The Longest Running Environmental Disaster in the United States

The Longest Running Environmental Disaster in the United States:

Can You Smell It?

By Carolina London

Published: September 8th, 2022 11:45PM PST

Keep Out Sign in Southern San Diego beach near the U.S & Mexican Border (Credit: Wildcoast.org)

Tijuana is a coastal city located in Mexico with a population of 1.9 million people (Data Mexico). The name "Tijuana" comes from the Kumeyaay word Tiwan, which means “by the sea” and by the sea it is. With near-perfect weather and gorgeous beaches, it is no wonder that Tijuana and its neighbor to the north, San Diego, are top tourist destinations and in demand for those looking to relocate to a milder climate. However, there is a foul stench that has been stinking up the waters along the coast. What is causing this stench? Well, this investigative report will dive deep into the past to uncover why the most southwestern city in the continental United States and the westernmost city in Mexico are dealing with one of the largest and possibly longest ongoing environmental disasters in North America.

Battle of Buena Vista (Credit: Universal History Archive/Getty Images)

First, you need to know some background information. Tijuana, Baja California and San Diego, California weren’t always international neighbors. In fact, the recorded history of the region goes back to 1542 when Juan Rodriquez Cabrillo, a Portuguese explorer contracted by the Spanish crown, landed in San Diego Bay making him the first European in San Diego. Before 1542 San Diego was undiscovered by Europeans and inhabited by the Kumeyaay, who were natives to the region. Interestingly, it took 227 years before any Europeans returned. In 1769 the first building, Mission San Diego Alcala, was constructed by the Spanish Franciscan Friars in San Diego atop Presidio Hill. This landmark is sometimes referred to as the “Plymouth Rock of the West” since it is the first establishment on the west coast of the United States. Now, it wasn’t until Mexico gained its independence from Spain on September 27, 1821 that Tijuana become a part of Mexico. Soon after, the establishment of Tijuana as a Mexican ranch began in 1825 when Santiago Argüello won a land grant from the Mexican government and built a ranch called Tia Juana. Interestingly, Argüello was also given Mission San Diego Alcala on June 8, 1846 by the Governor, Don Pio de Jesus Pico, who governed over the newly formed California Republic that sought to separate itself from Mexico. However, this gift from the governor was short lived as the Mexican-American war was ongoing and U.S. Lieutenant John C. Fremont landed in San Diego on July 29, 1846, where he quickly and peacefully occupied San Diego and raised the U.S. flag the next day and making San Diego a part of the U.S. (San Diego Historical Society). Two years later on July 4, 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo become law. This treaty determined the new boundaries between the United States and Mexico along Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. Article two of the treaty required the establishment of a binational commission, run by both representatives of the U.S. and Mexico, in order to resolve boundary and other issues on the border (US National Archives). It wasn’t until The Convention of 1889 that the International Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC), formally the International Boundary Commission (IBC), was established to apply boundary and water treaties between the US and Mexico and settle any disputes that arose in their application (IBWC). The establishment of the IBWC in 1889 was a direct result of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and today the IBWC is operated by the U.S. Department of State. Although both cities began as one region their history divided them over time. It is this separation of Tijuana from San Diego that sealed the fate of each city to grow and develop vital infrastructure based on the new governing bodies and laws enacted after the Mexican-American War.

San Diego in the late 1880s (Credit Source: San Diego History Center)

From the end of the Mexican-American War in 1846 until 1889 Tijuana remained Rancho Tia Juana with no planned development towards becoming a city. It wasn’t until 1889 that the descendants of Argüello decided to begin the development of Tijuana. The City of Tijuana was officially established on July 11, 1889. The decision to build the city was most likely made as a result of the short-lived Baja California Gold Rush which began six months prior. It began in December of 1888 with Bacillo Padilla who discovered gold in the Santa Clara Mountains some 60 miles southeast of Ensenada (San Diego History Center). This discovery brought many fortune seekers to Tijuana as the city became a stopping point along the stagecoach lines to Ensenada. However, the city didn’t begin to boom until the 1920s during the prohibition of alcohol in the U.S., which lasted from 1920 to 1933. More importantly, the building of the Agua Caliente Casino and Hotel Resort in 1928 put Tijuana on the map. It opened as one of the best resorts in the world and even had a race track, airstrip, and golf course. The resort attracted Hollywood celebrities who were looking for a place to drink, gamble, and relax during U.S. prohibition, and Tijuana was the closest resort where it could be done legally and in luxury. However, the infrastructure was not quite ready for this influx of tourists and residents. To give you an idea, take a look at the population of Tijuana. It was less than 300 in 1900, 1,000 in 1915, and by 1928 there were over 5,000 residents. The city continued to grow through the 1930s and by 1940 the population had reached over 16,000 residents. The city didn’t stop there and by 1950 that population more than tripled with over 59,000 residents residing in the young city. With the passing of 30 more years, the population grew to almost half a million residents in 1980. Today, the population of Tijuana is 1.9 million as it more than doubled since 1980.

