‘San Diego needs to step up’ to solve sewage spill crisis, Imperial Beach mayor says

A raw sewage spill from the Mexican city of Tijuana this week forced beaches in Imperial Beach and Coronado to shut down due to the health risk it poses to lifeguards and to surfers — but the problem isn’t new and an ongoing challenge is getting authorities to act, said Serge Dedina.

Dedina, mayor of Imperial Beach, expressed frustration after a pipe in Tijuana ruptured on Monday and began spilling as many as 7 million gallons of raw sewage daily into the Tijuana River, which feeds into the Pacific Ocean. Dedina urged city leaders in San Diego to join a lawsuit to force the federal government to take action.

“It’s not fair that Imperial Beach and the [Port of San Diego] are shouldering the burden for this local immediacy,” Dedina told The San Diego Union-Tribune’s podcast The Conversation. “San Diego needs to step up.”

Authorities in Tijuana on Friday morning said they had managed to capture the flow of sewage waste and divert it to a wastewater treatment facility, The Union-Tribune reported. Beaches in Imperial Beach remained closed, however.

This week’s spill was the largest since February 2017 when a pipe in Tijuana burst and spilled 28 million gallons of raw sewage into the river adjacent to the U.S.-Mexico border where it meets the Pacific Ocean.

As a result of that spill, Imperial Beach sued the federal government.

“It’s like ‘Groundhog Day’ or a ‘Chronicle of a Death Foretold’ for sewage, it’s just a nightmare,” Dedina said. “And more importantly, it shouldn’t have happened. That collector pipe that was broken, the [Environmental Protection Agency] had written a study and said it was going to break so everyone knew it was going to break. They watched it break. They did nothing when it broke. And now we’re the ones paying the price.”

Listen to the full interview with Dedina on Soundcloud or your favorite podcast listening app.