NO B.S. Border Sewage Network

Art illustrative of a disaster much nearer home!

2011-11-29T09:42:00.000-08:00

http://www.surfrider.org/jims-blog/entry/surfrider-billboard-in-

Non TransparentSea

2011-11-08T11:23:00.000-08:00

The TransparentSea Voyage was such a great concept: “an awareness campaign aimed at highlighting coastal environmental issues, with particular attention given to cetaceans (whales and dolphins) and the waters they inhabit.” (http://transparentseavoyage.com/) It has also been a tremendous disappointment. Its organizers and participants squandered a wonderful opportunity to shed light on major problems facing cetaceans and humans along the Southern California coast. Instead of doing so, the voyage went from groomed beach to groomed beach (El Capitan State Park to Mission Beach in San Diego) and party to party at exclusive, elite, and affluent venues (Malibu Inn, Mission Bay Yacht Club), and promoted clean ups at relatively clean beaches. The TransparentSea Voyage appears to have been a project to raise funds, not awareness. Awareness would have meant exposing what is, perhaps, North America’s worst ongoing ecological disaster. Instead of picking up a few cigarette butts and Starbuck’s cups at the Malibu pier and at Mission Beach, the crew could have helped collect TONS of debris and plastic just before winter rains wash them into our beautiful ocean. (http://www.wildcoast.net/media-center/news/398) Instead of “peddling” through the relatively pristine waters off the Palos Verde Peninsula, they could have sailed in front of a California river mouth were, during the rainy season, hundreds of millions of gallons of water contaminated with human waste and industrial pollutants flow onto our ocean EVERY DAY, sometimes for months on end, washing those tons of plastics and debris out to sea. (http://www.sccoos.org/data/tracking/IB/ - check it out after a rain event) Instead of observing dolphins and blue whales living in clear and fairly healthy water near San Pedro, they could have seen a large pod of resident dolphins surfing and eating in the perfect, empty waves of a classic surf spot – empty because of the often putrid and chocolate brown water. They could have seen whales swim through this same fetid plume, which extends miles out to sea when the river flows. This unbelievably gross water has driven the local surfers from the lineup of a classic reef break, a reef that is also a proposed MPA! (http://www.signonsandiego.com/sports/20070102-9999-lz1s2surf.html) (http://www.wildcoast.net/media-center/news/270-tijuana-river-mouth-marine-protected-area-status-goes-into-effect-oct-1) Unfortunately, dolphins and grey whales can’t avoid the pollution like surfers do. This area is, basically, the Taiji Cove of the Californias. Dolphins certainly don’t suffer the quick, bloody death here that they do in Japan. They merely pass their winter months in an ocean filled with plastic waste, sewage, chemicals, and disease. Grey whales navigate these same poisoned waters twice a year on their annual migration. Who knows what effect it may have on them? The TransparentSea Voyage was informed about the problems this area poses to the ocean, humans, and cetaceans. It was asked to go there for a look, a couple of hours tops, on a tour that would have made their jaws drop. They didn’t come, apparently being too busy at glitzy venues, raising funds, and hobnobbing with the “elite”. This “cove” is the Tijuana River Valley, the Tijuana River, and the reef break known as the Tijuana Sloughs. It needs the kind of international exposure a project like TransparentSea can bring. Once again, an opportunity presented itself. Once again, the surfing community seems to have spent its time partying in beautiful and affluent places filled with beautiful and affluent people capable of giving large beautiful donations, instead of focusing on real problems. The TransparentSea Voyage was such a great concept. It was such a great disappointment.

Hi Jeff

We at S4C appreciate your passion and opinion for what Transparentsea did not accomplish. We have a long list of how to make this campaign better in the future and your input has been noted. Please continue to spread the word about the issues that the Tijuana Sloughs face as these are legitimate and something that needs to be addressed on both sides of the border.

Also please remember that our group are passionate volunteers who do campaigns like this because we feel its extremely important to do what we can for the oceans and the creatures that live in them, and not because of any "elite" or "exclusive" opportunities that appear to have presented themselves.

One of the goals of our non-profit is to inspire others as we have been inspired by other like minded activists over the years. You are clearly moved by the Transparentsea concept and very passionate about your local area and we applaud that effort...

We hope that in the future you will use those passions for the positive and not as a loud speaker to cut down our initiatives because it didn't meet your goals. We would love to help in any way we can going forward, but ask that you not use this platform to trash our efforts as the Sloughs and your local beaches have been trashed over the years.

Respectfully,

justin krumb | S4C USA | www.s4cglobal.org |

Hi Justin,

Thanks for such a prompt reply. I would like to point out a few things that might help you wrap your mind around my passion. The issues regarding the Tijuana River are international in scope. Two-thirds of its watershed lay within Mexico. The assembly plant industry (“maquiladoras”) in Tijuana, which contributes so much of the industrial pollution, is made up of companies from, among other countries, Japan and Korea. The foot print of contamination extends far beyond the confines of Imperial Beach and the Tijuana Sloughs reef, extending for many miles to the north, south and out to sea. Industries directly impacted by the plume include not only tourism and sport (surfing, diving, fishing), but also commercial fisheries on both sides of the border. The United States military commandos (SEALS) abandoned the area for training because of health issues. The United States Border Patrol receives “hazardous duty” pay when assigned to the area. As I stated in my initial letter, cetaceans are also quite heavily impacted, since they feed in and travel though the plume. This has been an international issue for many years, since before I was born’ I’m 62. It has been ignored all this time, perhaps because it is occurring in a “lost” corner of California or is viewed by many as too hard to deal with and impossible to solve. Personally, I’ve been involved in efforts to preserve the estuary, clean it of debris and silt, educate the public, and solve the sewage and contamination problems for over 40 years. Our activism here, is neither self-serving nor self-promoting. We have labored in obscurity all these years and now seek help in bringing this problem into the light of day. Our activism is altruistic and grassroots. We seek to solve this real and immense problem, not pay lip service to it through glitz and glamour. Our hands are dirty and our backs are sore. You were contacted through San Diego Surfrider with anticipation and informed of the severity of the problem and the importance of shedding some light on it. Surfrider San Diego was informed that TransparentSea and Mr. Rastovich were “100% on board” for a tour of the Tijuana River Valley and willing to learn about its impact on the ocean environment. Neither TransparentSea nor Mr. Rastovich followed through and fulfilled their stated obligation to come. Our offer of a tour still holds. We would be very happy to have you and your TransparentSea crew witness the “Taiji Cove” of the Californias. Don’t forget to bring a camera. Please let us know when you will be here. You can contact us through San Diego Surfrider.

Jeff

Cleanup This Saturday October 8th from 9-12pm- Tijuana River Action Month

2011-10-06T16:58:00.000-07:00

Tijuana River Action Network: Cleanup This Saturday October 8th from 9-12pm- : Join us this Saturday October 8, 2011 from 9-12pm for a cleanup of the Tijuana River as part of Tijuana River Action Month. Where: EAST of Dairy Mart Road Bridge When: Saturday October 8th from 9am-12pm. Why: Because we need to prevent trash from flowing out to our ocean! What: Bring your own supplies! Please wear long pants and closed toe shoes (no sandals please) We will provide supplies but bringing your own is highly encouraged. Water, snacks and goodies will be available.If there is light rain the day of the event the cleanup will go forward.

DIRECTIONS:From NorthTake 5 south exit on Dairy Mart Rd exit 3. Make a RIGHT at the stoplight. Pass a three way stop. Keep straight, pass the “Parks and Recreation-Tijuana River Valley Regional Park” sign”Road will slightly curve to the right-slow down. Make a LEFT onto a dirt road. Go down a small berm. Make a RIGHT (heading South)onto a semi paved road. Keep straight until you see a yellow “END” sign. Make a LEFT and follow the dirt road. Follow the orange flags until you come to a clearingPark on your right side by the canopies. We hope to see you there!!

NoBS Campaign Events this Weekend and Tijuana River Action Month!‏

2011-09-13T10:12:00.000-07:00

Hello everyone, here are updates and quite a few exciting events happening this weekend and during the upcoming Tijuana River Action Month (flier attached). It's a long one, so take a deep breath, sighhhh...and go!:

Coastal Cleanup Day - Saturday, September 17th 9-12pm. Surfrider NoBS will be hosting with the Tijuana Estuary at the Tijuana Slough location. This spot is currently full but we need more volunteers at Border Field State Park and Dairy Mart Road Bridge locations. Register today!! http://www.cleanupday.org/.Last year, more than 10,000 volunteers participated in San Diego County alone, but we know we can do better! Help us to remove harmful litter and debris from our beaches, bays, urban areas, and open spaces, while also tracking trash to learn more about the sources of this pollution and how we can stop it at its source. Visit http://www.cleanupday.org/ to learn more about the event, and to view a complete list of cleanup sites. Registration is now open, so gather your volunteer group and find the best site for you!

Surfrider 20th Anniversary Paddle for Clean Water - Sunday, September 18th 9-12pm at Ocean Beach Pier. The Paddle For Clean Water is a non-competitive event that consists of over 1000 local surfers and ocean enthusiasts paddling around the Ocean Beach Pier to bring awareness to the pollution problem along San Diego’s coastline. This is a free event, and everyone is invited to participate with any human-powered paddle craft. As part of the festivities, there will be free breakfast for all paddlers, guest speakers, a raffle and a beach cleanup. For more information http://paddle4cleanwater.blogspot.com/

Digging in: A Workshop on Community Based Restoration (Tijuana Estuary) - Wednesday, September 21st, 9am - 3pm at the Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve Training Center. The workshop is based on the California Coastal Commission’s how-to manual, Digging In: A Guide to Community-Based Habitat Restoration. For more information and to register for a lunch ticket http://diggingin.eventbrite.com/.

Surfrider September Chapter Meeting - Wednesday, September 21st 7-9pm at Forum Hall above the Well Fargo Branch in UTC. This month's guest speaker is Oscar Romo who will be talking about the progress in Mexico and the Tijuana River Valley in addressing sediment, trash and sewage that degrades the region. Oscar is the Watershed Coordinator at the Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve. In this capacity, he is the principal investigator of the San Diego coastal storms project, the trash tracking project and the waste tires tracking project. He works in the development of bi-national pilot projects to control sediment, trash and waste water flows at the source, as well as the development and implementation of public policies to conserve ecosystems on both sides of the US/Mexico border. Oscar also serves as the US co-chair of the Border 2012 water task force, as a delegate to the UN Commission on Sustainable Development and as a county delegate to the World Water Forum.

"National Public Lands Day" Border Field State Park 40th Anniversary Volunteer Planting Event - Saturday, September 24th 9-12pm at Border Field State Park, 1500 Monument Road, San Diego, CA. Celebrate National Public Lands Day and National Estuaries Day at a volunteer planting event on Saturday, September 24 at Border Field State Park. On-site registration at 9am. Be sure to wear long pants and closed toe shoes. Volunteers under 18 must have signed parent consent forms (available by request from volunteer@trnerr.org) tel:619-575-3613Surfrider hosted Tijuana River Valley Cleanup off Dairy Mart Road - Saturday, October 8th 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. As part of Tijuana River Action Month, Surfrider will be hosting a cleanup site at Dairy Mart Road Bridge Location. Contact Dan at dan@surfridersd.org to help with volunteer registration and sign in. For directions and more information on any of the Tijuana River Action Month events please see http://tijuanariveractionnetwork.blogspot.com/

South Water Quality Workshop: When is it safe to surf? Swim? - Wednesday, October 12th 6pm to 8pm at the Tijuana Estuary Training center. Presentations from local volunteer groups, Scripps, City of IB Lifeguards, City of San Diego about the quality of our water from inland rivers and streams that eventually lead to our Oceans here in South Bay San Diego.

Become a fan of NoBS at: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=119244691440340#!/pages/NoBS-No-Border-Sewage-Campaign-Border-Sewage-Affects-Us-All/317796537442?ref=search&sid=aWd8NJo_Yhyq2wzUrV0nfw.670169746..1

As always check out the blog http://www.bordersewagecoalition.blogspot.com/ for the latest news, and here is the link to photos from recent Stewardship events and monthly water testing. http://www.flickr.com/photos/surfridersandiego/sets/72157627087376124/

Tijuana River Action Month is around the corner! Join us for one of clean ups and workshops!

2011-09-06T11:45:00.000-07:00

WANTED: Volunteers for a Major Cleanup of the Tijuana River Valley

2011-07-27T16:25:00.000-07:00

On Saturday, August 13th the Surfrider Foundation San Diego Chapter will be hosting a cleanup of the Tijuana River Valley from 9am-12pm. Our volunteers will be working with the Tijuana River Valley Equestrian Association, Oceanforce, WiLDCOAST, Suzie’s Farm, Wild Willows Farm and others for a major cleanup of one of the horse trails that link the cathedral trail and the Saturn link. The Tijuana River Valley offers miles and miles of interconnecting hiking and horseback riding trails that run all the way to the beach. In fact, Border Field State Park beach just west of the Tijuana River Valley is one of the last places in Southern California where you can horseback ride on the beach! This trail has been highly impacted by the large amounts of trash, plastic, sediment and tires that wash through the River Valley during the winter flooding season.
Directions to the cleanup: Central Trail Staging Area – 2310 Hollister Street, San Diego, CA. From I 5 – South, take exit 4 – Coronado Avenue (not the Coronado Bridge) and continue straight (heading south) onto Hollister Street. As you reach the southern end of the first bridge, make an immediate right into the Tijuana River Valley Regional Park and look for cleanup signs.
If you would like to help volunteer for this cleanup or future NoBS projects please contact Dan at dan@surfridersd.org.

City of Imperial Beach Councilmembers, Stakeholder Group Meet with CESPT Director, Tour Tijuana's Wastewater Treatment Plants

2011-06-20T13:37:00.000-07:00

On June 14th, 2011 the Director of the State Public Services Commission of Tijuana (CESPT) hosted a tour for San Diego clean water stakeholders to discuss water quality issues in the border region. City of Imperial Beach councilmembers Jim King and Brian Bilbray were joined by Dan Murphy from Surfrider San Diego, Danielle Litke from the Tijuana River Research Reserve, Chris Helmer Environmental Manager for the City of Imperial Beach, IB Patch editor Khari Johnson and WiLDCOAST staff were welcomed at the CESPT headquarters. CESPT Director Ing. Hernando Duran and sub-director of sanitation Ing. Juan Manuel Tamayo briefed the group on the wastewater treatment efforts accomplished by CESPT in the last 20 years. Among these achievements are the recently built Mexican treatment plants Arturo Herrera and La Morita which treat ten and six million gallons per day respectively. Additionally in order to properly dispose the treated wastewater, a new 2300 meter impulsion line was built to divert the treated effluent to Punta Bandera (south of Playas de Tijuana) The total investment in these three plants was 22 million dollars which enable the City of Tijuana to treat wastewater up to tertiary level by means of activated sludge reactors and disinfection by ultraviolet light, allowing the agency to produce water of sufficient quality for reuse in the creation of green areas such as parks and ecological recreation centers in the city.

