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The California Beach Town Awash in Poop

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Saturday, August 10, 2024

One day in March 2017, Mitch McKay and his wife, Suzanne, took a walk on the sand near Imperial Beach, a small surf town south of San Diego where they’d raised their children. Suzanne liked to collect sea glass, and they often brought a spare grocery bag to pick up any trash they found amid the seaweed and driftwood. “It was our ritual,” Mitch said. Back home, Suzanne started to suffer from splitting headaches that seemed to emanate from the back of her neck, near the base of her skull. The headaches soon got bad enough that she went to the emergency room, where doctors performed a spinal tap. She had, they determined, spinal meningitis.Suzanne spent 12 days in the hospital, taking antibiotics and slowly regaining strength as doctors tried to deduce how she’d gotten sick. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent a representative from Los Angeles to review her case. Ultimately, only one coherent explanation materialized: Bacteria living in fecal matter in seawater had entered her body through a small open blister on her foot. “That was my first slap in the face in terms of what’s going on down here,” Mitch recalled. “People can die from this.”The McKays’ fateful walk came at the end of a wet winter. That January, just over the U.S.-Mexico border, workers from Tijuana’s water utility had been called to an industrial stretch of the city, where a rapidly growing sinkhole claimed a bus shelter, then the sidewalk beside it, and soon threatened traffic along a major thoroughfare. The cause, foretold by the smell, was a break in an even more important artery: a sewage pipeline five feet in diameter carrying the feces and dishwater of hundreds of thousands of people.Residents of imperial beach smelled the change within days, as a plume of turgid, foamy sewage pushed out to sea. For many, the spill was a signal event, dividing life into “before” and “after.”This flow ordinarily made its way across the border and into California underground, to a treatment plant owned by the U.S. arm of the International Boundary and Water Commission, or IBWC, an agency that administers bilateral agreements for watersheds shared by both countries. After the pipeline broke, workers used an inflatable plug to stop the sewage and redirect it. But when repairs got underway, the pumps weren’t capable of sending the backed-up sewage to the plant by another route. Instead, the waste began to empty into the Tijuana River, which heads north through a concrete flood channel and crosses into California six miles from the Pacific Ocean. Residents of Imperial Beach smelled the change within days, as a plume of turgid, foamy sewage pushed out to sea. By the time the spill stopped, at the end of February, up to 256 million gallons had flowed through a protected estuary and out to the ocean, leaving a dark residue in the sand that technical reports refer to vaguely as “organic material.”For the McKays and many of their neighbors in Imperial Beach, including Serge Dedina, the mayor at the time, the spill was a signal event, dividing life in the town into “before” and “after.” For more than a week, Dedina tried to reach federal officials in the United States and Mexico to learn what was going on. Nobody answered his calls. “Like, literally, there was no response,” he said.Sewage overflow and beach closures are a long-standing problem on this part of the border—U.S. officials barred the sale of vegetables grown in the Tijuana River Valley as far back as the 1930s, fearing sewage contamination in the water there—but the 2017 spill heralded an era of cascading failures. Repairs to one section of the pipeline revealed more damage elsewhere. Pumps and valves failed. More pipes broke. Tijuana’s largest sewage treatment plant, five miles south of the border, was eventually degraded beyond repair, and soon began sending 40 million gallons a day of essentially untreated sewage straight out to sea. From there, it was carried north on summer swells to Imperial Beach and Coronado, one of the wealthiest communities in California—perhaps best-known for the iconic Hotel del Coronado, made famous by Marilyn Monroe in the film Some Like It Hot.Though a few bold surfers disregard the warnings, sections of Imperial Beach have been closed to swimmers for more than 900 consecutive days. Bars and restaurants have seen business dry up; lifeguards keep leaving for towns where they don’t have to tell people to get out of the water. A recent City Council meeting featured a debate on whether to cancel a popular summer sand-castle competition. Citing sales data on comparable housing elsewhere in coastal San Diego County, Norm Miller, an emeritus professor of real estate at the University of San Diego, estimated that homes in Imperial Beach are discounted by as much as 50 percent.For Dedina, the whole thing can feel like an exercise in futility. A lifelong surfer and geographer by training, Dedina runs the nonprofit Wildcoast, which works on coastal conservation on both sides of the border. He ran for mayor to put in sidewalks and pave alleyways, only to find himself suing the federal government under the Clean Water Act and “leading an international coalition to fix a sewer system,” he said. Why, he wondered, did it fall to “a small city with no money” to press for change?By some measures, Dedina’s lawsuit was a success, providing leverage that helped members of Congress secure $300 million in federal funding to address sewage pollution as part of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, the successor to the North American Free Trade Agreement. It also helped spur a review by the Environmental Protection Agency, outlining a range of projects on both sides of the border needed to provide a more durable solution. Unfortunately, no one thinks $300 million, or even the additional $156 million secured earlier this year, will come close to resolving the issue.Earth is home to hundreds of border-spanning watersheds, and versions of this struggle exist all over the planet: where the Ganges carries untreated effluent and industrial runoff from India into the lowland farms and coastal swamps of Bangladesh; along the Zambezi, the Mekong, the Danube. One merciful quality of the Tijuana River is that it’s not longer, limiting the scope of the conflict to two metro areas in two countries, as opposed to, say, the 11 nations whose disputes span the 4,000-mile course of the Nile.At the heart of the sewage crisis in Tijuana is the question of who bears responsibility for keeping up with the city’s growth. As Carlos de la Parra, an environmental planner from the city, put it, “We have no business being this large, except for the fact that we border California, and that Mexico and the U.S. signed the North American Free Trade Agreement 30 years ago.”Parts of NAFTA anticipated this dynamic; the agreement included a provision to set aside $100 million a year for environmental infrastructure along the border. As time went on, though, Congress lost its appetite for funding public health upgrades in Mexican cities. How about building a wall and making Mexico pay for it?That’s the kind of solution that appeals to the American political psyche, but it suffers from a basic misunderstanding. You can draw the border as a line on a map, but you still have to deal with the world on the other side. A sewage crisis in Mexico can’t be solved with pipes in California any more than a migration crisis that spans the hemisphere can be solved with a wall across Texas and Arizona.Extreme cases like Suzanne McKay’s haunt Imperial Beach: the surfer with the lung abscess, the Border Patrol agent with a flesh-eating bacterial infection. But no one quite knows how many people get sick from the water south of San Diego.Kimberly Dickson and her husband, Matt, both doctors, moved to town in 2011 to open an urgent care clinic. Over the years, they estimated that ailments associated with sewage made up 10 to 15 percent of their business, the way a clinic in a popular hiking area might see more than its share of scrapes and sprains. But they hadn’t tracked patterns in the data until August 2023, when Tropical Storm Hilary lashed the Pacific Coast with torrential rains from the tip of the Baja Peninsula as far north as Los Angeles.Suddenly, instead of seeing five or six cases of diarrhea in a week, they counted 34. “We just started noticing, ‘Gosh, we have just a full clinic in the middle of summer with people with vomiting and diarrhea and abdominal cramping.’ And the thing is, none of these people were going in the water,” Matt recalled. “That was the really startling thing for us … where are they getting this?”One answer lay at the south end of town, where sewage overflowed along Hollister Street, leaving a layer of foul-smelling mud to dry into dust on the roadway. “Kids go to school on that sidewalk,” Matt explained. “They walk into class, maybe they touch their feet, and then they eat lunch. Now they’re sick. Or, you know, you drive through it and you drive into your garage. Well, now you’ve tracked sewage into your garage.”It wasn’t only diarrhea. People complained of skin infections, sinusitis, sore throats, headaches, asthma flare-ups, and general cloudiness, all of which the Dicksons associated with what Kimberly called the “whiff test”—as in, “If you open your window and you smell, there’s your whiff test.” Many ailments seemed to track the San Diego County Air Pollution Control District’s measurements of hydrogen sulfide, the rotten-egg smell released when organic material breaks down with insufficient oxygen—say, during a sewage spill. The Dicksons are now collaborating with the epidemiology unit of the county health department to evaluate both routes of infection: water and air.In 2021, Falk Feddersen, an oceanographer at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, led a study funded by the EPA to model the path of sewage plumes along the coast in order to evaluate which infrastructure upgrades would deliver the most benefit. Nestled among the findings was a startling estimate: Based on the prevalence of norovirus in the waters off Imperial Beach, nearly one out of every 25 swimmers could be getting sick—potentially thousands of people a year. Heather Buonomo, who leads the unit responsible for water testing at the County Department of Environmental Health and Quality, declined to comment directly on that projection, because, she said, the county was not involved in the research. But she suggested that the system of closures and health advisories triggered by evidence of sewage spills has been an effective deterrent: “People aren’t going in the water,” she said. “So the work that we’re doing to protect public health is working.”The Dicksons aren’t so sure. “We’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg,” Kimberly said. “There’s probably more out there, and it’s flying under the radar because it’s not reportable.” The real worry, Matt said, comes if Tijuana experiences a more virulent disease that sheds into sewage flows that cross the border: cholera, for instance, or shigella, a leading cause of diarrhea globally. (Though both pathogens are rare in Mexico, they are often spread through untreated water and can cause fatal illness.) “That’s where we’re gonna have a big problem,” he said. “It all depends on what’s coming across in that water.”One afternoon in April, I accompanied Rosario Norzagaray, who works with Dedina at Wildcoast, to visit Los Laureles, a neighborhood where a small share of the sewage that makes its way to the Tijuana River—and, ultimately, Imperial Beach—begins its journey. Norzagaray took a circuitous route through steep ravines along Tijuana’s western flank, bringing us to a ramshackle neighborhood in the headlands of a canyon whose waters drain into the United States above the river’s floodplain. She waved her arm at the sweep of pastel-colored homes clinging to the eroded slopes above us. “All this is invasion,” she said, explaining that the so-called colonias were settled by people who built homes without title to the land. Then again, she added, chuckling, “half of Tijuana is an invasion.”Tijuana’s population has followed a path of near exponential growth over the last century, ballooning from a community of 21,000 in 1940 to nearly two million at last count. The city’s first sewer infrastructure, a septic tank for 500 people, was built in 1928; within a decade, it served 10 times that number. U.S. officials made their first effort to stop untreated sewage fouling the coast in the 1930s, with an underwater pipe, or “outfall,” that discharged around 140 feet offshore. By then, Tijuana had built another, larger tank, to serve 5,000, but it was quickly oversubscribed to the point of obsolescence. It wasn’t until 1983 that another tank was built; at that time, Tijuana’s population was passing half a million, with dozens of maquiladoras, or foreign-owned manufacturing plants, attracting new transplants each year. By the late 1980s, Tijuana had become the world capital of television manufacturing, producing 30 million TVs a year. The passage of NAFTA in 1994 only accelerated the city’s growth.“Tijuana is a stop, not a destination,” Norzagaray said. “People don’t come to Tijuana thinking they’ll stay; they come thinking they’ll go find their American dream, but when they can’t get there, they come back here.”Though some houses in Los Laureles were built half a century ago, the neighborhood today reminded me of a packed open-air concert, where each group of new arrivals crowding onto the grass forces those who came earlier to rearrange their picnic blankets. Unpermitted homes, built and expanded in stages, jam the hillsides. We got out of the truck at the entrance to a concrete flood control structure. A trash boom, installed in 2021, stretched across the ravine like an oversize necklace made of corrugated plastic piping and steel. When it rains, the boom floats up with the floodwaters, skimming off piles of plastic bags, milk bottles, and Styrofoam as the runoff continues downstream. This is the linchpin of Wildcoast’s work in the area, a community recycling program that has removed more than 100,000 pounds of plastic waste in the last four years. But plastic is only the most tractable part of the equation. The other major components of runoff—sediment and sewage—require more than a trash boom.All around us were signs of development that had outpaced the infrastructure to support it. A garden hose snaked along 50 yards of concrete wall, splitting a single paid water connection among several houses. Raw sewage trickled into the street from exposed, broken drainage pipes that zigzagged down from homes high above us. Narrow stairways and retaining walls made of used tires ran up the slopes. “They’re trying to control all this with tires; but the water takes it,” Norzagaray explained about the eroding hillside. “And this situation is replicated in every canyon in Tijuana. Wherever there’s not supposed to be construction and there is—there are problems with sewage.” She pointed out an empty expanse on the slope above us where 20 homes had stood until 2015, when they were damaged during a landslide brought on by heavy rains.Over the years, the government has extended services to Tijuana’s colonias piecemeal. But many residents have no choice but to make do with latrines and DIY septic tanks: Though they’d be willing to pay the connection fee, they aren’t eligible for a new sewer line without title to the land. Maria del Pilar Márquez Gómez and her husband, Manuel López Paz, live in a modest white and blue cement house on a shared lot that backs up against the flood control channel. Each moved to the city during the boom years of the 1990s. Pilar Márquez Gómez came to Tijuana on a lark, and stayed when she found steady work cleaning beachfront apartments owned by wealthy Mexicans and American expats. A mason, López Paz recalled construction foremen driving trucks around the city and calling out for workers from their windows. His brother was the first to settle in Los Laureles, and he gradually brought in new families to share a 5,000-square-meter lot. “When I got here, all this didn’t exist,” López Paz said, looking up at the homes around us. “It was only farms.”Though none of the occupants had formal title, the arrangement came to feel settled, even sanctioned by the city. When the government announced plans to channelize the arroyo out back, the family lost most of their backyard, but the authorities didn’t touch the houses. Not long afterward, they returned from an extended trip to visit family in Guanajuato to see that their street was being paved, and their neighbors’ homes had been connected to water and sewer service as construction proceeded up the canyon. It turned out to be something like a onetime amnesty. Thirteen years later, they are still trying to get the right paperwork through City Hall to acquire title, and still using their septic tank. “We missed our chance,” Pilar Márquez Gómez said.In this instance, however, it’s not clear whether a sewer connection would make much difference. A mile uphill, the pavement stopped and the concrete channel gave way to an overgrown ditch lined with trash, a canyon in miniature etched by a small stream that ran downhill. Two children in pigtails skipped home across a makeshift bridge made of shipping pallets. Nearby, the stream’s “headwaters” spouted from a manhole cover atop a sewer main, where a persistent blockage sent raw sewage bubbling over in a man-made waterfall, destined for the beaches of California.Even as Dedina saw his view of the sewage crisis vindicated through his lawsuit—the federal judge in the case went so far as to visit the Tijuana River