IMPERIAL BEACH, Calif. (CN) — In the endless urban sprawl of Southern California, the Tijuana River Valley looks like a serene break of green before the sprawl resumes on the other side of the border.
But the seemingly bucolic area is where representatives from the California Coastal Commission met on Wednesday to see first hand how sewage in the river has made people in adjacent communities sick and affected state lands.
“It’s a matter of public health, of quality of life of course,” said Paloma Aguirre, the mayor of Imperial Beach, a city in San Diego County located five miles north of Tijuana.
Aguirre, who is also a commissioner on the California Coastal Commission, spoke to representatives from the group before its monthly meeting on a berm overlooking the Tijuana River Valley.
As Tijuana’s population and industrial sector has grown, the city’s public sewage treatment infrastructure has not. Broken, inoperable, and underperforming sewage treatment plants in Tijuana and a joint binational U.S-Mexico sewage treatment center have been leaking and discharging sewage into the Tijuana River for decades. The sewage not only pollutes the California coastline from Rosario in Mexico to Coronado in San Diego County, but during wet years, when the river flows, sewage runs up from Tijuana through the Tijuana River and out into Imperial Beach.
In August, Hurricane Hilary brought the sewage systems in Tijuana and along the border close to collapse, Aguirre said.
During and after the storm, two billion gallons of contaminated water flowed across the border, according to the International Boundary and Water Commission, the federal agency that operates the sewage treatment plant north of the U.S.-Mexico border.
After the storm, Imperial Beach had its first ever boil water advisory for three days. All of the city’s businesses were forced to shut down during that time, and some residents of the city came down with cases of Shigella and E. coli positioning, Aguirre added.
Even before that, sewage has caused officials to close the beach in the city for 285 days this year, and caused the Border Field State Park, a beach that abuts the U.S.-Mexico border and connects the Tijuana River Valley with the Pacific Ocean, to be closed for 680 consecutive days.
Beach closures, and the smell emanating from the sewage, have been a big blow to the local tourism and recreation economy, Aguirre added, and deprived low-income and Hispanic communities access to local beaches.
“We’re in a full and utter state of emergency. People are suffering,” Aguirre said.
When the Coastal Commission was taken to a mesa that abuts the border wall and looks out onto the closed Border Field State Park and the Tijuana River Estuary National Park, the largest coastal wetland in Southern California, Donne Brownsey, the chair of the Commission, said the scene almost made her cry.
“Nobody can go in. Nobody can walk on it,” she said. “Because it’s flooded with poop.”
At the commission's meeting at a seaside hotel in Imperial Beach after the tour, Aguirre requested that it vote to send a letter to both California Governor Gavin Newsom and President Biden demanding that a state of emergency be declared, and for the federal government to allocate up to a billion dollars to upgrade and expand the South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant, which treats Tijuana’s sewage, but is administered by the U.S. State Department, and divert the Tijuana River for treatment.
Brownsey added a suggestion to demand that the federal government fully fund the International Boundary and Water Commission, which along with working with the Mexican government on issues involving the waters and rivers that transverse the border, also develops and runs the South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant.
“We have a good and compassionate president, and I think if he knew about it, he would do something,” Brownsey said. “This is chump change,” she added, in comparison to other things the U.S. State Department funds.
The commission agreed to vote on the request next month.
On Wednesday, it spent hours hearing from various experts, officials, medical professionals, concerned citizens, and politicians, including Eleni Kounalakis, California’s lieutenant governor and chair of the State Lands Commission, about the environmental, public health, and economic impacts of the cross border pollution.
Local doctors Matt and Kimberly Dickson of South Bay Urgent Care said they’d seen a sharp intake of people coming into their clinic with diarrhea and gastrointestinal illness after Hurricane Hillary. These people were not swimming at the beach, they added, but just lived in the area.
“We’re sounding the alarm, we have the data,” said Kimberly Dickson. “We’re having health problems because of the sewage, and we need your help.”
The journal Environmental Sciences & Technology published research from the University of California-San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography in March that showed that the sewage from Tijuana is aerosolized and dispersed into the air by ocean waves near the shore.
Imperial Beach is one of the only relatively affordable beach communities left in Southern California, said Marce Gutiérrez-Graudiņš, the founder and executive director of Azul, a local organization that works with Hispanic residents to conserve marine resources, but it’s so polluted that she’s afraid to bring her kids to the beach.
“People just want to breathe,” she said.
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