The group then visited the Arturo Herrera Wastewater Treatment Plant where, the sub-director of sanitation services explained how they have developed a very unique educational program through local schools and fun activities at the treatment plant. The agency has created an interactive space for children to learn the wastewater treatment process. CESPT firmly believes that these educational efforts will lead to increased water conservation.

Additionally, the sub-director informed the group that these tretament plants took a lot of effort to build.

Because they are a state-run yet not state-funded agency, the funding to build these plants came from a Japanese Bank line of credit that had to be approved by the state congress. "we have to pay all of this money back " said the sub-director, "it is definitely a challenge".

The tour ended at the CILA pump station, a system that was put in place to redirect effluent from the Tijuana River during dry weather season and pump it over the city’s canyons to be treated and then discharged at Punta Bandera. Thanks to this operating system beach water quality is ensured in south San Diego Beaches during dry weather season.

"This was a very educational experience for me" said Jim King City of IB councilmember- "it's pretty amazing to see the great efforts Mexico is making to address water quality issues here at the border".

To see pictures from the tour visit: http://www.wildcoast.net/media-center/news/251

NoBS Updates for June and July

2011-06-10T22:30:00.000-07:00

NoBS updates for June (version Español sigue despues del correo en ingles):

Citizen Water Quality Monitoring - Our next Monitoring event is tomorrow Saturday, June 11th, at 9a.m., collecting Water Samples at 3 sites in the Tijuana River Valley. We need volunteers to collect water quality samples and take basic water chemistry measurements on a regular basis for the Tijuana River Valley and Estuary sites. We are looking to train volunteers to collect samples every month, or serve as a back-up for other volunteers at the estuary or throughout the county. If you have attended the training and would like to attend this month's sampling, please Contact dan@surfridersd.org and dylan@sdcoastkeeper.org for more info and to sign up. Also, the California State Water Quality Board is asking volunteers to help them document trash levels and water flow with their new CreekWatch app for the Iphone (coming soon for Droids). If you have an Iphone, check out the app--you can really help them out while you’re in the field. It also helps them determine impaired water body (303d) listings too.

Tijuana Estuary Second Saturday Volunteer Stewardship Event - Saturday, June 11th, 9am to 12pm at Tijuana Estuary Visitor Center. Join the Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve for trail maintenance and invasive plant removal. No experience necessary! Individuals, families and groups are welcome to participate. Volunteers must work in long pants and boots or sturdy shoes. Please wear sunscreen, sunglasses and a hat. Gloves and tools provided. Volunteers under 18: Must bring signed permission forms, available by request, and volunteers under 16 must attend with an adult. For more information contact Danielle Litke @dlitke@parks.ca.gov

NoBS Quarterly Workshop - the second quarter workshop will take place June 16th 6:30 to 8pm at Mark's house in IB - 321 Daisy Ave. Imperial Beach, CA. The NoBS campaign will be holding quarterly workshops to work on the 2011 Campaign plan/goals, coordinate events/volunteer opportunities and train new volunteers on the issues/policies outlining the campaign. If you are interested in attending or helping out with these workshops please send me some of your ideas at dan@surfridersd.org This quarter we will focus on planning for Tijuana River Action Month, and other important campaign action items.

Ocean Friendly Gardens is coming to IB! Join us Sunday July 17th at 10am at the entrance to the Tijuana Estuary for our next Lawn Patrol!!
We will take a quick walk up Imperial Beach Blvd and surrounding streets around the Estuary and check out some gardens that are mostly ocean friendly and some that are not so ocean friendly and talk about the difference. We will also visit City Hall in IB.

Lawn Patrols are a great way to learn about what makes an Ocean Friendly Garden ocean friendly, the impacts that the choices we make in our gardens have on the health of our local environment, and what easy steps you can take to turn your garden into an OFG! We talk about soil health, plant choices, how to retain rainwater on-site, and how to use organic choices instead of chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides!

Next Monthly Tijuana River Action Network Meeting - The next meeting is scheduled for Wednesday, July 27th at 6:30 - 8pm in (location TBD). Network meetings are a great way to meet and share ideas with staff and volunteers from Fundacion la Puerta, Proyecto Fronterizo, Fundacion Que Transforma, Alter Terra, Surfrider Foundation, Border Encuentro, Grupo Ecologista Tijuana, Tijuana Calidad de Vida, Tijuana Estuary, WiLDCOAST, Tijuana River Citizens’ Council, 4 Walls International, and more. The agenda for the meeting will be posted to the TRAN blog. Visit the blog: http://tijuanariveractionnetwork.blogspot.com/ for more information about the Network and notes from the past meetings. If interested in attending please contact Dan@surfridersd.org.

Become a fan of NoBS at:

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=119244691440340#!/pages/NoBS-No-Border-Sewage-Campaign-Border-Sewage-Affects-Us-All/317796537442?ref=search&sid=aWd8NJo_Yhyq2wzUrV0nfw.670169746..1

As always check out the blog http://www.bordersewagecoalition.blogspot.com/ for the latest news, and here is the link to photos from the winter flooding in the Tijuana River Valley, Stewardship events and monthly water testing. http://www.flickr.com/photos/surfridersandiego/sets/72157625743131314/

SPANISH

Vigilancia de Calidad de Agua por Ciudadanos- Nuestro próximo evento de Vigilancia será mañana, sábado, 11 de junio, a las 9 a.m., donde estaremos recogiendo muestras de agua en 3 sitios diferentes en el valle del Rio Tijuana. Necesitamos voluntarios para obtener muestras de calidad de agua, y para tomar medidas químicas básicas regularmente para los sitios del Rio Tijuana y el estuario. Necesitamos voluntarios para entrenar en obtener muestras cada mes, o para ser disponibles como reemplazos para otros voluntarios en el estuario, o a través del condado entero. Si usted ha atendido la sesion de entrenamiento y le gustaria contribuir colectando muestras este mes, por favor contacte a dan@surfridersd.org o dylan@sdcoastkeeper.org para más información, y para registrarse. También, déjenos saber si está regresando como voluntario o si es nuevo(a) al programa. En adición, la Junta Estatal de Calidad de Agua de California está buscando voluntarios para ayudar documentar niveles de basura y flujo de agua con su nuevo app para el iPhone CreekWatch (próximamente para el Droid). Si usted tiene un iPhone, busque el app y ayúdelos mientras esta en el campo. Este app le ayudara a la Junta determinar listados de agua afectadas (303d) también.

Evento Voluntario del Estuario de Tijuana Cada Segundo Sábado Mensual- sábado, 11 de junio, 9 a.m. a 12 en el centro de visitantes del estuario de Tijuana. Únase a la Reserva de el Estudio del Estuario Nacional del Rio Tijuana para la preserva y conservación de plantas nativas. No se requiere experiencia previa! Individuos, familias y grupos son cordialmente invitados a participar. Todo voluntario deberá trabajar en pantalones largos y botas o zapatos fuertes. Por favor traiga bloqueo de sol, lentes solares y sombreros. Guantes y herramientas serán proveídos. Voluntarios menores de 18 años: tienen que traer formas de permisos firmadas, las cuales tenemos disponibles, y voluntarios menores de 16 años tienen que ser acompañados por un adulto. Para más información contacte a Danielle Litke a dlitke@parks.ca.gov.

NoBS Taller Trimestral- el primer taller tomara lugar el 16 de junio de 6:30 a 8:00 p.m. en la residencia de Mark en Imperial Beach: 321 Daisy Ave., Imperial Beach, CA. La campaña NoBS estará conduciendo talleres trimestrales para trabajar hacia la campaña de trabajo del 2011, coordinar eventos y oportunidades para voluntarios, y para entrenar nuevos voluntarios en cuestiones de política subrayando la campaña. Si está interesado en atender o ayudar con estos talleres, por favor envíeme sus ideas a dan@surfridersd.org. Este trimestre estaremos concentrando en la planificacion del Mes de Accion del Rio Tijuana, y otros puntos mayores para la campaña.

Jardines Concientes del Oceano vienen para IB! Acompañenos el domingo, 17 de julio a las 10 a.m. en la entrada al estuario de Tijuana para nuestra proxima patrulla de patios!!
Estaremos tomando una caminata breve por Imperial Beach Blvd y las calles adjacentes al Estuario, y estramos viendo algunos jardines que son en gran parte benignos al oceano, igual como algunos que no son tan benignos, y platicaremos acerca de las diferencias. Tambien visitaremos City Hall en IB.

Las Patrullas de patio son una perfecta manera para aprender que es lo que hace un Jardin Benigno al Oceano benigno, los impactos que tienen nuestras decisiones en nuestros jardines contra el medio ambiente, y que pasos faciles usted puede tomar para convertir su jardin en uno que beneficia el oceano! Estaremos hablando acerca de salud del suelo, opciones de plantas, como retener agua de lluvia en su sitio, y como utilizar opciones organicas en vez de fertilizantes quimicos, herbicidas, y pesticidas!

Proxima Reunion Mensual del Enlace de Accion para el Rio Tijuana - La proxima reunion esta programada para miercoles, 27 de julio de 6:30 p.m. a 8 p.m. (sitio sera determinado). Reuniones de enlace son una gran manera para conocer y compatir ideas con miembros de la organizacion y voluntarios de la Fundacion la Puerta, Proyecto Fronterizo, Fundacion Que Transforma, Alter Terra, Surfrider Foundation, Border Encuentro, Grupo Ecologista Tijuana, Tijuana Calidad de Vida, Tijuana Estuary, WiLDCOAST, Tijuana River Citizens’ Council, 4 Walls International, y mas. La agenda para esta reunion sera publicada al blog TRAN. Visite el blog: http://tijuanariveractionnetwork.blogspot.com/ para mas informacion acerca del Enlace, y notas de reuniones pasadas. Si esta interesado(a) en atender, por favor contacte a Dan@surfridersd.org.

Hágase Fan de NoBS en:
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=119244691440340#!/pages/NoBS-No-Border-Sewage-Campaign-Border-Sewage-Affects-Us-All/317796537442?ref=search&sid=aWd8NJo_Yhyq2wzUrV0nfw.670169746..1
Como siempre, vea nuestro blog en http://www.bordersewagecoalition.blogspot.com/ para las últimas noticias. Aquí está el enlace a fotos de la más reciente inundación del valle del rio Tijuana, eventos de administración, y pruebas de agua mensuales: http://www.flickr.com/photos/surfridersandiego/sets/72157625743131314/

Public Meeting To Discuss Water Quality And Water April 14 6 to 8pm

2011-04-13T10:56:00.000-07:00

http://www.imperialbeachnewsca.com/news/article_8f6be1cc-614f-11e0-b5bb-001cc4c002e0.html The United States Section of the International Boundary and Water Commission (USIBWC) has scheduled a public meeting of the USIBWC Citizens Forum on Thursday, April 14, 6 - 8 p.m. at the Tijuana Estuary Meeting Room, 301 Caspian Way in Imperial Beach. The meeting will focus on water quality and water reuse. The purpose of the Citizens Forum is to promote the exchange of information between the USIBWC and the community about Commission projects and related activities. Information about the Imperial Beach Bacterial Source Identification Study will be presented by Damon Owen, Field Operations Manager/Assistant Project Manager for Weston Solutions. The purpose of the study, funded by the State Water Quality Control Board under the Clean Beaches Initiative, is to plan, design, and implement a Source Identification Survey to identify sources of bacterial contamination in the U.S. portion of the Tijuana River Watershed and recommend appropriate actions and activities to reduce the input of those sources to the Tijuana River and adjacent Pacific Ocean. There are limited data regarding bacterial loads from sources and activities on the U.S. side of the watershed. Information regarding the impact of certain land uses and point and non-point sources has not been collected. As such, there is potential for water quality improvements in the U.S. portion of the watershed. This study aims to quantify bacterial loads from potential sources and propose solutions to reduce the impact of bacterial loads in the Tijuana River Watershed and Pacific Ocean. The implementation of successful best management practices will result in a reduction in beach postings and closures. With an update on activities south of the border, David Roberto Navarro Herrera, Secretary of Urban Development and Ecology for the Municipality of Tijuana, will discuss installation of sediment basins that will capture sediment and trash. Also on the agenda, Michael R. Markus, P.E., General Manager of the Orange County Water District, will discuss the Groundwater Replenishment System, a 70-million gallon per day advanced water purification project that is the largest planned indirect potable reuse project in the world. The Groundwater Replenishment System takes secondary treated sewer water and runs it through an advanced treatment process consisting of microfiltration, reverse osmosis, and ultraviolet light with hydrogen peroxide, producing water that is of nearly distilled water quality. This water is then recharged into Orange County’s groundwater basin, ultimately becoming a part of the potable water supply and providing enough water for nearly 600,000 people. Members of the public who would like more information about the meeting may call 619-662-7600 or e-mail sally.spener@ibwc.gov.Reuse April 14

NoBS Quarterly Workshop Tonight!

2011-03-09T16:02:00.000-08:00

First workshop will take place tonight March 9th 6:00 to 7:30pm at the Tijuana Estuary Visitor Center. Starting this year, in addition to the Network meetings, the NoBS campaign will be holding quarterly workshops to work on the 2011 Campaign plan/goals, coordinate events/volunteer opportunities and train new volunteers on the issues/policies outlining the campaign.

Tijuana Sloughs Cleanup Thursday Feb 17th at 2-4pm

2011-02-16T16:10:00.001-08:00

Preventing Future Sewage Spills Could Take Binational Effort | KPBS.org

2011-01-26T16:23:00.000-08:00

Preventing Future Sewage Spills Could Take Binational Effort KPBS.org

Massive sewage spill fouls Imperial Beach

2011-01-19T18:11:00.000-08:00

By Sandra Dibble
and Mike Lee
Originally published January 18, 2011 at 3:06 p.m., updated January 18, 2011 at 8:44 p.m.

