The Port of San Diego has joined San Diego County and the cities of San Diego and Imperial Beach in declaring a local emergency related to the ongoing Tijuana River Valley pollution crisis, officials said Wednesday.
San Diego County will spend $5 million to expand removal of sewage and trash from Mexico that accumulates in the Tijuana River Valley.
On Tuesday, the Board of Supervisors unanimously approved a plan that involves building a sediment- and trash-control basin and dredging the drainage channels, known as Smuggler’s Gulch and Pilot Channel, that often build up with debris after storms.
Imperial Beach urgently needs federal funding to put an end to the Tijuana River’s ongoing sewage spill that’s kept portions of the city’s beaches closed, Mayor Paloma Aguirre wrote in a letter to the White House.
Seeking a federal state of emergency status for the continued pollution, Mayor Aguirre called on the Biden administration to declare the emergency for the shoreline of Imperial Beach and the Tijuana River Valley. Such a proclamation would expedite funding and projects across federal agencies to tackle the source of the issue.
Imperial Beach’s new mayor, Paloma Aguirre, is dealing with an old problem in her city: beach closures forced by raw sewage from Mexico.
A recent string of powerful storms in the region has forced lots of raw sewage, trash, tires and other debris across the southern border into California.
Raw sewage is flowing into the Tijuana River Valley.
A private developer inadvertently damaged a 60-inch pipe on Feb. 10 which led to the spillage, according to the International Boundary and Water Commission.
Most of the sewage is spilling into Smuggler’s Gulch and Goat Canyon.
Every year, Imperial Beach residents board up their windows and shovel ocean sand off streets left underwater during high tide.
Researchers have been testing technology that warns the city in time to prepare for the arrival of powerful waves and, most recently, digging groundwater wells to track flooding.
The community can also play a significant role in reducing Imperial Beach’s flooding problems, researchers at San Diego State University said last week. How residents can get involved is what the researchers are hoping to find out.
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan got a first-hand look Friday at the Tijuana River Valley, where hundreds of millions of gallons of water laced with raw sewage, trash and industrial chemicals regularly foul San Diego shorelines, shuttering beaches as far north as Coronado.
“You know, you can read about these things and have your own visualization, but seeing it first-hand really is impactful,” said Regan, the first EPA administrator to tour the local border region.
Rain fell on San Diego Monday. It wasn’t a lot of rain – an Accuweather forecast called for “a brief morning shower or two” with an anticipated rainfall of 0.01 inches.
But it was enough to prompt a beach closure at the Tijuana Slough, just south of Imperial Beach. That section of the beach is closed whenever the Tijuana River is flowing.
Cross-border sewage spills have been an issue in South County for decades.
The San Diego region last year secured $300 million to plug a decades-long wastewater pollution crises in waters that snake across the U.S.-Mexico border and dump raw sewage, trash and sediment into the Pacific Ocean.
On Tuesday, Environmental Protection Agency officials held a virtual public meeting attended by more than 130 people to reveal 10 project proposals being considered to fix crumbing wastewater infrastructure at the border using the $300 million earmarked by the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA).
If the San Diego-Tijuana region were a human body, it’d have the stomach flu: Bad stuff is coming out of both ends. But instead of tackling the complicated source of the infection, the border towns are fighting over where to put a Band-Aid.
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