estuary to smell the stench in person—the underlying conditions were growing more dire. In late 2019, another major pipeline broke in Tijuana; nine million gallons of sewage crossed into California in two days. As the pandemic set in and the border was closed to nonessential travel, the combination of wet weather and failing infrastructure, Dedina said, seemed to create a new baseline. “It’s just polluted every day. The river’s going to flow, and there doesn’t have to be a response or timeline to fix it.”In the summer of 2020, Dedina sparked a minor diplomatic spat by saying, in an interview with a Mexican television station, “Tijuana’s sewage is killing us.” Jaime Bonilla, then governor of Baja, shot back, blaming the problem on foreign investors: “The vast amount of this contamination comes from American companies operating in Tijuana discharging their waste into the river; that’s where he needs to focus his attention.” As Dedina sees it, the pandemic broke down key bilateral relationships at all levels of government just as U.S. ties with Mexico were strained by other concerns. “All of a sudden, things just fell apart,” Dedina told me. “Fentanyl, migrants, the whole crisis in the relationship between the U.S. and Mexico—that’s taking all of Ken Salazar’s time,” he said, referring to the U.S. ambassador to Mexico. “This is not something the U.S. is willing to push on.”The modern Tijuana River is a hybrid, part natural waterway and part man-made infrastructure, whose flow is what ecologists call “urban drool.” What was once an intermittent, seasonal stream has been replaced, since the 1970s, by a steady flow of used tap water imported across 90 miles of open desert. The concrete flood channel that sheaths the river all the way through Tijuana ends just past the border. On the southern bank, the rusty bollards of the border fence climb a steep hillside at the city’s edge, flanked by shops and apartments all the way to the sea. On the north side, the enclosed tunnel of the pedestrian crossing follows the river right up to California, then turns 90 degrees and descends to U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement, a filter separating the people heading north from everything else.As the water slows down and spreads out across the floodplain, solids drop out of the current. Plovers and godwits peck at the mud among empty water jugs and motor oil containers, toys and soccer balls, sneakers, couch cushions, spaghetti knots of hardened caulking. Coke bottles urge “Recíclame.”Standing on an embankment 200 yards downstream, Chris Helmer, the director of environmental and natural resources for Imperial Beach, gazed out at a profusion of wild mustard and garland daisies sprouting from deposits that accumulate in the riverbed like layers of rock each spring.A few weeks earlier, Helmer explained, and the view would not have been obstructed by so much vegetation. “It’s highly nutrient rich water: What do you think is going to grow in here?” he said. Where water or bulldozers had cut into the banks, the structure that remained looked like a tall layer cake. “It’s almost like tree rings. Every single season you can see a new layer of sediment and trash, sediment, trash.”Clearing the debris is a Sisyphean undertaking, with each season’s work reset by the next rains, and in recent years the U.S. government hasn’t come close to keeping up. There are now something like 100,000 truckloads of material that will need to be moved to prevent flooding in the adjoining neighborhoods in San Ysidro and Tijuana.But Customs and Border Protection is also in the process of making the work much harder. Just upstream, construction had begun on a project announced abruptly in 2020: a bridge for Border Patrol agents to cross the flood channel as it enters the United States, combined with a fence, built along the upstream side, consisting of dozens of moving panels, or liftgates, that will have to be raised during heavy rains to allow the river’s flow to continue downstream. As a border security measure, the project is exempt from federal environmental review, but other agencies met the CBP’s proposal with pointed skepticism. California’s Environmental Protection Agency, CalEPA, warned that fortifying this area might simply create security issues near some of the other places where tributaries crossed the border, like Los Laureles. But the larger worry is that the liftgates will fail, or that CBP may not respond in time to raise them before a rainstorm, or debris will accumulate in back-to-back storms, and the fence, which is supposed to let water through, will act as a dam instead, leading to catastrophic flooding in a densely populated part of Tijuana. (CBP did not respond to interview requests for this story.)“All the debris and trash is going to back up in Mexico, so you rely on Mexico to maintain and clean this,” Helmer said—maintenance and cleaning the United States already fails to do. He called the project “utterly insane.”It’s expected to be completed by the end of the year.Residents of Imperial Beach sometimes seemed at a loss about where political pressure can be usefully applied. “When you’re in Washington, what is the federal government even saying about this happening to us?” one man asked at a recent city workshop on the sewage problem. After 16 years of going to public meetings about sewage, he wanted to know if there was a time frame for a solution. Other residents have compared spills to a “dirty bomb” dropped on the city. There were suggestions that the United States close the border to all travel north during sewage flows or cut off Tijuana’s access to Colorado River water.If residents don’t know how to pressure the feds, the feds often don’t seem to know how to pressure Mexico. The commissioner of the U.S. arm of the International Boundary and Water Commission, Maria-Elena Giner, has been frank about the challenges of treating sewage that originates in another country. “We cannot fine them for not treating their wastewater; we can’t fine them for discharging water,” Giner told me. What the IBWC can do is conduct meetings, collect evidence, write stern letters, appeal for more funding from Congress. The sewage that reaches the IBWC plant would be anomalous anywhere else in California. “You get rags, you get a lot of sediment, and it tears up the pumps, it tears up the concrete,” Giner said.Rags and sediment do a number on the sewer infrastructure in Tijuana, too. But the root of the problem isn’t technical so much as financial: The Comisión Estatal de Servicios Públicos de Tijuana, or CESPT, which provides water and sewer services to the city, gets most of its revenue from ratepayers, but loses money on nearly 80 percent of the water that flows through its pipes.In the spring, I met with CESPT’s director, Jesús García Castro, and deputies responsible for finance and operations, around a coffee table spread with chocolate-covered nuts and cut fruit. García Castro had been on the job only a few months, but it turned out to be an auspicious moment to take over: A few weeks after he began, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or AMLO, as he’s known, announced that the city’s largest treatment plant, which hasn’t operated effectively in five years, would be rebuilt by a unit of the Secretaría de Defensa Nacional, or SEDENA, comparable to the Army Corps of Engineers. Salazar, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, traveled to Tijuana to attend the groundbreaking: Finally, it seemed, sewage had risen up the list of issues competing for political oxygen in the U.S.-Mexico relationship. The new treatment plant “will reduce the flows of untreated sewage to the Pacific Ocean by 90 percent,” García Castro said confidently. “So that’s a big part of the solution.”Under AMLO, the military has become something like Mexico’s contractor of first resort, with the ability to bypass environmental review and typical procurement processes. Keeping with SEDENA’s style, the construction schedule announced at the groundbreaking was ambitious, condensing what would ordinarily be a multiyear project into nine months. U.S. officials received the news with wary optimism. “SEDENA works fast,” one federal official told me in a text message. “Not necessarily a good thing as they tend to build BEFORE design.” Still, the Mexican government had ultimately scuttled a series of earlier initiatives to rebuild the plant with private funding, as far back as 2011, and there was a sense that if it wasn’t built by SEDENA, it might not be built at all.Before the existing plant at San Antonio de los Buenos went offline, it limped along well past its useful life, hobbled by a lack of maintenance. Sludge accumulated in treatment lagoons that were rarely dredged. Eventually, they stopped functioning altogether. A 2019 review by an independent consultant found that there was no backup power system and “no preventive maintenance program,” noting that CESPT typically received just a third of the operating budget it asked for.After years of delay, García Castro was adamant that the utility was making up for lost time. “We’ll have results this year,” he said. “Next year, already, we’ll be able to have clean beaches.” The reality is that most directors don’t stick around at CESPT long enough to see such promises through. When I asked how many people had held García Castro’s job before he got there, his deputies, both longtime employees, began counting on their fingers, seeming to flip through a mental catalog of past bosses like baseball fans trying to name bench players on favorite childhood teams. Eventually, they came up with a figure. “Thirteen in 10 years,” García Castro said.The IBWC’s South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant may be the easiest place on the entire border to cross legally between the United States and Mexico. Here, flatbed trucks bearing CESPT’s blue logo make daily return trips to a loading bay beneath an elevated conveyor belt carrying trash extracted from Tijuana sewage.In the spring, Morgan Rogers, who oversees the plant’s operations, watched through wraparound shades as a stream of refuse fell from a chute in the ceiling into a waiting dumpster. “Mexico hauls that off when it gets full,” he explained. “They own the trash, they own the sludge, they own the sediment”—he paused—“and they actually own the water. But we throw the water off the coast because they can’t do anything with it.”“But they can do stuff with the trash and sludge and sediment?” I asked.“Well, we make them take that.”Rogers nodded in the direction of the border wall, just on the other side of the building, its tall, rusted slats climbing to the horizon in either direction. “We have a gate out back here,” he said. The IBWC plant was built in the years after NAFTA was passed, partly out of a conviction that the Mexican government couldn’t be relied on to treat sewage to standards that would keep California beaches swimmable. It’s meant to handle about a third of Tijuana’s wastewater, along with dry weather flows from the Tijuana River and runoff from neighborhoods like Los Laureles. But as Tijuana has continued to grow, the plant has been broken down by the combined effects of storm events and infrastructure failures.In July 2022, Rogers explained, two critical pipelines, serving a pump station that allowed CESPT to divert sewage flows several miles south of the border, failed one after the other. That December, a series of atmospheric rivers also worsened damage to a valve controlling how much sewage the IBWC plant lets in. As a result, Rogers said, “Whatever flows come from Mexico, we take.”The consequences have been disastrous. During rainstorms, as much as 80 million gallons a day poured into a plant designed to handle 25 million, carrying trash and sediment that clogged critical equipment. By the end of 2023, all five of the plant’s primary treatment tanks were inoperable, filled to the brim with sludge.Tropical Storm Hilary made things even worse, destroying all but one of the pumps that moved sewage into the treatment tanks. Rogers leaned over a concrete wall where backed-up trash formed a dam during the storm, and he peered down at the pumps below. “There was eight feet of water down there,” he said. “We were on the edge: If you lost that pump, we’d have been out of business.”As it was, the plant was still recovering, with new pumps waiting on the grass to be installed, and waist-high weeds sprouting from treatment tanks, which were still being emptied and overhauled one at a time. Rogers credited Tropical Storm Hilary with spurring a new sense of urgency somewhere above his pay grade. “Hilary, really as much damage [as] it did, it kind of woke us up”—he paused, looking at his counterpart from IBWC’s political side, Sally Spener, following along in a pink button-down and maroon cowboy boots. “Not us, but it woke—Who would you say it woke up?” Spener didn’t answer.Throughout the tour, Spener countered Rogers’s blunt assessments of the plant’s condition with steadfast diplomacy: the broken valve (“But the contract has been awarded to fix it, right?”); the failing pump stations (“That’s all part of that rehab that’s envisioned.”); the oversize pipeline that sent the plant’s treated water three miles off the coast (“the award-winning ocean outfall!”). The dynamic captured the unwieldiness of the agency’s mission: to operate a utility whose “customers” live in another country, and to manage a spiraling set of technical problems enmeshed in a much larger diplomatic relationship.In June, Mexico elected its first woman president, Claudia Sheinbaum, a former professor of engineering from AMLO’s Morena party. The alignment between the levers of power in Baja state and Mexico City increases the chances that the leadership team at CESPT will keep their jobs long enough to make a dent in the priorities they’ve outlined.But the shift that may ultimately force the city into a different relationship with wastewater is climate change. As in urban areas across the U.S. Southwest, Tijuana’s water supply is dominated by the dwindling Colorado River. In 2023, CESPT was forced to shut off supply to nearly half the city and get emergency allocation from a cross-border connection with California to avoid prolonged water outages. Water, then, is the limiting factor on Tijuana’s growth: CESPT is now pursuing a long-postponed plan to reuse a portion of Tijuana’s treated water for agriculture, a signal that sewage is finally seen as a commodity worth capturing. “Mexico owns the water rights to this,” Chris Helmer told me as we watched Tijuana’s stream of urban drool meander past us into the estuary. “It’s written in the treaties. At some point, Mexico is going to want to use this water.”Straddling one of the busiest land crossings in the world, the Tijuana River reminds us that both sides of the border constitute a single place. Once the poop is in the water, no amount of barbed wire can get it out.When plans for a U.S. plant to treat Mexican sewage were first proposed, in the 1970s, they called for a facility big enough to handle 100 percent of Tijuana’s wastewater. Gradually, the plant-to-be was whittled down to a quarter of that size and simplified so that it could be built more cheaply, with the idea that upgrades would be made over time. David Gibson, an executive officer of the San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board, said the IBWC plant was already outdated by the time it was completed, in 1997. “Design decisions that were made in the 1990s for that treatment plant, we’re paying for even now,” Gibson said. Without ratepayers to cover maintenance costs, the plant has also fallen victim to the Darwinian logic of the federal budget, receiving just $4 million for maintenance, cumulatively, from 2010 to 2020, a period when billions of additional dollars were allocated to border security. “This is like buying a nice Corolla in 1997 or a nice Ford, but you never change the tires, you never change the oil,” Gibson said. The plan now is to make overdue repairs and double its capacity. But the current funding, Gibson said, is “barely half” what’s needed “for the economy model.” He worries the region is on track to reprise nearly 100 years of sewage history, “outgrowing the infrastructure only a decade or so after it’s installed.”Still, Gibson echoed the point of view I heard from nearly every American official I spoke to—that the only reliable solution to Tijuana’s sewage problem is building the infrastructure on the U.S. side. In this, sewage treatment for Tijuana seems destined to operate as something like an extension of the border wall, a constant, churning intervention made at the river’s mouth, rather than its source, whatever the price. “I don’t think Mexico in general has sufficient resources to attend to their problems,” Giner, the IBWC commissioner, told me. “How are we going to ensure this moves forward with sufficient resources after all of this is built?” she asked, referring to upgrades on the U.S. side. “Let’s say we’ve caught up. Once we catch up, we will have to answer that question.”Nearly wherever you look, border politics in the United States is animated by a persistent myth: that with enough money and willpower, you could eventually seal off the countries from one another, like apartments that share a 1,954-mile wall. One way to describe decades of militarization on the border is that it serves to make Mexico invisible to residents of the United States. The same might be said of cross-border industrial development: porous to money and airplane parts, hardened to everything else. Straddling one of the busiest land crossings in the world, the Tijuana River offers a stubborn rebuttal, a reminder that both sides of the border constitute a single place. Once the poop is in the water, no amount of barbed wire can get it out.

