precedent for other cities affected by large-scale crises beyond their scope to address. But much work remains.

A worsening problem

The Tijuana River watershed, which originates in Mexico, has been a source of pollution for a century. But for the last two decades, Tijuana’s treatment plants have not been able to keep up with the city’s swelling population. Add a marked increase in severe storms and millions of gallons of contaminated water are now flowing out to the ocean each day as far north as San Diego. A January storm alone brought the highest one-day flow of sewage-tainted water since 1993. The total amount of annual waste discharged reached 40 billion gallons in 2023 — an increase of 30 billion over the previous year.

But it’s not just Mexico’s Punta Bandera sewage treatment plant that can no longer keep pace. North of the border, the federally managed International Wastewater Treatment Plant is already woefully inadequate and needs hundreds of millions of […]

Full article: www.westerncity.com