The administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lee Zeldin, said on April 22 that Mexico must stop the flow of billions of gallons of raw waste water and toxic chemicals on the Tijuana River, which has contaminated the Pacific Ocean in the south of California, closing beaches, creating toxic care points on the river and even closed naval stamps that the water on the edge of the United States.
The Zeldin Earth Day trip to the California-Mexico border also included a tour of the international water water plant in South Bay in the American part of the border, which is being expanded to treat the flow water flows in Mexico, and a meeting with Marine staff, including stamps and a stamps. Visit by helicopter on the border with the U.S. Customs and Borders Patrol. The EPA administrator also cited the United States military preparation as affected by the wastewater crisis.
“The North -Americans on our side of the border have been treating -for decades, they have been without patience,” Zeldin said in a press conference in a Marine Corps recruiting deposit in San Diego. “There is no way we are in front of the people of California and we ask them to have more patience and that they take us with all of us as we go through the next 10 or 20 years of being pasted to 12 feet of raw wastewater and not reaching any place.”
Zeldin said in the coming days, the EPA will present in Mexico a list of projects to resolve the environmental crisis in the Tijuana river valley. Wastewater flows and chemicals of an expanding manufacturing base on the Mexican side of the border have crossed to the south of San Diego County through the river for decades.
As a result, the community beaches have begun to be closed and residents have experienced air quality warnings since 2018. Currently, Mexico’s Miltary has been working on a new international collector project aimed at better containing wastewater flows in the Mexican part of the border. Part of this project, however, required to send 5 million gallons of raw waste water to the Tijuana river from April 9, according to the Mexican government. The EPA estimates that 100 billion gallons of raw and polluting wastewater has flowed in the Pacific Ocean through the Tijuana river since 2018.
“We were told that this was a difficult decision and spent days looking at other alternatives,” Maria-Elena Giner, the curator leaving the American section of the International Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC), a federal agency created by treaties accused of negotiating border problems with Mexico.
“In the end,” Giner added, “the team that worked 24 hours in this complex and extremely important project felt that they had exhausted all the other options and found a way to mitigate the amount of flow in the river from a potential of about 25 mgd to 5 mgs.”
The last step, Giner said, is to dry a juinion box so that it can be rebuilt with reinforced concrete. This will require diverting the flow, most of which will continue to be sent to the Mexican coast, but still about 5 mgd will go to the river, he said on April 9.
Among those who joined Zeldin at the event were the representatives Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), Juan Vargas (D-Calif.), Mike Levin (D-Calif.) And Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.), Former representatives Mike Garcia and Brian Bilbray and the newly named Commissioner for the United States section of (IBWCC), Whoever replaces who replaces who replaces who replaced the one who replaced the one who replaced the person who replaced who replaced the one who replaced.
The group traveled several locations along the border and the southern bay plant, to see the impact on the residents and their communities.
Zeldin’s journey also included a meeting of April 21 with Alicia Bárcena, the Secretary of the Environment and Natural Resources of Mexico and other Mexican officials, saying that it was a discussion “about ending with decades of raw waste water that entered the United States from Mexico.”
“It was clear about the way the Mexican environmental secretary approached all aspects of this meeting … who wants to have a strong collaborative relationship,” Zeldin said. “I welcome this collaboration.”
The Mayor of the Imperial Beach, Paloma Aguirre, one of the local officials present when Zeldin traveled the wastewater treatment installation, said he wants actions.
“It is absolutely essential to do it as quickly as possible,” said Aguirre.
For years, Aguirre and other mayors have requested that the EPA declare all the southern bay of San Diego County a superfund place. Zeldin denied Aguirre’s most recent request on March 14, but his invoked in military preparation can put this application again at the EPA table.
“The plan must be all this to end this crisis,” Zeldin said. “Everything must be completed as quickly as possible, and it must be completed so that the future also plans, the population of Tijuana continues to increase.
“I hope this is the beginning of a new collaborative relationship of transparency and honesty, and a laser focus to clean the river and keep it clean during the decades,” he continued.