One day in March 2017, Mitch McKay and his wife, Suzanne, took a walk on the sand near Imperial Beach, a small surf town south of San Diego where they’d raised their children. Suzanne liked to collect sea glass, and they often brought a spare grocery bag to pick up any trash they found amid the seaweed and driftwood. “It was our ritual,” Mitch said. Back home, Suzanne started to suffer from splitting headaches that seemed to emanate from the back of her neck, near the base of her skull. The headaches soon got bad enough that she went to the emergency room, where doctors performed a spinal tap. She had, they determined, spinal meningitis.Suzanne spent 12 days in the hospital, taking antibiotics and slowly regaining strength as doctors tried to deduce how she’d gotten sick. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent a representative from Los Angeles to review her case. Ultimately, only one coherent explanation materialized: Bacteria living in fecal matter in seawater had entered her body through a small open blister on her foot. “That was my first slap in the face in terms of what’s going on down here,” Mitch recalled. “People can die from this.”The McKays’ fateful walk came at the end of a wet winter. That January, just over the U.S.-Mexico border, workers from Tijuana’s water utility had been called to an industrial stretch of the city, where a rapidly growing sinkhole claimed a bus shelter, then the sidewalk beside it, and soon threatened traffic along a major thoroughfare. The cause, foretold by the smell, was a break in an even more important artery: a sewage pipeline five feet in diameter carrying the feces and dishwater of hundreds of thousands of people.Residents of imperial beach smelled the change within days, as a plume of turgid, foamy sewage pushed out to sea. For many, the spill was a signal event, dividing life into “before” and “after.”This flow ordinarily made its way across the border and into California underground, to a treatment plant owned by the U.S. arm of the International Boundary and Water Commission, or IBWC, an agency that administers bilateral agreements for watersheds shared by both countries. After the pipeline broke, workers used an inflatable plug to stop the sewage and redirect it. But when repairs got underway, the pumps weren’t capable of sending the backed-up sewage to the plant by another route. Instead, the waste began to empty into the Tijuana River, which heads north through a concrete flood channel and crosses into California six miles from the Pacific Ocean. Residents of Imperial Beach smelled the change within days, as a plume of turgid, foamy sewage pushed out to sea. By the time the spill stopped, at the end of February, up to 256 million gallons had flowed through a protected estuary and out to the ocean, leaving a dark residue in the sand that technical reports refer to vaguely as “organic material.”For the McKays and many of their neighbors in Imperial Beach, including Serge Dedina, the mayor at the time, the spill was a signal event, dividing life in the town into “before” and “after.” For more than a week, Dedina tried to reach federal officials in the United States and Mexico to learn what was going on. Nobody answered his calls. “Like, literally, there was no response,” he said.Sewage overflow and beach closures are a long-standing problem on this part of the border—U.S. officials barred the sale of vegetables grown in the Tijuana River Valley as far back as the 1930s, fearing sewage contamination in the water there—but the 2017 spill heralded an era of cascading failures. Repairs to one section of the pipeline revealed more damage elsewhere. Pumps and valves failed. More pipes broke. Tijuana’s largest sewage treatment plant, five miles south of the border, was eventually degraded beyond repair, and soon began sending 40 million gallons a day of essentially untreated sewage straight out to sea. From there, it was carried north on summer swells to Imperial Beach and Coronado, one of the wealthiest communities in California—perhaps best-known for the iconic Hotel del Coronado, made famous by Marilyn Monroe in the film Some Like It Hot.Though a few bold surfers disregard the warnings, sections of Imperial Beach have been closed to swimmers for more than 900 consecutive days. Bars and restaurants have seen business dry up; lifeguards keep leaving for towns where they don’t have to tell people to get out of the water. A recent City Council meeting featured a debate on whether to cancel a popular summer sand-castle competition. Citing sales data on comparable housing elsewhere in coastal San Diego County, Norm Miller, an emeritus professor of real estate at the University of San Diego, estimated that homes in Imperial Beach are discounted by as much as 50 percent.For Dedina, the whole thing can feel like an exercise in futility. A lifelong surfer and geographer by training, Dedina runs the nonprofit Wildcoast, which works on coastal conservation on both sides of the border. He ran for mayor to put in sidewalks and pave alleyways, only to find himself suing the federal government under the Clean Water Act and “leading an international coalition to fix a sewer system,” he said. Why, he wondered, did it fall to “a small city with no money” to press for change?By some measures, Dedina’s lawsuit was a success, providing leverage that helped members of Congress secure $300 million in federal funding to address sewage pollution as part of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, the successor to the North American Free Trade Agreement. It also helped spur a review by the Environmental Protection Agency, outlining a range of projects on both sides of the border needed to provide a more durable solution. Unfortunately, no one thinks $300 million, or even the additional $156 million secured earlier this year, will come close to resolving the issue.Earth is home to hundreds of border-spanning watersheds, and versions of this struggle exist all over the planet: where the Ganges carries untreated effluent and industrial runoff from India into the lowland farms and coastal swamps of Bangladesh; along the Zambezi, the Mekong, the Danube. One merciful quality of the Tijuana River is that it’s not longer, limiting the scope of the conflict to two metro areas in two countries, as opposed to, say, the 11 nations whose disputes span the 4,000-mile course of the Nile.At the heart of the sewage crisis in Tijuana is the question of who bears responsibility for keeping up with the city’s growth. As Carlos de la Parra, an environmental planner from the city, put it, “We have no business being this large, except for the fact that we border California, and that Mexico and the U.S. signed the North American Free Trade Agreement 30 years ago.”Parts of NAFTA anticipated this dynamic; the agreement included a provision to set aside $100 million a year for environmental infrastructure along the border. As time went on, though, Congress lost its appetite for funding public health upgrades in Mexican cities. How about building a wall and making Mexico pay for it?That’s the kind of solution that appeals to the American political psyche, but it suffers from a basic misunderstanding. You can draw the border as a line on a map, but you still have to deal with the world on the other side. A sewage crisis in Mexico can’t be solved with pipes in California any more than a migration crisis that spans the hemisphere can be solved with a wall across Texas and Arizona.Extreme cases like Suzanne McKay’s haunt Imperial Beach: the surfer with the lung abscess, the Border Patrol agent with a flesh-eating bacterial infection. But no one quite knows how many people get sick from the water south of San Diego.Kimberly Dickson and her husband, Matt, both doctors, moved to town in 2011 to open an urgent care clinic. Over the years, they estimated that ailments associated with sewage made up 10 to 15 percent of their business, the way a clinic in a popular hiking area might see more than its share of scrapes and sprains. But they hadn’t tracked patterns in the data until August 2023, when Tropical Storm Hilary lashed the Pacific Coast with torrential rains from the tip of the Baja Peninsula as far north as Los Angeles.Suddenly, instead of seeing five or six cases of diarrhea in a week, they counted 34. “We just started noticing, ‘Gosh, we have just a full clinic in the middle of summer with people with vomiting and diarrhea and abdominal cramping.’ And the thing is, none of these people were going in the water,” Matt recalled. “That was the really startling thing for us … where are they getting this?”One answer lay at the south end of town, where sewage overflowed along Hollister Street, leaving a layer of foul-smelling mud to dry into dust on the roadway. “Kids go to school on that sidewalk,” Matt explained. “They walk into class, maybe they touch their feet, and then they eat lunch. Now they’re sick. Or, you know, you drive through it and you drive into your garage. Well, now you’ve tracked sewage into your garage.”It wasn’t only diarrhea. People complained of skin infections, sinusitis, sore throats, headaches, asthma flare-ups, and general cloudiness, all of which the Dicksons associated with what Kimberly called the “whiff test”—as in, “If you open your window and you smell, there’s your whiff test.” Many ailments seemed to track the San Diego County Air Pollution Control District’s measurements of hydrogen sulfide, the rotten-egg smell released when organic material breaks down with insufficient oxygen—say, during a sewage spill. The Dicksons are now collaborating with the epidemiology unit of the county health department to evaluate both routes of infection: water and air.In 2021, Falk Feddersen, an oceanographer at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, led a study funded by the EPA to model the path of sewage plumes along the coast in order to evaluate which infrastructure upgrades would deliver the most benefit. Nestled among the findings was a startling estimate: Based on the prevalence of norovirus in the waters off Imperial Beach, nearly one out of every 25 swimmers could be getting sick—potentially thousands of people a year. Heather Buonomo, who leads the unit responsible for water testing at the County Department of Environmental Health and Quality, declined to comment directly on that projection, because, she said, the county was not involved in the research. But she suggested that the system of closures and health advisories triggered by evidence of sewage spills has been an effective deterrent: “People aren’t going in the water,” she said. “So the work that we’re doing to protect public health is working.”The Dicksons aren’t so sure. “We’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg,” Kimberly said. “There’s probably more out there, and it’s flying under the radar because it’s not reportable.” The real worry, Matt said, comes if Tijuana experiences a more virulent disease that sheds into sewage flows that cross the border: cholera, for instance, or shigella, a leading cause of diarrhea globally. (Though both pathogens are rare in Mexico, they are often spread through untreated water and can cause fatal illness.) “That’s where we’re gonna have a big problem,” he said. “It all depends on what’s coming across in that water.”One afternoon in April, I accompanied Rosario Norzagaray, who works with Dedina at Wildcoast, to visit Los Laureles, a neighborhood where a small share of the sewage that makes its way to the Tijuana River—and, ultimately, Imperial Beach—begins its journey. Norzagaray took a circuitous route through steep ravines along Tijuana’s western flank, bringing us to a ramshackle neighborhood in the headlands of a canyon whose waters drain into the United States above the river’s floodplain. She waved her arm at the sweep of pastel-colored homes clinging to the eroded slopes above us. “All this is invasion,” she said, explaining that the so-called colonias were settled by people who built homes without title to the land. Then again, she added, chuckling, “half of Tijuana is an invasion.”Tijuana’s population has followed a path of near exponential growth over the last century, ballooning from a community of 21,000 in 1940 to nearly two million at last count. The city’s first sewer infrastructure, a septic tank for 500 people, was built in 1928; within a decade, it served 10 times that number. U.S. officials made their first effort to stop untreated sewage fouling the coast in the 1930s, with an underwater pipe, or “outfall,” that discharged around 140 feet offshore. By then, Tijuana had built another, larger tank, to serve 5,000, but it was quickly oversubscribed to the point of obsolescence. It wasn’t until 1983 that another tank was built; at that time, Tijuana’s population was passing half a million, with dozens of maquiladoras, or foreign-owned manufacturing plants, attracting new transplants each year. By the late 1980s, Tijuana had become the world capital of television manufacturing, producing 30 million TVs a year. The passage of NAFTA in 1994 only accelerated the city’s growth.“Tijuana is a stop, not a destination,” Norzagaray said. “People don’t come to Tijuana thinking they’ll stay; they come thinking they’ll go find their American dream, but when they can’t get there, they come back here.”Though some houses in Los Laureles were built half a century ago, the neighborhood today reminded me of a packed open-air concert, where each group of new arrivals crowding onto the grass forces those who came earlier to rearrange their picnic blankets. Unpermitted homes, built and expanded in stages, jam the hillsides. We got out of the truck at the entrance to a concrete flood control structure. A trash boom, installed in 2021, stretched across the ravine like an oversize necklace made of corrugated plastic piping and steel. When it rains, the boom floats up with the floodwaters, skimming off piles of plastic bags, milk bottles, and Styrofoam as the runoff continues downstream. This is the linchpin of Wildcoast’s work in the area, a community recycling program that has removed more than 100,000 pounds of plastic waste in the last four years. But plastic is only the most tractable part of the equation. The other major components of runoff—sediment and sewage—require more than a trash boom.All around us were signs of development that had outpaced the infrastructure to support it. A garden hose snaked along 50 yards of concrete wall, splitting a single paid water connection among several houses. Raw sewage trickled into the street from exposed, broken drainage pipes that zigzagged down from homes high above us. Narrow stairways and retaining walls made of used tires ran up the slopes. “They’re trying to control all this with tires; but the water takes it,” Norzagaray explained about the eroding hillside. “And this situation is replicated in every canyon in Tijuana. Wherever there’s not supposed to be construction and there is—there are problems with sewage.” She pointed out an empty expanse on the slope above us where 20 homes had stood until 2015, when they were damaged during a landslide brought on by heavy rains.Over the years, the government has extended services to Tijuana’s colonias piecemeal. But many residents have no choice but to make do with latrines and DIY septic tanks: Though they’d be willing to pay the connection fee, they aren’t eligible for a new sewer line without title to the land. Maria del Pilar Márquez Gómez and her husband, Manuel López Paz, live in a modest white and blue cement house on a shared lot that backs up against the flood control channel. Each moved to the city during the boom years of the 1990s. Pilar Márquez Gómez came to Tijuana on a lark, and stayed when she found steady work cleaning beachfront apartments owned by wealthy Mexicans and American expats. A mason, López Paz recalled construction foremen driving trucks around the city and calling out for workers from their windows. His brother was the first to settle in Los Laureles, and he gradually brought in new families to share a 5,000-square-meter lot. “When I got here, all this didn’t exist,” López Paz said, looking up at the homes around us. “It was only farms.”Though none of the occupants had formal title, the arrangement came to feel settled, even sanctioned by the city. When the government announced plans to channelize the arroyo out back, the family lost most of their backyard, but the authorities didn’t touch the houses. Not long afterward, they returned from an extended trip to visit family in Guanajuato to see that their street was being paved, and their neighbors’ homes had been connected to water and sewer service as construction proceeded up the canyon. It turned out to be something like a onetime amnesty. Thirteen years later, they are still trying to get the right paperwork through City Hall to acquire title, and still using their septic tank. “We missed our chance,” Pilar Márquez Gómez said.In this instance, however, it’s not clear whether a sewer connection would make much difference. A mile uphill, the pavement stopped and the concrete channel gave way to an overgrown ditch lined with trash, a canyon in miniature etched by a small stream that ran downhill. Two children in pigtails skipped home across a makeshift bridge made of shipping pallets. Nearby, the stream’s “headwaters” spouted from a manhole cover atop a sewer main, where a persistent blockage sent raw sewage bubbling over in a man-made waterfall, destined for the beaches of California.Even as Dedina saw his view of the sewage crisis vindicated through his lawsuit—the federal judge in the case went so far as to visit the Tijuana River estuary to smell the stench in person—the underlying conditions were growing more dire. In late 2019, another major pipeline broke in Tijuana; nine million gallons of sewage crossed into California in two days. As the pandemic set in and the border was closed to nonessential travel, the combination of wet weather and failing infrastructure, Dedina said, seemed to create a new baseline. “It’s just polluted every day. The river’s going to flow, and there doesn’t have to be a response or timeline to fix it.”In the summer of 2020, Dedina sparked a minor diplomatic spat by saying, in an interview with a Mexican television station, “Tijuana’s sewage is killing us.” Jaime Bonilla, then governor of Baja, shot back, blaming the problem on foreign investors: “The vast amount of this contamination comes from American companies operating in Tijuana discharging their waste into the river; that’s where he needs to focus his attention.” As Dedina sees it, the pandemic broke down key bilateral relationships at all levels of government just as U.S. ties with Mexico were strained by other concerns. “All of a sudden, things just fell apart,” Dedina told me. “Fentanyl, migrants, the whole crisis in the relationship between the U.S. and Mexico—that’s taking all of Ken Salazar’s time,” he said, referring to the U.S. ambassador to Mexico. “This is not something the U.S. is willing to push on.”The modern Tijuana River is a hybrid, part natural waterway and part man-made infrastructure, whose flow is what ecologists call “urban drool.” What was once an intermittent, seasonal stream has been replaced, since the 1970s, by a steady flow of used tap water imported across 90 miles of open desert. The concrete flood channel that sheaths the river all the way through Tijuana ends just past the border. On the southern bank, the rusty bollards of the border fence climb a steep hillside at the city’s edge, flanked by shops and apartments all the way to the sea. On the north side, the enclosed tunnel of the pedestrian crossing follows the river right up to California, then turns 90 degrees and descends to U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement, a filter separating the people heading north from everything else.As the water slows down and spreads out across the floodplain, solids drop out of the current. Plovers and godwits peck at the mud among empty water jugs and motor oil containers, toys and soccer balls, sneakers, couch cushions, spaghetti knots of hardened caulking. Coke bottles urge “Recíclame.”Standing on an embankment 200 yards downstream, Chris Helmer, the director of environmental and natural resources for Imperial Beach, gazed out at a profusion of wild mustard and garland daisies sprouting from deposits that accumulate in the riverbed like layers of rock each spring.A few weeks earlier, Helmer explained, and the view would not have been obstructed by so much vegetation. “It’s highly nutrient rich water: What do you think is going to grow in here?” he said. Where water or bulldozers had cut into the banks, the structure that remained looked like a tall layer cake. “It’s almost like tree rings. Every single season you can see a new layer of sediment and trash, sediment, trash.”Clearing the debris is a Sisyphean undertaking, with each season’s work reset by the next rains, and in recent years the U.S. government hasn’t come close to keeping up. There are now something like 100,000 truckloads of material that will need to be moved to prevent flooding in the adjoining neighborhoods in San Ysidro and Tijuana.But Customs and Border Protection is also in the process of making the work much harder. Just upstream, construction had begun on a project announced abruptly in 2020: a bridge for Border Patrol agents to cross the flood channel as it enters the United States, combined with a fence, built along the upstream side, consisting of dozens of moving panels, or liftgates, that will have to be raised during heavy rains to allow the river’s flow to continue downstream. As a border security measure, the project is exempt from federal environmental review, but other agencies met the CBP’s proposal with pointed skepticism. California’s Environmental Protection Agency, CalEPA, warned that fortifying this area might simply create security issues near some of the other places where tributaries crossed the border, like Los Laureles. But the larger worry is that the liftgates will fail, or that CBP may not respond in time to raise them before a rainstorm, or debris will accumulate in back-to-back storms, and the fence, which is supposed to let water through, will act as a dam instead, leading to catastrophic flooding in a densely populated part of Tijuana. (CBP did not respond to interview requests for this story.)“All the debris and trash is going to back up in Mexico, so you rely on Mexico to maintain and clean this,” Helmer said—maintenance and cleaning the United States already fails to do. He called the project “utterly insane.”It’s expected to be completed by the end of the year.Residents of Imperial Beach sometimes seemed at a loss about where political pressure can be usefully applied. “When you’re in Washington, what is the federal government even saying about this happening to us?” one man asked at a recent city workshop on the sewage problem. After 16 years of going to public meetings about sewage, he wanted to know if there was a time frame for a solution. Other residents have compared spills to a “dirty bomb” dropped on the city. There were suggestions that the United States close the border to all travel north during sewage flows or cut off Tijuana’s access to Colorado River water.If residents don’t know how to pressure the feds, the feds often don’t seem to know how to pressure Mexico. The commissioner of the U.S. arm of the International Boundary and Water Commission, Maria-Elena Giner, has been frank about the challenges of treating sewage that originates in another country. “We cannot fine them for not treating their wastewater; we can’t fine them for discharging water,” Giner told me. What the IBWC can do is conduct meetings, collect evidence, write stern letters, appeal for more funding from Congress. The sewage that reaches the IBWC plant would be anomalous anywhere else in California. “You get rags, you get a lot of sediment, and it tears up the pumps, it tears up the concrete,” Giner said.Rags and sediment do a number on the sewer infrastructure in Tijuana, too. But the root of the problem isn’t technical so much as financial: The Comisión Estatal de Servicios Públicos de Tijuana, or CESPT, which provides water and sewer services to the city, gets most of its revenue from ratepayers, but loses money on nearly 80 percent of the water that flows through its pipes.In the spring, I met with CESPT’s director, Jesús García Castro, and deputies responsible for finance and operations, around a coffee table spread with chocolate-covered nuts and cut fruit. García Castro had been on the job only a few months, but it turned out to be an auspicious moment to take over: A few weeks after he began, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or AMLO, as he’s known, announced that the city’s largest treatment plant, which hasn’t operated effectively in five years, would be rebuilt by a unit of the Secretaría de Defensa Nacional, or SEDENA, comparable to the Army Corps of Engineers. Salazar, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, traveled to Tijuana to attend the groundbreaking: Finally, it seemed, sewage had risen up the list of issues competing for political oxygen in the U.S.-Mexico relationship. The new treatment plant “will reduce the flows of untreated sewage to the Pacific Ocean by 90 percent,” García Castro said confidently. “So that’s a big part of the solution.”Under AMLO, the military has become something like Mexico’s contractor of first resort, with the ability to bypass environmental review and typical procurement processes. Keeping with SEDENA’s style, the construction schedule announced at the groundbreaking was ambitious, condensing what would ordinarily be a multiyear project into nine months. U.S. officials received the news with wary optimism. “SEDENA works fast,” one federal official told me in a text message. “Not necessarily a good thing as they tend to build BEFORE design.” Still, the Mexican government had ultimately scuttled a series of earlier initiatives to rebuild the plant with private funding, as far back as 2011, and there was a sense that if it wasn’t built by SEDENA, it might not be built at all.Before the existing plant at San Antonio de los Buenos went offline, it limped along well past its useful life, hobbled by a lack of maintenance. Sludge accumulated in treatment lagoons that were rarely dredged. Eventually, they stopped functioning altogether. A 2019 review by an independent consultant found that there was no backup power system and “no preventive maintenance program,” noting that CESPT typically received just a third of the operating budget it asked for.After years of delay, García Castro was adamant that the utility was making up for lost time. “We’ll have results this year,” he said. “Next year, already, we’ll be able to have clean beaches.” The reality is that most directors don’t stick around at CESPT long enough to see such promises through. When I asked how many people had held García Castro’s job before he got there, his deputies, both longtime employees, began counting on their fingers, seeming to flip through a mental catalog of past bosses like baseball fans trying to name bench players on favorite childhood teams. Eventually, they came up with a figure. “Thirteen in 10 years,” García Castro said.The IBWC’s South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant may be the easiest place on the entire border to cross legally between the United States and Mexico. Here, flatbed trucks bearing CESPT’s blue logo make daily return trips to a loading bay beneath an elevated conveyor belt carrying trash extracted from Tijuana sewage.In the spring, Morgan Rogers, who oversees the plant’s operations, watched through wraparound shades as a stream of refuse fell from a chute in the ceiling into a waiting dumpster. “Mexico hauls that off when it gets full,” he explained. “They own the trash, they own the sludge, they own the sediment”—he paused—“and they actually own the water. But we throw the water off the coast because they can’t do anything with it.”“But they can do stuff with the trash and sludge and sediment?” I asked.“Well, we make them take that.”Rogers nodded in the direction of the border wall, just on the other side of the building, its tall, rusted slats climbing to the horizon in either direction. “We have a gate out back here,” he said. The IBWC plant was built in the years after NAFTA was passed, partly out of a conviction that the Mexican government couldn’t be relied on to treat sewage to standards that would keep California beaches swimmable. It’s meant to handle about a third of Tijuana’s wastewater, along with dry weather flows from the Tijuana River and runoff from neighborhoods like Los Laureles. But as Tijuana has continued to grow, the plant has been broken down by the combined effects of storm events and infrastructure failures.In July 2022, Rogers explained, two critical pipelines, serving a pump station that allowed CESPT to divert sewage flows several miles south of the border, failed one after the other. That December, a series of atmospheric rivers also worsened damage to a valve controlling how much sewage the IBWC plant lets in. As a result, Rogers said, “Whatever flows come from Mexico, we take.”The consequences have been disastrous. During rainstorms, as much as 80 million gallons a day poured into a plant designed to handle 25 million, carrying trash and sediment that clogged critical equipment. By the end of 2023, all five of the plant’s primary treatment tanks were inoperable, filled to the brim with sludge.Tropical Storm Hilary made things even worse, destroying all but one of the pumps that moved sewage into the treatment tanks. Rogers leaned over a concrete wall where backed-up trash formed a dam during the storm, and he peered down at the pumps below. “There was eight feet of water down there,” he said. “We were on the edge: If you lost that pump, we’d have been out of business.”As it was, the plant was still recovering, with new pumps waiting on the grass to be installed, and waist-high weeds sprouting from treatment tanks, which were still being emptied and overhauled one at a time. Rogers credited Tropical Storm Hilary with spurring a new sense of urgency somewhere above his pay grade. “Hilary, really as much damage [as] it did, it kind of woke us up”—he paused, looking at his counterpart from IBWC’s political side, Sally Spener, following along in a pink button-down and maroon cowboy boots. “Not us, but it woke—Who would you say it woke up?” Spener didn’t answer.Throughout the tour, Spener countered Rogers’s blunt assessments of the plant’s condition with steadfast diplomacy: the broken valve (“But the contract has been awarded to fix it, right?”); the failing pump stations (“That’s all part of that rehab that’s envisioned.”); the oversize pipeline that sent the plant’s treated water three miles off the coast (“the award-winning ocean outfall!”). The dynamic captured the unwieldiness of the agency’s mission: to operate a utility whose “customers” live in another country, and to manage a spiraling set of technical problems enmeshed in a much larger diplomatic relationship.In June, Mexico elected its first woman president, Claudia Sheinbaum, a former professor of engineering from AMLO’s Morena party. The alignment between the levers of power in Baja state and Mexico City increases the chances that the leadership team at CESPT will keep their jobs long enough to make a dent in the priorities they’ve outlined.But the shift that may ultimately force the city into a different relationship with wastewater is climate change. As in urban areas across the U.S. Southwest, Tijuana’s water supply is dominated by the dwindling Colorado River. In 2023, CESPT was forced to shut off supply to nearly half the city and get emergency allocation from a cross-border connection with California to avoid prolonged water outages. Water, then, is the limiting factor on Tijuana’s growth: CESPT is now pursuing a long-postponed plan to reuse a portion of Tijuana’s treated water for agriculture, a signal that sewage is finally seen as a commodity worth capturing. “Mexico owns the water rights to this,” Chris Helmer told me as we watched Tijuana’s stream of urban drool meander past us into the estuary. “It’s written in the treaties. At some point, Mexico is going to want to use this water.”Straddling one of the busiest land crossings in the world, the Tijuana River reminds us that both sides of the border constitute a single place. Once the poop is in the water, no amount of barbed wire can get it out.When plans for a U.S. plant to treat Mexican sewage were first proposed, in the 1970s, they called for a facility big enough to handle 100 percent of Tijuana’s wastewater. Gradually, the plant-to-be was whittled down to a quarter of that size and simplified so that it could be built more cheaply, with the idea that upgrades would be made over time. David Gibson, an executive officer of the San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board, said the IBWC plant was already outdated by the time it was completed, in 1997. “Design decisions that were made in the 1990s for that treatment plant, we’re paying for even now,” Gibson said. Without ratepayers to cover maintenance costs, the plant has also fallen victim to the Darwinian logic of the federal budget, receiving just $4 million for maintenance, cumulatively, from 2010 to 2020, a period when billions of additional dollars were allocated to border security. “This is like buying a nice Corolla in 1997 or a nice Ford, but you never change the tires, you never change the oil,” Gibson said. The plan now is to make overdue repairs and double its capacity. But the current funding, Gibson said, is “barely half” what’s needed “for the economy model.” He worries the region is on track to reprise nearly 100 years of sewage history, “outgrowing the infrastructure only a decade or so after it’s installed.”Still, Gibson echoed the point of view I heard from nearly every American official I spoke to—that the only reliable solution to Tijuana’s sewage problem is building the infrastructure on the U.S. side. In this, sewage treatment for Tijuana seems destined to operate as something like an extension of the border wall, a constant, churning intervention made at the river’s mouth, rather than its source, whatever the price. “I don’t think Mexico in general has sufficient resources to attend to their problems,” Giner, the IBWC commissioner, told me. “How are we going to ensure this moves forward with sufficient resources after all of this is built?” she asked, referring to upgrades on the U.S. side. “Let’s say we’ve caught up. Once we catch up, we will have to answer that question.”Nearly wherever you look, border politics in the United States is animated by a persistent myth: that with enough money and willpower, you could eventually seal off the countries from one another, like apartments that share a 1,954-mile wall. One way to describe decades of militarization on the border is that it serves to make Mexico invisible to residents of the United States. The same might be said of cross-border industrial development: porous to money and airplane parts, hardened to everything else. Straddling one of the busiest land crossings in the world, the Tijuana River offers a stubborn rebuttal, a reminder that both sides of the border constitute a single place. Once the poop is in the water, no amount of barbed wire can get it out.