Sewage spill
An estimated 1.3 million gallons a day of sewage are flowing into the ocean just south of the international border, in what will rank among the largest single incidents to affect San Diego County in the past decade.
The ongoing leak adds a potent pollutant to coastal waters that currents commonly push north into the United States, where they mix with contaminated flow from the Tijuana River, which has lead to beach closures in South County for the past month.
Estimates of the spill size vary greatly — from more than 30 million gallons by environmentalists to just a few million gallons by wastewater officials in Mexico. Either way, the situation provides a vivid reminder that despite numerous upgrades to the sewage system in Tijuana, it remains a chronic environmental and human health problem with roots going back more than 70 years.
Baja California’s top health authority on Tuesday closed the beaches near the leak at Playas de Tijuana as a precautionary measure. Surfers in South San Diego County said they were concerned about getting sick from the tainted water.
The break was about one mile south of the border in a pipe linked to a pump station that lifts sewage to the Punta Bandera treatment plant. The state’s health department said a pipe ruptured when the ground gave way after December’s rainstorms.
A central question is when the leak started. Baja wastewater officials said Tuesday the major problems started last weekend and they acted as quickly as possible to a situation that started small and blew up without warning.
Environmentalists in Mexico said major flows began before Christmas. They and their counterparts in the United States questioned whether Mexico acted fast enough to address the break and issue warnings.
“This is pretty serious and demonstrates a breakdown in communication” between Mexican and U.S. officials, said Serge Dedina, head of the environmental group Wildcoast in Imperial Beach. “This is precisely an issue we have been trying to deal with — just getting basic notifications on sewage spills in Tijuana. Authorities have placed thousands of people at risk.”
Officials initially believed the problem was an overflow that typically occurs during rainstorms when sewage and stormwater mix in overloaded pipes, said Agustin Rojas, spokesman for the CESPT, the acronym of the state public service commission of Tijuana.
He said the scope of the issue was not initially apparent because it involved an underground sinkhole that formed around Dec. 29 but did not immediately damage the 30-inch pipe.
“We believe it began to have problems, but the water wasn’t flowing to the ocean yet,” Rojas said.
On Sunday, he said, “We had not detected the magnitude of the problem. ... It wasn’t until Monday.”
He said it would take another couple of days to stop the flow. The repairs involve replacing a 250-foot portion of the collector pipe that’s buried 15 feet below ground.
“We’ve got crews working long-hour shifts. It’s not an easy job, but they are committed to the task.”
Margarita Diaz, head of Probea, a Playas de Tijuana-based environmental organization, said the problems date back to Dec. 23.
“The collector was damaged, the ground collapsed, and it folded, and plugged it up. This caused the sewage to flow north toward the manholes. As it could not go to the pump station, it flowed through the drains.”
Diaz said the issue of the sewage overflows reached her office at the beginning of January, when local residents called and complained. When she called the CESPT, she said the common response was that the engineer was on vacation.
The Playas beach was closed Tuesday afternoon. “But this should have happened a long time ago,” she said. “It should have happened immediately, from the moment that the spill was detected. They were three weeks late.”
Mark McPherson, chief of land and water quality for San Diego County’s environmental health agency, said Tuesday afternoon that he had received no official notice of the incident. In this case, he said an alert would not have made a major difference because the Tijuana River is still flowing with millions of gallons a day of sewage-tainted water and the county has maintained beach closures for weeks in the South Bay because of that.
Dedina at Wildcoast said the problems at Playas de Tijuana likely are contributing to the mess caused by the Tijuana River.
“The stench at the south end of IB this morning was overpowering,” he said.
Conditions were worse south of the international border.
“I have been watching and smelling a stream of untreated sewage run down the street next to my house in Playas de Tijuana and to the ocean in a constant flow,” said resident Scott S. Peters. “The authorities have simply removed the manhole covers on my street and have been letting the sewage flow like a river since the storm a few weeks ago.”
Wastewater has been a major source of tension along the border since the early 1900s because Tijuana’s sewage system has not kept up with growth. Raw sewage flows into the Tijuana River whenever it rains. Agencies on both sides of the border have made big strides to cut down the pollution by building treatment plants and other facilities.

San Diego Group Using Grant To Reduce Cross Border Pollution

2011-01-14T19:25:00.000-08:00

By Ed Joyce
January 14, 2011

A San Diego based environmental group is using a grant from a federal agency to reduce cross-border trash and pollution. The WiLDCOAST project will benefit beaches on either side of the border.
The $50,000 Environmental Protection Agency grant will fund WiLDCOAST's project called Clean Canyon (Cañón Limpio) for 16 months.
Ben McCue with WiLDCOAST said the effort focuses on the Los Laureles Canyon, a sub-basin of the Tijuana River Watershed and drainage area.
"This canyon is literally a stone's throw from the U.S./Mexico border fence," said McCue. "And all of the trash that's not collected in this canyon, with next rain will end up in the Tijuana Estuary and eventually off our border beaches."
Many people living in the canyon, he said, don't have basic municipal services, including trash collection.
"The project will be giving residents tools needed to improve trash management in their community using activities such as workshops, leadership trainings and clean-up events," McCue said. "Reducing pollution includes getting residents to recycle trash and use composting."
McCue said the project will start in February.
He said there is a movement in Tijuana to eliminate illegal settlements that create much of the trash and sewage problems that foul beaches on both sides of the border.
"Until those areas are eliminated or are provided basic services, such as sewage treatment and trash collection services, we're going to continue to feel the effects downstream in San Diego," said McCue. "Everyone recognizes that the city of Tijuana has a lot of work to do to get the city completely plumbed for sewage treatment and set up for trash collection."
McCue said there's always going to be a need for local Tijuana communities to improve trash collection and recycling through their own resources.
"Leadership training on how to mobilize their neighbors to work on innovative composting and recycling projects will clearly benefit the Tijuana Estuary and San Diego beaches," said McCue.
Beach water quality has long been an issue along the U.S.-Mexico border.
McCue said the non-profit WiLDCOAST works with border communities and agencies of both countries to reduce the sources of pollution fouling the region's waterways.
He said the project is part of EPA’s Border 2012 Program, which works to address shared environmental problems across the US-Mexico border.
"All of the border states have cross-border pollution problems," McCue said. "The binational Border 2012 program has work groups in all of the US-Mexico border states."

Pictures taken at Border Field State Park during the recent rainstorms

2011-01-03T20:52:00.000-08:00

On 12/20 and 12/21/2010, a few of us drove down to Border field State Park and captured some pictures at the Goat Canyon Sediment basins, Smugglers Gulch, Dairy Mart Bridge, Saturn Blvd and Hollister Street. Not only did we see tons of plastic, styrofoam, sewage, and trash flowing from the Tijuana River, but we saw humans getting rescued. Some of the shots are pretty eye opening to say the least.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/surfridersandiego/sets/72157625743131314/

South San Diego Water Quality Workshop

2010-12-03T15:19:00.000-08:00

Join Scripps Institution of Oceanography, WiLDCOAST, the County of San Diego's Department of Environnmental Health, and San Diego Coastkeeper at TRNERR (Tijuana Estuary Visitor Center, 301 Caspian Way, Imperial Beach, California.) on December 7th from 6-8pm to learn about the process that goes into monitoring ocean water quality and influences beach closures and advisories. Walk away with practical tools that will help you to know when the water is safe and how to safeguard your health -- and some great food and raffle prizes too!

Protecting and preserving nature’s systems

2010-12-03T15:15:00.000-08:00

Mike A. McCoy’s passion for achieving a better understanding of the interrelationship of ecological systems has evolved over the decades. “It wasn’t much understood in the ’60s,” he says.
As a member of the stakeholders group setting up the Marine Life Protection Act Initiative for the California Department of Fish and Game, Mike travels the Southern California coast intent on preserving marine and estuarine systems.
“We have to understand and revamp the way we think. We have to look at any system like a microcosm — look locally and think globally,” Mike says.
Mike’s work started more than 40 years ago. A proposed marina created by dredging the Tijuana Estuary caught Mike’s interest in 1970. He recognized the importance of preserving it and its wildlife as one of the last intact salt marsh ecosystems in Southern California.
“If we fragment ecological systems, remove corridors and connections, we’ll slowly destroy their complexity and vibrancy,” he notes.
But about one-third of the community wanted to protect the estuary and two-thirds wanted a marina, he recalls. The creation of a marina meant money for the local tax base.
“The importance of 1.8 million people living in proximity to the estuary was an educational opportunity for so many to learn about the critical role these systems play in their daily lives,” Mike states. “Estuaries are the nurseries of the sea.”
In spearheading the 10-year effort to save the estuary, Mike challenged numerous cities and the San Diego County Comprehensive Planning Organization, including area mayors.
“The road was not easy and was paved with stress and violence along the way,” he remembers. “Death threats, bullets and loosening of lug nuts on our wheels happened during this time.”
With congressional support and that of the Southwest Wetlands Interpretive Association (SWIA), of which Mike was one of the founding members and now serves as president, the Tijuana Slough National Wildlife Refuge was acquired in 1980. The Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve was established in 1982. By 2005 the Tijuana Estuary, the most southwesterly coastal wetland in the U.S., was dedicated as a Ramsar Wetland of International Importance.
“Mike is one of those most responsible for bridging the political gap and keeping this estuary from development, which in turn allowed for a two-country stewardship for the benefit of this wetland of international importance,” says Bob Miller, SWIA vice president.
— Marty Coffin Evans

Border sewage plant nears completion

2010-12-03T15:10:00.000-08:00

By Mike Lee

Sunday, November 28, 2010 at noon

An expanded sewage-treatment plant more than a decade in the making has started processing wastewater in San Ysidro, and the agency in charge said it’s on track to meet a court-ordered deadline for reducing coastal water pollution.
The International Boundary and Water Commission is supposed to comply with U.S. Clean Water Act standards by Jan. 5 at its South Bay treatment facility, which handles up to 25 million gallons of raw sewage a day from Tijuana.
If the agency makes good on that effort, it will close a troubled chapter in the county’s most-polluted region and provide more momentum for a growing initiative to rid the border lands of trash, sediment and other pollutants. Even in its degraded state, the lower section of the river valley is prized by environmentalists because it’s one of the largest intact estuaries in California.
“Piece by piece, we are filling holes and dealing with the water quality issues on the border,” said Serge Dedina, head of the advocacy group Wildcoast in Imperial Beach. “It’s not just one solution. It’s a whole strategy.”
Upgrades at the sewage treatment plant are at the core of the overall plan. The boundary commission built it in the late 1990s to combat millions of gallons of sewage that commonly flowed north across the border. Related problems go back 70 years or more because South Bay communities are downhill from Tijuana, a fast-growing city that’s long struggled to provide adequate sewage infrastructure.
The U.S. wastewater plant is run by the boundary commission, which operates sewage and flood control projects all along the U.S.-Mexico border.
The San Ysidro facility has never met the “secondary treatment” standards in U.S. law. That’s partly because the commission couldn’t afford to complete all of the necessary infrastructure within its initial budget of $239 million.
For much of the past decade, treatment upgrades were on hold while a San Diego County company called Bajagua lobbied for a federal contract to build and operate a separate plant in Mexico. That effort fell apart in May 2008, when the U.S. government decided to upgrade the San Ysidro facility rather than build from scratch in Tijuana.
The boundary commission eventually selected PCL Construction of Tempe, Ariz., as the lead contractor for an $88 million project that started in January 2009. The price tag jumped to $92.7 million after the contractor added crews to meet the court mandate.
“It’s been a long time coming,” said Steve Smullen, area operations manager for the U.S. section of the boundary commission.
As Smullen toured the grounds last week, workers put finishing touches around the cavernous concrete basins where wastewater is scrubbed. A faint smell of sewage hung over the site, which is within sight of the fence along the international border.
Scores of metal railings and freshly painted pumps glistened in the midday sun, while bacteria fed on the organic matter in the soupy brown water that swirled in new million-gallon tanks. Over the next several weeks, Smullen’s goal is to build up colonies of microscopic organisms so they can process full loads delivered from the adjacent primary treatment plant.
Once the solids and the bacteria are separated out, the treated water is supposed to meet secondary standards and be flushed to the Pacific Ocean through an existing 3.5-mile pipe.
The current project doesn’t increase the plant’s overall capacity, but it will make the end product cleaner. The boundary commission needs to reduce the amount of suspended solids to comply with U.S. law, and it must decrease the toxicity of the water it discharges.
“We are hopeful the problems will be fixed,” Smullen said. “Time will tell.”
It’s not clear how much the work will improve the ocean water near the South County shoreline, which is bedeviled by multiple sources of contamination that routinely sicken surfers.
David Gibson, executive officer at the San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board, said he is optimistic about the expanded plant but he warned that there may be hiccups along the way.
He said the facility is hard to operate because Mexican factories don’t have the same kinds of controls as U.S. companies on the compounds they discharge to the sewage system. In addition, Tijuana residents typically use less water than San Diego County residents and that makes their sewage more concentrated and tougher treat.
Two other main pollutants in the watershed — trash and sediment — also present a major challenge. The regional board is drafting regulations to limit those sources of contamination in the Tijuana River, and it’s targeting the U.S. government as the responsible party.
No one is sure how much that strategy will cost or how long it will take, but Gibson said he aims to force more cleanup efforts as an alliance of more than 30 groups and agencies try to gain ground with cooperative efforts. That binational initiative involves crafting long-term plans for trash collectors, larger basins for capturing mud and building an environmental ethic among Tijuana residents.
“In the end, it will require the kind of capital investment, operations and maintenance to manage sediment and trash that we currently have for sewage,” Gibson said. “It will not be cheap and it will not be simple.”

Tijuana River Pollution Quiz

2010-11-08T06:07:00.000-08:00

Tijuana River Pollution Quiz

Written by Travis Pritchard

Pop quiz time.
Which of these ammonia test results are from the Tijuana River?

Which of these phosphate test results are from the Tijuana River?

If you guessed the dark blue ones, you are correct! Give yourself an A. These test tubes are some of the results from last weekend’s volunteer water quality monitoring event. The ammonia, nitrate, and phosphate levels in the Tijuana River were literally off the charts high. When it rains (which it recently had), the treatment facilities get overwhelmed and raw sewage flows into the river and out to the ocean. Our water quality tests show those trends in the water quality.

Check out Jen’s blog on July’s Tijuana River Valley sewage spill to learn more about efforts underway to fix this problem. You can check out the results of our water monitoring efforts at the watershed wiki. And don’t forget to check the current beach status before you head out into the water.

