‘Bamboozled’: IB residents wary of beach reopening with no fix to sewage crisis

For the first time in more than a thousand days, San Diego County officials reopened some of the shoreline of Imperial Beach on Monday. But many locals say the move gives a misleading illusion of safety. 

Millions of gallons of untreated sewage and wastewater from Mexico have flowed daily through the Tijuana River Valley and into the Pacific Ocean, sweeping up along Imperial Beach. The sewage continues to flow – only for now some of it has been diverted into Tijuana’s own infrastructure some miles south of the border following an unprecedented spike in complaints from U.S. residents. While a welcome reprieve, some say it’s only a matter of time before the situation changes. 

“The fact that the beaches reopened is literally like hanging by a thread,” said Imperial Beach Mayor Paloma Aguirre. “We need the state of emergency declaration. If we get south swell, not just the river, but everything that has been diverted south from us is going to move its way up the coast and close our beaches again.”

The beaches closing and reopening are one example of the uncertainty residents living along the Tijuana River Valley are experiencing. Earlier this month, San Diego County officials and researchers sparred publicly over just how toxic the air in the river valley is to nearby residents. A team of researchers saw spikes in hydrogen sulfide and sounded alarms about the presence of the toxic gas. 

But the county’s own hazardous incident response team, which went out with the researchers, could not replicate the data, and after testing on two separate days, the county declared the area smelly but safe.

“At this time, we’re telling our communities that it’s safe,” San Diego County Supervisor Nora Vargas said during a press conference. “It smells horrible, but it’s safe.”

State and federal regulators backed the county up, despite the researchers saying the county’s data wasn’t reliable because its team conducted too little testing and tested at the wrong times. 

Meanwhile, locals fear the narrative of a diminished health threat will derail efforts to engage resources to address the decades old sewage crisis. It also runs counter to what many community members, local leaders and doctors say they’re witnessing and experiencing themselves as they call on more and ongoing interventions. 

And some harbor a deep distrust of how or why some decisions are being made. 

“My first instinct was not to trust it. … Somebody decided, oh, let’s flip this switch and divert this water so it doesn’t go in the Tijuana River,” said Dr. Thomas Csanadi, a pediatrician and resident of Imperial Beach.  “I couldn’t help but think that it’s just in response to this tidal wave of attention, especially with the researchers and the task force and the media.”

Csanadi wondered, if someone could so easily decide to open a valve in Mexico, reducing the flow of pollution into the Tijuana River near Imperial Beach, that means someone decided not to do that sooner.

“And that just drives me insane.”

Air purifiers for the ‘lucky’

Failure of sewage treatment plants on both sides of the border have been plaguing the region for years, and solutions are far off.

Recently issued plans to fix the federal plant on the U.S. side won’t be complete for another five years at the very least.

Since 2018, 100 billion gallons of sewage and untreated wastewater have poured through the Tijuana River into the Pacific Ocean. Pump failures at the U.S.-run plant this summer have led to an unprecedented thousands of complaints of a persisting foul odor. Earlier this year, the San Diego County Air Pollution Control District  cited the plant with its first public nuisance violation.

Following the failures, San Diego County allocated $100,000 in June to procure 400 air purifiers for a fraction of the community affected by the odors. They were raffled off to South Bay communities bearing the impacts of the pollution. The Environmental Protection Agency has provided funding for another 400. Aguirre, the Imperial Beach mayor, estimates that at least 30,000 purifiers are needed to supply frontline communities.

And while the county says the filters provided to residents, which include carbon, have been tested by the manufacturer to reduce the presence of hydrogen sulfide in the air, some local researchers say there are better, albeit more expensive, solutions out there.

“To get full efficiency at really high concentrations of odors you need a lot of carbon,” said Benjamin Rico, a researcher from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “Especially for hydrogen sulfide, it is well known that potassium permanganate filters are the best.”

“The issue there is price and availability,” Rico said.

Locals say the raffling off of air filters also sent a negative message to residents.

“The lottery system is just absurd,” said Marvel Harrison, an Imperial Beach resident and member of the Tijuana River Pollution Task Force advocating for solutions to the sewage crisis. 

“That’s insulting, that you have to get lucky to have clean air, right?”

Scientists: enduring impacts unknown

Little is known about the health impacts of long-term exposure to hydrogen sulfide, especially at varying – and even low – concentrations, researchers say.

The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration says it’s unsafe for workers to be exposed to the gas for more than 10 minutes in a single workday if the concentration is between 20-50 parts per million. For weeks, researchers in the South Bay found levels between 1-4 parts per million. Between midnight and dawn in areas identified by locals as hotspots, hydrogen sulfide levels exceeded 4 parts per million – more than 133 times higher than the nuisance threshold set by the California Air Resources Board.

“The concern is chronic exposure. 20 parts per million is problematic for 10 minutes. But what does 1-4 ppm every night, for multiple hours, for multiple years do to people? No one knows,” Rico from Scripps said. 

Local doctors have reported seeing an uptick of patients with symptoms that may be linked to exposure to the chemical including a wide variety of respiratory issues, gastrointestinal issues, headaches, newly diagnosed migraines, nausea, rashes, eye irritation and brain fog.

“Most of these patients don’t end up in the emergency room,” said Dr. Kim Dickson, who founded an urgent care facility in the South Bay. “I think that’s why this has been flying under the radar for so long.”

A group of 29 pediatricians issued a statement echoing these concerns and say that the levels measured by the scientists, led by Scripps’ Kimberly Prather, do pose an immediate danger.

Prather, a prominent atmospheric chemist, who is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences, has been conducting several weeks of around-the-clock studies with a team of over 50 scientists from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the University of Texas in Austin. The project is the most thorough and wide-ranging study of Tijuana River Valley pollution to date. She is also collaborating with researchers from San Diego State University who have been running studies as well.

Community members pointed out that the odors were strongest after midnight. The studies confirmed that.

The researchers called a press conference to share their early findings and explain why they pulled their teams out of the area after their safety equipment warned them there could be an even more dangerous gas in the area. That gas, hydrogen cyanide, wasn’t present, the researchers later said, explaining that their safety gear was triggered by the high levels of hydrogen sulfide instead.

The county responded by sending its own hazmat team to conduct testing, but they found lower levels of hydrogen sulfide, except at one spot near the river where they measured concentrations of 15.5 parts per million. Soon after, the county declared the air safe, a finding backed by the California Department of Public Health and the Environmental Protection Agency.

The communities living the daily effects of raw sewage emanating gasses into their neighborhoods see county, state and federal response to the crisis as vastly insufficient.

That feeling sharpened when County Supervisor Vargas declared that the air quality was not a threat despite concerns raised by Prather.

Aguirre says the county must do more.

“The county needs to collect a lot more data, especially around hydrogen sulfide, if they don’t want to accept the data from the scientists or leading experts,” she said, noting that the EPA sometimes fails to protect public health as it did during the Flint, Michigan, water crisis. 

Community members ailing from the air say the scientists give them hope.

“The community sees them as superheroes, because they’re validating what the community is feeling and what the community knows,” said Dickson, the local clinician.

“I think we’re just being bamboozled,” said Christine Bergh in response to the county’s declaration. She is an Imperial Beach resident who received one of the filters. 

Bergh says she keeps her doors and windows closed, but when she opened her front door, the purifier’s red light came on within a few minutes. She says the odors wake her at night, and she has developed a persistent cough.

To Harrison, a psychologist who also serves on the pollution task force, the message from government leaders that the air is safe comes off as a betrayal – especially since so many locals feel it’s making them sick. 

“They are the people we pay. Those are the people that we have entrusted our safeguarding and health with.”