U.S., Mexico Forge Cleanup Plan for Polluted New River

At night the stench wafts up from the greenish river and burrows into Blanca Sanchez’s shanty.

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The river is a stew of human waste, industrial effluent and agricultural chemicals. Its odors attack the senses. Sleep is difficult, sore throats frequent. Sanchez says the water teems with germs for cholera, polio and dysentery.

“We have to be after the kids all the time so they don’t fall in,” Sanchez said. He has seen mentally retarded transients bathe in the turgid water, even drink it.

It is named the New River, a name implying freshness and cleanliness. What a cruel misnomer. For decades, this waterway spanning two countries has landed on everybody’s list of the most fetid in North America.

Penuriousness and indifference have allowed the pollution to build. Now, finally, the United States and Mexico appear ready to finance a binational cleanup.

“Work is happening right now,” said Douglas Eberhardt of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “But it is not something where we have a long history of this type of cooperation.”

If the North American Free Trade Agreement is a watershed in tariff-free trade between nations, then the New River cleanup is a test of whether nations can cooperate as smoothly on environmental concerns.

A clean river would not only enhance the region’s image, fish and wildlife would probably return. No longer would residents have to mutely accept a toxic river.

“They have just lived with it for so long,” said Wayne Van De Graaff, an Imperial County supervisor and border resident for 40 years. “They’ve become used to it.”

After the New River leaves Mexicali, it flows through the U.S. desert city of Calexico, past several wildlife breeding habitats, an egret rookery and, 60 miles later, empties into the Salton Sea, a once-popular but now fading recreational area.

Both the New River and Salton Sea were accidents of man, an unintended consequence of an attempt earlier this century to divert Colorado River water to irrigate Imperial Valley crops.

Feces, animal parts, tires and trash bags have been spotted bobbing in the river.

Sometimes a body floats up.

For all its rank odor and off-putting appearance, Mexican officials say the river has not caused any health crises. But, north of the border, several Imperial County doctors have detected a higher than normal incidence of infections in eyes, skin and respiratory tracts, as well as hair loss.

The U.S. Public Health Service is testing to determine if those or any other ailments are linked to the river.

Residents north of the border fear a major epidemic.

“North of the border, it’s pretty well known that this is a polluted river,” said Thomas Wolf of the Imperial County Health Department. “The potential is there. It’s really just a time bomb.”

The cleanup campaign centers on an overburdened sewage treatment system in Mexicali, a city of 1 million and expanding on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Pipes and pumps in Mexicali carry domestic and industrial waste from homes and businesses to treatment lagoons at two different plants. The treated water is then dumped into the New River.

But the city’s population is bulging, and the aging equipment is under increasing stress. One of the plants is forced to process more than three times its capacity, causing islands of sludge to form in one of the lagoons.

Pipes often collapse, pumps break and untreated water spews into the river.

“These problems are occurring on a daily basis,” said Phil Gruenberg of the California Regional Water Quality Control Board, which regularly tests the river.

During one month last year, four of six pumps faltered and as much as 10 million gallons of raw sewage a day poured into the river, according to U.S. officials.

But the cleanup has been stalled by unanswered questions: How do you divvy up responsibility when a river passes through two countries? How much should each country pay? How much effort should each expend?

Mexico has failed to generate the money to renovate its treatment system, and U.S. officials have balked at paying to solve a problem widely viewed as originating in Mexico.

“To design any kind of treatment procedures, you have to have some control over the source and we don’t have that in Mexico,” Gruenberg said. “The only way to get it cleaned up is to have Mexico do it.”

But the United States’ hands are not totally clean.

At least some of the river’s pollution comes from pesticides used in Imperial County, and U.S. manufacturers are rumored to cross into Mexicali to dump chemical waste into the river.

Jose Alberto Castaneda Estrada, director general of Baja California’s water services commission, acknowledges that the pollution is severe but denies that raw sewage leaks are a daily event.

He says Mexico is more aggressive than ever in fighting the pollution’s sources.