The Surfrider Blue Water Task Force is a great way to get involved and take action to prevent contaminants from reaching San Diego's watersheds and ultimately reaching the Pacific Ocean to negatively impact our coast and marine life. Blue Water Task Force members currently monitor the bacteria levels in the Tijuana River Watershed on the US side of the border, specifically at the Tijuana River mouth and other select areas in the Tijuana Estuary.

Month of border cleanups yields 56 tons of trash

2010-11-02T08:05:00.000-07:00

By Lily Leung

A monthlong series of cleanups in the U.S.-Mexico border region yielded more than 2,300 tires and 56 tons of garbage that could have ended up at sea by way of the Tijuana River.Environmental group Wildcoast of Imperial Beach increased efforts to control pollution near the border this month with the help of several partners, including nonprofit organizations such as Surfrider San Diego and San Diego Coastkeeper.More than 2,800 volunteers participated.Among the most successful cleanups this month:-An Oct. 16 event at Cañon de los Laureles in Tijuana that cleared 21 tons of trash from the channel that drains into the Tijuana River. That involved 30 volunteers.-An Oct. 18 gathering of 41 trade-student volunteers and instructors from the San Diego Job Corps. They removed about 1,000 tires from the main channel.Last Saturday's cleanup was canceled due to rain, a pattern that Wildcoast officials are expecting to continue, said Paloma Aguirre, border program manager for the group."This month has been great, but I was kind of saddened and disappointed that we couldn't host the last cleanup," Aguirre said.The group will wait for better weather before scheduling future cleanups and environmental workshops in the border area, she said.

Tijuana River Action Month - Cleanups throughout the month of October

2010-10-14T07:20:00.001-07:00

Chapter Meeting Wed. 15th, 7pm at Forum Hall

2010-09-15T09:59:00.000-07:00

In a effort to kick off Coastal Cleanup Day and Tijuana River Action Month, this month's chapter meeting will focus on Beach Cleanups and Border Sewage and is honored to have Bob Scott give a presentation. Bob is a Professional Geologist and Certified Hydrogeologist at URS Corporation here in San Diego where he has been employed for over 20 years. He currently manages its local site assessment and remediation group and conducts work related to soil and groundwater contamination. He recently completed a study funded by the State for the Tijuana River Valley Recovery Team to identify the locations, quantity and characteristics of trash and sediment that gets transported downstream from Mexico during rain events. The information that his team has collected will help in developing a program to address this problem. Bob will share the results of the study and work that is currently being done in the valley related to trash and sediment. We'll also cover general chapter updates and ways to get involved with Surfrider. You don't need to be a Surfrider member but it's always encouraged. This one is at Forum Hall in UTC / La Jolla, Click Here for directions

Tracking IB's 'smelly water'

2010-08-04T14:35:00.000-07:00

By Mike Lee, UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
Originally published July 27, 2010 at 10 p.m., updated July 28, 2010 at 12:02 a.m.

For the past decade, surfers and others have complained about an unusual odor wafting over the sand and waves of Imperial Beach.
It’s often described as having a detergentlike quality, and it comes with shimmery bubbles in the surf zone. One scientific paper calls it “smelly water.”
For just as long, the on-again-off-again scent has defied attempts to determine its source and answer questions about whether it poses dangers for beach users.
“We are really concerned because our noses and all of our physical senses when we are in the water are telling us one thing, and the tests are telling us another,” said Ben McCue, a surfer and coastal program manager for the nonprofit group Wildcoast in Imperial Beach.
In recent weeks, conservationists have fashioned a plan to solve the mystery using high-end tests that go beyond the typical sampling for indicator bacteria in coastal waters. They said the issue is resurfacing now because upgrades at the International Wastewater Treatment Plant in San Ysidro are nearly done after years of debate, allowing beach advocates to focus on other issues in one of the county’s most polluted areas.
“We are going to nail it down this summer,” McCue said.
As usual, the main barrier is money — an estimated $15,000 to look for chemical clues that can help pinpoint the source of the odor, which is widely thought to be from wastewater. It will take more time and money to determine whether the impurities cause human health problems.
The San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board, which regulates water pollution in the area, offered about $14,000 for testing several weeks ago. Those funds were only available until the fiscal year ended June 30. No reports of odor problems surfaced during the testing window, so the plan was shelved.
Regional board officials said they are trying to free up money from fines paid by polluters to underwrite the analysis. Until that happens, they are unsure about how to view the occasional stink.
“That is one of the reasons I am interested in exploring this further — to find out what we don’t know,” said David Gibson, head of the regional board. “It’s worthwhile investigating.”
A natural suspect is the Tijuana River, which for decades has carried sewage-tainted runoff from Mexico to South Bay beaches during the rainy season.
What worries McCue is that the unsettling smell occurs in the summer when the river isn’t flowing to the Pacific Ocean.
Instead, beach users have noticed the odors when nearshore currents are moving north. Some have also linked it to southwest winds.
One leading theory is that the smell is from the South Bay Ocean Outfall, which deposits treated sewage from the United States and Mexico about 3.5 miles offshore near Imperial Beach.
McCue and others said it’s more likely that the smell is from treated and untreated sewage dumped into the surf zone roughly five miles south of the U.S.-Mexico border at Punta Bandera.
The plume from Punta Bandera typically travels south but it moves north across the border about 12 percent of the time, according to a 2009 paper by Eric Terrill, director of the Coastal Observing Research and Development Center at Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
His research wasn’t designed to pin down the funky odor.
“Right now, I don’t think we have a gold-standard test that has said unequivocally that it is Punta Bandera,” Terrill said. “Wildcoast is on the right track. … A special study needs to be done.”
One reason the odor mystery remains unsolved is that standard beach water tests assess fecal indicator bacteria, which can be killed by treatment or diluted to the point that they are not found.
The problem is that there still could be harmful viruses or other pollutants in “smelly water” even if the bacteria aren’t detected.
Clay Clifton, watershed monitoring program manager for San Diego Coastkeeper, said he started hearing about the strange smells shortly after he started working at the county’s Department of Environmental Health in the late 1990s.
“We said, ‘Let’s document that there is a contamination event happening,’ ” Clifton said. “This happened year after year where we went out with our traditional bacterial analysis, collected samples and processed them. … We never had any exceedances (of water-quality standards).
“We were scratching our heads and wondering what is going on,” Clifton said.
Any new sampling efforts likely will target ingredients in laundry soap. Some detergents used in Mexico aren’t approved in the United States, making them useful indicators of where wastewater originates.
In addition, tests may look at caffeine or artificial sweeteners, traces of which could connect the odors to human excrement and raise concerns about the potential for waterborne illnesses. That kind of chemical fingerprinting is several times more expensive than fecal indicator tests.
“Usually when you test the water, you know what you are looking for,” McCue said. “In this case, we are trying to figure out what’s in the water. It’s almost a reverse investigation.”
Even if the regional board agrees to finance a study, success will hinge on the smell lingering long enough to get several water samples.
“These events come and go depending on what the surf is doing,” Clifton said. “You could very easily miss it.”

Sick of Sewage

2010-07-23T11:19:00.000-07:00

Reactions to 2.1 Million Gallon Sewage Spill in Tijuana River Valley

Written by Jen Kovecses

Of San Diego’s eleven watersheds, the Tijuana River watershed is the largest. Most of it lies on the Mexican side of the border. It is also the watershed with some of the worst sewage pollution in our region. When you hear about Imperial Beach being closed because of high bacteria counts, it is a good bet that the sewage causing the problem came from Mexico. After years of squabbling over how to fix the problem – building the Bajagua treatment plant, upgrading other facilities – there seemed to be enough political drama to start a Mexican soap opera but no real solution to the problem. In April of this year, La Morita sewage treatment plant opened in Tijuana. This plant will treat much of the sewage in the Tijuana region and reclaim some of that treated wastewater for use in the irrigation of an adjacent nursery. The trees grown with that reclaimed water will be planted throughout Baja California. This plant is a big step towards being the first region in Mexico to treat 100% of its sewage.

Needless to say, it was with dismay that I read the news on Sunday that there had been an enormous spill – 2.1 million gallons of raw sewage – in the Tijuana River Valley at the beginning of June. Maybe more alarming than the spill itself is that none of it was captured by the International Boundary and Water Commission’s facility. The IWBC treatment facility was designed specifically to capture these types of flows. The foreign origin of the problem and the federal status of the IWBC facility have put this spill outside of the regulatory reach of the Regional Water Quality Control Board and it seems that in addition to no clean-up, there will be no real enforcement action either.

While news of this spill is a sad reminder of the many infrastructure problems of the border region, we need to stay focused on the positive steps that have been taken to remedy the problem. Less than ten years ago, it was not uncommon to open your morning newspaper to read a story about huge volumes of sewage flowing untreated into San Diego’s creeks and bays. These spills would leave behind a wake of pollution that fouled our shorelines and exposed surfers and swimmers to micro-organisms that can make people sick. In the face of government and regulatory inaction, groups like San Diego Coastkeeper stepped in with advocacy, including a lawsuit to force upgrades to our wastewater collection system. Since that time, we have seen a huge drop in sewage spills. So we know with enough pressure and will that change can happen.

Spills suggest problems aren't under control

2010-07-23T11:03:00.000-07:00

Second sewage overflow since June flows into U.S.
By Mike Lee, UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
Originally published July 20, 2010 at 2:05 p.m., updated July 20, 2010 at 9:24 p.m.

A second major wastewater overflow in Tijuana since the start of June has sullied the Tijuana River Valley in southern San Diego County.
More than 2.7 million gallons of sewage-tainted water coursed through the dry river bed on July 7 and 8, according to state and federal reports. No health problems have been linked to the spill.
It came just over a month after more than 2.1 million gallons of sewage crossed the international border downstream at the base of a canyon known as Smuggler’s Gulch.
Both are among the largest wastewater accidents to affect San Diego County since 2000. Because both incidents started in Mexico, California regulators have little leverage to issue fines or cleanup orders like they typically would if a local city caused the problem.
Despite major improvements to Tijuana’s sewage system in recent years, the back-to-back spills during dry weather suggest that long-running problems aren’t entirely under control.
“Although this spill did not cause direct human health impact, it is evidence that there are still improvements to be made. … We need increased funding for border environmental infrastructure,” said Paloma Aguirre, a conservationist with the nonprofit group Wildcoast in Imperial Beach.
Officials at the San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board said Tuesday they are considering how to handle the two sewage overflows, likely with a consultation or letter requesting details about the incidents in hopes of improving reporting protocol and warding off future problems.
Senior engineer Brian Kelley at the regional board said he has seen numerous similar problems over the past three decades.
“It’s somewhat frustrating,” he said. “But it didn’t raise a huge red flag because we are used to it.”
Leaders at Tijuana’s water and wastewater agency said the incident mainly involved drinking water that was discharged into the river to clear a pipe and repair a leak.
A report from the U.S. section of the International Boundary and Water Commission, which manages wastewater facilities along the U.S.-Mexico border, said the problem started about 9 a.m. July 7, when a break in a drinking-water line filled a concrete channel in Mexico and mixed with treated sewage.
Public works officials in Tijuana failed to increase pumping capacity to handle the extra load, resulting in an overflow to San Diego County, according to the boundary commission.
It said the flows were largely absorbed into the dry Tijuana River bed and did not reach as far as the bridge at Dairy Mart Road in San Ysidro, roughly 1.5 miles northwest of where the river enters the United States.
The line break was repaired about 24 hours later.
A second report filed with environmental regulators in California said drinking water was not harmed and there were no known injuries related to the spill.
That incident came on the heels of a smaller spill a month earlier. On June 2 and 3, roughly 5 million gallons of wastewater from a line break in Mexico flowed through Smuggler’s Gulch to a structure in the United States that was designed to divert such flows to a treatment plant in San Ysidro.
In that case, boundary commission officials said they suffered from a pump failure and having a pipe out of service, leaving them unable to capture about 2.1 million gallons of sewage that contaminated parts of the river valley.
Staff writer Sandra Dibble contributed to this report.

Beach may have a scoop

2010-07-16T10:13:00.000-07:00

Sand-replenishing project appears resurrected, thanks to Army Corps
By Janine Zúñiga UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
Thursday, July 15, 2010 at midnight

Sand replenishing could begin in the fall if approvals are granted by the Imperial Beach City Council, San Diego port officials and the Army Corps of Engineers.
A plan to bring 300,000 cubic yards of sand to Imperial Beach’s shore may be back on track.
A U.S. Army Corps of Engineers project to deepen the San Diego Bay entrance called for dumping the sand early last year just off Imperial Beach’s coast. The project was postponed indefinitely in October because of permitting delays and scaled back to 100,000 cubic yards after logistic complications prevented the placement of the beach-quality sand closer to the city’s shoreline.
Since then, the Army Corps agreed to forego the use of its larger but limited dredging equipment in place of a contractor’s smaller and more maneuverable apparatus. Additionally, the San Diego Unified Port District agreed to take $1 million of $1.8 million previously approved for a larger, more uncertain federal sand renourishment project in Imperial Beach and redirect about $300,000 of it for the bay-sand project.
Both actions allow for the original 300,000 cubic yards of sand to be deposited closer to the city’s beach.
All that’s left now is getting the changes approved.
The Imperial Beach City Council agreed last week to ask the Army Corps to enter into an agreement allowing both to participate in the San Diego Harbor Maintenance Dredging Project. They also agreed to use the Port District’s $300,000 for the project.
Without threatening any future federal funding for the larger Silver Strand Shoreline Renourishment Project, Imperial Beach is looking for ways to keep all of its sand-replenishment options open.
The council also agreed to ask the state Department of Boating and Waterways about redirecting $4.2 million also earmarked for the Silver Strand project for a third sand project, this one proposed by the San Diego Association of Governments. The council also supported the use of $700,000 in port funding, the balance of the $1 million, toward SANDAG’s Regional Beach Sand Project.
“We’re exploring other potential options to fund the most imminent projects as soon as possible,” said Greg Wade, community development director.
The SANDAG project is a repeat of a 2001 effort that placed 2.1 million cubic yards of sand on county beaches.
The Silver Strand Shoreline Renourishment Project, which was sidelined last year after it received no funding in this year’s federal energy and water appropriations bill, was authorized in 2007. City officials had hoped funding would follow.
The Shoreline Renourishment Project would place 1.6 million cubic yards of sand on the Imperial Beach shore, with periodic deposits for 50 years. A funding request has been submitted for next year’s appropriations bill.
Right now, the best hope is for the city to get sand from the Army Corps’ bay-deepening project.
Wade said he hopes to get all city approvals for that in place for the July 21 council meeting. The Port District also needs to approve the agreements, as does the Army Corps. He said work could begin as early as this fall.
The SANDAG project won’t get started until 2012.
The Port District has asked that if it funds the bay-dredging project, the Army Corps and Imperial Beach should establish a long-term dredging arrangement.

