Border Sewage Pact Gains Seen but Doubts and Spills Continue

Six months after U.S. and Mexican officials signed a historic agreement aimed at ending the decades-old but ever-worsening border pollution problem, raw sewage from Tijuana continues to stream largely unchecked into San Diego.

Despite the flow, however, officials on both sides of the border see developments in the past year--notably the opening of Tijuana’s new pumping facility and ground breaking for its long-awaited treatment plant--as distinctly positive chapters in the checkered history of the long-running sewage saga.

“We’ve accomplished miracles,” said Brian Bilbray, the San Diego County supervisor who represents the border area and who has long questioned Mexico’s ability and desire to deal with the sewage problem. “If we can do as much in the next 12 months as we have in the last year, we’ll have the problem on the run.”

Others aren’t so sure. Many on the U.S. side remain skeptical of assurances by Mexican officials.

Underlying U.S. doubts is a deep-rooted pessimism about Mexico’s commitment--and its ability--to build and maintain an effective sewage-treatment system at a time when Tijuana’s population is rising sharply and Mexico, facing a severe economic crisis, has far more pressing needs.

Some view the developments arising from the July agreement between the United States and Mexico as little more than a stopgap measure that ultimately deferred real progress for the thorny problem. Under the agreement, Mexico agreed to modernize Tijuana’s sewage facilities and build the treatment plant, among other things.

“In my view, we’re basically looking at a Band-Aid-type solution,” said Art Coe, an engineer with the California Water Quality Control Board, which has monitored the situation closely. Coe points out that even if Tijuana’s treatment plant is completed on schedule, its capacity will be severely taxed by the city’s burgeoning population.

The sewage issue remains the most dramatic--and most urgent--of a growing number of trans-border pollution problems that have occasionally strained relations between the two nations and caused increasing concern in both Washington and Mexico City. That concern culminated in August, 1983, when President Reagan and Mexican President Miguel De la Madrid signed an accord calling on both sides to take action aimed at curbing the transnational pollution problem.

“Pollution doesn’t recognize international boundaries,” noted Jorge Bustamante, director of the Center for Border Studies of Northern Mexico, a Tijuana-based research organization.

Indeed, although sewage flows from the Mexican side are at fault here, the United States has contributed to pollution in Mexican border areas. In El Paso, Tex., for instance, the smokestacks of the ASARCO smelter have for years released lead and other hazardous airborne wastes that fall on neighboring Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.

Such problems reflect the singularity of life along the 1,900-mile U.S.-Mexico border: it is a rapidly growing place where perhaps the world’s most developed and technologically advanced nation meets a struggling Third World country whose sprawling northern cities are constantly expanded by streams of impoverished migrants seeking work on both sides of the border.

“In the absence of a specific agreement, pollution does not come as a first priority in the face of other problems of development,” noted Bustamante, who is considered one of Mexico’s foremost experts on the United States.

“That’s something that people find hard to understand sometimes,” said Richard Reavis, an official with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in San Francisco who has worked on the border pollution problem for more than a decade. “It makes it a little hard to explain why we still have raw sewage coming across the border.”

And there is no question that it is still coming across, by land and by sea.

At a place called Smuggler’s Gulch, in the border community of San Ysidro, a rushing stream bounds down from the high ground of adjacent Tijuana. From afar, it could be a picturesque setting: a gushing waterway traversing Tijuana’s jagged canyons and settling in San Diego’s semi-rural coastal lowlands. A closer look, however, reveals a discolored water that is composed largely of sewage; signs warn visitors “Keep Out.” Each day, as much as 1 million gallons of the stuff may flow through Smuggler’s Gulch--enough to fill seven Olympic-sized swimming pools. The whole area surrounding the gulch carries the cloying stench of raw waste.

“You get used to the smell when you’ve been working here a while,” noted an engineer who was surveying the area on a recent morning.

Actually, Smuggler’s Gulch is only one of a number of passageways traversed by Tijuana sewage on its way to the United States. Only about half of Tijuana’s population of about 1 million is hooked up to regular sewer lines, officials say. And many of those lines are in an almost-constant state of disrepair. Topography dictates that much of the escaped raw sewage finds its way to canyons, arroyos and other drainage areas that end up in San Diego: much of Tijuana is situated on a rise, and the lowlands on the U.S. side serve as a drainage area.

During heavy rains, a virtual flood of tainted water rushes into the farms, parks and marshes on the U.S. side.

“Simply stated,” said a county report released in April, “any contact with sewage is bad for you, bad for business and bad for the environment.”

Quantifying those effects has proven more difficult. Officials can cite no known illnesses definitely linked directly to the sewage. But they note that it is hard to trace the origins of the gastrointestinal ailments associated with sewage--particularly since such illnesses often aren’t reported to physicians.

Economically, officials estimate that a major sewage spill in 1980 caused almost $500,000 in crop damage in the Tijuana Valley area of southern San Diego. Beach closings, particularly those at Imperial Beach in 1983, are also thought to have hurt tourist revenues there. And the city of San Diego estimates that it has lost about $6 million during the life of a 21-year agreement under which Tijuana sewage is treated on the U.S. side of the border.

