With the flow of raw sewage from Mexico forcing communities near San Diego to close their beaches for more than 1,000 days, Imperial Beach residents have filed a lawsuit against Veolia Water, alleging that the consultant ‘engineer and manager of the International Water and Boundary Commission – the federal agency that manages the South Bay sewage treatment plant on the US side of the border – has not done enough to prevent for raw sewage to cross the border from Mexico to the border. USA
“Despite receiving millions of dollars from the federal government to operate, manage and maintain the plant, Veolia has instead caused or contributed to, or failed to ameliorate, a public health and environmental crisis that continues to harm residents in Imperial. Beach,” says the class action lawsuit filed on behalf of 10 Imperial Beach residents by Imperial Beach residents and attorneys Stephen B. Morris and Lance Rogers.
The litigants claim that the plant’s treatment system has been inadequate to handle the amount of sludge originating in Mexico. “Since 2018, the IBWC and Veolia have caused, or failed to prevent, more than 500 incidents of illegal discharge from the plant, resulting in more than one billion gallons of raw wastewater being spilled in the river that flows south of San Diego.”
As a class action, other residents may join the complaint of the original 10 class members at a later date. While the current action is only against Veolia Water, an engineering consultant to hundreds of municipalities and other federal agencies, the language of the lawsuit states that the plant’s owner, the IBWC, will be added after the six-month waiting period to apply. ends a lawsuit against a federal agency.
“Veolia recognizes that transboundary pollution, caused by the continued population growth of Tijuana, Mexico, and the associated wastewater flowing into the United States, is a serious problem,” said Adam Lisberg, Senior Vice President of Municipal Water Communications from Veolia. “Veolia looks forward to continuing to assist IBWC with the operation of the South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant and hopes that the substantial repairs, rehabilitation and expansion of facilities planned by IBWC will bring relief to the affected communities in the near future.”
The lawsuit states that according to IBWC’s own schedule, the recently announced repairs would take at least five years to complete. Tension in border communities near the Tijuana River has risen since Sept. 9, when researchers from San Diego State University, the University of California, San Diego and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography reported finding high levels of toxic hydrogen sulfide and hydrogen cyanide in the air. South Bay. Academic institutions and the California Environmental Protection Agency have been testing the air and water in the South Bay for more than a year. The San Diego County Air Pollution Control District has also recommended that school students and residents stay indoors for most of the year. While the county has supported efforts to deal with effluent flow and construction projects like the recently announced South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant expansion, Board of Supervisors Chairwoman Nora Vargas, objected to the investigators’ findings at a press conference on September 10.
“Air quality in the region is within safe limits and does not pose a threat to public health at this time,” he said. “As president, I want to reassure everyone that this is not an imminent threat and that it is safe to be outside and attend school.”
Vargas said county experts are collecting public health data and conducting research to provide the most accurate information, and said she and the county are struggling to address the root of the problem, more pollution from the Tijuana side of the border
At the news conference, Vargas and Air Pollution Control District officials said the SDSU researchers’ results may have returned falsely high positives because of the presence of the toxic gas hydrogen cyanide, a byproduct of the manufacture of plastics, nylon and fumigants, around the Tijuana river valley. . Department of Health and Environmental Quality of the region. said it is true that air quality monitoring instruments that measure toxins in the air can show falsely high readings of hydrogen cyanide even when it is hardly present when the instruments measure air that also contains hydrogen sulfide, which is what they attributed to the high readings in San Diego State. . This prompted a strong response on Twitter from Dr. Kim Prather, professor of atmospheric chemistry and distinguished professor at UCSD/Scripps who leads his test team.
“Just because [hydrogen sulfide] Levels in South Bay Below Threshold to Cause Instant Fatalities to All Residents Doesn’t Mean Air is Safe @SupNoraVargas. Stop saying that,” he wrote on Twitter. “You are causing serious harm to the community in so many ways. Please hear their cries for help.”
Prather further explained that researchers have done just that identified “hot spots” in Imperial Beach where turbulence in the river releases large amounts of odors and river spray aerosols that contain viruses, bacteria and other pollutants and that the air is now unsafe to breathe due to ‘a series of toxins that cause headaches and illnesses beyond the simple. hydrogen cyanide. A 2023 research by Prather and the rest of the Scripps Institute team identified 70 to 80 million gallons of sewage that had been dumped into the Pacific Ocean and aerosolized since 2018, making the situation there resemble the waterfront communities before modern waste water treatment existed.
The American section of the IBWC, for its part, issued a strong statement on September 11 about the definitive stoppage of wastewater crossing the border. Flows of raw sewage from the Mexican side had been a problem in the early 2010s, but the situation began to lead to more frequent beach closures after a ruptured supply pipe let out line a plant in Punta Bandera, Mexico, in 2014. Former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador handed over control of the reconstruction of the Punta Bandera plant to the Mexican military in January.
“The USIBWC is very concerned about the high flows and sediment entering the United States from Mexico in the Tijuana River. We are implementing several steps to identify the sources of the flows, including working closely with Mexico and using satellite imagery. identified, we will request an action plan from the Tijuana Water Company to address the necessary repairs and monitor their progress,” the statement said.