No cleanup in huge TJ sewage spill

2010-07-11T10:55:00.000-07:00

Mexican discharge raises jurisdictional, legal issues By Mike Lee

A mechanical breakdown and construction work at some U.S. sewage facilities allowed more than 2.1 million gallons of wastewater from Mexico to flood the Tijuana River Valley in San Diego County in early June.
Unlike most other spills of that size, it has prompted scant enforcement action by water-quality regulators and no cleanup.
The incident ranks as one of the county’s largest sewage-related accidents in the past decade, and one that likely would prompt hundreds of thousands of dollars in penalties if it was caused by a local agency.
A top regulator at the San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board said he doesn’t plan to issue fines because the U.S. section of the International Boundary and Water Commission is exempt from them under the principle of sovereign immunity.
Federal facilities can deflect some environmental fines under a legal theory that is thought to have its roots in Britain. The policy shielded the king from being sued in his own courts. Congress has removed the waiver from various laws but not the Clean Water Act.
“We have one hand tied effectively behind our back,” said David Gibson, executive officer of the regional board.
Gibson said the investigation has been complicated because the discharge started in Mexico, where he has no authority.
The boundary commission took required steps to notify local agencies about the sewage spill in a report but didn’t try to recapture the liquid, Gibson said. He said it’s not clear what restoration steps the commission must take because it didn’t cause the spill.
“We are going to have a meeting with them to clarify roles and responsibilities, and coming out of that we will consider our compliance options,” he said.
Alternatives include issuing a cleanup order, but Gibson wouldn’t commit to a strategy before consulting with the commission.
He also said the overflow raised questions about the level of maintenance the federal agency must do at its sewage diversion structures.
“That is certainly one of those things we will address in black and white … in the next permit” issued for operating those facilities, Gibson said.
Commission spokeswoman Sally Spener said her agency took precautions to prevent the wastewater spill from reaching the river valley, but that its efforts were undermined by “unforeseeable circumstances.” Spener said the commission has not changed any policy or procedure because of the incident.
“I think that everyone who is involved with this understands that the true solution is to have improvements in the wastewater collection system in Mexico,” Spener said.
Other regulators said that is not the only issue.
“Even though the source is south of the border, it is bypassing U.S. taxpayer-funded infrastructure that was designed to capture that flow,” said Bart Christensen, a senior engineer for the State Water Resources Control Board in Sacramento who has spent 25 years working on wastewater issues in the San Diego-Tijuana region.
“If there were (millions of gallons) of sewage spilled anywhere else, you couldn’t say, ‘Well, gee. We were working on something, therefore our system was down,’ ” Christensen said.
South Bay conservationist Paloma Aguirre was planning a trash cleanup event for the nonprofit group Wildcoast in early June when she noticed sewage streaming through the Tijuana River Valley.
“It was black and there was a definite smell,” Aguirre said.
The source was uphill in Mexico, where an estimated 5 million gallons of sewage were released June 2 and 3 and then funneled to the United States through Smuggler’s Gulch.
On the U.S. side of the border, that region is sparsely populated by farmers and ranchers. Much of the nearby land is protected habitat for birds and other species.
Problems in Smuggler’s Gulch started the morning of June 2 after workers in Tijuana shut down the Matadero Pump Station to fix a broken sewage line, according to a report by the boundary commission.
The commission’s report said the Smuggler’s Gulch collector captured all the wastewater from Mexico until 4:30 p.m. At that point, the pumps couldn’t keep up and the sewage ran into the Tijuana River Valley until about 8 a.m. the next day, the report said.
Spener said one of the boundary commission’s pipes for shunting sewage to its nearby wastewater treatment plant was out of service at the time because another pipe was being placed underneath it during upgrades to the system. She said the project had been coordinated with officials in Mexico in hopes of avoiding problems.
“We waited to cut (the pipe) until we thought we were ‘all clear’ regarding potential spills,” Spener said. “We still had one line in service and we felt that would be adequate to handle any flows that came across” from Mexico.
She said the temporary system was working until a breaker on one pump kept tripping, forcing it out of action.

MAJOR SEWAGE SPILLS
Over the past decade, San Diego County has had several spills of more than 1 million gallons. The incidents include:
June 2010: A mainline break in Mexico released more than 2.1 million gallons of untreated wastewater into the Tijuana River Valley.
March-April 2007: A ruptured pipe spewed 7.3 million gallons of sewage into the Buena Vista Lagoon.
November 2004 to November 2006: At least 14 million gallons of sewage flowed undetected from Navy barracks into San Diego Bay.
October 2004: Wastewater and debris clogged the Point Loma treatment plant, sending 2.26 million gallons of sewage into the ocean.
February 2004: A blocked sewer line in Balboa Park caused 4.9 million gallons of sewage to flow into San Diego Bay.
August 2003: A line break led to a 1.5 million-gallon spill at a treatment plant operated by Oceanside.
April 2003: A line break caused a 1.2 million-gallon spill in the Rainbow Municipal Water District.
February 2001: A clogged sewer line caused Mission Bay to become contaminated with about 1.5 million gallons of sewage that had overflowed into Tecolote Creek.
September 2000: About 2.7 million gallons of sewage spilled from a Camp Pendleton housing complex into the Santa Margarita River estuary.
February 2000: A clogged sewer line along Alvarado Creek went undetected for a week, allowing 34 million gallons of sewage to flow into the San Diego River.

Next Monthly Tijuana River Action Network Meeting

2010-06-29T16:22:00.000-07:00

Next Monthly Tijuana River Action Network Meeting (every last Wednesday) - Wednesday June 30th at 6:00pm - Tijuana Estuary Training Center 301 Caspian Way, Imperial Beach, CA 91932.

Cross-border collaboration to address the conservation and restoration of the Tijuana River watershed by engaging in outreach, education, and being advocates for natural resources. Network meetings are a great way to meet and share ideas with staff and volunteers from Fundacion la Puerta, Proyecto Fronterizo, Fundacion Que Transforma, Alter Terra, Surfrider Foundation, Border Encuentro, Grupo Ecologista Tijuana, Tijuana Calidad de Vida, Tijuana Estuary, WiLDCOAST, Tijuana River Citizens’ Council and more. Volunteers and community members are welcome and encouraged to attend!

Visit the blog: http://tijuanariveractionnetwork.blogspot.com/

Environmental Issues Hurting Communities in the U.S.-Mexico Border Region

2010-06-29T16:21:00.000-07:00

By Regina Ip
The United States and Mexico share a 2000-mile border where a population of 9 million is growing more than twice as fast as the populations of U.S. and Mexico.
Despite this growing population, the border region is confronted with many environmental health issues because of the lack of clean drinking water and proper health care. Even more, five out of the seven poorest communities in the country is in the border region. More than 35 percent of its population is living in poverty.
The living conditions in the area are in dire need of help. From weak social communities to inadequate building infrastructures, where there is no running water, sewage systems or electricity, the U.S.-Mexico border region faces many detrimental environmental health issues that cannot be fixed with the shortage of health care professionals or the stigma associated with the area.
“Almost everywhere you go in this world, there are people or groups of people that experience environmental injustices,” Paula Stigler said. “They are often low-income and people of color who do not have a voice and therefore are exposed unjustly to contamination in both their community and their workplaces.”
Stigler, who is the environmental program manager and tribal liaison for The San Diego Foundation, has been working on environmental issues, like water monitoring, with indigenous communities in San Diego County and Mexico for about ten years.
She has worked with various people including tribal health community promoters in remote tribal communities in Baja CA Mexico, local San Diego tribal environmental programs, communities in Cañon de los Laureles (Goat Canyon) in Tijuana and elsewhere.
Currently, Stigler is earning her doctorate in global health at UCSD/SDSU. She is currently interested in studying how climate change and its policies will affect susceptible populations in the border region.
The severity of the environmental health problems parallels those found in Third World countries. In addition to the underrepresented communities in the border region, many other residents are living in poor conditions. In some cases, there is no clean water for food, like drinking and cooking, or for hygienic purposes like bathing and washing. Even more, there is no basic sewage system to maintain wastes.
Because of this, residents have a much higher chance of catching waterborne and infectious diseases, such as salmonella infections, mosquito-transmitted malaria, measles and tuberculosis. Considered as a place where many people from different countries pass through often, about an average of 1.6 million per day, the health of those living in the border region confronts a national concern.
According to Stigler, some of the border cities do not follow safe air standards. Hazardous waste is a big problem as the border region becomes more industrialized.
New River, which runs down the inland region of Southern California, is the most polluted river in the United States. It has more than 100 industrial chemicals and 76 million liters of raw sewage passes through the river each day.
The rate of tuberculosis is twice the national rate. The rate of Hepatitis A is three times the rate of United States’ and two times the rate of Mexico’s. Salmonella and shigella dysentary is four times the rate of U.S. and Mexico.
Stigler develops workshops and speaks at community meetings on how residents can protect themselves from harmful contaminants in drinking water and in the environment. At these workshops, she calls attention to problems like poor drinking water.
“When looking at exposure to poor drinking water, it’s often a concern for waterborne pathogens and dehydration from gastrointestinal problems,” Stigler said. “This is especially problematic for children and the elderly. Since environmental health deals with so many different issues [like] air, trash, food, water, there are many health concerns [such as] cancer from exposure to dangerous chemicals, asthma from poor air quality [and] lead poisoning from exposure to lead in homes.
Stigler said that the current methods to solve the problem of poor water resources are not enough.
“Drinking water infrastructure was brought to communities in Mexico, however after assessing the decrease in gastrointestinal problems within the communities, my research found that the water was still contaminated due to unsafe storage practices in the homes and a lack of disinfection in the system.”
Stigler has formed the Tribal Environmental Health Collaborative, which is made up of tribal representatives, tribal NGO’s and universities that are assessing the top priorities for tribes in San Diego on environmental health and also trying to find funding to address their problems.
She said that, with the San Diego tribal environmental health collaborative project (TEHC), it’s difficult to measure the success of the drinking water infrastructure.
In addition, there is the issue of cultural competence in environmental health initiatives.
With the services that help tackle the issue, there are cultural conflicts in language and views on how to interpret natural elements, like water, which is considered sacred and represents nature.
“Cultural conflicts arise often due to a misunderstanding of how different communities and governments operate. When working binational there are language and communication barriers as well as cultural differences that can make the work challenging,” Stigler said.
“One thing I noticed was that while in the US we are accustomed to accomplishing many tasks via email and non-personal contact, in many other communities the face-to-face method is obligatory and works best for them,” Stigler said. One aspect of the language barrier involves the different approaches to communication that make it difficult to maintain regular contact. “Recognizing this is critical to having successful projects.”
Besides the language barriers, Stigler also comes across other communication challenges because of what technologies are used to communicate and how the political hierarchies work in the community. Understanding and respecting tribal sovereignty is very important.
“Politics is always an issue. Communication is probably the second biggest issue whether it be that calling internationally is not always easy or the same language isn’t spoken is a huge challenge.” Stigler said. “Also, a lack of understanding about the issues, the politics around those issues and no resources to address the problems. Many people are stretched so thin in addressing these problems and the resources are so slim that it can be really difficult to keep projects going.”
Despite the cultural challenges, the attempts to address and solve the environmental health issues have made some impact.
“Many tribes are now more aware of health and environmental concerns and beginning to address them through their tribal governments, which is a huge step in the right direction.”
Stigler will continue to work as a program manager to bring environmental awareness to local tribes.
“I hope to continue to work with non-profits who are fighting environmental injustices in our region and globally,” she said.
Those who are interested in helping can volunteer or donate to numerous organizations who are working on the issues, such as Environmental Health Coalition and the Native American Environmental Protection Coalition.
“There are many projects and groups that advocate for environmental injustices. I have worked with the US and Mexican governments both to help bring clean drinking water to communities in Mexico and have also received funding from foundations to organize tribes to assess and advocate for addressing environmental health priorities in their communities.”
Regina Ip is a public information intern with the Comprehensive Research Center in Health Disparities (CRCHD) and is majoring in Communications and Biology at UC San Diego. The CRCHD is a partnership of organizations focusing on community health and health disparities research. This publication was supported by the UC San Diego Comprehensive Research Center in Health Disparities Grant # 5 P60 MD000220 from the National Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities, National Institutes of Health.