One day in March 2017, Mitch McKay and his wife, Suzanne, took a walk on the sand near Imperial Beach, a small surf town south of San Diego where they’d raised their children. Suzanne liked to collect sea glass, and they often brought a spare grocery bag to pick up any trash they found amid the seaweed and driftwood. “It was our ritual,” Mitch said. Back home, Suzanne started to suffer from splitting headaches that seemed to emanate from the back of her neck, near the base of her skull. The headaches soon got bad enough that she went to the emergency room, where doctors performed a spinal tap. She had, they determined, spinal meningitis.

Suzanne spent 12 days in the hospital, taking antibiotics and slowly regaining strength as doctors tried to deduce how she’d gotten sick. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent a representative from Los Angeles to review her case. Ultimately, only one coherent explanation materialized: Bacteria living in fecal matter in seawater had entered her body through a small open blister on her foot. “That was my first slap in the face in terms of what’s going on down here,” Mitch recalled. “People can die from this.”

The McKays’ fateful walk came at the end of a wet winter. That January, just over the U.S.-Mexico border, workers from Tijuana’s water utility had been called to an industrial stretch of the city, where a rapidly growing sinkhole claimed a bus shelter, then the sidewalk beside it, and soon threatened traffic along a major thoroughfare. The cause, foretold by the smell, was a break in an even more important artery: a sewage pipeline five feet in diameter carrying the feces and dishwater of hundreds of thousands of people.

This flow ordinarily made its way across the border and into California underground, to a treatment plant owned by the U.S. arm of the International Boundary and Water Commission, or IBWC, an agency that administers bilateral agreements for watersheds shared by both countries. After the pipeline broke, workers used an inflatable plug to stop the sewage and redirect it. But when repairs got underway, the pumps weren’t capable of sending the backed-up sewage to the plant by another route. Instead, the waste began to empty into the Tijuana River, which heads north through a concrete flood channel and crosses into California six miles from the Pacific Ocean. Residents of Imperial Beach smelled the change within days, as a plume of turgid, foamy sewage pushed out to sea. By the time the spill stopped, at the end of February, up to 256 million gallons had flowed through a protected estuary and out to the ocean, leaving a dark residue in the sand that technical reports refer to vaguely as “organic material.”

