Officials in Imperial Beach said Wednesday that sewage flowing up the coast from Tijuana fouled miles of shoreline over the weekend, severely sickening surfers and other beach goers.

Mayor Serge Dedina, who also fell ill, said he received no advanced notice from officials in Mexico about the pollution.

“We’re doing everything we can to build our relationship with Mexico, but if they’re going to be continually dumping sewage on us and making our council members and our community sick, it’s hard to continue that positive, proactive approach,” he said Wednesday at a news conference.

The Comision Estatal de Servicios Publicos de Tijuana, or CESPT, a state agency that operates the city’s sewer and water delivery system, did not respond to a request for comment.


Officials with the U.S. International Boundary and Water Commission, or IBWC, said they received word from the agency’s Mexican counterpart, the Comision Internacional de Limites y Aguas, or CILA, there was no report of a spill.

“We did speak with Mexico, and we got through to CILA, and they said there’s no information regarding a spill,” said Lori Kuczmanski, spokeswoman for IBWC, which oversees water treaties between Mexico and the United States.

Spearheaded by Dedina, an effort is building throughout the county to take the IBWC to court to force the federal agency to ramp up pressure on Mexico to stop the sewage spills. Imperial Beach and Chula Vista, as well as the city, county and port of San Diego have now all filed an intent to sue the agency.

“Right now, we don’t seem to have any help in our United States government in combating these sewage flows and protecting public health,” Dedina said.


The Tijuana-based environmental group Proyecto Fronterizo de Educación Ambiental did independent water testing on Friday and leaders of the organization said they found “extremely high” levels of fecal indicator bacteria in Playas de Tijuana.

The group has pointed to the deteriorating San Antonio de Los Buenos sewage treatment plant at Punta Bandera as the likely source of the pollution.

Mexican officials have said that upgrading the plant is a top priority in a massive infrastructure overhaul that would cost at least $372 million.

Starting last Thursday evening, sewage polluted miles of shoreline from coastal communities south of the border to Imperial Beach, said Paloma Aguirre, coastal and marine director with the nonprofit environmental group Wildcoast.


“I personally received reports from our colleagues in Playas de Tijuana saying that the stench of raw sewage permeated throughout the entire city,” she said. “Friday morning, we started to receive multiple reports of odor by surfers from the (Imperial Beach) Pier.”

Wildcoast said it contacted the San Diego County Department of Environmental Health about the contamination — the agency that oversees beach closures — but no testing was done and the shoreline remained open through the weekend.

“That means that the beach remained open, putting at risk all of the ocean users over the weekend,” she said.

County health officials said that while they didn’t conduct water sampling, they did visual field inspections on Friday that didn’t reveal sewage contamination.


“In the morning, staff responded to the area of complaint to investigate and did not observe any odors or water discoloration,” said Jessica Northrup, county spokeswoman. “Had odors been observed, water quality samples would have been taken.”

A massive sewage spill in the Tijuana River in February fouled beaches as far north as Coronado. Federal records show that since that event, polluted water has continued to regularly flow from Mexico across the border through the river and a series of canyons that empty into the Tijuana River Valley.

Before the two countries spent billions of dollars to construct treatment plants on both sides of the border more than a decade ago, around 10 million gallons of raw sewage a day flowed down the Tijuana River and into San Diego County.


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