Effects on ground water remain uncertain. Also unclear are the effects on wildlife, particularly the fish, plants and many species of birds--including endangered peregrine falcons and brown pelicans--that occasionally inhabit southern San Diego’s Tijuana River National Estuarine Sanctuary. The enclave is one of only two federal saltwater marsh sanctuaries in California and among 17 nationwide.

A mile or so west from Smuggler’s Gulch, where the Pacific surf caresses a white-sand beach at Border Field State Park, there are more signs: Contaminated With Sewage . . . Keep Out . . . Avoid All Contact.

In all, more than two miles of beach in San Diego County--stretching northward from the border to the southern perimeter of Imperial Beach--remain under a county health quarantine dating from March, 1983. During the height of the 1983 tourist season, officials quarantined about seven miles of county beaches, an event that focused considerable attention on the sewage problem.

The sea is the primary source of beach pollution. Each day, Tijuana dumps 3 million to 5 million gallons of raw sewage into the ocean from various discharge points beginning about a half-mile south of the border, according to estimates. Prevailing currents often bring those discharges north, polluting San Diego’s scenic coast.

Presumably, the same currents also pollute the miles of beachfront in adjacent Tijuana. But several federal officials in Tijuana were evasive when asked about the impact and refused to say if a quarantine had ever been considered and whether the ocean water was being monitored.

“That’s not our responsibility,” said Dr. Edgar F. Fritz, chief of the department of sanitary regulation for the Mexican Secretariat of Health in Tijuana.

The U.S. beaches are also polluted by effluent from the Tijuana River, which flows northward from Tijuana into San Diego, where it enters the Pacific. South of the border, the river picks up lots of raw sewage.

“It’s grossly polluted,” John Melbourn, an engineer for the San Diego County Health Department, said of the river.

Despite the continuing sewage flows, there have been some positive developments:

- The International Boundary and Water Commission, an independent body consisting of U.S. and Mexican representatives, recently began operating a long-awaited pumping system that is designed to capture escaped Mexican sewage along the border and ship it back to Tijuana. Mexico agreed to accept these so-called “renegade” flows as part of the agreement signed in July.

- In recent weeks an engineering firm hired by the City of San Diego began preliminary work on a $3-million system designed to collect Tijuana sewage flowing through Smuggler’s Gulch and other areas on the U.S. side.

- Mexican officials have largely completed construction of a new system to replace Tijuana’s antiquated and notoriously inefficient sewage pumps, pipes and canals, which were subject to frequent breakdowns and major leaks. By March, Mexican officials say, they also anticipate initial operation of a pumping plant at Playas de Tijuana, where as much as 1 million gallons a day of raw sewage is now released into the surf just a half mile south of the border.

“We now have a system that’s safer for the people of San Diego,” said U.S. Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-San Diego).

Most promising of all is the new Tijuana treatment plant being constructed on a hillside site overlooking the Pacific about five miles south of the border. The plant, scheduled to open in December, will be the city’s first extensive sewage-treatment facility.

The Mexican-designed system, using considerable American technology, will consist of three large lagoons in which the sewage will collect; the waste will be infused with oxygen to speed its biological breakdown. Afterward, the wastes will be chlorinated and the treated product will be dumped into the Pacific at a point 5.6 miles south of the border.

“We’re well within schedule,” said Alfonso Camarena, general superintendent of the work for the Mexican Secretariat of Urban Development and Ecology. “We’re using proven technology--some of it purchased from the United States. . . . The Mexican government has declared its commitment in completing this project.”

Indeed, U.S. officials monitoring the situation agree that the Mexicans are keeping their word and using sound technology: “The Mexicans are taking this seriously and they’re acting,” said Fitzhugh Green, an associate administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington.

However, there is still considerable skepticism as to whether the treatment facility will ever be completed--and, once completed, whether it will be properly maintained. The history of the border sewage problems--dating to the contamination of crops on the U.S. side in the 1930s--is marked by numerous much-ballyhooed “solutions” that went awry.

“The question is whether Mexico will be able to deliver what they intend to do,” said Armand Campillo, water utilities director for the city of San Diego. “There’s a suspicion that if it’s not properly monitored and not properly maintained, we will see failures again.”

Furthermore, there is valid doubt about whether Mexico’s projects will ever be able to handle all of Tijuana’s sewage, given the city’s rapidly rising population. Mexican officials are committed to building a second plant by 1989, but those plans are still preliminary.

Many U.S. observers still lament the death of a proposal to build a jointly operated plant on U.S. territory--an idea whose price tag of up to $750 million scared off officials from both nations. Despite recent developments, some officials say the sewage problem could get worse.

“I look for a period of relief,” said Art Coe, the California water official, “followed by a period of gradual return to conditions that are as bad if not worse than conditions in the past.”