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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.

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Chesapeake Bay’s oysters make a steady comeback

The Maryland mollusks have survived decades of overharvesting, disease and drought.

For the fifth year in a row, the oyster population in the Chesapeake Bay is doing well after decades of combating drought, disease, loss of habitat and overharvesting.The Maryland Department of Natural Resources said in March that its annual fall oyster survey showed that the “spatfall intensity index” — a measure of how well oysters reproduced and their potential population growth — again hit above a 40-year median.“We seem to be making some headway,” said Lynn Waller Fegley, director of fishing and boating services for the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. “With the work we’ve done to help restore oysters, and combined with the fact that we’ve been gifted with some really favorable environmental conditions, we’ve seen the oyster population trend upward.”Oyster-processing companies, oystermen, conservation groups and local fish and wildlife departments in the region have spent years trying to boost the population of oysters, which serve an important role as “filter feeders,” sifting sediment and pollutants such as nitrogen out of the water.The cleaner water in turn spurs underwater grasses to grow, while oyster reefs create habitats for fish, crabs and dozens of other species. Adult oysters can filter up to two gallons of water per hour, making them the bay’s “most effective water filtration system,” according to experts at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, a nonprofit organization that advocates for the health of the bay.Oysters thrive in brackish water — a mix of saltwater and freshwater. They attach and grow on hard surfaces such as rocks, piers or old shells. Too much rain lowers the salinity, while drought makes water too salty. Both situations can create conditions in which oysters can become vulnerable to disease or unable to reproduce as well.Before the 1880s, the oyster population was so healthy it could filter in a week a volume of water equal to that of the entire bay — about 19 trillion gallons — according to the bay foundation. But now it would take the vastly smaller oyster population more than a year to do the same amount.This fall, biologists in Maryland collected more than 300 oyster samples from the bay and tributaries, including the Potomac River, for their annual survey. The results were promising, experts said, given that 2023 was an unusual year for oysters because drought conditions raised the salinity in the bay.There are several other encouraging signs, experts said. The mortality rate of oysters has stabilized, their “biomass index,” which shows how oyster populations are doing over time, has been increasing for the past 14 years, and an analysis of their habitat showed continued improvements.“They’ve been hit by a pretty severe drought, then got pretty decimated by disease,” Fegley said. “They’ve been cycling back, and we’re now in a state of grace.”Another sign oysters are doing better is their “spat sets” — the process of the tiny larvae (spat) attaching to a hard surface so they can grow into mature oysters. A high number of spat equals successful reproduction. A low number means there are fewer young oysters that will grow into adults.Fegley said last year, the bay’s oysters had “epic, generational spat sets.”“Not only were there a lot of young oysters, which is a good sign of health, but they were distributed through the bay in a way that we had not seen in many years where they were farther up tributaries,” Fegley said. “We’ve had years where the conditions in the bay were just right — with a good balance of salinity levels, no disease and good reproduction.”The success of oysters is also due in part to Maryland and Virginia working over the past few years to build more oyster reefs along the bottom of the bay so oysters could grow successfully, according to Allison Colden, executive director of Maryland for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. In recent years, she said, more than 1,300 acres of oyster reefs have been replenished in both states.In the past decade, Virginia has also tried to boost its oyster population with aquaculture farms that raise oysters in cages and return their spat to natural waters. The commonwealth increased its number of oyster farms to more than 130 in 2018, up from 60 in 2013, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.Last season, Virginia harvested 700,000 bushels of oysters, one of the highest annual harvests since the late 1980s, according to Adam Kenyon, chief of the shellfish management division at the Virginia Marine Resources Commission.Those efforts, plus Mother Nature, have helped create the delicate combination oysters need to survive.“In the last five years, we’ve seen a rebound,” Colden said. “Reproduction has been higher than the long-term average, and we’re seeing more consistency in how they’re doing year-to-year, and that’s a positive sign.”For Jeff Harrison, a fifth-generation waterman who serves as president of the Talbot County Watermen Association, the changes have been like a roller coaster over the 47 years he has made a living off the bay. He’s seen diseases hit, oyster-harvesting seasons shortened, prices fluctuate and many other watermen leave the business because they couldn’t turn a profit.“I’ve seen some of the worst seasons in oystering,” he said. “We’d always have ups and downs. Now we’re seeing a steady up, and we’re hoping we have turned the corner.”

These communities are unaware they’ve lived near toxic gas for decades. Why has no action been taken?

