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In the wake of rising outcry in San Diego of cross-border flows of contaminated water, trash and sediment from Tijuana, Mexico is moving ahead with a series of short-term upgrades to Tijuana’s sewage collection and treatment system aimed at preventing such incidents, and responding with greater speed should they occur. These efforts include upgrading a key piece of infrastructure in Tijuana known as Pump Station CILA that is critical for preventing dry weather flows in the Tijuana River channel from crossing into the United States.

Jim Cuming is a retired farmer whose grandfather immigrated to the U.S. from Ireland. Edward Cuming got 160 acres in Arizona’s Yuma Valley from the federal government. Jim Cuming said the land was as undeveloped as a dry riverbed. In order to survive and develop the farm, his grandfather had to make a living. “This Laguna Dam project opened up. So they moved up to the dam and he worked on the dam there as a carpenter,” he said. That means Cuming’s grandfather helped build the dam that made it possible to irrigate his own farmland.

NBC 7’s Audra Stafford reports on sewage spills along the U.S.-Mexico border over the last 3 years that are the subject of a new lawsuit filed Friday.

The decision of the Port of San Diego and the cities of Imperial Beach and Chula Vista to sue the U.S. branch of the binational International Boundary and Water Commission for allegedly violating the federal Clean Water Act is a proportionate, necessary response to a grave problem that only seems to get worse, not better. The port and the cities say they can no longer tolerate the commission’s failure to prevent sewage, trash, industrial waste and pesticides from flowing through the Tijuana River and into the Pacific Ocean on the U.S. side of the border.

South Bay elected officials said they are filing a lawsuit Friday in the most dramatic attempt in decades to force the federal government to plug up the millions of gallons of sewage and polluted water that routinely stream over the border from Tijuana into the San Diego region. The cities of Imperial Beach and Chula Vista, as well as the Port of San Diego are suing the U.S. side of the International Boundary and Water Commission, or IBWC, alleging violations of the Clean Water Act and Resource Conservation and Recovery Act.