Contamination of soil and groundwater takes a huge toll on California’s environment.
In 2017, the amount of untreated sewage and industrial waste dumped into Southern California rivers was equal to at least 500 Olympic-sized swimming pools. More than 100 million gallons of untreated sewage were dumped into the Tijuana River near Imperial Beach in September 2019.
The problem is getting worse.
Activists pushed for action at a rally Saturday morning addressing the toxic flow of sewage from Tijuana into Southern California beaches.
Sewage flowing into the Tijuana River has been responsible for closing beaches an average of 300 days a year. Environmental organization “Stop the Poop” wants to see permanent solutions.
“This is environmental and biological terrorism on the people of the United States of America,” said Stop the Poop Founder Baron Partlow.
Elected leaders from around the San Diego region met with the Trump administration on Tuesday to ask for help stopping the sewage-tainted water that regularly flows in the Tijuana River across the border with Mexico.
Specifically, regional leaders tried to persuade federal authorities to fund a more than $400-million plan to capture and treat the pollution — which has shuttered shorelines in Imperial Beach on more than 200 days this year alone.
The U.S. Conference of Mayors joined Coronado and San Diego today in calling for increased federal funding to tackle Mexico river pollution that plagues San Diego County beaches and other communities along the southern U.S. border.
San Diego County has agreed to pay nearly $700,000 for a pipeline rupture that dumped raw sewage into a San Diego River tributary. The spill sent about 760,000 gallons of sewage into Los Coches Creek in February and March 2017, violating the federal Clean Water Act, among other state and federal rules. Those rules allowed the Regional Water Quality Control Board to penalize the county up to $7.8 million, but instead the county and regulators agreed to settle. The resulting fines amount to less than 90 cents per gallon of the spilled sewage.
International water investigators will meet with Mexican counterparts Monday to discuss clean-up and repair efforts after a huge sewage spill in the Tijuana River Valley. The meeting is expected to last most of the day and will mainly cover funding for continued repair of Mexico’s sewage infrastructure. “It’s reached its life cycle,” explained Lori Kuczmanski, the Public Affairs Officer for the IBWC. “The pipes are 50 to 60 years old. They’re outdated and just old and ruptured.”
While a ruptured pipe in Mexico continues to spill sewage into the Tijuana River, federal officials said that as of Friday morning the effluent was being captured at the border and diverted to a wastewater treatment facility. Over the last few days, efforts to remove sediment and debris from pumps in the Tijuana River helped restart a diversion system that effectively ended the cross-border impacts at 7 a.m., which reportedly started Monday night from a broken pipe that leaked millions of gallons and shuttered South Bay beaches.
Broken sewage infrastructure in Tijuana early this week sent roughly 7 million gallons a day of sewage into the Tijuana River, leading to beach closures along the south San Diego coast. The cause was a ruptured collector pipe in a part of the sewage system that has already received millions of dollars in upgrades in recent years, according to the International Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC), a joint U.S.-Mexico agency that oversees binational water issues.
The federal government was back in court Monday, arguing that the lawsuits asking the U.S. government to fix cross-border sewage flows should be thrown out. The Department of Justice is trying, for the second time, to have three cross-border sewage lawsuits thrown out before they get to trial. Imperial Beach, Chula Vista and the port of San Diego filed the first lawsuit. SurfRider’s San Diego chapter filed the second. And the state of California filed the third.
A bacteria common to sewage and feces was found in Camp Pendleton, California’s drinking water last month, Marine Corps officials warned on-base families this week in a notice obtained by Military.com. Base residents received a notice May 29 from the installation’s housing office that coliform bacteria had been found in the water supply during a routine test in April. The notice, dated May 25, says the drinking water is safe and that residents “do not need to boil your water or take other corrective actions.”
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