A photograph of sewage spilling onto Playa Blanca, a beach in Tijuana, in March of this year.

For the McKays and many of their neighbors in Imperial Beach, including Serge Dedina, the mayor at the time, the spill was a signal event, dividing life in the town into “before” and “after.” For more than a week, Dedina tried to reach federal officials in the United States and Mexico to learn what was going on. Nobody answered his calls. “Like, literally, there was no response,” he said.

Sewage overflow and beach closures are a long-standing problem on this part of the border—U.S. officials barred the sale of vegetables grown in the Tijuana River Valley as far back as the 1930s, fearing sewage contamination in the water there—but the 2017 spill heralded an era of cascading failures. Repairs to one section of the pipeline revealed more damage elsewhere. Pumps and valves failed. More pipes broke. Tijuana’s largest sewage treatment plant, five miles south of the border, was eventually degraded beyond repair, and soon began sending 40 million gallons a day of essentially untreated sewage straight out to sea. From there, it was carried north on summer swells to Imperial Beach and Coronado, one of the wealthiest communities in California—perhaps best-known for the iconic Hotel del Coronado, made famous by Marilyn Monroe in the film Some Like It Hot.

Though a few bold surfers disregard the warnings, sections of Imperial Beach have been closed to swimmers for more than 900 consecutive days. Bars and restaurants have seen business dry up; lifeguards keep leaving for towns where they don’t have to tell people to get out of the water. A recent City Council meeting featured a debate on whether to cancel a popular summer sand-castle competition. Citing sales data on comparable housing elsewhere in coastal San Diego County, Norm Miller, an emeritus professor of real estate at the University of San Diego, estimated that homes in Imperial Beach are discounted by as much as 50 percent.

For Dedina, the whole thing can feel like an exercise in futility. A lifelong surfer and geographer by training, Dedina runs the nonprofit Wildcoast, which works on coastal conservation on both sides of the border. He ran for mayor to put in sidewalks and pave alleyways, only to find himself suing the federal government under the Clean Water Act and “leading an international coalition to fix a sewer system,” he said. Why, he wondered, did it fall to “a small city with no money” to press for change?

By some measures, Dedina’s lawsuit was a success, providing leverage that helped members of Congress secure $300 million in federal funding to address sewage pollution as part of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, the successor to the North American Free Trade Agreement. It also helped spur a review by the Environmental Protection Agency, outlining a range of projects on both sides of the border needed to provide a more durable solution. Unfortunately, no one thinks $300 million, or even the additional $156 million secured earlier this year, will come close to resolving the issue.

Earth is home to hundreds of border-spanning watersheds, and versions of this struggle exist all over the planet: where the Ganges carries untreated effluent and industrial runoff from India into the lowland farms and coastal swamps of Bangladesh; along the Zambezi, the Mekong, the Danube. One merciful quality of the Tijuana River is that it’s not longer, limiting the scope of the conflict to two metro areas in two countries, as opposed to, say, the 11 nations whose disputes span the 4,000-mile course of the Nile.

At the heart of the sewage crisis in Tijuana is the question of who bears responsibility for keeping up with the city’s growth. As Carlos de la Parra, an environmental planner from the city, put it, “We have no business being this large, except for the fact that we border California, and that Mexico and the U.S. signed the North American Free Trade Agreement 30 years ago.”

Parts of NAFTA anticipated this dynamic; the agreement included a provision to set aside $100 million a year for environmental infrastructure along the border. As time went on, though, Congress lost its appetite for funding public health upgrades in Mexican cities. How about building a wall and making Mexico pay for it?

That’s the kind of solution that appeals to the American political psyche, but it suffers from a basic misunderstanding. You can draw the border as a line on a map, but you still have to deal with the world on the other side. A sewage crisis in Mexico can’t be solved with pipes in California any more than a migration crisis that spans the hemisphere can be solved with a wall across Texas and Arizona.


Extreme cases like Suzanne McKay’s haunt Imperial Beach: the surfer with the lung abscess, the Border Patrol agent with a flesh-eating bacterial infection. But no one quite knows how many people get sick from the water south of San Diego.

Kimberly Dickson and her husband, Matt, both doctors, moved to town in 2011 to open an urgent care clinic. Over the years, they estimated that ailments associated with sewage made up 10 to 15 percent of their business, the way a clinic in a popular hiking area might see more than its share of scrapes and sprains. But they hadn’t tracked patterns in the data until August 2023, when Tropical Storm Hilary lashed the Pacific Coast with torrential rains from the tip of the Baja Peninsula as far north as Los Angeles.

Suddenly, instead of seeing five or six cases of diarrhea in a week, they counted 34. “We just started noticing, ‘Gosh, we have just a full clinic in the middle of summer with people with vomiting and diarrhea and abdominal cramping.’ And the thing is, none of these people were going in the water,” Matt recalled. “That was the really startling thing for us … where are they getting this?”

One answer lay at the south end of town, where sewage overflowed along Hollister Street, leaving a layer of foul-smelling mud to dry into dust on the roadway. “Kids go to school on that sidewalk,” Matt explained. “They walk into class, maybe they touch their feet, and then they eat lunch. Now they’re sick. Or, you know, you drive through it and you drive into your garage. Well, now you’ve tracked sewage into your garage.”

It wasn’t only diarrhea. People complained of skin infections, sinusitis, sore throats, headaches, asthma flare-ups, and general cloudiness, all of which the Dicksons associated with what Kimberly called the “whiff test”—as in, “If you open your window and you smell, there’s your whiff test.” Many ailments seemed to track the San Diego County Air Pollution Control District’s measurements of hydrogen sulfide, the rotten-egg smell released when organic material breaks down with insufficient oxygen—say, during a sewage spill. The Dicksons are now collaborating with the epidemiology unit of the county health department to evaluate both routes of infection: water and air.

In 2021, Falk Feddersen, an oceanographer at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, led a study funded by the EPA to model the path of sewage plumes along the coast in order to evaluate which infrastructure upgrades would deliver the most benefit. Nestled among the findings was a startling estimate: Based on the prevalence of norovirus in the waters off Imperial Beach, nearly one out of every 25 swimmers could be getting sick—potentially thousands of people a year. Heather Buonomo, who leads the unit responsible for water testing at the County Department of Environmental Health and Quality, declined to comment directly on that projection, because, she said, the county was not involved in the research. But she suggested that the system of closures and health advisories triggered by evidence of sewage spills has been an effective deterrent: “People aren’t going in the water,” she said. “So the work that we’re doing to protect public health is working.”

The Dicksons aren’t so sure. “We’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg,” Kimberly said. “There’s probably more out there, and it’s flying under the radar because it’s not reportable.” The real worry, Matt said, comes if Tijuana experiences a more virulent disease that sheds into sewage flows that cross the border: cholera, for instance, or shigella, a leading cause of diarrhea globally. (Though both pathogens are rare in Mexico, they are often spread through untreated water and can cause fatal illness.) “That’s where we’re gonna have a big problem,” he said. “It all depends on what’s coming across in that water.”


One afternoon in April, I accompanied Rosario Norzagaray, who works with Dedina at Wildcoast, to visit Los Laureles, a neighborhood where a small share of the sewage that makes its way to the Tijuana River—and, ultimately, Imperial Beach—begins its journey. Norzagaray took a circuitous route through steep ravines along Tijuana’s western flank, bringing us to a ramshackle neighborhood in the headlands of a canyon whose waters drain into the United States above the river’s floodplain. She waved her arm at the sweep of pastel-colored homes clinging to the eroded slopes above us. “All this is invasion,” she said, explaining that the so-called colonias were settled by people who built homes without title to the land. Then again, she added, chuckling, “half of Tijuana is an invasion.”

A panoramic view of Tijuana’s Los Laureles Canyon in 2023

Tijuana’s population has followed a path of near exponential growth over the last century, ballooning from a community of 21,000 in 1940 to nearly two million at last count. The city’s first sewer infrastructure, a septic tank for 500 people, was built in 1928; within a decade, it served 10 times that number. U.S. officials made their first effort to stop untreated sewage fouling the coast in the 1930s, with an underwater pipe, or “outfall,” that discharged around 140 feet offshore. By then, Tijuana had built another, larger tank, to serve 5,000, but it was quickly oversubscribed to the point of obsolescence. It wasn’t until 1983 that another tank was built; at that time, Tijuana’s population was passing half a million, with dozens of maquiladoras, or foreign-owned manufacturing plants, attracting new transplants each year. By the late 1980s, Tijuana had become the world capital of television manufacturing, producing 30 million TVs a year. The passage of NAFTA in 1994 only accelerated the city’s growth.

“Tijuana is a stop, not a destination,” Norzagaray said. “People don’t come to Tijuana thinking they’ll stay; they come thinking they’ll go find their American dream, but when they can’t get there, they come back here.”

Though some houses in Los Laureles were built half a century ago, the neighborhood today reminded me of a packed open-air concert, where each group of new arrivals crowding onto the grass forces those who came earlier to rearrange their picnic blankets. Unpermitted homes, built and expanded in stages, jam the hillsides. We got out of the truck at the entrance to a concrete flood control structure. A trash boom, installed in 2021, stretched across the ravine like an oversize necklace made of corrugated plastic piping and steel. When it rains, the boom floats up with the floodwaters, skimming off piles of plastic bags, milk bottles, and Styrofoam as the runoff continues downstream. This is the linchpin of Wildcoast’s work in the area, a community recycling program that has removed more than 100,000 pounds of plastic waste in the last four years. But plastic is only the most tractable part of the equation. The other major components of runoff—sediment and sewage—require more than a trash boom.

All around us were signs of development that had outpaced the infrastructure to support it. A garden hose snaked along 50 yards of concrete wall, splitting a single paid water connection among several houses. Raw sewage trickled into the street from exposed, broken drainage pipes that zigzagged down from homes high above us. Narrow stairways and retaining walls made of used tires ran up the slopes. “They’re trying to control all this with tires; but the water takes it,” Norzagaray explained about the eroding hillside. “And this situation is replicated in every canyon in Tijuana. Wherever there’s not supposed to be construction and there is—there are problems with sewage.” She pointed out an empty expanse on the slope above us where 20 homes had stood until 2015, when they were damaged during a landslide brought on by heavy rains.

A photo a trash boom in Los Laureles Canyon. When it rains, the boom floats up with the floodwaters, skimming off piles of plastic bags, milk bottles, and Styrofoam.

Over the years, the government has extended services to Tijuana’s colonias piecemeal. But many residents have no choice but to make do with latrines and DIY septic tanks: Though they’d be willing to pay the connection fee, they aren’t eligible for a new sewer line without title to the land. Maria del Pilar Márquez Gómez and her husband, Manuel López Paz, live in a modest white and blue cement house on a shared lot that backs up against the flood control channel. Each moved to the city during the boom years of the 1990s. Pilar Márquez Gómez came to Tijuana on a lark, and stayed when she found steady work cleaning beachfront apartments owned by wealthy Mexicans and American expats. A mason, López Paz recalled construction foremen driving trucks around the city and calling out for workers from their windows. His brother was the first to settle in Los Laureles, and he gradually brought in new families to share a 5,000-square-meter lot. “When I got here, all this didn’t exist,” López Paz said, looking up at the homes around us. “It was only farms.”

Though none of the occupants had formal title, the arrangement came to feel settled, even sanctioned by the city. When the government announced plans to channelize the arroyo out back, the family lost most of their backyard, but the authorities didn’t touch the houses. Not long afterward, they returned from an extended trip to visit family in Guanajuato to see that their street was being paved, and their neighbors’ homes had been connected to water and sewer service as construction proceeded up the canyon. It turned out to be something like a onetime amnesty. Thirteen years later, they are still trying to get the right paperwork through City Hall to acquire title, and still using their septic tank. “We missed our chance,” Pilar Márquez Gómez said.

In this instance, however, it’s not clear whether a sewer connection would make much difference. A mile uphill, the pavement stopped and the concrete channel gave way to an overgrown ditch lined with trash, a canyon in miniature etched by a small stream that ran downhill. Two children in pigtails skipped home across a makeshift bridge made of shipping pallets. Nearby, the stream’s “headwaters” spouted from a manhole cover atop a sewer main, where a persistent blockage sent raw sewage bubbling over in a man-made waterfall, destined for the beaches of California.


Even as Dedina saw his view of the sewage crisis vindicated through his lawsuit—the federal judge in the case went so far as to visit the Tijuana River estuary to smell the stench in person—the underlying conditions were growing more dire. In late 2019, another major pipeline broke in Tijuana; nine million gallons of sewage crossed into California in two days. As the pandemic set in and the border was closed to nonessential travel, the combination of wet weather and failing infrastructure, Dedina said, seemed to create a new baseline. “It’s just polluted every day. The river’s going to flow, and there doesn’t have to be a response or timeline to fix it.”

In the summer of 2020, Dedina sparked a minor diplomatic spat by saying, in an interview with a Mexican television station, “Tijuana’s sewage is killing us.” Jaime Bonilla, then governor of Baja, shot back, blaming the problem on foreign investors: “The vast amount of this contamination comes from American companies operating in Tijuana discharging their waste into the river; that’s where he needs to focus his attention.” As Dedina sees it, the pandemic broke down key bilateral relationships at all levels of government just as U.S. ties with Mexico were strained by other concerns. “All of a sudden, things just fell apart,” Dedina told me. “Fentanyl, migrants, the whole crisis in the relationship between the U.S. and Mexico—that’s taking all of Ken Salazar’s time,” he said, referring to the U.S. ambassador to Mexico. “This is not something the U.S. is willing to push on.”

The modern Tijuana River is a hybrid, part natural waterway and part man-made infrastructure, whose flow is what ecologists call “urban drool.” What was once an intermittent, seasonal stream has been replaced, since the 1970s, by a steady flow of used tap water imported across 90 miles of open desert. The concrete flood channel that sheaths the river all the way through Tijuana ends just past the border. On the southern bank, the rusty bollards of the border fence climb a steep hillside at the city’s edge, flanked by shops and apartments all the way to the sea. On the north side, the enclosed tunnel of the pedestrian crossing follows the river right up to California, then turns 90 degrees and descends to U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement, a filter separating the people heading north from everything else.

As the water slows down and spreads out across the floodplain, solids drop out of the current. Plovers and godwits peck at the mud among empty water jugs and motor oil containers, toys and soccer balls, sneakers, couch cushions, spaghetti knots of hardened caulking. Coke bottles urge “Recíclame.”

