Some 22 billion gallons of raw sewage have flowed from Mexico into San Diego County since the end of December, the International Boundary and Water Commission reported on Wednesday.
“Transboundary flows continue down the Tijuana River from recent rains,” the IBWC, a binational entity responsible for shared water resources, said in a statement on Twitter.
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.
A nearly half-billion-dollar investment in new sewage treatment facilities in Tijuana could clean up perpetually polluted beaches in San Diego, U.S. and Mexican officials say.
Officials from both countries signed a treaty through the International Boundary and Water Commission that commits to funding new sanitation projects during a ceremony at the Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve in Imperial Beach on Thursday.
The big fix for the region’s border sewage problem remains several years away, but that does not mean sewage will flow unabated until then.
Some recent smaller-scale projects are already having an impact on the dry-weather flows coming through the Tijuana River channel. And planning for a large-scale fix continues moving forward.
On Tuesday, Californians settled three lawsuits against the International Boundary and Water Commission or the IBWC, the binational agency that treats a portion of the sewage-laden water rolling into the U.S. from Tijuana under a treaty between the two countries.
At the crux of the many complaints by the city of Imperial Beach, Surfrider Foundation, and San Diego’s Regional Water Quality Control Board and others was general frustration that the IBWC, which runs an international wastewater treatment plant at the border, wasn’t doing enough to prevent and monitor Tijuana wastewater entering the Tijuana River and the valley on the U.S. side.
Imperial County officials are considering suing the federal government over continued inaction at the polluted New River.
Members of the Imperial County Board of Supervisors during their meeting on Tuesday, Feb. 23, discussed potentially suing the United States government or sending a strongly worded “demand” letter to federal officials to try to sway them to take action on building a wastewater treatment facility on the border to help clean the filthy waterway.
We’re letting millions of gallons of sewage-contaminated Tijuana River water go to waste by tossing it to the Pacific Ocean.
That’s the opinion of two competing forces – one from the United States and another from Mexico – that are rethinking the region’s oldest and dirtiest problem, imagining it instead as a moneymaking opportunity.
A report released Thursday by the International Boundary and Water Commission found a significant presence of wastewater in border channels in the Tijuana River Basin impacting San Diego.
In the report, “Binational Water Quality Study of the Tijuana River and Adjacent Canyons and Drains,” scientists from the United States and Mexico collected samples from of seven transboundary channels.
Baja California Gov. Jaime Bonilla is involved in a war of words with a California mayor over cleanup efforts along the Tijuana River Valley, which lies between Tijuana and the city of San Diego.
For decades, raw sewage, trash and debris have flowed from south of the border into the U.S.
Most of those materials, especially the raw sewage, end up in the Pacific Ocean, forcing the closure of beaches in cities like Imperial Beach where over the last nine months, beaches have been closed 180 days due to high bacteria levels in the ocean water.
Mexico’s water wars have turned deadly.
A long-simmering dispute about shared water rights between Mexico and the United States has erupted into open clashes pitting Mexican National Guard troops against farmers, ranchers and others who seized a dam in northern Chihuahua state.