Five facilities near schools and houses in LA County fumigate produce shipped from overseas with methyl bromide. But the air agency doesn’t plan to monitor the air or take any immediate steps to protect people from the gas, which can damage lungs and cause neurological effects.

In summary Five facilities near schools and houses in LA County fumigate produce shipped from overseas with methyl bromide. But the air agency doesn’t plan to monitor the air or take any immediate steps to protect people from the gas, which can damage lungs and cause neurological effects. In a quiet Compton neighborhood near the 710 freeway, children on a recent afternoon chased each other at Kelly Park after school. Parents watched their kids play, unaware of a potential threat to their health.  On the other side of the freeway, just blocks from the park and Kelly Elementary School, a fumigation company uses a highly toxic pesticide to spray fruits and vegetables.  The facility, Global Pest Management, has been emitting methyl bromide, which can cause lung damage and neurological health effects, into the air near the neighborhood for several decades.  Earlier this year, the South Coast Air Quality Management District asked the company — along with four other fumigation facilities in San Pedro and Long Beach — to provide data on their methyl bromide usage. But the air quality agency does not plan to install monitors in the communities that would tell residents exactly what is in their air, or hold community meetings to notify them of potential risks. Instead, the South Coast district has launched a preliminary screening of the five facilities to determine if a full assessment of health risks in the neighborhoods is necessary. But even if that analysis is conducted, the agency won’t require the companies to reduce emissions unless they reach concentrations three times higher than the amounts deemed a health risk under state guidelines, said Scott Epstein, the district’s planning and rules manager. Piedad Delgado, a mother picking up her daughter from the Compton school, said she “didn’t even know” that the hazardous chemical was being used nearby. When a CalMatters reporter told her about the fumigation plant, Delgado wondered if it was causing her daughter’s recent, mysterious bouts of headaches and nausea. “It’s concerning. We may be getting sick but we don’t know why,” she said. For about the past 30 years, the companies have sprayed methyl bromide on imported produce arriving at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach to kill harmful pests. Adults and children are shown after school at Kelly Elementary School in Compton, which is near a facility that uses a highly toxic fumigant, methyl bromide. Photo by Joel Angel Juarez for CalMatters Methyl bromide, which was widely used to treat soil on farm fields, has been banned worldwide for most uses since 2005 under a United Nations treaty that protects the Earth’s ozone layer. Exemptions are granted for fumigation of produce shipped from overseas. While little to no residue remains on the food, the gas is vented into the air where it is sprayed. State health officials have classified methyl bromide as a reproductive toxicant, which means it can harm babies exposed in the womb. With acute exposure, high levels can cause headaches, dizziness, nausea and difficulty breathing, while chronic exposure over a year or longer could cause more serious neurological effects, such as learning and memory problems, according to the California Air Resources Board. “It’s concerning. We may be getting sick but we don’t know why.”Piedad Delgado, Compton Resident State and local air quality officials are responsible for enforcing laws and regulations that protect communities from toxic air contaminants such as methyl bromide, while the Los Angeles County Agricultural Commissioner issues the permits to the fumigation companies. After CalMatters reported about the facilities last month, members of Congress representing the communities demanded “greater monitoring, transparency and oversight surrounding these fumigation facilities and their toxic emissions.” “We have serious concerns about the prevalent use of methyl bromide, a toxic pesticide, by container fumigation facilities in Los Angeles County,” U.S. Reps. Nanette Barragán, Maxine Waters and Robert Garcia wrote in an April 11 letter to state and local air regulators and county and federal agricultural officials.  “Several of these fumigation facilities are located close to homes, schools, parks, and other public spaces. Our communities deserve a greater understanding of the levels of toxic emissions from these facilities, the health risks from exposure to such emissions, and the oversight processes in place to ensure all protocols are maintained at these sites,” they wrote. “Our communities deserve a greater understanding of the levels of toxic emissions from these facilities, the health risks from exposure to such emissions, and the oversight processes in place.”U.S. Reps. Nanette Barragán, Maxine Waters and Robert Garcia Even though the San Pedro facility at the Port of Los Angeles and the Compton plant use the largest volumes of methyl bromide — a combined 52,000 pounds a year — the air in nearby communities has never been tested.  The two Long Beach facilities use much less, yet state tests in 2023 and 2024 detected potentially dangerous levels in a neighborhood near an elementary school. South Coast district officials said although certain levels of methyl bromide in the air could cause health effects, it doesn’t necessarily mean immediate action is necessary.  “We don’t want to go out and unnecessarily concern folks if there isn’t (a health concern), but we are actively investigating this right now,” said Sarah Rees, the South Coast district’s deputy executive office for planning, rule development and implementation.   Global Pest Management, which fumigates in Compton and Terminal Island, did not return calls from CalMatters. An employee at the facility declined to comment. A general manager at SPF Terminals in Long Beach also declined to comment.  Greg Augustine, owner of Harbor Fumigation in San Pedro, said his company has been permitted for more than 30 years and complies with all requirements. “To protect the health of our community, the air district establishes permit conditions and we comply with all of those permit conditions,” he said. “Those are vetted by the air district…and they’re all designed to protect the health of our community.”  “To protect the health of our community, the air district establishes permit conditions and we comply with all of those permit conditions.” Greg Augustine, owner of Harbor Fumigation in San Pedro Daniel McCarrel, an attorney representing AG-Fume Services, which fumigates at facilities in Long Beach and San Pedro, did not respond to questions but previously told CalMatters last month that the company is adhering to all of its permit conditions.  High levels found in Long Beach  Back in 2019, during regionwide testing, South Coast district officials detected methyl bromide in the air near the two West Long Beach facilities close to concentrations that could cause long-term health effects. The South Coast district took no action at the time — other than to publish a large study online of all toxic air contaminants throughout the four-county LA basin. Then, several years later, the state Air Resources Board found that the two facilities — SPF Terminals and AG-Fume Services — spewed high concentrations of methyl bromide at various times throughout the year. The state’s air monitor near Hudson Elementary School in West Long Beach — which is just about 1,000 feet from the two facilities — detected an average of 2.1 parts per billion in 2023 through part of 2024. Exposure to as little as 1 ppb for a year or more can cause serious nervous system effects as well as developmental effects on fetuses, according to state health guidelines. Spikes of methyl bromide were as high as 983 and 966 ppb in February and March of 2024. Short-term exposure to 1,000 ppb can cause acute health effects such as nausea, headaches and dizziness.  But state and district air-quality officials didn’t inform nearby residents about any of the monitoring data for longer than a year — not until three months ago, in a community meeting held in Long Beach.  First: Edvin Hernandez, right, waits to pick up his son at Kelly Elementary School in Compton, which is near a fumigation plant. Last: SPF Terminals in Long Beach uses methyl bromide. High levels of the gas were found near an elementary school in West Long Beach. Photos by Joel Angel Juarez and J.W. Hendricks for CalMatters Upon learning of the test results, the Los Angeles County Agricultural Commissioner a few months ago added new permit conditions for SPF Terminals and AG-Fume Services, including shutting doors, installing taller smokestacks and prohibiting fumigation during school hours, according to permits obtained by CalMatters. But the county permits for the three San Pedro and Compton facilities, which use much larger volumes of methyl bromide, remain unchanged, with none of the protections added to the Long Beach permits. And officials still have not held any community meetings there. The agricultural commissioner’s office declined to comment on the facilities. A complex web of ‘hot spots’ rules for methyl bromide About 38% of the methyl bromide used in California for commodity fumigation is in LA County, according to Department of Pesticide Regulation data for 2022. After many Long Beach residents expressed concerns, the South Coast district assessed all nine facilities permitted to use the chemical in the region and determined that five could pose a risk to residents.  Now the agency is going through a complex process outlined under the state’s Air Toxics “Hot Spots” law, enacted in 1987. Usage data, weather patterns and proximity to neighborhoods will be used to calculate a “priority score” for each of the five facilities. If a facility’s score is high enough, then the company will be required to conduct a full health risk assessment to examine the dangers to the community. None of the scores have been released yet. Risk assessments under the air district’s rules are a complicated, multi-step process likely to take many months. Smokestacks are shown at a facility that fumigates imported produce at the Port of Los Angeles in San Pedro. AG-Fume Services and Harbor Fumigation operate at this facility. Photo by Joel Angel Juarez for CalMatters And these health assessments may not trigger any changes at the facilities. It all depends on whether certain thresholds for hazards are crossed. The state Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment has set guidelines, called reference exposure levels, for concentrations of methyl bromide that could cause the long-term or short-term health effects, such as respiratory and neurological damage, nausea and fetal effects, based on human and animal studies. But South Coast district officials said action isn’t triggered if methyl bromide exceeds these reference levels. Instead, the district uses a state-created “hazard index” based on them. If a facility’s hazard index reaches one — which means concentrations outside the facility have reached the reference dose and could cause harm — the company must notify the public, under a South Coast district regulation. However, the facilities will only be required to take steps to reduce emissions if the hazard index reaches three — three times the reference level that indicates potential harm, according to that regulation. Expedited action is required under the rule if the index is five times higher.   “Just because it’s above the (reference level), it doesn’t mean it’s going to cause health impacts,” said Ian MacMillan, assistant deputy executive officer at the South Coast air district. He said the reference level indicates “there’s a possibility that there could be health impacts.”  The series of escalating thresholds is designed as a balancing act between regulating facilities and protecting the public, officials said. MacMillan also said methyl bromide emissions must be considered in the context of overall air quality in the region — the entire LA basin has an average hazard index of 5.5 when considering all sources of toxic air pollutants from industries and vehicles, he said. When told about the fumigation plants and lack of air testing and risk assessments, residents contacted by CalMatters were outraged. “There’s no interest from the government to protect our health,” said Edvin Hernandez, a father picking up his 9-year-old son from Kelly Elementary School in Compton. “We’re surviving by the hand of God.” The members of Congress — Barragán, Waters and Garcia — asked air regulators to install monitors near all Los Angeles County fumigation facilities, compile inspection records, conduct health assessments in the communities and provide all of the results on a public website.  “It is egregious that communities in California are still being impacted by this harmful and unnecessary chemical,” said Alison Hahm, a staff attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, which is working with community members. “In addition to stopping this ongoing public health threat in West Long Beach and Los Angeles, residents are demanding accountability and remedies for the harm endured.” The methyl bromide facilities in L.A. County are subjected to a different permitting process than elsewhere in California.  That’s because in 1996, the South Coast air district and the Los Angeles County Agricultural Commissioner agreed to share responsibility for regulating fumigating facilities. The agricultural office is tasked with issuing permits and the air agency is in charge of setting emissions limits and enforcing them.   In the Bay Area, the local air district has a similar agreement with agricultural departments that originated in 1997. However, the district decided that agreement is out of date so it is now issuing permits, too. One facility in the Bay Area uses the pesticide, Impact Transportation of Oakland. In 2019, the air district assessed the health risks of that facility and modeled how the fumes spread.   In the San Joaquin Valley, new facilities or those changing their methyl bromide use are subject to a health risk evaluation before a permit is issued. Facilities permitted before the air district was established in 1992 are subject to a review like the one that the South Coast district is now launching in San Pedro and Compton. The Los Angeles Agriculture Commissioner’s office, when asked whether it conducts a risk assessment before issuing permits, declined to answer any questions. CalMatters filed a public records request seeking risk assessments, but they said they had no records matching the request.   South Coast air regulators said they and the commissioner are now considering if any changes to their agreement should be made.  Allowed to use up to a half-ton of methyl bromide a day  Fumigation of produce using methyl bromide occurs within an enclosed facility, and the produce is covered by a tarp when sprayed. The fumes are then released into the atmosphere through tall smokestacks, a process called aeration. CalMatters filed a public records request with the county agricultural office and received the five facilities’ permits for 2023 through 2025. The permits show that the two Long Beach companies are now required to take an array of new precautions to limit fumes emitted into communities that the three Compton and San Pedro families are not — even though the Long Beach ones use much smaller volumes of methyl bromide. The San Pedro and Compton plants are allowed to use up to 1,000 pounds of methyl bromide in a 24-hour period. In contrast, the Long Beach plants can use up to 200 pounds in 24 hours, and in Oakland, Impact Transportation’s permit allows only 108 pounds.  First: Pallets of produce are piled up at the outer berths at the Port of Los Angeles in San Pedro. Last: A tarped area holds a tank that contains a hazardous gas, most likely methyl bromide. A fan and roof vents ventilated the area while garage doors were left open on April 8, 2025. AG-Fume Services and Harbor Fumigation operate at this location. Photos by Joel Angel Juarez for CalMatters The San Pedro and Compton facilities release fumes into the atmosphere during the daytime, except when they use an exhaust stack meeting certain height requirements, according to their permits. The two Long Beach facilities, SPF Terminals and AG Fume Services, have new, additional requirements this year: Fumigation can’t occur between 8:30 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. when a school is within 1,000 feet. And by the end of this month, they must replace their smokestacks with taller ones that are at least 55 feet tall, which disperse the fumes better. All doors must be closed during fumigation and aeration and fans must be used in the aeration process.  ‘We don’t have a choice’ At a ballpark on a recent day in San Pedro, Eastview Little League players took the field.  When a 13-year-old boy on the Pirates team was up to bat, his mom, Amy Shannon, cheered him on.  “Let’s go D! Deep breath boy, you got it!” she shouted.  Then she paused. Maybe she shouldn’t be encouraging her son to take a deep breath, she said. Shannon had just learned from CalMatters about the fumigation facility across the street from the baseball field. Amy Shannon, left, and Roxanne Gasparo, right, attend their children’s Little League game at Bloch Field near the Port of Los Angeles in San Pedro on April 8, 2025. Both women were unaware that a fumigation facility nearby has been using a toxic gas for about 30 years. Photo by Joel Angel Juarez for CalMatters At the facility where AG Fume and Harbor Fumigation operate, located at 2200 Miner Street, it was business as usual that day. A ship was docked on one side of the Los Angeles Port berth. On the other side, hundreds of stacks of fruits and vegetables were visible through several large garage doors.  Some of the stacks were covered with plastic. A tank containing a fumigant — labeled with a hazard sign depicting a skull — was hooked up outside. Yellow smokestacks protruded from the facility.  An AG-Fume Services truck was parked near one of the garage doors. Workers wearing yellow vests and sun-protective hats closed the garage doors, but left them slightly open at the bottom.  At the baseball field, Shannon watched the game with a friend, Roxanne Gasparo. Both women grew up in San Pedro. Gasparo said she wasn’t at all surprised to learn that a dangerous gas could be in their air.   “Because it’s a port town, unfortunately, we’re used to pollution. We have the port, obviously, and all the refineries next to us,” Gasparo said. “There’s really no way to get out of it unless you leave the city, and because most of the families here are blue collar families that rely on the unions, we kind of don’t have a choice,” she added. “We just deal with it and raise our kids the best we can.” More about air pollution in port communities ‘We should be in crisis mode’: Toxic fumigant could be seeping into these communities March 21, 2025March 26, 2025 Polluted communities hold their breath as companies struggle with California’s diesel truck ban December 10, 2024December 10, 2024

