White sand stretches for miles where Pacific Ocean waves crash into the shore. Nearby, bicycles lean against seaside cottages that are accented by banana and palm trees out front. A rickety wooden pier offers spectacular views of sherbet-hued sunsets over the water.
To the eye, Imperial Beach, Calif., is an idyllic beach town, a playground for tourists and Southern California residents alike at the southern border with Mexico.
But lately, the view has been ruined by the sea breeze, which reeks of rotten eggs. The surfers who once prepared for big-wave competitions are gone. So are the tourists who built intricate sand castles and licked ice cream cones on the pier.
Imperial Beach is now the center of one of the nation’s worst environmental disasters: Every day, 50 million gallons of untreated sewage, industrial chemicals and trash flow from Tijuana, Mexico, into southern San Diego County.
The cross-national problem traces back at least a century. But it has significantly worsened in recent years as the population of Tijuana has exploded and sewage treatment plants in both countries have fallen into disrepair.
“It’s a public health ticking time bomb that isn’t being taken seriously,” said Paloma Aguirre, the mayor of Imperial Beach. “We need help.”
Imperial Beach’s shoreline, which has drawn tourists for more than a century, has been closed for more than 1,200 days in a row because of health concerns.
A growing body of research suggests that even breathing the air may be harmful, as toxic particles in the water can become airborne. There are no overnight solutions, and officials on both sides of the border say that it will take yearslong expansions of sewage treatment plants to stop the pollution.
In the meantime, Ms. Aguirre permanently sealed shut the windows of her home to keep out the noxious stench.
More than 1,100 Navy recruits have contracted gastrointestinal illnesses after training in southern San Diego waters, the Office of the Naval Inspector General determined. And nearly half of the region’s 40,900 households have experienced health problems, including migraine headaches, rashes and shortness of breath, that were most likely attributable to the sewage, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Things have grown so desperate that when Lee Zeldin, President Trump’s new environmental secretary and a former Republican congressman, arrived last month, even local Democrats cheered. On Earth Day, Mr. Zeldin came to Imperial Beach and vowed to urgently fix the sewage problem, which he said was “top of mind” for Mr. Trump.
“We are all out of patience,” Mr. Zeldin said.
The crisis has upended life in southern San Diego County — what locals call South County — which has an unusual mix of touristy beach towns and industrial warehouses. The region is defined by its border with Mexico, where Spanish and English flow interchangeably and the densely populated hillsides of Tijuana loom in the distance.
But South County residents have felt powerless when it comes to the complex international dynamics that have allowed so much sewage to overwhelm their neighborhoods.
“We want to be able to survive,” said Jesse Ramirez, 60, who has owned a skate and surf shop on Imperial Beach’s main drag for three decades. On a recent morning during what would typically be the start of tourist season, his store was entirely empty.
Imperial Beach, known to locals as I.B., was never as glamorous as the wealthy beach spots farther north. It takes its name from Imperial County, an inland region from which farmers once arrived each summer to escape the sweltering heat.
The city has long been a working-class community, and its nearly four miles of coastline have functioned as a town square at the southwestern corner of the continental United States.
Not long ago, surfers rode the world-renowned swells at Tijuana Sloughs, the city’s southernmost beach. Locals walked their dogs on the warm sand and enjoyed the sea breeze and pints of beer on outdoor patios.
But so-called extreme odor events happen more nights than not. Tests have found a disturbing slew of contaminants in the water, including arsenic, heavy metals, hepatitis, E. coli, salmonella, banned pesticides such as DDT, and more.
“We have watched in horror as the amounts of sewage have catastrophically increased,” said Serge Dedina, a surfer and environmentalist who served as mayor of Imperial Beach from 2014 to 2022. “It’s become kind of like a collective mental health crisis.”
In the 1990s, in an act of binational cooperation, the United States built a plant on its side of the border to help treat sewage from Tijuana, which often flowed into San Diego beaches via northward currents from Mexico. At the same time, Mexico established a plant in Tijuana as well.
But those plants haven’t kept up with explosive population growth in Tijuana, one of Mexico’s fastest-growing cities. Roughly 2.3 million people now live in the city, spurred in part by American companies that built factories there for cheap labor. Aging infrastructure and damage from turbulent rains have further reduced how much sewage the plants can treat.
The sewage problem now stretches up to Coronado, a wealthy enclave known for the historic Hotel del Coronado, where rooms regularly go for $1,000 a night and a $550 million renovation just finished after six years.
Beaches have been forced to close there as well, so fewer tourists are booking lodging, said John Duncan, the city’s mayor.
“My biggest concern as mayor is that the reputation as ‘the toilet of Mexico’ starts to stick at some point and really hurts us,” Mr. Duncan said.
In addition to the sewage that goes directly into the ocean, another 10 million gallons each day flow into the 120-mile Tijuana River, which begins in Mexico and winds northward into the United States before emptying at Imperial Beach, according to the U.S. International Boundary and Water Commission, which manages the U.S. treatment plant and is overseen by the State Department.
The river waste comes from factories, as well as from shantytowns in Tijuana that aren’t hooked up to the city’s sewer system. The river provides habitat for 370 species of birds along the Pacific Flyway, an important migratory pathway. But in recent years, it has essentially become an open sewer running through southern San Diego neighborhoods and near schools, researchers say.
On a recent day, the water in the Tijuana River appeared fluorescent green and was spotted with foam, what scientists say is the product of industrial chemicals. Beneath lanky willows, discarded tires clogged the waterway. Crushed milk jugs and scraps of clothing piled up on the river’s muddy banks. The sulfur stench was pungent, even through a respirator mask.
Along the river, scientists have detected astronomically high levels of hydrogen sulfide in the air, which can cause headaches, fatigue, skin infections, anxiety and respiratory and gastrointestinal problems. Residents have complained about such symptoms for years, said Paula Stigler Granados, a public health researcher at San Diego State University.
“I consider this to be the largest environmental justice issue in the whole country,” Ms. Granados said. “I don’t know any other place where millions of gallons of raw sewage would be allowed to flow through a community.”
The U.S. boundary commission has secured $600 million to double its treatment capacity to 50 million gallons per day, according to Frank Fisher, a spokesman. The Mexican plant is also working on repairs and expanding capacity, he said.
Many worry that the changes will take too long: The expansion at the American plant alone will take five years. Some short-term ideas that have been floated include trying to treat the river water before it reaches neighborhoods and giving air purifiers to residents.
Mr. Zeldin said when he visited San Diego in April that he was compiling a list of projects that would solve the crisis sooner. He suggested building a funnel at the Mexican treatment plant that would send sewage farther from the shore.
Mr. Dedina, the former Imperial Beach mayor, moved there when he was 7 and grew up surfing and lifeguarding. But he surfed those waters for the last time in 2019, he said, heading back to shore despite perfect, 10-foot waves. The water that day was simply too foul.
“I just said: ‘I can’t do this anymore. I can’t go in the water,’” he recalled. “It’s like Russian roulette.” In 2022, Mr. Dedina moved Wildcoast, the environmental nonprofit he runs, out of Imperial Beach because his employees began complaining of toxic fumes. Then, last year, he and his wife moved to central San Diego, away from the stench. The health risks in his hometown had become too much.
“I miss the life that I had,” he said. “Grabbing my surfboard, going in the water. It’s gone and it’s tragic.”
Soumya Karlamangla is a Times reporter who covers California. She is based in the Bay Area.
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