Each day, millions of gallons of raw sewage cascade through a canyon and into the Pacific Ocean just south of the U.S.-Mexican border. - REUTERS
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00Imperial Beach is a Southern California community wedged between San Diego and Tijuana,
00:07and it's the kind of place where you'd like to stroll the pier, walk the sand, and surf the waves, but for the smell.
00:14It smells here on the beach, it smells at my home. I live right across the street from the beach.
00:19And the yellow warning signs.
00:21It's crazy because I live right across the street from the beach, and I have a granddaughter who comes,
00:27but I'll bring her here, like where I sit, but I won't put her in the sand,
00:31because obviously the water comes up and goes down, or play in the water.
00:35The reek and the caution is because each day, millions of gallons of raw sewage originating in Mexico
00:41is gushing into the Pacific Ocean just south of here.
00:45Paloma Aguirre is the mayor of Imperial Beach.
00:49We're living the biggest environmental crisis in the nation, in my opinion.
00:55We have been named, sadly, the most polluted beach in the entire United States.
01:01So this is what 50 million gallons a day of untreated wastewater looks like.
01:06It's kind of a sad story where this flow has been flowing like this for two and a half years.
01:11That's why our beaches have been closed for over 900 days in Imperial Beach.
01:15Chris Helmer is the director of environmental and natural resources for the city of Imperial Beach,
01:20and he's standing alongside the Tijuana River.
01:23A mix of treated and untreated wastewater flows into this river
01:27from an overburdened and aging treatment plant on the American side of the U.S.-Mexico border.
01:32The International Wastewater Treatment Plant was built in 1997 to treat sewage from the city of Tijuana.
01:38It belongs to the International Boundary and Water Commission,
01:41a creation of U.S.-Mexican treaty agreements.
01:44Morgan Rogers gave Reuters a tour of the facility,
01:47where he said the plant's capacity was strained until it failed.
01:51Back in March of last year, all five of our primary sedimentation tanks were out of service.
01:57So we've been out of compliance with our permit for a while.
01:59When Reuters visited, only one of the plant's five primary tanks,
02:03each with nearly the capacity of an Olympic swimming pool, was working properly.
02:08See some flow coming through here.
02:11So we're making some good progress.
02:13We need at least three of these tanks online to properly treat the wastewater.
02:18We're expecting that we'll be in compliance again in the August time frame.
02:23Rogers said a $30 million upgrade will help bring the plant back to compliance,
02:27and he said the plant is also about to undergo a $600 million expansion to double capacity,
02:32of which $400 million has been budgeted.
02:35But this struggling treatment plant is only one source of the raw sewage spoiling local beaches.
02:40About six miles south of the border,
02:42a tunnel beneath the coastal highway releases gushing wastewater into the Pacific.
02:47It is outflow from San Antonio de los Buenos,
02:50Tijuana's broken-down sewage treatment plant.
02:53Mexico says a new $33 million plant under construction is scheduled to come online by September 30.
03:00The total amount of sewage flowing into the ocean is a matter of dispute,
03:04but its impact is clear.
03:06While Mexico is not officially admitting that they're dumping this amount of water,
03:10it doesn't take much deduction to be able to figure out that this is actually sewage.
03:14You can see, you can smell it, you can visually inspect it as it's flowing into the river valley south of the border,
03:18which we have done.
03:20We've known how to treat sewage for over 100 years.
03:22We just need to have the political will and the money to invest in it to treat it properly.
03:27Because we should not, absolutely not have people living next to a river of raw sewage and toxic chemicals.
03:34It's insane.
03:36Philip Eusigas is the executive director of San Diego Coastkeeper, an environmental organization.
03:43And that has huge ecological and environmental impacts.
03:46It has enormous public health impacts that we're just learning and learning more about.
03:50And it also has ecological impacts to the marine environment in the Pacific Ocean,
03:57to the environment here in the Tijuana River estuary, which is a national wildlife refuge.
04:02It's a globally recognized tidal wetland.
04:05It's one of the few remaining tidal estuaries on the west coast of the U.S.
04:09But it's being slowly destroyed and contaminated by this toxic flow of pollution.