Tijuana’s Mayor Seeks Solutions to Flooding

As emergency crews mopped up after a storm that killed four people, the city’s new mayor called Wednesday for solutions to the causes of deadly flash floods: an inadequate sewer system and haphazard urbanization.

The intense downpour Monday choked entire neighborhoods with mud and knocked down walls and power lines in this congested, rapidly growing border city of more than 1 million people.

The city’s response lagged because civil defense officials and others in a newly elected municipal government are still in transition after last week’s change of administration.

“This sudden storm caught everyone off-guard,” said Jose Federico Benitez, director of the Tijuana municipal police.

But Hector Osuna Jaime, a 35-year-old architect who was elected mayor this fall, said his administration will attack the roots of the problems that engulf Tijuana after heavy rains.

The city’s sewer system was woefully insufficient for the onslaught, he said, particularly in unpaved shantytowns and neighborhoods built on ravines where garbage dumping clogs drainage pipes. Only 10% of the city has adequate drainage, and Mexico’s central government must provide help, Osuna told reporters.

“Resolving this grave problem of urban infrastructure will require a major investment of federal resources,” said Osuna, the second consecutive member of Mexico’s traditional political opposition, the National Action Party, to win the Tijuana municipal presidency.

The most-damaged areas were middle-class neighborhoods in the central and southern sections of Tijuana, officials said. Unauthorized housing has sprung up haphazardly in the path of streams and other danger zones vulnerable to floods, officials said. Moreover, excavation at construction sites has weakened hillsides, and accumulations of dirt fed mudslides.

Osuna said the city will review new construction in flooded areas and crack down on city code violators.

Estimates were still hazy Wednesday, but city officials said at least a dozen people were injured and many buildings were damaged. The death toll remained at four, after it was determined that a house fire that killed three people was not related to the chubasco , or sudden squall.

The dead included a 4-year-old boy who was pulled out of his mother’s arms by surging currents in a poor neighborhood southeast of downtown. Two workers were killed by a collapsing basement wall in a furniture factory in a border-area industrial district.

And a 22-year-old man died as he tried to help a woman across a steep street that had been transformed into a raging river of muck. He drowned after being knocked unconscious, swept downhill and pinned underneath a parked car.

Main thoroughfares had been cleared by Wednesday night, but crews worked to bring life back to normal in impoverished outlying neighborhoods and squatter’s colonies, where rain brings death and destruction.

Miguel Cervantes in Tijuana contributed to this story.