It’s been more than 30 years since toxic sewage from broken infrastructure in Tijuana reaching coastal areas and marshes from the border to Coronado was likened to a “local version of the Exxon Valdez oil disaster in Alaska.” Over the decades, swimmers, beachgoers, Navy sailors, Border Patrol agents in the Tijuana River Valley and many others have been sickened as a result. According to the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, at least 34,000 illnesses in 2017 alone were linked to water pollution in the area.
But addressing skepticism that the health threat was severe played at least a small role last year in a formal request to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control that it take a hard look at local conditions. The CDC’s involvement was long overdue, given that the sewage influx has worsened in recent years. Since 2019, more than 100 billion gallons of toxic waste have flowed north from the Tijuana River, shutting beaches and businesses for years at a time.
This month, the agency released a weighted survey of households in South County communities that showed a staggering number of residents report health problems they link to exposure to untreated sewage. Per the CDC, respondents in 45% of households said that in the month before they were surveyed, a resident had suffered headaches, nausea, gastrointestinal sicknesses or other illnesses they attributed to their feces-fouled surroundings. So much for the skeptics.
Yet to hear it from a veteran of San Diego’s congressional delegation, the biggest news of late is the final approval of an additional $250 million in federal funding to repair and upgrade the South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant in San Ysidro, which cleans up Tijuana’s effluent. A news release from Rep. Scott Peters, D-San Diego, asserted the money would “fully repair” the sewage plant.
Don’t buy the hype. We salute Peters, Rep. Juan Vargas, D-San Diego, and other elected leaders for their hard work pursuing a conventional solution to the sewage nightmare. But it has to be pointed out that fixes promised five years ago were supposed to have been finished by now, and the fixes promised now can’t remotely be counted on to be finished five years from now. And it also has to be pointed out that in a sane world, we wouldn’t be waiting for such a response. Repairing a sewage system is not remotely a technological or engineering challenge. It requires money and leadership. A federal emergency declaration — providing billions in immediate funding and expediting needed approvals — would quickly reduce the scope of this nightmare.
This possibility seemed closer than ever last summer when state legislators unanimously called for the declaration of such an emergency. Maybe the same federal bureaucrats who saw broken bridges and river flooding as disasters would finally grasp that under Federal Emergency Management Association rules, emergencies can be declared when a disaster is so severe “that it is beyond the combined capabilities of state and local governments to respond.” Maybe they’d finally grasp that South Bay’s sewage catastrophe is well beyond that point.
But do-nothing Gov. Gavin Newsom’s main response was with an October border photo op. Without his , the Legislature was unlikely to change minds in the Biden White House. Now Donald Trump is back in the Oval Office, and hopes for a federal emergency declaration look as remote as ever, given his eagerness to hold California in disdain.
San Diegans deserve infinitely better. Instead, as FEMA would say, this challenge has been “beyond the combined capabilities” of our leaders.