Aerial view of Tijuana, Mexico & Tia Juana California 1880s ( Credit Source: therealtijuana.blogspot.com)

So what does the history of San Diego and Tijuana have to do with a modern environmental disaster? That’s a good question. The answer is everything. Now, remember the boom years of Tijuana in the 1920s? Well, tax revenue from hotels, casinos, and restaurants helped to fund the building of infrastructure. This included a small sewage system and a community septic tank that served over 500 people and was built in 1928 (San Diego Reader). The problem was that the population in 1928 was already well over 5,000. As the city continued to grow in the 1930s there was more sewage coming from an increase of homes and businesses as well as tourism. It got so bad that by the mid-1930s the Tijuana River was contaminated with raw sewage and the neighboring U.S. community of San Ysidro located in San Diego could no longer use their now contaminated well water. In fact, the US outlawed the sale of truck crops grown in San Ysidro. Then in 1935, the City of Tijuana builds a new community septic tank to treat the wastewater for 5,000 residents but by this time Tijuana already had over 10,000 residents (San Diego Reader). This resulted in the immediate contamination of the Tijuana River, again, as the system was simply not designed to meet the capacity required for the population in Tijuana. Then in 1939, the city decides to reroute the sewage away from the Tijuana River and pipe it straight to the Pacific Ocean with the minimal treatment of the wastewater. By 1950 there is no new or expanded sewage or septic system treating the sewage of the now 59,000 residents living in Tijuana. The only system in place is the community septic system that was built in 1935 to handle 5,000 residents. In 1952 the County of San Diego offered the City of Tijuana the opportunity to connect its sewage to the community of San Ysidro on the U.S. side of the border for the treatment and disposal of wastewater. Unfortunately, by the time June of 1954 rolled around the plan didn’t go through due to the proposed location of the sewage system which was considered controversial at the time. By 1953 there were 3.5 million gallons of raw sewage spilling into the Pacific Ocean and damaging the beaches of Imperial Beach on the U.S. side of the border. In 1958 Tijuana officials lied to San Diego officials when they said they would remove sludge from their septic tank. That same year the San Diego City Council approved the San Diego Metro Sewer System which was to include a line to Tijuana but Tijuana didn’t want to be a part of this plan and in 1959 they announced that they would build oxidation ponds and reclamation facilities to treat their wastewater. However, by January 1962 the City of Tijuana runs out of money to build these facilities, and by the spring of 1962 raw sewage is flowing into the Tijuana River then the same thing happens in 1965 after an April storm. In 1966 an emergency bypass connecting the Tijuana sewer to the Point Loma Wastewater Treatment Plant located in San Diego is completed. However, by 1971 the emergency bypass system is being used daily and treating 8% of Tijuana’s sewage. In 1975 the only wastewater treatment in the city was the 1935-built community septic tank made to handle 5,000 residents. By May of 1979, San Diego was processing 70% of Tijuana’s sewage via the emergency bypass system. In January of 1980, the emergency bypass pipe broke, and some 15 million gallons of sewage spilled out daily into the Tijuana River and then into the Pacific Ocean. During the 1980s Mexican officials in Tijuana were reluctant to build a binational water treatment facility so in 1985 the US and Mexico governments agreed that Mexico would build their own wastewater treatment facility in two phases. In 1987 they built the San Antonio De Los Buenos Treatment Plant located at Punta Bandera some 6 miles south of the border. However, later that year the plant broke down and wasn’t reopened until May of 1988 at which time the Mexican government also announced that they wouldn’t be completing the second phase of the wastewater plant thus limiting the amount of sewage that could be treated. Eventually, the Mexican government agreed to help pay for a binational wastewater treatment plant that was completed in 1996 and processes 25 million gallons of sewage from Tijuana a day. Fast forward to 2016 and the Punta Bandera wastewater facility is no longer operating at all. In addition, today, the binational wastewater plant is no longer able to handle the amount of sewage coming from Tijuana. Due to more than 100 years of poor leadership and planning, lack of funds, and political corruption Tijuana has been left with no wastewater treatment facility that is in operation today. Shockingly, there are currently about 40 to 50 million gallons of raw sewage spilling out into the Pacific Ocean daily from Punta Bandera where the San Antonio De Loa Buenos Treatment Plant was built in 1987 and meant to process sewage before discharging it into the ocean. What is even more startling about the sewage coming from Point Bandera is that this figure doesn’t even consider the sewage coming from the Tijuana River (AGU). Now, it is easier to see how things haven’t been so neighborly between the sister cities of Tijuana and San Diego. It seems that the history of Tijuana’s wastewater has revealed much more than just a stench.

