EPA fix for Tijuana River must keep pace with city’s explosive growth

Reports of Tijuana sewage leaking over the border into the San Diego region stretch back at least to the 1930s. The fundamental issue hasn’t changed all that much over time. Plumbing still isn’t keeping pace with population growth.

Water officials in Baja California have frequently pointed out that sewage collection in Tijuana far exceeds that in many parts of Mexico. It’s estimated that roughly 90 percent of homes are hooked into the sewer system, compared with 50 percent nationwide.

Still, with an estimated metro-area population of more than 2 million, that means about 200,000 people are likely dumping untreated human waste directly into the environment. That sewage, along with toxic chemicals, gets washed into the ocean when it rains.

The solution for San Diego has long been to capture those polluted flows using pumps in the concrete channel of the Tijuana River and in the canyons along the border, such as Smuggler’s Gulch and Goat Canyon. However, those diversion systems are constantly being overwhelmed. The Imperial Beach shoreline near the international border was closed for 295 days last year.

As recently reported in the Uniontribune, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is gearing up to help expand those facilities and potentially build a new diversion pump in the Tijuana River on the U.S. side of the border. The project would also require finding new capacity to clean those polluted flows at a wastewater treatment plant.

Some officials in the San Diego region have expressed worry that this could give Tijuana a free pass to grow without providing new wastewater infrastructure to its residents.

“This is where I get kind of concerned,” said Chris Helmer, environmental and natural resources director for Imperial Beach. “Are we offering too prematurely to build a plant for Mexico in the United States?”

Regardless, it’s likely that any expansion to the diversion systems will be only a temporary fix if Tijuana continues to grow at breakneck speed. Its population has roughly doubled since the mid-’90s.

It’s no coincidence that the recently $300 million secured by the U.S. EPA to address the problem was attached to the United States-mexico-canada trade agreement. A major source of the pollution comes from folks who have flocked to shanty towns along the border in Tijuana in order to work in the factories known as maquiladoras. Many of these are run by American businesses, such as Coca-cola.

ALEJANDRO TAMAYO U-T The Tijuana River and Rio Tecate join together to flow in a single channel toward the U.s.-mexico border.