60 million gallons of waste per day continues to flow from Mexico into San Diego’s ocean

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IMPERIAL BEACH – While most of the Earth has been singularly obsessed with an invisible virus from a foreign land, in this California beach town, it’s a “crisis on top of crisis’. Not only dealing with the creepy disease we can’t see, but a river of toxic waste from a foreign land that we can see, but chose to ignore.

Over the years, it has not been unusual for the City of Imperial Beach to close the ocean due to contaminated water.

“One billion gallons last month alone.  One billion gallons of raw sewage in March.  It’s the worst it’s ever been and the Government of Mexico is lying to us while the U.S. Government doesn’t care,” says Mayor Serge Dedina of Imperial Beach.

Make no mistake, while the Government of Mexico is lying and the U.S. Government is hiding, this is the “Longest lasting environmental crisis in America” and it’s coming from a foreign land.

KUSI’s Dan Plante covered this story for his senior project at San Diego State University in 1984, and it is an even bigger problem in 2020.

Tuesday, San Diego County Leader including Senator Ben Hueso, Imperial Beach Mayor Serge Dedina, San Diego Councilmember Vivian Moreno, Port Commissioner Dan Malcolm, and the Imperial Beach City Council held a press conference in Imperial Beach announcing the entire city of Tijuana is dumping their sewage into San Diego.

“I’ve been saying this for years and I’ll say it again. The beautiful beaches of South San Diego are not a dumping ground for Mexico,” says San Diego Council member Vivian Moreno.

Oh, but they are!  And have been for at least 40-years.  The water, the land, and even the air down there are full of toxic waste that’s been building for decades. The ground is poison 20-feet down.  The water is poison from the vile Tijuana River Valley to the Pacific Ocean.  Then there’s the air.  We now learn this toxic waste is in the air in the form of “aerosol spray.”  If the wind blows over the valley or the waves crash in the ocean, that toxic waste becomes an aerosol that we’ve been breathing for decades.

San Diego Port Commissioner Dan Malcolm picked up where Mayor Dedina left off saying, “I’m calling here today, on the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA; you’ve had a lot of studies, you’ve had a lot of talk, your name is Environmental Protection Agency, the city of Imperial Beach is in need of Environmental Protection. You need to get down here, you need to solve the problem.”

Continuing, “No doubt this is the long-running environmental crisis in America.  It’s time for the EPA to do its job.  We can’t control what happens in Mexico.  But we can enforce our own laws on our own land and we are going after the EPA with the lawsuit and everything we’ve got.”

Mayor Dedina explained, “The river flow in the Tijuana River should be zero gallons a day during dry weather. Today, it is 60 million gallons a day. That’s a minimum flow. The entire Tijuana sewage system has collapsed, and it appears there are absolutely no efforts underway in Mexico, or on the part of the U.S. Federal Government, the Trump administration, to actually move forward and ask for emergency repairs so we don’t endure an entire summer of polluted beaches.”

While government leaders have failed time and time again to stop the madness, a local group of citizens has formed a non-profit called “Stop The Poop.”

The founder of “Stop the Poop,” Baron Von Partlow of Imperial Beach told KUSI’s Dan Plante, “This is biological international terrorism.  Mexico is killing us with toxic waste and they’re getting away with it.  The inability for so-called Government leaders to do anything is a crime.  We’ve been talking about this for decades.”

As for the $300-million dollars approved by Congress and signed by President Trump in the USMCA Trade Deal?  Who knows!  Lost in space.  Or more accurately, lost at the EPA.  At this stage, $300-million could make a difference.  After all, this is basic plumbing, not rocket science

Sadly, it’s going to take a lawsuit against our own government, forcing them to abide by their own laws, namely the Clean Water Act,   While that lawsuit moves forward, 60-million gallons of the nastiest sewage and sludge moves slowly down the Tijuana River Valley. killing the Ocean and everything along the way.  Enough!

KUSI’s Dan Plante spent the day in Imperial Beach gathering all the details on the “river of toxic poison from Mexico” that continues to flow into our ocean.

Sewage spilling into the ocean from Tijuana in 2018

Source: kusi.com

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