Costa Rica Ghost Net Cleanup Saves Marine Life in Puntarenas

For the Oceans Foundation successfully completed the first stage of its ghost net rescue campaign in Costa de Pájaros, Puntarenas, removing approximately 15 tons of abandoned fishing nets from the seabed, enough to nearly fill a 20-ton truck, according to social media reports and foundation statements. The initiative aims to eliminate these silent killers that […] The post Costa Rica Ghost Net Cleanup Saves Marine Life in Puntarenas appeared first on The Tico Times | Costa Rica News | Travel | Real Estate.

For the Oceans Foundation successfully completed the first stage of its ghost net rescue campaign in Costa de Pájaros, Puntarenas, removing approximately 15 tons of abandoned fishing nets from the seabed, enough to nearly fill a 20-ton truck, according to social media reports and foundation statements. The initiative aims to eliminate these silent killers that harm marine life and promote sustainable fishing practices in Costa Rica’s coastal communities, a critical step toward preserving ourcountry’s rich biodiversity. Ghost nets are abandoned, lost, or discarded fishing gear that continue to trap marine life, such as fish, sea turtles, dolphins, and sharks, while damaging coral reefs and seagrass beds. Globally, an estimated 640,000 tons of ghost gear pollute the oceans, contributing to 10% of oceanic litter, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization. In Costa Rica, these nets threaten iconic species like the hawksbill turtle and disrupt artisanal fishing livelihoods, exacerbating ocean pollution and habitat loss. The cleanup effort united 20 artisanal fishing families, professional rescue divers, and more than 60 volunteers, showcasing community-driven conservation. The operation was led by Captain Gabriel Ramírez of UDIVE 506, with eight fishing boats navigating the Gulf of Nicoya’s challenging currents. Reportedly, organizations including the Parlamento Cívico Ambiental, ACEPESA, Coast Guard, Red Cross, IPSA, REX Cargo, and Cervecería y Bebidas San Roque provided logistical support, transportation, hydration, and assistance with sorting and processing the recovered nets. Marine Biology students from the National University (UNA) played a key role by preparing the nets for recycling, ensuring minimal environmental impact. “Each of us can contribute to the environment. This is not for me or for you—it’s for Costa Rica, for the planet, and for marine life,” said Jorge Serendero, Director of Fundación For the Oceans. This cleanup builds on Costa Rica’s leadership in marine conservation, with over 30% of its territorial waters protected as of 2021, a global benchmark. The foundation reported a tense moment when a diver became entangled in a drifting net due to strong currents. Thanks to the quick action of his colleagues, he was freed unharmed, underscoring the risks of such operations. This campaign highlights the power of collective action in protecting marine ecosystems, a priority for Costa Rica as it expands marine protected areas like Cocos Island. Fundación For the Oceans plans additional cleanups in 2025 to address ghost nets across Costa Rica’s Pacific coast. Interested individuals can contact For the Oceans Foundation at info@fortheoceansfoundation.org or +506 8875-9393 to volunteer, donate, or learn about upcoming initiatives to safeguard the oceans. The post Costa Rica Ghost Net Cleanup Saves Marine Life in Puntarenas appeared first on The Tico Times | Costa Rica News | Travel | Real Estate.