A photo of a Mexican worker in Tijuana’s Matadero Canyon examining a sewage pipeline. During seasonal rains, water from numerous canyons in Tijuana, including nearby Los Laureles, drains into the United States.

Standing on an embankment 200 yards downstream, Chris Helmer, the director of environmental and natural resources for Imperial Beach, gazed out at a profusion of wild mustard and garland daisies sprouting from deposits that accumulate in the riverbed like layers of rock each spring.

A few weeks earlier, Helmer explained, and the view would not have been obstructed by so much vegetation. “It’s highly nutrient rich water: What do you think is going to grow in here?” he said. Where water or bulldozers had cut into the banks, the structure that remained looked like a tall layer cake. “It’s almost like tree rings. Every single season you can see a new layer of sediment and trash, sediment, trash.”

Clearing the debris is a Sisyphean undertaking, with each season’s work reset by the next rains, and in recent years the U.S. government hasn’t come close to keeping up. There are now something like 100,000 truckloads of material that will need to be moved to prevent flooding in the adjoining neighborhoods in San Ysidro and Tijuana.

But Customs and Border Protection is also in the process of making the work much harder. Just upstream, construction had begun on a project announced abruptly in 2020: a bridge for Border Patrol agents to cross the flood channel as it enters the United States, combined with a fence, built along the upstream side, consisting of dozens of moving panels, or liftgates, that will have to be raised during heavy rains to allow the river’s flow to continue downstream. As a border security measure, the project is exempt from federal environmental review, but other agencies met the CBP’s proposal with pointed skepticism. California’s Environmental Protection Agency, CalEPA, warned that fortifying this area might simply create security issues near some of the other places where tributaries crossed the border, like Los Laureles. But the larger worry is that the liftgates will fail, or that CBP may not respond in time to raise them before a rainstorm, or debris will accumulate in back-to-back storms, and the fence, which is supposed to let water through, will act as a dam instead, leading to catastrophic flooding in a densely populated part of Tijuana. (CBP did not respond to interview requests for this story.)

“All the debris and trash is going to back up in Mexico, so you rely on Mexico to maintain and clean this,” Helmer said—maintenance and cleaning the United States already fails to do. He called the project “utterly insane.”

It’s expected to be completed by the end of the year.


Residents of Imperial Beach sometimes seemed at a loss about where political pressure can be usefully applied. “When you’re in Washington, what is the federal government even saying about this happening to us?” one man asked at a recent city workshop on the sewage problem. After 16 years of going to public meetings about sewage, he wanted to know if there was a time frame for a solution. Other residents have compared spills to a “dirty bomb” dropped on the city. There were suggestions that the United States close the border to all travel north during sewage flows or cut off Tijuana’s access to Colorado River water.

If residents don’t know how to pressure the feds, the feds often don’t seem to know how to pressure Mexico. The commissioner of the U.S. arm of the International Boundary and Water Commission, Maria-Elena Giner, has been frank about the challenges of treating sewage that originates in another country. “We cannot fine them for not treating their wastewater; we can’t fine them for discharging water,” Giner told me. What the IBWC can do is conduct meetings, collect evidence, write stern letters, appeal for more funding from Congress. The sewage that reaches the IBWC plant would be anomalous anywhere else in California. “You get rags, you get a lot of sediment, and it tears up the pumps, it tears up the concrete,” Giner said.

Rags and sediment do a number on the sewer infrastructure in Tijuana, too. But the root of the problem isn’t technical so much as financial: The Comisión Estatal de Servicios Públicos de Tijuana, or CESPT, which provides water and sewer services to the city, gets most of its revenue from ratepayers, but loses money on nearly 80 percent of the water that flows through its pipes.

In the spring, I met with CESPT’s director, Jesús García Castro, and deputies responsible for finance and operations, around a coffee table spread with chocolate-covered nuts and cut fruit. García Castro had been on the job only a few months, but it turned out to be an auspicious moment to take over: A few weeks after he began, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or AMLO, as he’s known, announced that the city’s largest treatment plant, which hasn’t operated effectively in five years, would be rebuilt by a unit of the Secretaría de Defensa Nacional, or SEDENA, comparable to the Army Corps of Engineers. Salazar, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, traveled to Tijuana to attend the groundbreaking: Finally, it seemed, sewage had risen up the list of issues competing for political oxygen in the U.S.-Mexico relationship. The new treatment plant “will reduce the flows of untreated sewage to the Pacific Ocean by 90 percent,” García Castro said confidently. “So that’s a big part of the solution.”

Under AMLO, the military has become something like Mexico’s contractor of first resort, with the ability to bypass environmental review and typical procurement processes. Keeping with SEDENA’s style, the construction schedule announced at the groundbreaking was ambitious, condensing what would ordinarily be a multiyear project into nine months. U.S. officials received the news with wary optimism. “SEDENA works fast,” one federal official told me in a text message. “Not necessarily a good thing as they tend to build BEFORE design.” Still, the Mexican government had ultimately scuttled a series of earlier initiatives to rebuild the plant with private funding, as far back as 2011, and there was a sense that if it wasn’t built by SEDENA, it might not be built at all.

Before the existing plant at San Antonio de los Buenos went offline, it limped along well past its useful life, hobbled by a lack of maintenance. Sludge accumulated in treatment lagoons that were rarely dredged. Eventually, they stopped functioning altogether. A 2019 review by an independent consultant found that there was no backup power system and “no preventive maintenance program,” noting that CESPT typically received just a third of the operating budget it asked for.

After years of delay, García Castro was adamant that the utility was making up for lost time. “We’ll have results this year,” he said. “Next year, already, we’ll be able to have clean beaches.” The reality is that most directors don’t stick around at CESPT long enough to see such promises through. When I asked how many people had held García Castro’s job before he got there, his deputies, both longtime employees, began counting on their fingers, seeming to flip through a mental catalog of past bosses like baseball fans trying to name bench players on favorite childhood teams. Eventually, they came up with a figure. “Thirteen in 10 years,” García Castro said.


The IBWC’s South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant may be the easiest place on the entire border to cross legally between the United States and Mexico. Here, flatbed trucks bearing CESPT’s blue logo make daily return trips to a loading bay beneath an elevated conveyor belt carrying trash extracted from Tijuana sewage.

In the spring, Morgan Rogers, who oversees the plant’s operations, watched through wraparound shades as a stream of refuse fell from a chute in the ceiling into a waiting dumpster. “Mexico hauls that off when it gets full,” he explained. “They own the trash, they own the sludge, they own the sediment”—he paused—“and they actually own the water. But we throw the water off the coast because they can’t do anything with it.”

“But they can do stuff with the trash and sludge and sediment?” I asked.

“Well, we make them take that.”

Rogers nodded in the direction of the border wall, just on the other side of the building, its tall, rusted slats climbing to the horizon in either direction. “We have a gate out back here,” he said. The IBWC plant was built in the years after NAFTA was passed, partly out of a conviction that the Mexican government couldn’t be relied on to treat sewage to standards that would keep California beaches swimmable. It’s meant to handle about a third of Tijuana’s wastewater, along with dry weather flows from the Tijuana River and runoff from neighborhoods like Los Laureles. But as Tijuana has continued to grow, the plant has been broken down by the combined effects of storm events and infrastructure failures.

A photograph of Mexican workers repairing broken pipelines connected to the San Antonio de los Buenos sewage treatment plant in Tijuana. Before the plant went offline, it limped along well past its useful life, hobbled by a lack of maintenance.

In July 2022, Rogers explained, two critical pipelines, serving a pump station that allowed CESPT to divert sewage flows several miles south of the border, failed one after the other. That December, a series of atmospheric rivers also worsened damage to a valve controlling how much sewage the IBWC plant lets in. As a result, Rogers said, “Whatever flows come from Mexico, we take.”

The consequences have been disastrous. During rainstorms, as much as 80 million gallons a day poured into a plant designed to handle 25 million, carrying trash and sediment that clogged critical equipment. By the end of 2023, all five of the plant’s primary treatment tanks were inoperable, filled to the brim with sludge.

Tropical Storm Hilary made things even worse, destroying all but one of the pumps that moved sewage into the treatment tanks. Rogers leaned over a concrete wall where backed-up trash formed a dam during the storm, and he peered down at the pumps below. “There was eight feet of water down there,” he said. “We were on the edge: If you lost that pump, we’d have been out of business.”

As it was, the plant was still recovering, with new pumps waiting on the grass to be installed, and waist-high weeds sprouting from treatment tanks, which were still being emptied and overhauled one at a time. Rogers credited Tropical Storm Hilary with spurring a new sense of urgency somewhere above his pay grade. “Hilary, really as much damage [as] it did, it kind of woke us up”—he paused, looking at his counterpart from IBWC’s political side, Sally Spener, following along in a pink button-down and maroon cowboy boots. “Not us, but it woke—Who would you say it woke up?” Spener didn’t answer.

Throughout the tour, Spener countered Rogers’s blunt assessments of the plant’s condition with steadfast diplomacy: the broken valve (“But the contract has been awarded to fix it, right?”); the failing pump stations (“That’s all part of that rehab that’s envisioned.”); the oversize pipeline that sent the plant’s treated water three miles off the coast (“the award-winning ocean outfall!”). The dynamic captured the unwieldiness of the agency’s mission: to operate a utility whose “customers” live in another country, and to manage a spiraling set of technical problems enmeshed in a much larger diplomatic relationship.


In June, Mexico elected its first woman president, Claudia Sheinbaum, a former professor of engineering from AMLO’s Morena party. The alignment between the levers of power in Baja state and Mexico City increases the chances that the leadership team at CESPT will keep their jobs long enough to make a dent in the priorities they’ve outlined.

But the shift that may ultimately force the city into a different relationship with wastewater is climate change. As in urban areas across the U.S. Southwest, Tijuana’s water supply is dominated by the dwindling Colorado River. In 2023, CESPT was forced to shut off supply to nearly half the city and get emergency allocation from a cross-border connection with California to avoid prolonged water outages. Water, then, is the limiting factor on Tijuana’s growth: CESPT is now pursuing a long-postponed plan to reuse a portion of Tijuana’s treated water for agriculture, a signal that sewage is finally seen as a commodity worth capturing. “Mexico owns the water rights to this,” Chris Helmer told me as we watched Tijuana’s stream of urban drool meander past us into the estuary. “It’s written in the treaties. At some point, Mexico is going to want to use this water.”

When plans for a U.S. plant to treat Mexican sewage were first proposed, in the 1970s, they called for a facility big enough to handle 100 percent of Tijuana’s wastewater. Gradually, the plant-to-be was whittled down to a quarter of that size and simplified so that it could be built more cheaply, with the idea that upgrades would be made over time. David Gibson, an executive officer of the San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board, said the IBWC plant was already outdated by the time it was completed, in 1997. “Design decisions that were made in the 1990s for that treatment plant, we’re paying for even now,” Gibson said. Without ratepayers to cover maintenance costs, the plant has also fallen victim to the Darwinian logic of the federal budget, receiving just $4 million for maintenance, cumulatively, from 2010 to 2020, a period when billions of additional dollars were allocated to border security. “This is like buying a nice Corolla in 1997 or a nice Ford, but you never change the tires, you never change the oil,” Gibson said. The plan now is to make overdue repairs and double its capacity. But the current funding, Gibson said, is “barely half” what’s needed “for the economy model.” He worries the region is on track to reprise nearly 100 years of sewage history, “outgrowing the infrastructure only a decade or so after it’s installed.”

Still, Gibson echoed the point of view I heard from nearly every American official I spoke to—that the only reliable solution to Tijuana’s sewage problem is building the infrastructure on the U.S. side. In this, sewage treatment for Tijuana seems destined to operate as something like an extension of the border wall, a constant, churning intervention made at the river’s mouth, rather than its source, whatever the price. “I don’t think Mexico in general has sufficient resources to attend to their problems,” Giner, the IBWC commissioner, told me. “How are we going to ensure this moves forward with sufficient resources after all of this is built?” she asked, referring to upgrades on the U.S. side. “Let’s say we’ve caught up. Once we catch up, we will have to answer that question.”

Nearly wherever you look, border politics in the United States is animated by a persistent myth: that with enough money and willpower, you could eventually seal off the countries from one another, like apartments that share a 1,954-mile wall. One way to describe decades of militarization on the border is that it serves to make Mexico invisible to residents of the United States. The same might be said of cross-border industrial development: porous to money and airplane parts, hardened to everything else. Straddling one of the busiest land crossings in the world, the Tijuana River offers a stubborn rebuttal, a reminder that both sides of the border constitute a single place. Once the poop is in the water, no amount of barbed wire can get it out.

Read the full story here.
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Average person will be 40% poorer if world warms by 4C, new research shows

Experts say previous economic models underestimated impact of global heating – as well as likely ‘cascading supply chain disruptions’Economic models have systematically underestimated how global heating will affect people’s wealth, according to a new study that finds 4C warming will make the average person 40% poorer – an almost four-fold increase on some estimates.The study, by Australian scientists, says average global GDP per person will be reduced by 16% even if warming is kept to 2C higher, , much higher than previous estimates of a drop of about 1.4%. Continue reading...

Economic models have systematically underestimated how global heating will affect people’s wealth, according to a new study that finds 4C warming will make the average person 40% poorer – an almost four-fold increase on some estimates.The study, by Australian scientists, says average global GDP per person will be reduced by 16% even if warming is kept to 2C higher, , much higher than previous estimates of a drop of about 1.4%.Even if governments around the globe hit their near-term and long-term climate targets, scientists now estimate global temperatures will rise by 2.1C.Criticisms have mounted in recent years that a set of economic tools known as integrated assessment models (IAM) – used to guide how much governments should invest in cutting greenhouse gas emissions – have failed to capture major risks from climate change, particularly extreme weather events.The new study, in the journal Environmental Research Letters, took one of the most popular economic models and enhanced it with climate change forecasts to capture the impacts of extreme weather events across global supply chains.Dr Timothy Neal, of the University of New South Wales’s Institute for climate risk and response and the lead author of the study, said the new research had looked at the likely impact of global heating of 4C – seen by many climate experts as catastrophic for the planet – finding it would make the average person 40% poorer. This compared with about 11% poorer when using the models without enhancements.Previous economic models that “inadvertently concluded” even high levels of global heating would have only modest impacts on the global economy had “profound implications for climate policy”, Neal said.He said economic models had tended to only account for changing weather on a local level, rather than how weather extremes like droughts or floods could affect global supply chains.“In a hotter future, we can expect cascading supply chain disruptions triggered by extreme weather events worldwide,” Neal said.Prof Andy Pitman, a climate scientist at UNSW and co-author of the research, said: “It’s in the extremes when the rubber hits the road. It isn’t about average temperatures”“Retooling economic models to account for extremes in your part of the world and its impact on supply chains feels like a very urgent thing to do so countries can fully cost their economic vulnerabilities to climate change and then do the obvious thing – cut emissions.”Some economists have argued global losses from global heating might be partially balanced by warming that could benefit some cold regions, such as Canada, Russia and northern Europe. But Neal said global heating would hit countries everywhere, because global economies are linked by trade.Prof Frank Jotzo, a climate policy expert at Australian National University who was not involved in the research, said economic climate modelling using IAMs assumed that if climate change made an activity such as agriculture unviable in one part of the world, increased output would simply come from somewhere else.“The result is that the models say that climate change makes little difference to the future world economy, which is contrary to what physical impact science and a nuanced understanding of interdependencies in the economy would suggest.”A report in January from the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, representing the profession that underpins the risk management decisions of the world’s insurers and pension funds, said previous economic risk assessments had failed to account for real-world climate impacts like “tipping points, extreme events, migration, sea level rise, human health impacts or geopolitical risk.”“The benign but flawed results may reinforce the narrative that these are slow-moving risks with limited impacts, rather than severe risks requiring immediate action,” the report said.Mark Lawrence researches climate risk as a professor of practice at the University of Adelaide and previouslyworked in financial risk management with senior roles at major financial institutions including Merrill Lynch and ANZ Banking Group. He said the results of the new research were credible.“If anything, I believe the economic impacts [of climate change] could be even worse,” he said.A consequence of the disconnect between modelling and real-world climate impacts, Lawrence said, was that “the potential economic benefits of urgent climate policy action have also been significantly understated”.