Waiter, There's a Metal Rod in My Sand

2010-06-14T16:17:00.000-07:00

By ADRIAN FLORIDO
In 2005, surfers and beachgoers in Imperial Beach noticed that chunks of rock, mangled metal rods and other debris were washing up on the shore.
The problem started, they said, not long after the federal government dumped 250,000 cubic yards of sand near the shoreline of the city's beaches. (That's enough to fill up 12 percent of Qualcomm Stadium.)
The Army Corps of Engineers had dredged the sand from the San Diego Bay floor as part of a project to clear the way for large vessels. The federal agency made an agreement with Imperial Beach to dispose of the sediment near its shores.
The city's beaches are constantly losing sand to erosion, and city officials saw the project as an opportunity to replenish the sand they say is important for attracting tourists. But surfers and environmentalists said the sand was contaminated.
Five years later, the city is gearing up to enter into a similar agreement with the Army Corps to bring as much as 300,000 cubic yards of sand to Imperial Beach. Last month, it asked the Port of San Diego to provide $1.8 million for two sand replenishment projects. It wants to give $1.1 million to the Army Corps of Engineers and $700,000 to a second project planned by the San Diego Association of Governments.
Environmentalists fear contaminated sand might once again be dumped on Imperial Beach and say the city has given them little chance to weigh in on the project's fate.
Greg Wade, the city's community development director, said plans to fund the Army Corps project would depend on several factors, including how much money the city gets from the Port and how the city can best leverage its money to get more sand.
Wade said a plan to keep debris out of dredged sand was not implemented before the Army Corps' earlier project, which may have explained the contamination, but that the city would be more vigilant this time around.
He said the City Council would review the project's environmental assessment and ensure that measures to prevent contamination -- like inspecting the sand on the dredge boat and running it through a grate to filter out debris -- were included in the plans.
The Army Corps' current project will dredge the channel entry to San Diego Bay off the tip of Point Loma, not in the heavily trafficked bay where sediment contamination is more likely.
"The fact that it's in the entrance channel gives me some comfort," Wade said. "The possibility of that type of material in the sediment is less likely."
Those differences provide little comfort to Serge Dedina, a local surfer and executive director of Wildcoast, a nonprofit environmental group based in Imperial Beach. He questions why the city, which is primarily interested in sand, would help pay for a federal project whose main purpose is to clear vessel routes of excess sediment and to dispose of sand as an afterthought.
Scott John, manager for the Army Corps' $1.4 million project, said the dredging does not depend on additional funding from Imperial Beach. But if the city pays for the sand -- giving the Corps more money -- the agency could dredge deeper and lengthen the time before the agency has to return to maintain the area.
"It's common for some of our projects to enter into cost sharing agreements and for other agencies to split the cost of dredging in exchange for the sand," John said.
The agreement would guarantee the sand would be delivered to Imperial Beach instead of another dump site near Coronado.
Without cost-sharing agreements, John said, the Army Corps usually disposes of sand at the nearest available dump site to save on transport costs.
Dedina's concerns are pitted against the cash-strapped city's desire to attract more tourists and generate greater tax revenue. Sand acts as a buffer between battering waves and coastal development and also makes the city's beaches attractive to visitors.
City officials say most of Imperial Beach's sand historically came from sediment that washed in from the mouth of the Tijuana River. But that natural, recurring source was eliminated when the river was dammed. The city has had to find other ways to replenish its beaches from erosion caused by storms and the flow of currents in the area that carry sand from Imperial Beach north toward Coronado.
"We basically have been fighting for every project," said Imperial Beach Mayor Jim Janney. "I'm sorry, but we're basically asking for anything. The real goal, in my opinion, is to maintain Imperial Beach as a viable area. This is called opportunistic sand."
Dedina said he was concerned that the decision to ask the Port for money for sand should have been more open and allowed more opportunity for public input. It is especially important, he said, for groups like his that want to protect coastal wildlife and have a serious stake in how sand replenishment projects are carried out.
Janney acknowledged that the decision to ask the Port for money was made during a private conversation with Port Commissioner Mike Bixler and City Manager Gary Brown. But he said they had the city's best economic interests in mind.
"We had to keep this on the radar screen," he said. "It was dropping below their cutoff line for available money and we wanted to reiterate the desire to bring material to Imperial Beach."
He said he and other City Council members would not allow the Army Corps to bring contaminated sand to Imperial Beach.
"From everything I've been told, the material that's in the dredge, that material is extremely good sand," he said.
But he said he also had a responsibility to jump at any opportunity to secure increasingly scarce funding for sand replenishment.
"I would hate it to come about that people say we never advocated for the money," Janney said.
Please contact Adrian Florido directly at adrian.florido@voiceofsandiego.org and follow him on Twitter: twitter.com/adrianflorido.

Efforts to clean up Salton Sea begin with Mexican pollution

2010-05-18T07:39:00.000-07:00

A signs warns people not to enter the New River near the town of Calipatria. (Jay Calderon The Desert Sun)

Keith Matheny • The Desert Sun • May 17, 2010

As Mexican officials cut the ribbon on a new wastewater treatment plant in Tijuana late last month, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and San Diego-area environmental watchdogs were among those on hand applauding.

The U.S. is more than an interested observer in its southern neighbor's efforts to clean up the environment along the border and even into the fringes of the Coachella Valley. It's an investor and partner.
The EPA has helped build 88 water and sewer projects along its more than 2,000-mile border with Mexico using about $550 million in Border Environment Infrastructure Funds, an offshoot of the 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement, said Douglas Liden, a water infrastructure specialist for EPA's western region.
The total cost of the work is $1.6 billion, and about half of the projects and expenditures have been on the Mexican side of the border.
The projects are in Mexican border cities experiencing explosive growth, having inadequate or no sewer systems, and usually with much smaller U.S. “sister cities” on the other side bearing the brunt of the pollution, said Tomas Torres, director of EPA's San Diego border office.
The EPA-assisted work includes two major infrastructure projects to improve water quality in the New River, which flows into the nearby Salton Sea and is considered one of the most polluted rivers in the United States.
The river carries a harmful stew of industrial and municipal waste with historically little or no treatment. It flows north from the Mexican border city of Mexicali, with a metropolitan area of nearly 1 million residents, past a number of California communities before emptying into the Salton Sea, the state's largest lake.
A tainted Salton Sea has far-reaching effects for the valley and the rest of Southern California. Toxins in the water negatively affect everything from fish, birds and other wildlife to the humans who fish and boat on it.

The New River flows north into the United States of America from Mexico through an opening in the international border. The river is considered one of the most polluted in the U.S. Officials on both sides are working to clean it up. (Omar Ornelas The Desert Sun)
The EPA also contributed $41 million for planning and construction of two large wastewater treatment projects in Mexicali that totaled more than $98 million in construction costs, Liden said. The most recent project went online in 2007, and the two projects remove more than 40 million gallons per day of untreated sewage from the New River, he said.

Though environmental problems persist, the river and Salton Sea's environmental conditions have “drastically improved,” and public health risks have been reduced, Liden said.

Officials say the U.S.-funded projects are critical.
“We're at the end of the pipe, like it or not,” said Ben McCue, a coastal conservation program manager with Wildcoast, a nonprofit environmental protection group working to improve the Pacific coastal region near the border. “It makes more sense to use our tax dollars on that end than here.”
The collaborations produce positive results in the U.S., said Jose Angel, assistant executive officer of the California Regional Water Quality Control Board's Palm Desert office.
“Surely we have a vested interest in seeing Mexico address its water quality issues at the border,” he said. “We've found that a cooperative approach with Mexico works better than an antagonistic one.”
Joint effort
The EPA works through the North American Development Bank, a binational financial institution capitalized and governed equally by the United States and Mexico, to finance environmental projects certified by the Border Environment Cooperation Commission, also created as part of side agreements from NAFTA, Liden said.
Other projects using U.S. funds in Mexico have included removing tons of hazardous waste from abandoned factory sites and developing air quality management programs, according to the EPA's website.
U.S. Rep. Ciro Rodriguez, a Texas Democrat whose Congressional district includes much of the state's western border with Mexico, supports the cross-border water infrastructure projects.
“The community on the other side is usually five to 10 times larger,” he said. “That always has an impact on our environment on this side of the border. Tuberculosis and other types of diseases don't recognize borders.”
Under the cooperative agreement between the EPA and its Mexican counterpart agency, infrastructure projects must be within 100 kilometers, or about 62 miles, of either side of the border. Mexico must provide at least a 50 percent match in money, but typically provides more than half for its projects, EPA officials said.

A small tributary of the New River flows into the Salton Sea near the area where the New River empties into the sea. The New River is among the most polluted in the U.S. (Jay Calderon Desert Sun file photo)

The Mexican-side projects must have a demonstrable environmental benefit for the U.S.

Douglas Eberhardt, chief of the infrastructure office for EPA's western region, said that when he started working on Mexican border projects in 1989, “you had 13 million gallons of raw sewage a day coming across the border in the Tijuana River.”
Border Patrol agents in 1994 sued the U.S. government to receive hazard pay for working along the polluted Tijuana and New rivers flowing across the border from Mexico. The officers in 2005 settled the case for $15 million and the government gave them protective gear when working by the rivers, their attorney, Gregory McGillivary, said.
Diseases abound
Just on the U.S. side from Tijuana is Imperial Beach, counted among California's most polluted beaches by Wildcoast and other environmental groups. It's typically closed about 200 days per year due to pollution, McCue said.
Researchers at San Diego State University's Graduate School of Public Health found Hepatitis A and other viruses — including strains of polio virus — in 80 percent of water samples at Imperial Beach within three days of rain.
And waterborne diseases such as Hepatitis A and cholera occur at much higher rates in the Texas border region than in other parts of the state, according to a December 2009 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
The EPA has invested $42 million for wastewater collection and treatment projects in Tijuana and nearby Rosarito, Mexico, since 1998, about 40 percent of the projects' $98 million total cost. It doubled to 80 percent the number of homes in the Tijuana area with sewer services, despite rapid population growth, Liden said.
Along the Texas border, the EPA put $20 million into a wastewater treatment plant in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, that was completed in March, serving 126,000 residents. A smaller project in Ojinaga, Mexico, sister city to Presidio, Texas, was also completed this spring, said Gilbert Tellez, EPA's environmental engineer for the border program in the Texas region.

“In the Ojinaga area, you can really see a decrease in bacterial counts in the Rio Grande River. It's a pretty drastic change there,” Tellez said.

Shrinking funding
The program isn't without problems.
The Government Accountability Office's December report found that water and sewer infrastructure projects along the border have been “ineffective” because multiple government agencies involved in the projects in addition to the EPA, such as the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Army Corps of Engineers and Housing and Urban Development, have failed to comprehensively assess needs and coordinate their efforts.
Annual funding for the EPA border projects has dropped from a high of about $100 million several years ago to $17 million this fiscal year, Eberhardt said.
McCue said he'd like to see the program continued and expanded.
“I think it's more difficult for people who aren't local, who can't see the benefits, and say, ‘Why are we spending U.S. taxpayer dollars in Mexico?'” he said. “But it really comes down to the most efficient and effective way to spend that money.
“You can get more done by working collaboratively in Mexico rather than unilaterally here in the U.S.”

A Vote to Allow City to Hasten Dirty Storm Water to the Ocean

2010-05-16T08:21:00.001-07:00

The San Diego Planning Commission Thursday approved a proposal by the city’s Storm Water Department to clear vegetation from creeks around the city, even though the plan acknowledges that it will cause storm water that reaches the coastal waters to be even more polluted.
The impetus for this project comes from flooding that causes problems in a few areas -- for example, some areas of the Tijuana River Valley, Alvarado and Grantsville areas in the San Diego River watershed.
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The problem is that the plan identifies about 170 areas in the city for vegetation clearing and new road building in open space, including creeks where flooding has never been a problem, such as in the Gilman Canyon section of Rose Canyon. When challenged by the Friends of Rose Canyon, the city quickly removed those areas from the plan, causing me to wonder. If the city admits that these specific areas are not necessary for the plan, how were all of the sites selected?
Strangely, the plan does not include any hydrologic models that would allow us to predict what the effect of vegetation removal from our creeks will be, whether vegetation removal will solve property loss from flooding, or even whether it will cause worse flooding problems downstream. But, we can be sure that removing vegetation will decrease water quality because wetland plants and soil microbes have been demonstrated to clean urban pollutants out of storm water. Instead, the city will continue to use a method that has fallen into disfavor in the last century because of environmental degradation that it causes.
Other cities approach storm water management in a new way. Instead of speeding storm water to the ocean as fast as possible, they find ways to keep our storm water on the land as long as possible. This can be achieved by increasing the infiltration where the rain falls, by intercepting it on the way downstream with basins and wetlands, and by repairing eroded creeks so that the water spreads out, slows down, and sinks in. (Read more about this process here.)
Sadly, none of these alternatives are part of the approved plan.
Seven San Diego environmental groups (San Diego Coastkeeper, Costal Environmental Rights Foundation, San Diego Audubon Society, Friends of Rose Canyon, Sierra Club San Diego Chapter, San Diego Canyonlands, and California Native Plant Society San Diego Chapter) have called for the city to reconsider its plan and come up with a solution that will reduce flood damage and also have beneficial effects on the rest of our environment. This call has been ignored so far, it remains to be seen whether the City Council will answer it.
-- CARRIE SCHNEIDER

Surfers support 2 fired lifeguards

2010-05-05T10:04:00.000-07:00

By Janine Zúñiga, UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

IMPERIAL BEACH — After changing into their wet suits on a stormy Sunday in March, off-duty Imperial Beach lifeguards Aaron Quintanar and Hans Fernan joined a gathering of grieving surfers in a paddle-out paying homage to a fallen friend. Mourners atop surfboards joined hands. Several tearfully recounted old times and shared their deep sense of loss.

Two weeks later, Quintanar and Fernan were fired for violating an unwritten city rule prohibiting the use of a lifeguard tower to suit up before heading into contaminated water. Signs posted that March 7 morning noted that the beach was polluted with runoff from the rain that began falling the night before.

Now the surfing community is rallying behind the pair, saying the punishment went overboard.

“This just compounds the wounds,” said Imperial Beach resident and surfer Greg Hughes. “They fired two great guys that have spent a good portion of their lives training to save lives in Imperial Beach. Both lifeguards are great watermen and do their jobs because they love this community and want to help make it safe. These guys volunteer to train lifeguards in Mexico on their own time.”

Imperial Beach officials say the city has a long-standing directive aimed at making lifeguards role models for beachgoers.

“We want (lifeguards) to set a good example for the rest of the community to not go swimming in polluted water,” City Manager Gary Brown said. “We want to discourage people from doing that so our lifeguards don’t have to rescue people in polluted water.”

Beach closures immediately north of Mexico are routine. The city’s beach has been closed for 35 days this year due to runoff, mostly after heavy rains.

The former lifeguards understand what they did was wrong but say it is being taken out of context.

“We weren’t down here because the surf was 6 feet or to have fun,” said Quintanar, 45, as he sat near the Imperial Beach pier last week. “I was in a fog. I just showed up. It was a cold, rainy, ugly day. I didn’t think about contamination. Hans didn’t see the signs. I don’t recall seeing them.”

City officials would not comment further about the dismissals because they are a personnel matter.

The paddle-out was for Britt Clamp, who died in a motorcycle accident in February in the El Centro desert. Quintanar said he and Clamp became close friends after Clamp moved to Imperial Beach in 1980. Clamp was well-liked among surfers, about 50 of whom attended the memorial north of the pier.

Quintanar, who earned just under $20 an hour, has 600 rescues over 26 years as a seasonal lifeguard, most in Imperial Beach. Fernan, a 15-year veteran, was selected in 2001 as one of the country’s top five favorite lifeguards in a national contest.

Both say they weren’t treated fairly and would accept any appropriate disciplinary action if they could get their jobs back.

“I think it’s worth fighting,” said Fernan, 37, who earned about $2.50 more an hour than Quintanar because of a previously held supervisor position.