Transboundary Flows (Credit Source: San Diego Water Board –R9)

There is light at the end of the tunnel here, but it’s complicated. It appears that the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the United States-Mexico-Canada-Agreement (USMCA) are currently limiting the U.S. Federal Government’s ability to provide aid to the IBWC to resolve this environmental disaster. Let me explain, the IBWC was created as a result of the Mexican-American War that resulted with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The treaty required that a binational organization operated by both the federal U.S. and Mexican governments resolve boundary and water issues on the U.S. and Mexico border. Well, the IBWC currently operates the Southbay International Wastewater Treatment Plant (SBIWTP) that is located in San Ysidro but the plant needs to be expanded to treat stormwater and handle a higher capacity of sewage. A report by researchers at the EPA, UCSD, the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, and Stanford University, published a scientific article on October 18, 2021, that proved sewage has been bypassing these systems in the Tijuana River and going out into the Pacific Ocean in Imperial Beach (AGU). As a result, the City of Imperial Beach, City of San Diego, City of Chula Vista, The Surf Rider Foundation, the San Diego Water Board, and more sued the U.S. side of the IBWC in 2018 for breaking the Clean Water Act due to the SBIWTP’s release of untreated sewage, pesticides, heavy metals, and trash into the Pacific Ocean (NBC San Diego). The lawsuit was later dropped in July of 2020. This was after President Trump and Congress, on July 1, 2020, enacted the allocation of funds in the US-Mexico-Canada-Agreement (USMCA) to the EPA to fix this environmental disaster. On September 2, 2020, the EPA announced that “the USMCA implementing legislation Section 821 directs [the] EPA to address polluted transboundary flows in the Tijuana River Watershed and the legislation included an appropriation of $300 million for infrastructure projects in connection with wastewater facilities in the area of the United States–Mexico Border” (EPA). The issue is that the money is currently sitting in the EPA’s bank account and not one penny can be disbursed to the IBWC, which manages the SBIWTP. Why? Well, bureaucratic red tape and legal language are why. The IBWC is not truly a federal agency and although the IBWC is run by the U.S. State Department it is technically a binational organization and thus not truly a federal organization that would be able to receive funds from the EPA. Plus there is no specific language that gives the IBWC permission to receive this funding. Interestingly, the Border Water Infrastructure Improvement Act and the Border Water Quality Restoration and Protection Act would have allowed the transfer of these funds but both bills died in Congress, the first in 2019 and the second in 2021. In addition, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo does not have specific language that allows the IBWC to receive federal funding from the EPA or for any wastewater treatment facility. There is also the fact that the EPA was not created until December 2, 1970, by President Nixon so the specific language wouldn’t have existed anyway. Okay, so now what?

Now it is up to Congress and President Biden to pass legislation that would explicitly allow the EPA to give federal funding to the IBWC. Even after this money is approved and transferred to the IBWC it doesn’t guarantee that repairs on the SBIWTP will occur immediately. Why? Because Congress will need to ensure that the legislation includes specific language that gives the IBWC permission to use these funds to repair and increase the treatment of wastewater at the plant and to improve wastewater treatment in Tijuana. So far, the EPA has secured $300 million in federal funding but still needs $330 million more as the EPA announced a plan to clean up the sewage coming from Tijuana that would cost $630 million (AP News). Unfortunately, nothing can be done about the toxic waste that is destroying the San Diego and Tijuana coast lines until legislation is passed by Congress and President Biden that allows the transfer and use of these EPA funds to fix the problem.

Hold your horses now. There is another issue. That’s right, the issue of disagreements and the allocation of these millions of dollars to a binational organization. Think about it, Tijuana is a 133-year-old city, and in the time it has existed, none of its leaders have been able to fund and build any type of remotely adequate wastewater treatment plant in relation to its population. Why should we trust the Mexican side of the IBWC to adequately use these funds? Why doesn’t the City of Tijuana, the state of Baja California Norte, and the Mexican Federal Government pay for their own wastewater treatment plant in Tijuana? Why does Tijuana get rewarded for over a century of disagreements that has benefited the residents of Tijuana but not the residents of its neighbor city San Diego? These questions are hard to answer, and it isn’t a simple black and white solution. Unfortunately, corrupt Mexican politics and business in Tijuana has clearly not prioritized the development of adequate wastewater infrastructure, which has now resulted in great suffering for the residents of both cities. Yet the sad truth remains, if we do not act and try to clean up this mess, then nothing will be done, and the sewage will simply continue to flow.

Sources:

• http://www.imperialbeachnewsca.com/news/article_1ef964d6-53bb-11ec-993e-337fea6e8cb7.html

• https://voiceofsandiego.org/2022/07/07/vargas-jacobs-try-new-route-to-spend-300-million-on-tijuana-pollution-fix/ • https://voiceofsandiego.org/2022/03/28/tijuana-sewage-fix-makes-presidents-budget/

• https://apnews.com/article/business-us-environmental-protection-agency-san-diego-mexico-pollution-c88f63956525f87ab84441a04f0f657e • https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/epa-announces-two-near-term-clean-water-projects-tijuana-river

• https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/water-board-sues-ibwc-over-untreated-sewage-from-tijuana-river/172594/

• https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1029/2021GH000490

• https://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/1988/nov/23/cover-shocking-facts-and-horrifying-history-of-tij/

• https://sandiegohistory.org/journal/1980/january/gold/

• https://www.ibwc.gov/About_Us/About_Us.html

• https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/treaty-of-guadalupe-hidalgo

• https://sandiegohistory.org/journal/2003/january/war-2/

• https://datamexico.org/en/profile/geo/tijuana