U.S. Winks at Mexican Oil Dumping in Calexico

U.S. environmental officials are ready to accept their Mexican counterparts’ assurances that the dumping by Mexican truckers of thousands of gallons of oily sludge in the California desert last week was an accident, a high-level Environmental Protection Agency official said Tuesday in Washington.

But a top health officer in Imperial County--where the dumping occurred just days after the U.S. and Mexican governments signed an agreement to stem such incidents--said the calm U.S. response was only the latest episode in a long history of failure by the federal government to deal with ecological problems along the border.

“It seems like they just want to sweep everything under the rug,” said Thomas Wolf, Imperial County director of environmental health.

U.S. prosecutors and the EPA’s Office of Criminal Investigation are continuing to probe the Nov. 18 incident, in which a Border Patrol pilot spotted two 5,000-gallon tankers owned by Pemex, the Mexican national oil company, draining their contents on U.S. government-owned land just across the border southwest of El Centro. One of the truckers is in federal custody in San Diego, charged with a misdemeanor count of violating U.S. pollution regulations. Five others involved in the dumping fled back into Mexico when confronted by American officers.

Nonetheless, EPA Associate Administrator Fitzhugh Green said Tuesday that U.S. officials believe the trucks crossed the border by mistake. Federal officials, he said, do not view the dumping as a violation of the pact signed by EPA and Mexican environmental officials less than a week before the incident. THe pact imposes strict regulations on the transport of hazardous wastes across the border.

Green said Manuel Camacho Solis, Mexico’s secretary of urban development and ecology, had contacted U.S. officials to express his dismay over the incident and to report that Mexican authorities were conducting their own investigation. Green said Camacho Solis recognized that the incident could appear to be a flaunting of the agreement, but indicated his desire to abide by “the spirit and the letter” of the pact.

“It appears to be an innocent mistake,” Green said. “We’re willing to assume that’s so, because we know Camacho Solis is very upset about it.”

Alfonso Macin, a spokesman for the ecology ministry in Mexico City, said Tuesday that the agency had little information about the incident. He said Mexican officials, too, believed the truckers wandered across the border by mistake and had intended to dispose of the diesel wastes in a government-approved dump in Mexicali.

Meanwhile, Green sought to minimize the environmental threat posed by the dumping of as much as 10,000 gallons of water mixed with diesel fuel.

“Our indication was it was just some diesel oil, and there was nothing particularly hazardous about it,” he said. “After all, oil comes out of the ground to begin with.”

Wolf, however, reiterated his contention that the Mexicans had purposely crossed the border. He noted that the jailed Pemex trucker has told U.S. investigators that he and his associates had repeatedly driven into the United States to empty their tankers because earlier dumping on the Mexican side had saturated the ground and left it impassable.

Wolf, who has expressed concern about the effects of the dumping on underground water supplies and desert plant life, laughed when told of Green’s comments about the risks associated with the dumping.

“That guy belongs in the State Department,” Wolf said. “We’ve had this from politicians in State on other issues that dealt with environmental problems along the border.”

Wolf compared EPA’s handling of the dumping incident with what he and other Imperial County officials consider the lack of attention paid by the federal agency to their feud with Mexico over the condition of New River.

Mexicali, a city of about 600,000 people, dumps untreated residential and industrial sewage in the river, which then flows north into California through Calexico. Imperial County officials say the river poses health dangers to U.S. residents.

“They’ve been feeding us this line on the New River for years,” Wolf said of EPA and Mexican officials. “I’m sure the people driving those trucks knew exactly where they were.”

More information about the incident could emerge today in U.S. District Court in San Diego, where the jailed Mexican trucker, Francisco Macias Lujan, will appear for a review of his $10,000 bail.

Macias Lujan’s court-appointed attorney, Pierre Pfeffer, said Tuesday that it seemed evident that the Mexican was guilty of dumping his truck’s contents in the United States. But Pfeffer said Macias Lujan has insisted to him that he did not know he had crossed the border.

Times staff writer Patrick McDonnell contributed to this story.