Lack of fluoride, dentists leaves rural America at risk

Two recent polls have found that the largest share of Americans support fluoridation, but a sizable minority does not. Utah just became the first state to ban it.

In the wooded highlands of northern Arkansas, where small towns have few dentists, water officials who serve more than 20,000 people have for more than a decade openly defied state law by refusing to add fluoride to the drinking water.For its refusal, the Ozark Mountain Regional Public Water Authority has received hundreds of state fines amounting to about $130,000, which are stuffed in a cardboard box and left unpaid, said Andy Anderson, who is opposed to fluoridation and has led the water system for nearly two decades. This Ozark region is among hundreds of rural American communities that face a one-two punch to oral health: a dire shortage of dentists and a lack of fluoridated drinking water, which is widely viewed among dentists as one of the most effective tools to prevent tooth decay. But as the anti-fluoride movement builds unprecedented momentum, it may turn out that the Ozarks were not behind the times after all.“We will eventually win,” Anderson said. “We will be vindicated.”Fluoride, a naturally occurring mineral, keeps teeth strong when added to drinking water, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Dental Association. But the anti-fluoride movement has been energized since a government report last summer found a possible link between lower IQ in children and consuming amounts of fluoride that are higher than what is recommended in American drinking water. asaDozens of communities have decided to stop fluoridating in recent months, and state officials in Florida and Texas have urged their water systems to do the same. Last week, Utah became the first state to ban it in tap water.Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has long espoused fringe health theories, has called fluoride an “industrial waste” and “dangerous neurotoxin” and said the Trump administration will recommend it be removed from all public drinking water.Separately, Republican efforts to extend tax cuts and shrink federal spending may squeeze Medicaid, which could deepen existing shortages of dentists in rural areas where many residents depend on the federal insurance program for whatever dental care they can find.Dental experts warn that the simultaneous erosion of Medicaid and fluoridation could exacerbate a crisis of rural oral health and reverse decades of progress against tooth decay, particularly for children and those who rarely see a dentist.“If you have folks with little access to professional care and no access to water fluoridation,” said Steven Levy, a dentist and leading fluoride researcher at the University of Iowa, “then they are missing two of the big pillars of how to keep healthy for a lifetime.”Many already are.James Flanagin, the only dentist in the tiny Arkansas town of Leslie, treats patients in the back of an antique store and, with hand-painted lettering, advertises his clinic and himself as a “pretty good dentist.” (Katie Adkins for KFF Health News)Katie AdkinsOverlapping ‘dental deserts’ and fluoride-free zonesNearly 25 million Americans live in areas without enough dentists — more than twice as many as prior estimates by the federal government — according to a recent study from Harvard University that measured U.S. “dental deserts” with more depth and precision than before.Hawazin Elani, a Harvard dentist and epidemiologist who co-authored the study, found that many shortage areas are rural and poor, and depend heavily on Medicaid. But many dentists do not accept Medicaid because payments can be low, Elani said.The ADA has estimated that only a third of dentists treat patients on Medicaid.“I suspect this situation is much worse for Medicaid beneficiaries,” Elani said. “If you have Medicaid and your nearest dentists do not accept it, then you will likely have to go to the third, or fourth, or the fifth.”The Harvard study identified over 780 counties where more than half of the residents live in a shortage area. Of those counties, at least 230 also have mostly or completely unfluoridated public drinking water, according to a KFF analysis of fluoride data published by the CDC. That means people in these areas who can’t find a dentist also do not get protection for their teeth from their tap water.A Flourish data visualizationThe KFF Health News analysis does not cover the entire nation because it does not include private wells and 13 states do not submit fluoride data to the CDC. But among those that do, most counties with a shortage of dentists and unfluoridated water are in the south-central U.S., in a cluster that stretches from Texas to the Florida Panhandle and up into Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma.In the center of that cluster is the Ozark Mountain Regional Public Water Authority, which serves the Arkansas counties of Boone, Marion, Newton, and Searcy. It has refused to add fluoride ever since Arkansas enacted a statewide mandate in 2011. After weekly fines began in 2016, the water system unsuccessfully challenged the fluoride mandate in state court, then lost again on appeal.Anderson, who has chaired the water system’s board since 2007, said he would like to challenge the fluoride mandate in court again and would argue the case himself if necessary. In a phone interview, Anderson said he believes that fluoride can hamper the brain and body to the point of making people “get fat and lazy.”“So if you go out in the streets these days, walk down the streets, you’ll see lots of fat people wearing their pajamas out in public,” he said.Nearby in the tiny, no-stoplight community of Leslie, Arkansas, which gets water from the Ozark system, the only dentist in town operates out of a one-man clinic tucked in the back of an antique store. Hand-painted lettering on the store window advertises a “pretty good dentist.”James Flanagin, a third-generation dentist who opened this clinic three years ago, said he was drawn to Leslie by the quaint charms and friendly smiles of small-town life. But those same smiles also reveal the unmistakable consequences of refusing to fluoridate, he said.“There is no doubt that there is more dental decay here than there would otherwise be,” he said. “You are going to have more decay if your water is not fluoridated. That’s just a fact.”Flanagin, the only dentist in the tiny Ozark town of Leslie, Arkansas, runs his clinic in the back of an antique store. He says the town suffers from high levels of tooth decay because the local drinking water is not fluoridated.(Katie Adkins for KFF Health News)Fluoride seen as a great public health achievementFluoride was first added to public water in an American city in 1945 and spread to half of the U.S. population by 1980, according to the CDC. Because of “the dramatic decline” in cavities that followed, in 1999 the CDC dubbed fluoridation as one of 10 great public health achievements of the 20th century.Currently more than 70% of the U.S. population on public water systems get fluoridated water, with a recommended concentration of 0.7 milligrams per liter, or about three drops in a 55-gallon barrel, according to the CDC.Fluoride is also present in modern toothpaste, mouthwash, dental varnish, and some food and drinks — like raisins, potatoes, oatmeal, coffee, and black tea. But several dental experts said these products do not reliably reach as many low-income families as drinking water, which has an additional benefit over toothpaste of strengthening children’s teeth from within as they grow.Two recent polls have found that the largest share of Americans support fluoridation, but a sizable minority does not. Polls from Axios/Ipsos and AP-NORC found that 48% and 40% of respondents wanted to keep fluoride in public water supplies, while 29% and 26% supported its removal.Chelsea Fosse, an expert on oral health policy at the American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry, said she worried that misguided fears of fluoride would cause many people to stop using fluoridated toothpaste and varnish just as Medicaid cuts made it harder to see a dentist.The combination, she said, could be “devastating.”“It will be visibly apparent what this does to the prevalence of tooth decay,” Fosse said. “If we get rid of water fluoridation, if we make Medicaid cuts, and if we don’t support providers in locating and serving the highest-need populations, I truly don’t know what we will do.”Multiple peer-reviewed studies have shown what ending water fluoridation could look like. In the past few years, studies of cities in Alaska and Canada have shown that communities that stopped fluoridation saw significant increases in children’s cavities when compared with similar cities that did not. A 2024 study from Israel reported a “two-fold increase” in dental treatments for kids within five years after the country stopped fluoridating in 2014.Despite the benefits of fluoridation, it has been fiercely opposed by some since its inception, said Catherine Hayes, a Harvard dental expert who advises the American Dental Association on fluoride and has studied its use for three decades.Fluoridation was initially smeared as a communist plot against America, Hayes said, and then later fears arose of possible links to cancer, which were refuted through extensive scientific research. In the ‘80s, hysteria fueled fears of fluoride causing AIDS, which was “ludicrous,” Hayes said.More recently, the anti-fluoride movement seized on international research that suggests high levels of fluoride can hinder children’s brain development and has been boosted by high-profile legal and political victories.Last August, a hotly debated report from the National Institutes of Health’s National Toxicology Program found “with moderate confidence” that exposure to levels of fluoride that are higher than what is present in American drinking water is associated with lower IQ in children. The report was based on an analysis of 74 studies conducted in other countries, most of which were considered “low quality” and involved exposure of at least 1.5 milligrams of fluoride per liter of water — or more than twice the U.S. recommendation — according to the program.The following month, in a long-simmering lawsuit filed by fluoride opponents, a federal judge in California said the possible link between fluoride and lowered IQ was too risky to ignore, then ordered the federal Environmental Protection Agency to take nonspecified steps to lower that risk. The EPA started to appeal this ruling in the final days of the Biden administration, but the Trump administration could reverse course.The EPA and Department of Justice declined to comment. The White House and Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to questions about fluoride.Despite the National Toxicology Program’s report, Hayes said, no association has been shown to date between lowered IQ and the amount of fluoride actually present in most Americans’ water. The court ruling may prompt additional research conducted in the U.S., Hayes said, which she hoped would finally put the campaign against fluoride to rest.“It’s one of the great mysteries of my career, what sustains it,” Hayes said. “What concerns me is that there’s some belief amongst some members of the public — and some of our policymakers — that there is some truth to this.”Not all experts were so dismissive of the toxicology program’s report. Bruce Lanphear, a children’s health researcher at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, published an editorial in January that said the findings should prompt health organizations “to reassess the risks and benefits of fluoride, particularly for pregnant women and infants.”“The people who are proposing fluoridation need to now prove it’s safe,” Lanphear told NPR in January. “That’s what this study does. It shifts the burden of proof — or it should.”Cities and states rethink fluorideAt least 14 states so far this year have considered or are considering bills that would lift fluoride mandates or prohibit fluoride in drinking water altogether. In February, Utah lawmakers passed the nation’s first ban, which Republican Gov. Spencer Cox told ABC4 Utah he intends to sign. And both Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo and Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller have called for their respective states to end fluoridation.“I don’t want Big Brother telling me what to do,” Miller told The Dallas Morning News in February. “Government has forced this on us for too long.”Additionally, dozens of cities and counties have decided to stop fluoridation in the past six months — including at least 16 communities in Florida with a combined population of more than 1.6 million — according to news reports and the Fluoride Action Network, an anti-fluoride group.Stuart Cooper, executive director of that group, said the movement’s unprecedented momentum would be further supercharged if Kennedy and the Trump administration follow through on a recommendation against fluoride.Cooper predicted that most U.S. communities will have stopped fluoridating within years.“I think what you are seeing in Florida, where every community is falling like dominoes, is going to now happen in the United States,” he said. “I think we’re seeing the absolute end of it.”If Cooper’s prediction is right, Hayes said, widespread decay would be visible within years. Kids’ teeth will rot in their mouths, she said, even though “we know how to completely prevent it.”“It’s unnecessary pain and suffering,” Hayes said. “If you go into any children’s hospital across this country, you’ll see a waiting list of kids to get into the operating room to get their teeth fixed because they have severe decay because they haven’t had access to either fluoridated water or other types of fluoride. Unfortunately, that’s just going to get worse.”Methodology: How We CountedThis KFF Health News article identifies communities with an elevated risk of tooth decay by combining data on areas with dentist shortages and unfluoridated drinking water. Our analysis merged Harvard University research on dentist-shortage areas with large datasets on public water systems published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.The Harvard research determined that nearly 25 million Americans live in dentist-shortage areas that span much of rural America. The CDC data details the populations served and fluoridation status of more than 38,000 public water systems in 37 states. We classified counties as having elevated risk of tooth decay if they met three criteria:--More than half of the residents live in a dentist-shortage area identified by Harvard.--The number of people receiving unfluoridated water from water systems based in that county amounts to more than half of the county’s population.--The number of people receiving unfluoridated water from water systems based in that county amounts to at least half of the total population of all water systems based in that county, even if those systems reached beyond the county borders, which many do.Our analysis identified approximately 230 counties that meet these criteria, meaning they have both a dire shortage of dentists and largely unfluoridated drinking water.But this total is certainly an undercount. Thirteen states do not report water system data to the CDC, and the agency data does not include private wells, most of which are unfluoridated.KFF Health News data editor Holly K. Hacker contributed to this article.

World's Glaciers Are Losing Record Ice as Global Temperatures Climb, U.N. Says

By Alexander Villegas(Reuters) - Glaciers around the globe are disappearing faster than ever, with the last three-year period seeing the largest...