Keeping lifeguards from polluted waters is not unusual. Lt. Nick Lerma with San Diego Lifeguard Services said San Diego has a policy prohibiting lifeguards from going into polluted water while on duty, except for rescues.

But, Lerma said, “We don’t have anything that says they can’t go into the water on their time off.”

He also said that as far as changing in a city facility, “we haven’t spelled that out for anybody.”

Word of the firings has spread among surfers, some of whom are asking elected leaders to intercede. Many have been sharing the news via e-mail.

Brent Jex, an attorney with Keegan & Baker, a San Diego firm specializing in employment litigation, said California law “is really broad in terms of giving employers the right to fire for basically any situation.” He said there are exceptions, such as exercising one’s First Amendment rights.

“I’m not sure a lifeguard could fall into this,” Jex said. “Religious practice, freedom of speech, there might be some protection in there. I would need to research it more.”

Quintanar said he was contacted by city officials April 26 to see if he and Fernan wanted to discuss the matter, but the meeting was canceled.

Sewage treatment plant opening big step forward for Baja region

2010-04-28T09:39:00.000-07:00

By Jose Luis Jiménez, UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

Wednesday, April 28, 2010 at 12:05 a.m.

TIJUANA— In 1990, Tecate, Rosarito Beach and Tijuana treated about 50 percent of their sewage, with the rest running into the Tijuana River or being dumped directly into the Pacific Ocean. That led to frequent closures of beaches in south San Diego County due to high levels of contamination.

With the opening Tuesday of the La Morita sewage treatment plant in Tijuana, officials said the region will soon treat 90 percent of its wastewater. The facility in the fast-growing southeast portion of the city will treat up to 20 percent of the incoming flow for use in irrigation. A nursery built next to the plant will use some of the water to grow trees and plants that will be planted throughout Baja California. The treated water will also irrigate a soccer field and public plaza next to the plant.

With the opening of another facility scheduled for the end of the year, Baja California Gov. José Guadalupe Osuna Millán and Tijuana Mayor Jorge Ramos predict the region will treat 100 percent of its sewage, a first in Mexico. Throughout the country, only about 35 percent of the wastewater is treated.

“This is a significant step toward our goal of making Tijuana green,” the governor said during a ceremony inaugurating the plant.

Environmentalists on hand for the opening hailed it as significant progress toward cleaning up the border.

“We are here to recognize and applaud their work,” said Ben McCue, of the U.S. environmental group Wildcoast. “In turn, we get clean water in San Diego.”

The plant, designed to treat about 5.6 million gallons of sewage daily, is in a valley surrounded by fast-growing suburbs and industry. It will serve approximately 250,000 people.

While the plant was built with funds from Mexico’s federal government and a loan from Japan, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is contributing $2.7 million to connect more than 8,000 homes to the plant. Since 1998, the agency has invested $56 million to pay for 18 infrastructure projects in cities along the border, seven of which have been completed, said Doug Liden, an environmental engineer with the Environmental Protection Agency.

The region is close to reaching its wastewater treatment goal even though the population has increased by an average of 100,000 people a year during the past decade.

“Ten years ago, the focus was getting the waste out of the river,” Liden said. “The waste is pretty much out of the river. Now the focus is on trash and sediment.”

South Bay secondary treatment facilities to be completed by January

2010-04-26T16:35:00.000-07:00

Environment and Resources - Water
BY Emily Holding
Tuesday, 20 April 2010 16:04

After years of waiting for funding and litigation, the construction of the secondary treatment facilities at the South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant finally has a projected date of completion.

Ed Brusina, commissioner of the U.S. section of the International Boundary and Water Commission, says the long-awaited facilities should be finished next January. In a March 23 letter to the California Regional Water Quality Control Board, Brusina called the completion of the secondary treatment facilities one of his highest priorities.

The South Bay Treatment Plant in San Ysidro was built in 1997 to handle untreated wastewater from Mexico coming into the U.S. through the Tijuana River. The plant treats 25 million gallons of water per day to primary treatment standards, but the Clean Water Act requires that water be given secondary treatment before it is released into the ocean. The secondary treatment facilities were not included in the initial construction due to lack of funding and legal challenges, according to a report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

Lack of secondary sewage treatment provisions has led to beach closures in places like Imperial Beach and Coronado. Environmental group WildCoast reports that 80 to 90 percent of the beach closures in San Diego County each year are due to this pollution carried into the U.S. from the Tijuana River. Last March, surfers at Imperial Beach were encouraged to get Hepatitis vaccinations due to the pollution.

Pollution from Tijuana has been a concern since 1934, when the U.S. and Mexico asked the International Boundary Commission to cooperate in a report on the Tijuana sewage problem. In the ‘90s, the U.S. and Mexican sections of the International Boundary and Water Commission worked with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to address the problem by building the South Bay treatment plant, which was completed in 1997.

In 2001, the California Regional Water Quality Control Board (CRWQCB) sued the U.S. section of the International Boundary and Water Commission (USIBWC) in federal court, asking for judicial enforcement of waste discharge requirements at the South Bay plant. The court issued a final judgment in favor of the CRWQCB in December 2004, which included a Compliance Order directing the USIBWC to construct secondary treatment facilities by August 24, 2008.

A year before this due date, the USIBWC asked for an amendment to the Compliance Order that would extend the deadline to March 2010. But Congress ended up setting aside $66 million in the 2008 budget for the secondary treatment facilities. Despite this funding for secondary treatment of the South Bay plant, the court extended the deadline to Jan. 5, 2011.

In order to meet this deadline, Drusina said that the USIBWC negotiated two modifications to the existing contract in early 2010 to speed up the process. The modifications cost about $4 million and include overtime for existing and additional crews and accelerated delivery of equipment. In the letter to the CRWQCB, Drusina said the USIBWC has made some in-house changes as well, which include a full-time contracting officer and increased on-site personnel observations.

“This additional work will result in secondary treatment of SBIWTP (South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant) effluent by January 5, 2011, which the contractor has guaranteed and in accordance with the deadline established by the court order,” Drusina wrote, adding that he appreciates “that this has been a long project fraught with difficulties, and that we are all anxious to complete the SBIWTP.”

Environmentalists call for binational solution to clean up Tijuana River

2010-04-08T00:06:00.000-07:00

Jay Novak used to ignore the pollution warning signs in Imperial Beach and go surf the dreamy, if dirty, break.

No more.

"I used to go out in the water even when it was polluted," he said. "I ruptured both of my eardrums from ear infections. Obviously, I don't do that anymore."

Toxic chemicals and fecal matter have lined the Tijuana River Valley for decades, making it one of America's most polluted rivers. But there may be a glimmer of new hope. Even as the condition of the valley has continued to deteriorate, collaborative new efforts among U.S. and Mexican environmental groups have brought forth new attention and some positive momentum.

The binational river enters the United States behind the Plaza de las Americas mall in San Ysidro, and empties into the Tijuana Estuary, just south of Imperial Beach. In addition to being a primary habitat for hundreds of species of animals, the estuary channels water from the Tijuana River into the Pacific Ocean.

Novak, founder of the Tijuana River Valley Citizen's Council (TRCC), has witnessed the pollution firsthand.

"Any day during or after a rain you can see the water coming out," he said. "It's not a pleasant sight. The water is usually brown and sudsy, and it's usually littered with lots of plastics and debris."

The amount of pollution that flows out of the river, often in excess of 225 million gallons of contaminated water per minute, swamps the small filtering facility in the riverbed on the American side. Novak said the plant can only treat 25 to 30 million gallons per day.

"When the plant is overwhelmed by the amount of water during and following rainy days all that polluted water simply bypasses the system and flows straight into the estuary and then into the Pacific Ocean," he said.

Oscar Romo, Watershed Coordinator for the Tijuana River National Estuary Research Reserve, said that sediments in the water pose a threat to the environment and public health.

Paloma Aguirre, coastal conservation program coordinator at WiLDCOAST, said a study conducted by SDSU found strands of Hepatitis A and other diseases in the river.

All parties acknowledge that the crisis has amplified in recent years.

"The problem has a direct correlation to the population of Tijuana and the lack of proper sewage and trash facilities," said Novak. "As Tijuana has grown, so too has the pollution and dirty water issue."

Aguirre said that the local government is simply unable to keep pace with the rate at which Tijuana has grown. She said that although it might be easy to blame Tijuana and the Mexican government, that it is not fair and unproductive.

"There is absolutely no blame to be placed anywhere," she said.

Romo shared the same sentiments.

"It is so easy to point the finger at a community like Tijuana," he said. "But that is plain ignorance. Mexican officials are taking this problem very seriously. It is not as if they don't care or don't want to do anything to help, it is just the means by which to implement a project that are unavailable to them. Mexico has simply not had the financial resources to have taken care of the issue by themselves."

Dan Murphy, campaign manager of the "No BS" campaign for the Surfrider Foundation, agreed.

"They are trying on their side of the border," he said. "They want to know and are willing to learn what they need to do to prevent their sewage from winding up in the river."

The organizations agreed that their biggest challenge was the issue of bi-nationality.

"Because it is a binational issue, there are different levels of involvement on a local, regional, and national scale on both sides of the border," said Aguirre.

Prior administrations have made attempts, Romo said, but those efforts have been hasty and foolish.

"The Reagan administration was the first to shed light on the issue," he said. "But it acted quickly and irrationally. Now we are paying the consequences for that botched attempt."

Murphy said that the government on our side is slowly becoming more involved.

"Senator Denise Ducheney introduced a bill to allocate a certain amount of funds to starting a tire recycling program in Mexico," he said. "Not only that, the EPA has been doing a great job lately of working with the water agencies down there. So we're really seeing a lot of progress."

Aguirre said the most important step was to keep open lines of communication between environmentalist coalitions and government officials from each side.

Politics may prevent those lines from opening.

"By the time we even begin to establish a good relationship and social network with their officials, it is re-election time," said Romo. "It is difficult to maintain the type of communication we need with so much turnover."

With constant communication being the key, local nonprofits, such as TRCC, the Surfrider Foundation and WiLDCOAST have stepped up their levels of involvement and are making an impact by keeping communication lines open and bustling.

Kelly Keniston, steering committee member at TRCC, said the joint efforts of such organizations are new and leading the issue in the right direction, despite previous conflicting views between the groups.

"We are all working together to keep the issue on the forefront of the elected officials' minds," she said.

Murphy agreed.

"We've made a lot of progress," he said. "Every time we come together and have these meetings, there is more getting done, and even more on the horizon."

The organizations, which now convene under the recently formed Tijuana River Recovery Team, are cautiously optimistic about its prospects of garnering national attention.

"It's a local problem," said Romo. "We'd like it to be solved by locals on each side of the border, but we know that is not possible. To us it is a huge issue, but to officials in Mexico City and Washington D.C, it's not yet."

These organizations are focused on raising awareness locally and regionally, which they hope will translate into bringing national recognition.

"There are a ton of people here in our community that don't realize the severity of the situation," said Novak. "If people living here don't know about it, I doubt people living in Sacramento or outside of the state are any more informed."

A priority of the groups is to start small and let local efforts snowball into much larger future efforts.

"A big focus is getting volunteers down here," said Murphy. "They need to see the issue first hand. From there, the community can put a huge amount of pressure on politicians, letting them know that we are tired of swimming in pollution. We are tired of having to get Hepatitis shots all the time, and getting our ears drilled from the sewage. We're not going to just stand there and watch these beautiful waves breaking from the beach. We are tired of this issue."

By: Anthony Dacong

I.B. Declares April Environmental Awareness Month

2010-04-01T22:26:00.000-07:00

In the spirit of Earth Day on April 22, Imperial Beach has declared April Environmental Awareness Month and is hosting events to help residents recycle, reuse items and clean up their neighborhood.

In honor of Environmental Awareness Month, the city and EDCO will bestow “Recycling All-Star” awards to four Imperial Beach residents who exemplify exceptional recycling and waste reduction practices based on their ratio of recycling, trash and green waste put curbside for trash pick-up. Award winners will receive $100 from EDCO and a bag of environmental goodies from the city. Each of the winners will be chosen on a different pickup day, giving recyclers throughout the city a chance to win all month long.

The 9th annual Citywide Garage Sale, to be held 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Saturday, April 24, will offer residents a free opportunity to sell clothing, furniture and other items they no longer use. It's also a chance for shoppers to save money and support their neighbors by spending the day shopping among the garage sale locations instead of going to a mall.

Maps of the garage sale locations are available at the city's Public Works Department and at any 7-Eleven stores in Imperial Beach starting April 20. Maps will also be available on the city's Web site, www.cityofib.com.

“These community events are a great way to check-off spring cleaning to-do lists and prepare for summer by picking up some new items at a garage sale,” said Environmental Program Specialist Guy Nelson. “Plus, you can get to know your neighbors and support your community while lessening the adverse impact on the environment.”

Also on Saturday, April 24 will be the 8th annual Creek to Bay Cleanup held by I Love a Clean San Diego and sponsored in part by Imperial Beach. The city is sponsoring the cleanup as a regional watershed activity to raise public awareness on storm water pollution. Residents are encouraged to participate in two cleanup sites scheduled at the Tijuana River mouth and Tijuana River Valley. For more information or to join a clean-up team, visit www.ilacsd.org.

Residents are encouraged to clean out their homes and get rid of appliances, furniture, yard waste, metal concrete, asphalt, home-improvement debris and electronic waste through the Home Front Cleanup event. Residents can dispose of any such items as long as they do not contain hazardous waste for free courtesy of EDCO. Items should be dropped off at the collection site at Mar Vista High School from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Saturday, May 1.

Seniors or physically disabled residents not able to drop items off for the Home Front Cleanup can schedule a curbside pick-up of no more than five bulky items. Those wishing to utilize this offer must schedule an appointment before April 23 by calling EDCO at (619) 287-7555.

For more information about Environmental Awareness Month activities, contact Imperial Beach Environmental Program Specialist Guy Nelson, at (619) 424-4095.

Seven miles to Mexico

2010-03-31T13:40:00.000-07:00

The group is Tijuana River Network. The mission, adjusted a few times, but seemingly decided, is … “To support the conservation and restoration of the Tijuana River Watershed though education, outreach, and advocacy without borders.”

The group met in Playas de Tijuana last Saturday, March 27, at the quaint Café Aquamarino. Representatives from Fundacion la Puerta, Proyecto Fronterizo, Fundacion Que Transforma, Alter Terra, Surfrider, Border Encuentro, Grupo Ecologista Tijuana, Tijuana Calidad de Vida, Tijuana Estuary, WILDCOAST, and the hospitable hostess and owner of the cafe, Carmen Romo, gathered to share and collect ideas.