Commercial salmon season is shut down — again. Will California’s iconic fish ever recover?

While it’s an unprecedented third year in a row for no commercially caught salmon, brief windows will be allowed for sportsfishing in California.

In summary While it’s an unprecedented third year in a row for no commercially caught salmon, brief windows will be allowed for sportsfishing in California. Facing the continued collapse of Chinook salmon, officials today shut down California’s commercial salmon fishing season for an unprecedented third year in a row.  Under the decision by an interstate fisheries agency, recreational salmon fishing will be allowed in California for only brief windows of time this spring. This will be the first year that any sportfishing of Chinook has been allowed since 2022. Today’s decision by the Pacific Fishery Management Council means that no salmon caught off California can be sold to retail consumers and restaurants for at least another year. In Oregon and Washington, commercial salmon fishing will remain open, although limited. “From a salmon standpoint, it’s an environmental disaster. For the fishing industry, it’s a human tragedy, and it’s also an economic disaster,” said Scott Artis, executive director of the Golden State Salmon Association, an industry organization that has lobbied for river restoration and improved hatchery programs.  The decline of California’s salmon follows decades of deteriorating conditions in the waterways where the fish spawn each year, including the Sacramento and Klamath rivers. California’s salmon are an ecological icon and a valued source of food for Native American tribes. The shutdown also has an economic toll: It has already put hundreds of commercial fishers and sportfishing boat operators out of work and affected thousands of people in communities and industries reliant on processing, selling and serving locally caught salmon.  California’s commercial fishery has never been closed for three years in a row before.  Some experts fear the conditions in California have been so poor for so long that Chinook may never rebound to fishable levels. Others remain hopeful for major recovery if the amounts of water diverted to farms and cities are reduced and wetlands kept dry by flood-control levees are restored.  This year’s recreational season includes several brief windows for fishing, including a weekend in June and another in July, or a quota of 7,000 fish.   Jared Davis, owner and operator of the Salty Lady in Sausalito, one of dozens of party boats that take paying customers fishing, thinks it’s likely that this quota will be met on the first open weekend for recreational fishing, scheduled for June 7-8.   “Obviously, the pressure is going to be intense, so everybody and their mother is going to be out on the water on those days,” he said. “When they hit that quota, it’s done.” One member of the fishery council, Corey Ridings, voted against the proposed regulations after saying she was concerned that the first weekend would overshoot the 7,000-fish quota. Davis said such a miniscule recreational season won’t help boat owners like him recover from past closures, though it will carry symbolic meaning. “It might give California anglers a glimmer of hope and keep them from selling all their rods and buying golf clubs,” he said.  “It continues to be devastating. Salmon has been the cornerstone of many of our ports for a long time.”Sarah Bates, commercial fisher based in San Francisco Sarah Bates, a commercial fisher based at San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf, said the ongoing closure has stripped many boat owners of most of their income.  “It continues to be devastating,” she said. “Salmon has been the cornerstone of many of our ports for a long time.” She said the shutdown also has trickle-down effects on a range of businesses that support the salmon fishery, such as fuel services, grocery stores and dockside ice machines. “We’re also seeing a sort of a third wave … the general seafood market for local products has tanked,” such as rockfish and halibut. She said that many buyers are turning to farmed and wild salmon delivered from other regions instead. Davis noted that federal emergency relief funds promised for the 2023 closure still have not arrived. “Nobody has seen a dime,” he said.  Fewer returning salmon Before the Gold Rush, several million Chinook spawned annually in the river systems of the Central Valley and the state’s northern coast. Through much of the 20th century, California’s salmon fishery formed the economic backbone of coastal fishing ports, with fishers using hook and line pulling in millions of pounds in good years.  