(Reuters) - Glaciers around the globe are disappearing faster than ever, with the last three-year period seeing the largest glacial mass loss on record, according to a UNESCO report released on Friday. The 9,000 gigatons of ice lost from glaciers since 1975 are roughly equivalent to "an ice block the size of Germany with the thickness of 25 meters," Michael Zemp, director of the Switzerland-based World Glacier Monitoring Service, said during a press conference announcing the report at the UN headquarters in Geneva.The dramatic ice loss, from the Arctic to the Alps, from South America to the Tibetan Plateau, is expected to accelerate as climate change, caused by the burning of fossil fuels, pushes global temperatures higher. This would likely exacerbate economic, environmental and social problems across the world as sea levels rise and these key water sources dwindle.  The report coincides with a UNESCO summit in Paris marking the first World Day for Glaciers, urging global action to protect glaciers around the world.Zemp said that five of the last six years registered the largest losses, with glaciers losing 450 gigatons of mass in 2024 alone.The accelerated loss has made mountain glaciers one of the largest contributors to sea level rise, putting millions at risk of devastating floods and damaging water routes that billions of people depend on for hydroelectric energy and agriculture.Stefan Uhlenbrook, the director of water and cryosphere at the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), said that about 275,000 glaciers remain globally which, along with the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, comprise about 70% of the world's freshwater."We need to advance our scientific knowledge, we need to advance through better observing systems, through better forecasts and better early warning systems for the planet and the people," Uhlenbrook said.About 1.1 billion people live in mountain communities, which suffer the most immediate impacts of glacier loss, due to the increasing risks with natural hazards and unreliable water sources. The remote locations and difficult terrains also make cheap fixes difficult to come by.Rising temperatures are expected to worsen droughts in areas that rely on snowpack for freshwater, while increasing both the severity and frequency of hazards like avalanches, landslides, flash floods and glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs).One Peruvian farmer living downstream of a retreating glacier has taken the issue to court, suing German energy giant RWE for a portion of the glacial lake's flood defenses proportionate to its historic global emissions."The changes we see in the field are literally heartbreaking," glaciologist Heidi Sevestre, secretariat at the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program, told Reuters outside the UNESCO headquarters in Paris on Wednesday.    "Things in certain regions are happening actually much faster than we anticipated," Sevestre added, noting a recent trip to the Rwenzori Mountains, located in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo in East Africa, where glaciers are now expected to disappear by 2030.Sevestre has worked with the region's indigenous Bakonzo communities who believe a deity called Kitasamba lives in the glaciers."Can you imagine the deep spiritual connection, this strong attachment they have towards the glaciers and what it might mean for them that their glaciers are disappearing?" Sevestre said.Glacial melt in East Africa has led to increased local conflicts over water, according to the new UNESCO report, and while the impact on a global scale is minimal, the trickle of melting glaciers around the world is having a compounding impact.    Between 2000 and 2023, melting mountain glaciers have caused 18 millimeters of global sea level rise, about 1 mm per year. Every millimeter can expose up to 300,000 people to annual flooding, according to the World Glacier Monitoring Service. "Billions of people are connected to glaciers, whether they know it or not, and that will require billions of people to protect them," Sevestre said.(Reporting by Alexander Villegas; Editing by Gloria Dickie and Aurora Ellis)Copyright 2025 Thomson Reuters.Photos You Should See - Feb. 2025

Controversy erupts over claims Microsoft invented a new state of matter

This discovery could change the computing world entirely. But many are skeptical of their claims

The matter making up the world around us has long-since been organized into three neat categories: solids, liquids and gases. But last month, Microsoft announced that it had allegedly discovered another state of matter originally theorized to exist in 1937.  This new state of matter called the Majorana zero mode is made up of quasiparticles, which act as their own particle and antiparticle. The idea is that the Majorana zero mode could be used to build a quantum computer, which could help scientists answer complex questions that standard computers are not capable of solving, with implications for medicine, cybersecurity and artificial intelligence. In late February, Sen. Ted Cruz presented Microsoft’s new computer chip at a congressional hearing, saying, “Technologies like this new chip I hold in the palm of my hand, the Majorana 1 quantum chip, are unlocking a new era of computing that will transform industries from health care to energy, solving problems that today's computers simply cannot.” However, Microsoft’s announcement, claiming a “breakthrough in quantum computing,” was met with skepticism from some physicists in the field. Proving that this form of quantum computing can work requires first demonstrating the existence of Majorana quasiparticles, measuring what the Majorana particles are doing, and creating something called a topological qubit used to store quantum information. But some say that not all of the data necessary to prove this has been included in the research paper published in Nature, on which this announcement is based. And due to a fraught history of similar claims from the company being disputed and ultimately rescinded, some are extra wary of the results. Although the paper describes the structure and architecture that could potentially be used to build a topological quantum computer, it’s not clear if all of these ingredients can be put together to actually construct the system, said Dr. Jelena Klinovaj, a theoretical physicist at the University of Basel who studies topology of quantum.  "Discourse and skepticism are all part of the scientific process." “In this Microsoft paper, they cannot show that they can really operate it,” Klinovaj told Salon in a video call. “They did not show in a peer-reviewed publication that it is really a topological state because some objects could have exactly the same properties in experiments.” Despite Microsoft’s announcement, one of the peer-review files accompanying the Nature paper also states, “The editorial team wishes to point out that the results in this manuscript do not represent evidence for the presence of Majorana zero modes in the reported devices.” Dr. Chetan Nayak, Microsoft Station Q Director, said in an email that prior work published in Nature “confirms the existence of [Majorana zero modes] and demonstrates the basic operation needed for a topological qubit.” “Since then, we have fabricated and tested topological qubits, building on this prior work and further confirming the existence of [Majorana zero modes],” Nayak wrote. A Microsoft spokesperson said in an email that the company has made significant progress since the paper was submitted and has been able to demonstrate “the basic native operations in a measurement-based topological qubit.” Want more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon's weekly newsletter Lab Notes. “Discourse and skepticism are all part of the scientific process,” they wrote. “That is why we are dedicated to the continued open publication of our research, so that everyone can build on what others have discovered and learned.” It’s not the first time there has been controversy in this research field. In 2018, a study partially funded by Microsoft but conducted by an independent university reported that they had detected the presence of Majorana zero-modes. Later, it was retracted by Nature, the journal that published it after a report from independent experts put the findings under more intense scrutiny. In the report, four physicists not involved in the research concluded that it did not appear that the authors had intentionally misrepresented the data, but instead seemed to be “caught up in the excitement of the moment.” Establishing the existence of these particles is extremely complex in part because disorder in the device can create signals that mimic these quasiparticles when they are not actually there.  "Me and many other experts do not think they have demonstrated even the basic science behind it." Modern computers in use today are encoded in bits, which can either be in a zero state (no current flowing through them), or a one state (current flowing.) These bits work together to send information and signals that communicate with the computer, powering everything from cell phones to video games. Companies like Google, IBM and Amazon have invested in designing another form of quantum computer that uses chips built with “qubits,” or quantum bits. Qubits can exist in both zero and one states at the same time due to a phenomenon called superposition.  However, qubits are subject to external noise from the environment that can affect their performance, said Dr. Paolo Molignini, a researcher in theoretical quantum physics at Stockholm University. “Because qubits are in a superposition of zero and one, they are very prone to errors and they are very prone to what is called decoherence, which means there could be noise, thermal fluctuations or many things that can collapse the state of the qubits,” Molignini told Salon in a video call. “Then you basically lose all of the information that you were encoding.” It’s necessary to correct errors that creep in with this noise, and in order to do so, you need to add many more qubits to the system. Within the last six months, Amazon announced it had built a computer chip that used five qubits, and Google announced that it had built one with 105 qubits. In December, Google said its quantum computer could perform a calculation that a standard computer could complete in 10 septillion years — a period far longer than the age of the universe — in just under five minutes.  However, a general-purpose computer would require billions of qubits, so these approaches are still a far cry from having practical applications, said Dr. Patrick Lee, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who co-authored the report leading to the 2018 Nature paper's retraction. Microsoft is taking a different approach to quantum computing by trying to develop  a topological qubit, which has the ability to store information in multiple places at once. Topological qubits exist within the Majorana zero states and are appealing because they can theoretically offer greater protection against environmental noise that destroys information within a quantum system. Think of it like an arrow, where the arrowhead holds a portion of the information and the arrow tail holds the rest, Lee said. Distributing information across space like this is called topological protection. “If you are able to put them far apart from each other, then you have a chance of maintaining the identity of the arrow even if it is subject to noise,” Lee told Salon in a phone interview. “The idea is that if the noise affects the head, it doesn’t kill the arrow and if it affects only the tail it doesn’t kill your arrow. It has to affect both sides simultaneously to kill your arrow, and that is very unlikely if you are able to put them apart.” In a Microsoft press release announcing the Majorana 1, the company says the chip could calculate catalysts that break down plastic pollutants and “lead to self-healing materials that repair cracks in bridges or airplane parts, shattered phone screens or scratched car doors.” “Enzymes, a kind of biological catalyst, could be harnessed more effectively in healthcare and agriculture, thanks to accurate calculations about their behavior that only quantum computing can provide,” it states. “This could lead to breakthroughs helping to eradicate global hunger: boosting soil fertility to increase yields or promoting sustainable growth of foods in harsh climates.” Yet Dr. Sergey Frolov, an associate professor of physics at the University of Pittsburgh whose analysis of the 2018 study data led to its subsequent investigation and retraction, argues that the paper does not demonstrate the existence of a topological qubit which is critical in establishing the quantum computing system they say they are creating. “The long story short is that me and many other experts do not think they have demonstrated even the basic science behind it, let alone the leap into technology of scaling up, production, etc.,” Frolov told Salon in a phone interview.  Nevertheless, Lee believes that even if the data doesn’t entirely prove that topological qubits exist in the Majorana zero-state, it still represents a scientific advancement. But he noted that several important issues need to be solved before it has practical implications. For one, the coherence time of these particles — or how long they can exist without being affected by environmental noise — is still very short, he explained. “They make a measurement, come back, and the qubit has changed, so you have lost your coherence,” Lee said. “With this very short time, you cannot do anything with it.” It could be that some form of engineering is necessary to incrementally improve the coherence of the qubits to solve this problem, Lee said. Or, it could require other major scientific breakthroughs that change the way we think about them, he said.  Nayak said the company plans to present these findings at the American Physical Society’s Global Physics Summit later this month. But it’s yet to be seen if all of the pieces necessary to make this form of quantum computer will come together into something with practical implications. “As far as the press announcement that they have a topological qubit, I would say most scientists would dispute that,” Lee said. “They are far from having a working qubit.” In the meantime, some are concerned that the back and forth on the topic within the field could cast a shadow on future developments in topological quantum computing. “I just wish they were a bit more careful with their claims because I fear that if they don’t measure up to what they are saying, there might be a backlash at some point where people say, ‘You promised us all these fancy things and where are they now?’” Molignini said. “That might damage the entire quantum community, not just themselves.” Read more about technology

Rain gave Australia’s environment a fourth year of reprieve in 2024 – but this masks deepening problems: report

Favourable short-term conditions kept Australia’s environmental scorecard high in 2024 – but long-term problems are worsening.

Lauren Henderson/ShutterstockFor the fourth year running, the condition of Australia’s environment has been relatively good overall. Our national environment scorecard released today gives 2024 a mark of 7.7 out of 10. You might wonder how this can be. After all, climate change is intensifying and threatened species are still in decline. The main reason: good rainfall partly offset the impact of global warming. In many parts of Australia, rainfall, soil water and river flows were well above average, there were fewer large bushfires, and vegetation continued to grow. Overall, conditions were above average in the wetter north and east of Australia, although parts of the south and west were very dry. But this is no cause for complacency. Australia’s environment remains under intense pressure. Favourable conditions have simply offered a welcome but temporary reprieve. As a nation we must grasp the opportunity now to implement lasting solutions before the next cycle of drought and fire comes around. This snapshot shows the environmental score for a range of indicators in Australia. Australia’s Environment Report 2024, CC BY-NC-ND Preparing the national scorecard For the tenth year running, we have trawled through a huge amount of data from satellites, weather and water measuring stations, and ecological surveys. We gathered information about climate change, oceans, people, weather, water, soils, plants, fire and biodiversity. Then we analysed the data and summarised it all in a report that includes an overall score for the environment. This score (between zero and ten) gives a relative measure of how favourable conditions were for nature, agriculture and our way of life over the past year in comparison to all years since 2000. This is the period we have reliable records for. While it is a national report, conditions vary enormously between regions and so we also prepare regional scorecards. You can download the scorecard for your region at our website. Different jurisdictions had quite different environmental scores in 2024. Australia’s Environment Report 2024, CC BY-NC-ND Welcome news, but alarming trends continue Globally, 2024 was the world’s hottest year on record. It was Australia’s second hottest year, with the record warmest sea surface temperatures. As a result, the Great Barrier Reef experienced its fifth mass bleaching event since 2016, while Ningaloo Reef in Western Australia also experienced bleaching. Yet bushfire activity was low despite high temperatures, thanks to regular rainfall. National rainfall was 18% above average, improving soil condition and increasing tree canopy cover. States such as New South Wales saw notable improvements in environmental conditions, while conditions also improved somewhat in Western Australia. Others experienced declines, particularly South Australia, Victoria, and Tasmania. These regional contrasts were largely driven by rainfall – good rains can hide some underlying environmental degradation trends. Favourable weather conditions bumped up the nation’s score this year, rather than sustained environmental improvements. Mapping the environmental condition score to local government areas reveals poor (red) conditions in the west and the south, with good scores (blue) in the east and north. White is neutral. Australia’s Environment Explorer, CC BY-NC-ND A temporary respite? The past four years show Australia’s environment is capable of bouncing back from drought and fire when conditions are right. But the global climate crisis continues to escalate, and Australia remains highly vulnerable. Rising sea levels, more extreme weather and fire events continue to threaten our environment and livelihoods. The consequences of extreme events can persist for many years, like we have seen for the Black Summer of 2019–20. To play our part in limiting global warming, Australia needs to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. Progress is stalling: last year, national emissions fell slightly (0.6%) below 2023 levels but were still higher than in 2022. Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions per person remain among the highest in the world. Biodiversity loss remains an urgent issue. The national threatened species list grew by 41 species in 2024. While this figure is much lower than the record of 130 species added in 2023, it remains well above the long-term average of 25 species added per year. More than half of the newly listed or uplisted species were directly affected by the Black Summer fires. Meanwhile, habitat destruction and invasive species continue to put pressure on native ecosystems and species. The Threatened Species Index captures data from long-term threatened species monitoring. The index is updated annually but with a three-year lag due largely to delays in data processing and sharing. This means the 2024 index includes data up to 2021. The index revealed the abundance of threatened birds, mammals, plants, and frogs has fallen an average of 58% since 2000. But there may be some good news. Between 2020 and 2021, the overall index increased slightly (2%) suggesting the decline has stabilised and some recovery is evident across species groups. We’ll need further monitoring to confirm whether this represents a lasting turnaround or a temporary pause in declines. This graph shows the relative abundance of different categories of species listed as threatened under the EPBC Act since 2000, as collated by the Threatened Species Index. Australia’s Environment Report 2024, CC BY-NC-ND What needs to happen? The 2024 Australia’s Environment Report offers a cautiously optimistic picture of the present. Without intervention, the future will look a lot worse. Australia must act decisively to secure our nation’s environmental future. This includes reducing greenhouse gas emissions, introducing stronger land management policies and increasing conservation efforts to maintain and restore our ecosystems. Without redoubling our efforts, the apparent environmental improvements will not be more than a temporary pause in a long-term downward trend. Australia’s Environment Report is produced by the ANU Fenner School for Environment & Society and the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN), which is enabled by the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy. Albert Van Dijk receives or has previously received funding from several government-funded agencies, grant schemes and programs. Shoshana Rapley is a Research Assistant and PhD candidate at the Australian National University and has received funding from the Ecological Society of Australia and BirdLife Australia. Tayla Lawrie is a current employee of the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN), funded by the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy.

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