As beach closures in the San Diego area extend more than 1,000 days due to raw sewage flows from Mexico, Imperial Beach residents have filed a lawsuit against Veolia Water, accusing the consultant of ‘engineering which also operates the South Bay Wastewater Treatment Plant on the US side. of the border for the International Boundary and Water Commission, of not doing enough to stop toxic sludge flows.
“Despite receiving millions of dollars from the federal government to operate, manage and maintain the plant, Veolia has instead caused, contributed to, or failed to ameliorate, a public health and environmental crisis that continues to harm residents in Imperial Beach.” says the lawsuit filed on behalf of 10 residents. “Since 2018, [federal agency] and Veolia have caused, or failed to prevent, more than 500 incidents of illegal discharges from the plant, which have caused more than [one] billions of gallons of raw sewage pouring into the river that flows south of San Diego.”
As a class action, other neighbors can still join the complaint. Although the action is only against Veolia Water, which provides water services to hundreds of municipalities and other federal agencies, the suit says it will be amended to include the commission at a later date. Attorney Stephen B. Morris said the six-month waiting period to file a lawsuit against a federal agency was the reason for the delay.
“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 Water Communications municipal “Veolia looks forward to continuing to help [the commission] with the [plant] operation and expects that the important repairs, rehabilitation and expansion of the facility planned for [the commission] will bring relief to the affected communities in the near future.”
The lawsuit states that, based on the commission’s own timeline, the recently announced repairs would take at least five years to complete. Tension in border communities near the Tijuana River has been rising since Sept. 9, when researchers from San Diego State University, the University of California and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at San Diego and others reported that they find high levels of toxic hydrogen sulfide and hydrogen cyanide in the air in the 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 students and residents stay indoors for most of the year. While the county has supported efforts to deal with effluent flow and supports construction projects such as the recently announced South Bay plant expansion, Board of Supervisors Chairwoman Nora Vargas deferred against the researchers’ 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 that she and the county are struggling to address the root of the problem: more pollution on the Tijuana side of the border.
At the press conference, Vargas and Air Pollution Control District officials said the investigators’ results may have returned falsely high positives because of the presence of the toxic gas hydrogen cyanide, a byproduct of plastics manufacturing. , nylon and fumigants around the Tijuana River Valley.
The county’s Department of Environmental Health and Quality said it is safe to say that air quality monitoring instruments that measure toxins in the air can show falsely high readings of hydrogen cyanide even when the gas it is barely present if the instruments measure air that also contains hydrogen sulfide. The latter is what attributed the high readings to San Diego State. This drew a strong response on Twitter from Kim Prather, a 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 listen [the] cry out for help.”
Prather further explained that researchers have done just that identified “hot spots” in Imperial Beach where turbulence in the river releases a strong odor, as well as aerosols of river spray containing viruses, bacteria and other pollutants, adding that the air is currently unsafe to breathe due to ‘a range of toxins that cause headaches and sickness beyond hydrogen cyanide. A The 2023 research paper by Prather and the rest of the Scripps Institute team identified Between 40 and 70 million gallons of sewage dumped into the Pacific Ocean and aerosolized since 2018, making the situation there resemble waterfront communities before the modern waste water treatment.
The US section of the border commission issued a strong statement on September 11 about finally stopping sewage from 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 disconnect in 2014 at a plant in Punta Bandera, Mexico. Former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador handed control of the rebuilding of the Punta Bandera plant to the Mexican military in January.
“The [commission] is very concerned about 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,” the agency’s statement said. “Once the sources are identified, we will request an action plan from the Tijuana water company to address the necessary needs. repairs and monitor progress.”