Fast Growth Blamed for Tijuana Flood Damage

As emergency crews cleared the debris left by storms that killed four people and forced the evacuation of hundreds, city authorities blamed the damage partly on this fast-growing border city’s inadequate sewer system and haphazard urbanization.

Officials also said the response to the flash floods stemming from Monday’s rains lagged because civil defense officials and others in a newly elected city 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.

In fact, harried city officials on Wednesday had not yet been able to tally the monetary damage or the number of people injured in floods that choked major streets with mud, cut off poor neighborhoods and knocked down walls and power lines. City emergency workers estimated that at least a dozen people were injured.

The death toll remained at four after it was determined that three deaths in a house fire were not related to the downpour.

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

And a 22-year-old man died as he and another passerby tried to help a woman across a downhill street that had been transformed into a raging river; the man drowned after being knocked unconscious and pinned underneath a parked car.

The worst damage occurred in middle-class neighborhoods in the central and southern sections of the city, a magnet of migration and job growth whose population has grown well beyond 1 million in the last decade, overburdening infrastructure.

The sewer system simply could not take the onslaught, Benitez said, particularly in neighborhoods built on ravines where people have dumped mattresses and other garbage that clogs drainage pipes.

City officials said there has been chaotic development in newer residential areas, with houses built in the path of natural streams and other flood areas. Moreover, excavation has weakened hillsides and dirt at construction sites fed mudslides, leaving a mess that was still being carted off Wednesday.

Correspondent Miguel Cervantes in Tijuana contributed to this story.