After $630 Mil Plan Fails to Stop Flow of Waste, Sewage from Tijuana U.S. Solution Relies on Mexico

Just a few years after the U.S. government wasted $630 million on a failed plan to stop the constant flow of toxic waste and raw sewage that gushes in from Mexico, the Trump administration is celebrating a new project it guarantees will finally solve the problem though it seems too good to be true. The new initiative, disclosed this week by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and International Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC), is called Minute 333 and is being hailed as a “historic new agreement between the United States and Mexico” that will “permanently end the decades-long Tijuana River sewage crisis.” The project relies heavily on Mexico and does not obligate any additional U.S. taxpayer funding, raising serious doubts about its potential to succeed despite the EPA’s claims that it is a historic milestone toward implementing 100% solution to the Tijuana River sewage crisis that contaminates California beaches with high levels of fecal bacteria that pose serious health risks and negatively impact marine life.

Hundreds of billions of gallons of trash, toxic sewage and unmanaged stormwater have flooded into the U.S. from Mexico for years and Americans have paid exorbitant sums to clean it up. The government refers to it as transboundary flow and it contains a combination of treated wastewater, untreated wastewater, and stormwater. Around 50 million gallons of mostly raw sewage flows into the Pacific Ocean from the San Antonio de los Buenos Creek in Tijuana, Mexico not far from the California border, according to the EPA. Northward currents carry the discharge up the coast to the U.S. causing marine transboundary flows, the agency confirms. During wet-weather events an average of 109 million gallons per day flow into the Pacific Ocean via the Tijuana River. The contaminated water includes raw sewage, trash from Tijuana’s famously polluted urban area and eroded soil from the canyons and upstream of the Tijuana River. The contaminated flows create significant negative impacts to water quality, public health, and the environment.

This has been going on for decades and the U.S. has paid handsomely to mitigate the mess though it has barely put a dent on controlling the damage. The constant stream of pollutants has taken a huge toll, including negatively impacting public health and beach water quality as well as threats to wildlife and U.S. government activities. The untreated wastewater contains harmful pathogens that pose risks to human health, the EPA disclosed long ago. Sediment, trash, and polluted wastewater hurt aquatic and terrestrial wildlife and degrades the marine and estuarian habitats that wildlife rely on to thrive. The pollution has also made U.S. Military and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) personnel quite sick. A few years ago a national news outlet visited the region and published a troubling piece that includes a detailed list of the contaminants in the Tijuana River water; “fecal coliforms, drug-resistant bacteria, benzene, cadmium, mercury, hexavalent chromium medical waste, and DDT, which has been banned for years in the United States.”

No one can blame the Trump administration for celebrating a proposed project to finally stop Mexico’s trash and sewage from seeping into the U.S., but some of the details are likely to ignite skepticism. For starters, Minute 333 was born out of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signed by EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin and his Mexican counterpart, Alicia Bárcena Ibarra, in Mexico City over the summer. The MOU says Mexico will seek funding to initiate the construction of a mechanism to divert treated effluent entering the Tijuana River to an upstream site, initiate engineering and financial feasibility of installing an ocean outfall in Tijuana and construct and maintain the sediment basin at Matadero Canyon before the upcoming rainy season. Also known as Smuggler’s Gulch, Matadero Canyon is the U.S.-Mexico border area near San Diego and Tijuana well known for illegal crossings and wastewater pollution. The commissioner of Mexico’s IBWC says the project reiterates her country’s commitments to resolve the border sanitation problem pursuant to the provisions of the 1944 Water Treaty. That means it has taken eight decades for Mexico to keep its end of the deal if in fact Minute 333 goes as planned.