IMPERIAL BEACH, Calif. — Looking for answers about the sewage-polluted, foul-smelling river they say has made them sick, residents packed a San Diego County school auditorium on Wednesday night. City Council members from Imperial Beach, a city 5 miles north of Tijuana, joined researchers and a government minister from Baja California to offer information and plans.
“We have a right to clean air as humans, and water,” said Augustina Gil, a local who spoke during the public comment section at Imperial Beach’s special meeting on the raw sewage and industrial chemicals polluting the Tijuana River.
She not only loses sleep because of the river's horrible odor, but she also believes living near the waterway has caused her gastrointestinal and other health problems.
While 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, Mexico, to Coronado in San Diego County, but as the river flows, sewage runs up from Tijuana through the Tijuana River and out into Imperial Beach.
When Hurricane Hilary hit the region in August 2023, it brought the sewage systems in Tijuana and along the border close to collapse.
During and after the storm, 2 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.
The agency's commissioner, Maria-Elena Giner, spoke at Wednesday’s meeting, along with a representative from the Environmental Protection Agency, a public health professor from San Diego State University, two researchers from Scripps Institute of Oceanography, and the Minister of Economy and Innovation for the Governor of Baja California.
Despite federal money earmarked 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 — Giner said more money is needed for projects like a levee that could protect nearby communities from flooding.
It’s up to the local community, and local leaders, to pressure the federal government to fund new infrastructure projects, a charge which Paloma Aguirre, the mayor of Imperial Beach, has helped lead.
Earlier this year, Aguirre traveled to Washington and lobbied for $310 million to fund the South Bay treatment plant. Last week Congress passed a $1.2 trillion budget package that includes $156 million for the commission's construction projects — marking a more than $100 million increase from last year’s budget.
Aguirre also wants the Biden administration to declare a state of emergency to streamline federal bureaucracy and allocate more federal funding for projects to fix the problem.
“This council has been fighting tooth and nail for you, every single day,” Aguirre said. She said more needs to be done, including funding projects to treat and divert wastewater from the river, and repairing and upgrading the San Antonio de los Buenos treatment plant in Punta Bandera in Baja California, one source of pollution that reaches Imperial Beach.
“I am ashamed,” said Kurt Ignacio Honold Morales, the secretary of economy and innovation for the Baja California governor’s office. “Sorry that we have not been doing anything in many years.”
Recently though, he added, the Baja government has started to pitch in with various projects to solve the problem. His state’s government is considering treating and recycling wastewater if other water sources run out. Closing beaches along the Baja coast because of wastewater pollution is another possibility.
“It’s on both sides,” he said.
Paula Stigler Granados, a public health professor at San Diego State University, showed findings that the water around Imperial Beach has 175 chemical compounds that are on the EPA’s list of toxic substances, including E. coli, legionella, acetone, pesticides and flame retardants, while DDT and PCBs were found in local soil.
Kimberly Prather, an atmospheric chemist and professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, presented research on how pathogens from the river are aerosolized.
The Tijuana River has a big impact on the air in Imperial Beach, Prather said, and there is a correlation between contaminants in the water being aerosolized, though researchers have yet to show the effects they have on people.
Prather also presented a statistic from two local doctors who said they had a 560% increase in patients with diarrheal illness after Hurricane Hillary flooded city streets, none of whom had contact with the water.
Imperial Beach is “holding a global level burden,” Aguirre said.
On Thursday afternoon around three dozen students high school students from nearby Coronado, and some elected officials, including Aguirre, gathered on Coronado Central Beach to protest the sewage pollution problem, and to ask President Biden to declare a state of emergency.
"We need our beaches open now, not later," said Danny Vinegrad, a high school student at Coronado High School, and the president of the school's Stop the Sewage club, who co-organized the protest.
One student held a sign that read "wake up and smell the sewage."
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