But in 2024, just 99,274 fall-run Chinook — the most commercially viable of the Central Valley’s four subpopulations — returned to the Sacramento River and its tributaries, substantially lower than the numbers in 2023. In 2022, fewer than 70,000 returned, one of the lowest estimates ever. About 40,000 returned to the San Joaquin River. Fewer than 30,000 Chinook reached their spawning grounds in the Klamath River system, where the Hoopa, Yurok and Karuk tribes rely on the fish in years of abundance.  The decline of California’s salmon stems from nearly two centuries of damage inflicted on the rivers where salmon spend the first and final stages of their lives. Gold mining, logging and dam construction devastated watersheds. Levees constrained rivers, turning them into relatively sterile channels of fast-moving water while converting floodplains and wetlands into irrigated farmland.  Today, many of these impacts persist, along with water diversions, reduced flows and elevated river temperatures that frequently spell death for fertilized eggs and juvenile fish. The future of California salmon is murky Peter Moyle, a UC Davis fish biologist and professor emeritus, said recovery of self-sustaining populations may be possible in some tributaries of the Sacramento River.  “There are some opportunities for at least keeping runs going in parts of the Central Valley, but getting naturally spawning fish back in large numbers, I just can’t see it happening,” he said. Jacob Katz, a biologist with the group California Trout, holds out hope for a future of flourishing Sacramento River Chinook. “We could have vibrant fall-run populations in a decade,” he said.  That will require major habitat restoration involving dam removals, reconstruction of levee systems to revive wetlands and floodplains, and reduced water diversions for agriculture — all measures fraught with cost, regulatory constraints, and controversy.  “There are some opportunities for at least keeping (salmon) runs going in parts of the Central Valley, but getting naturally spawning fish back in large numbers, I just can’t see it happening.”Peter moyle, uc davis fish biologist State officials, recognizing the risk of extinction, have promoted salmon recovery as a policy goal for years. In early 2024, the Newsom administration released its California Salmon Strategy for a Hotter, Drier Future, a 37-page catalogue of proposed actions to mitigate environmental impacts and restore flows and habitat, all in the face of a warming environment.  Artis of Golden State Salmon Association said the state’s salmon strategy includes some important items but leaves out equally critical ones, like protecting minimum required flows for fish — what Artis said are threatened by proposed water projects endorsed by the Newsom administration. “It fails to include some of the upcoming salmon-killing projects that the governor is pushing like Sites Reservoir and the Delta tunnel, and it ignores the fact that the Voluntary Agreements are designed to allow massive diversions of water,” he said. Experts agree that an important key to rebuilding salmon runs is increasing the frequency and duration of shallow flooding in riverside riparian areas, or even fallow rice paddies — a program Katz has helped develop through his career.  On such seasonal floodplains, a shallow layer of water can help trigger an explosion of photosynthesis and food production, ultimately providing nutrition for juvenile salmon as they migrate out of the river system each spring.  Through meetings with farmers, urban water agencies and government officials, Rene Henery, California science director with Trout Unlimited, has helped draft an ambitious salmon recovery plan dubbed “Reorienting to Recovery.” Featuring habitat restoration, carefully managed harvests and generously enhanced river flows — especially in dry years — this framework, Henery said, could rebuild diminished Central Valley Chinook runs to more than 1.6 million adult fish per year over a 20-year period.  He said adversaries — often farmers and environmentalists — must shift from traditional feuds over water to more collaborative programs of restoring productive watersheds while maintaining productive agriculture. As the recovery needle for Chinook moves in the wrong direction, Katz said deliberate action is urgent.  “We’re balanced on the edge of losing these populations,” he said. “We have to go big now. We have no other option.” more about salmon ‘No way, not possible’: California has a plan for new water rules. Will it save salmon from extinction? by Alastair Bland December 16, 2024December 16, 2024 A third straight year with no California salmon fishing?  Early fish counts suggest it could happen by Alastair Bland October 30, 2024October 30, 2024

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