Three of those beaches closed a combined 25 times in 2022 for the same reason, according to the agency.
But efforts to reduce pollution by the U.S.–Mexico border water treatment facility—called the South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant—is expected to result in improvements in the coming years, according to Angela Howe, a senior legal director of the Surfrider Foundation, a San Clemente-based nonprofit that bills itself as an organization dedicated to the protection of the world’s oceans and beaches.
The mitigation efforts come after a 2018 lawsuit filed by the Surfrider Foundation and several local government agencies against the U.S. section of the International Boundary and Water Commission, which oversees the plant and water sanitation at the border.
The water treatment plant, a 75-acre parcel of land about two miles west of the San Ysidro Port of Entry, processes up to 30 million gallons per day of sewage and other wastewater that flows from Mexico into the United States, according to the commission.
But the plant’s area operations manager, Morgan Rogers, told The Epoch Times that another 30 to 40 million gallons of untreated sewage is pumped out to sea about 30 miles south of Tijuana.
Unlike the Colorado River and the Rio Grande, the Tijuana River doesn’t have natural flows every day of the year. It flows naturally only during the rainy season, from about November to April each year. The rest of the year, from May to about October, is the dry season, according to Rogers.
During the dry season, water still flows through the river and canyons toward the border from Tijuana. The dry season water flows come from different sources in Tijuana, such as irrigation runoff, leaking pipes, and groundwater, according to Rogers. The commission has the infrastructure, known as canyon collectors, designed to capture that water and divert it to the plant for treatment.
“Our objective here is we don’t want any transboundary flows during the dry season,” Rogers said.
The plant doesn’t treat rainwater because it’s too clean and would harm the chemical balance of the treatment plant, but when it does rain, the rainwater picks up contaminants and trash that collect in the riverbed and brings that into the United States, according to Rogers.
“So, that’s another source of closing beaches,” he said.
The lawsuit alleged that the commission violated the Clean Water Act by “allowing egregious water pollution flows through their flood control conveyance,” which eventually ended up in the Pacific Ocean, according to Surfrider’s Howe.
After more than four years, the commission settled the lawsuits in April 2022, promising to “take short-term, mid-term, and long-term actions to intercept or divert transboundary flows.”
“At Surfrider, we’re really proud of the major clean water victory that we achieved with the settlement,” Howe said.