The purpose of the meeting was to unite the efforts of Mexico and U.S. governments, citizens and environmental activists and to create change for the polluted condition of the beaches, river valley, the waters and the ecological lives that are shared between the two. People are refusing to allow the area to become no man’s land. With persistence, anything is possible. With more voices, persistence will be heard.

California and Mexico share a unique relationship – geographical neighbors with different sized bank accounts. The good thing about black and white issues is the gray space in between. The gray area is where commonality will bring change to the area. I was one of two people who spoke basically zero Spanish, but Oscar Romo of TJ River National Estuarine Research Reserve, for our benefit, two out of 14 people, gave his entire presentation in English.

Compromise and respect was abundant in the group’s conversations. Sincere smiles, hugs and besos were plentiful. The walls of Carmen’s café are a soft turquoise; nothing stands between her windows and brilliant views of the ocean. Smells of coffee and teas infused with flowers swirled together with the salty air blowing in off the Pacific. Standing there, taking it all in, for just a moment we forgot that the water in front of us contained high levels of sewage. We forgot that ocean lives would be lost due to plastic ingestion. We forgot that trash would float down into the waves, carrying tires and children’s shoes. We remember though the water test results and the reasons why we crossed the border. We want to believe that every ocean should be brilliant blue - like Carmen's walls - but they are not.

This group is about being a good neighbor. We know that when we help Mexico advance, we advance our own lives. Neighbors choose what kind of relationship they are going to have with the other. The TJ River Network is going to share and take turns; the next meeting will be on the U.S. side. Numbers will help this cause, show up; we can get this thing rolling.

Sewage from Tijuana River Fouling Southbay Beaches

2010-03-24T07:54:00.000-07:00

SAN DIEGO - An influx of sewage from the Tijuana River prompted an ocean contamination warning stretching from the U.S.-Mexico border to the northern limits of Imperial Beach Tuesday.

Field measurements indicating northward-flowing pollution near the mouth of the Tijuana Estuary prompted the alert, according to the San Diego County Department of Environmental Health.

Signs cautioning the public about the contamination will stand along the affected beaches until follow-up tests determine that they are safe again for recreational uses, the DEH advised.

The Dead Seal

2010-03-20T00:52:00.000-07:00

Within a five foot square of Imperial Beach, I found a soft green piece of sea glass, an electric cordless beard shaver – without metal blades – an indistinguishable plastic toy-thing, and the approximately, two-week old carcass of a once brown Seal – eyes gone. I made phone calls. Seals are federally protected: dead or alive. (I’m new to this, bear with me.)

“It is the responsibility of the planet to take the seal,” the woman stated. She works with a local protect-the-seal group. I agree that it is. However, it seems the planet’s slacking off on its responsibilities and shouldn’t the Seal be allowed a decent burial. Don’t we all deserve that much? Does anyone have a small boat, could you just drag its body out a little bit and let its life disperse with dignity?

The Seal waits on the rocks at the southernmost end of Sea Coast Dr. Two people and some rope, forget the boat. It had a life just as we do; it’s now gone, as ours will be too. I know all of you here feel a part of the ocean. Salt water runs through our veins too. Two people, tops.

cindy

Borderline Wasteland

2010-03-19T15:08:00.000-07:00

It is Paradise Lost-by-the-Sea. Milton's mouth of hell is the Tijuana River's mouth of pollution. California's southernmost waterway has become the River Styx.

Our El Niño rains have once again brought back the gurgling, churning river choked with tires, trash, dead animals and sewage. A concoction straight from Hades, the toxic stew courses through the Tijuana Estuary and out into the Pacific. Paradise trashed.

WildCoast/Costa Salvaje, Dr. Serge Dedina's visionary bi-national environmental coalition, is on the side of the angels. After years of finger pointing and recrimination among leaders and citizens of Tijuana and San Diego, WildCoast has made inroads building a bilingual, hands-across-the-border movement.

It is a slow journey, however, and Mother Earth is paying a heavy price. Border State Park is just one example of this devastation. A recent tire cleanup rounded up enough rubber to open a mid-sized shop.

San Diego has played a shameful role in the pollution of our beautiful oceans with its overmatched sewers and street run-off. Worse still is the Tijuana River which has, for years, been a snaking liquid dump. Heavy rains wash trash and sewage from Tijuana hillsides across the border and into the river, where it travels through the estuary to the sea.

Visiting Border Field State Park can be an overwhelmingly emotional experience. This is not going to change until a much-debated filtering system is built in the Tijuana River to clean water before it flows through Imperial Beach. For years politicians in Sacramento, Mexicali, Mexico City and Washington D.C. have paid lip service to a proposal by a group of entrepreneurs who call themselves Bajagua, but neither side will accept responsibility or put up the money to build it. The devil is in the details.

Both nations are at fault. For this problem to ever find a solution, an international contract should be signed between Mexico and the United States.

America should split the cost for the filtering system even if most of the pollutants come from Mexico. Estuary inhabitants are being placed in harm's way. Animals are in danger daily with the all the trash being dumped into the river.

Enter WildCoast on the proverbial white horse. Dedina, a bilingual Ph.D.-surfer who loves Mexico, represents the solution. Energized young people from both nations have already paid dividends and are working to save the whale breeding sanctuary Scanlins Lagoon. WildCoast is now diving into-figuratively, of course-the polluted waters of the Tijuana River. Rule #1 of WildCoast is "no finger pointing." Dedina and his crew focus on looking forward with a positive attitude and a willingness to work.

People travel to San Diego as a vacation spot and clean water should be a top priority to all businesses and community residents. Tourists do not come to San Diego to see signs on the beaches warning of potentially fatal toxins in the water.

Health clinics in Imperial Beach provide free hepatitis shots for surfers and swimmers due to the vile state of the beaches. That is noble, but sad.

Bob Dylan once said, "Get out of the way if you can't lend a hand." WildCoast is lending a hand and could use our help.

Hope and help could be the only things that can really fix the devastating state of the Tijuana River and its estuary. It is time to fix this very fixable problem--and quickly.

To volunteer at WildCoast/Costa Salvaje contact the organization at: WildCoast, 925 Seacoast Drive, Imperial Beach CA 91932. Phone: (619) 423-8665. www.wildcoast.net

From the Southwestern Sun by Cody Yarbro

SD allowed to continue ocean disposal of sewage

2010-03-15T22:33:00.001-07:00

SAN DIEGO — The California Coastal Commission agreed to alter the terms of San Diego's sewage treatment permit, allowing the city to continue to pump 50 billion gallons of partly treated sewage deep into the Pacific Ocean each year.

The panel voted Friday that the city can avoid the recommendations made by a $2 million study of wastewater recycling options.

The amended permit also removes language that suggested San Diego's disposal of sewage into the ocean could be creating environmental problems.

The city is operating its Point Loma Wastewater Treatment Plant under a waiver from the U.S. Clean Water Act granted by the Coastal Commission in October. It's the third time the city has obtained a waiver from meeting federal standards for treatment of sewage.

The commission's decision was a "victory for all San Diegans," a spokesman for Mayor Jerry Sanders told the Union-Tribune.

The recycling study had examined adding expensive secondary sewage treatment to remove water from the sewage, and use it for landscaping at parks and golf courses. San Diego is the only major California city not required to use secondary treatment, and numerous coastal cities use expensive tertiary treatment to extract and recycle irrigation water from some of its sewer plants.

The Point Loma facility processes sewage from more than 2.2 million people in and around the city and sends solids into the ocean.

The permit was altered Friday to remove requirements that the city reduce the volume of sewage not fully treated before discharge. Left in place were requirements that the city continue to investigate wastewater reclamation and recycling.

The Associated Press

Comment time extended for Navy’s strand plans

2010-03-15T15:35:00.000-07:00

By Janine Zúñiga, UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
Sunday, March 14, 2010 at 4:01 a.m.

CORONADO — After hearing from concerned residents and local city officials, the Navy is extending the public comment period on its proposal to vastly increase activity at the Silver Strand Training Complex between Coronado and Imperial Beach.
The deadline is now March 30. The original deadline was Tuesday.
At two public hearings last month, several residents told Navy officials they were just hearing about the plans and hadn’t had time to read an 800-page Environmental Impact Statement the service conducted that outlines the potential impacts on their communities.
Coronado and Imperial Beach each formally requested an extension, arguing that those interested in commenting on the large document, which took 10 years to complete, needed more than the allotted 45 days.
“That’s good news,” Imperial Beach City Manager Gary Brown said Friday upon learning of the extension. “It’s just such a massive document.”
The Navy said it wanted to “give local communities, citizens and organizations additional time to review the entire document and submit comments.”
Navy officials say they need to improve the availability and quality of training at its complex, and to prepare for future requirements. The Navy plans to increase use of the 540-acre complex where land, beach and offshore training has been conducted for more than 60 years.
The Navy proposes an increase in activities along the Silver Strand to 5,343 from 3,926 annually. The number of helicopter sorties would increase to 2,200 from 778 a year and firearm discharges would rise to 1,400 from 150.
Coronado and Imperial Beach both submitted initial concerns about traffic, noise and beach access, and each said it would take another look at the environmental study and possibly submit additional comments.

Achieving water security by becoming water self-sufficient

2010-03-13T09:12:00.000-08:00

Many experts are projecting gloomy scenarios of decreasing water supplies and increasing costs, yet the San Diego/Tijuana Region can easily become renewable water self-sufficient and even develop into a net water exporter.

Even if we assume the worst case scenario of zero precipitation and the complete cutoff of all imported water, the region could completely replace all the freshwater currently used by installing solar panels over 4.3 percent of roofs and parking lots. In 2015, 4.3 percent of our region’s roofs and parking lots will be about 9 sq. miles, or 4.5 sq. miles on each side of the border.

The above statement is based on the following assumptions:

1. Yearly average of five hours of sunlight per day

2. 1,000 sq. feet of roof and parking lot per capita

3. Average potable water consumption level of 180 gallons per capita each day

4. Regional population of 6 million people in 2015

5. Assumption that 70 gallons of freshwater can be extracted from seawater per kWh of electricity consumed through reverse osmosis (RO)

6. PV (photovoltaic) panels 15 percent efficient at converting sunlight into electricity (Commercially available panels are already pushing efficiencies of 20 percent or better).

The electricity produced by this system would be used to power large scale reverse osmosis (RO) pumps to convert seawater into freshwater. The pumps push seawater through filters that let in freshwater while excluding salt, other minerals and contaminants in general.

The issue of sucking marine life into reverse osmosis systems can be solved if seawater to be processed into freshwater is extracted from wells close to the ocean above high tide instead of direct ocean extraction. Since seawater coming into such wells would be sand filtered, marine organisms will be eliminated from the process.

Similarly, since “waste water” from the RO process will be twice as salty as seawater, it will have to be diluted by mixing it with seawater— also extracted from the nearby ocean wells— until the water to be returned to the ocean is no more than 20 percent saltier than seawater. Once diluted, its release into the ocean would be defused as an additional precaution against negative ecological consequences. Other sand filtering technologies have also been proposed.

Mining RO waste water for salt and other minerals opens up other local business and employment opportunities for the region and could potentially eliminate the need to return RO wastewater to the ocean at all.

The impact of the “worst case scenario” RO system discussed above could be cut in half if recycled sewage water was filtered, disinfected and used for irrigation. Using gray water at home would also be a plus for efficient water use. This is because half of the potable water currently used in our region is used for irrigating landscaping and crops.

Water-use efficiency improvements could reduce the role of renewable energy-powered RO as well.

By combining water recycling and efficient water use with better rainwater runoff collection and storage systems, our region would only need to install 15 percent efficient PV panels on 2 percent of its roofs and parking lots to provide equal or superior water use services in the future, compared with what we have today. Plus, if we want more freshwater, we can cover more roofs and parking lots with PV panels to power expanded RO capacity and create all the freshwater we want.

Additionally, all this can be funded through a water purchase agreement model that will pay for itself by redirecting the dollars we now export to pay for imported water into hiring local businesses and workers to make our region renewable water self-sufficient, with renewable energy powered RO being our back-up for water if all else fails.

by Jim Bell

Jim Bell is an internationally-recognized expert on life support sustaining development. His projects include the design and construction of the San Diego Center for Appropriate Technology and Ecoparque, a prototype wastewater recycling plant in Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico. Currently, he serves as Director of the Ecological Life Systems Institute and the San Diego Center for Appropriate Technology, and as representative of the Sierra Club on the City of San Diego’s Regional Advisory Energy Committee. Jim has more than 40 years experience in the design and construction industry and ran for Mayor of San Diego in 1996 and 2000, as well as 2nd District City Council in 2002. The views expressed here are his own.

Imperial Beach - Property owners claim threat to property but forget to mention their seawalls and development caused loss of beach

2010-03-12T09:45:00.000-08:00

The article below is typical. A property owner builds too close to an eroding shoreline and then blames waves and tides for threatening their home. In the meantime, because they built this house an eroding coastline the beach has completely disappeared in front of their wall and home. The beach needs to shift landward but it cannot. Now the beach is gone. That is the real tragedy here. Nobody except Surfrider will fight to save that beach. - Jim Jaffee

IMPERIAL BEACH — All that remains of a small, sandy beachfront yard once filled with lounge chairs and a fire pit are precariously stacked, protective boulders that residents of a four-unit Imperial Beach condominium complex say have sunk up to 10 feet.A particularly damaging mix of high tides and high surf and a growing number of winter storms have stripped the sand from much of Imperial Beach, resulting in an emergency situation for Bill and Marty Arbuckle and their neighbors on Ocean Lane. They have asked the city to permit them to temporarily protect their condos with special 6-by-6-foot sandbags.“This is the first time since we’ve lived here that we’ve had this kind of a problem,” Bill Arbuckle said last week from his home of 12 years as wisps of water from crashing waves reached his second-story sliding-glass door.Imperial Beach officials, who approved the condominium owners’ request for temporary shoreline protection, say the problem isn’t limited to those at the condominiums.“Shoreline erosion is a constant in our city but we’ve had consistent high storm and high tide events since December,” said Community Development Director Greg Wade. “Encinitas, Carlsbad and other coastal cities are having similar issues. The surf is so consistently high, there is no time for sand to settle back on the beach, which provides protection.”Read the entire article:http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2010/mar/09/high-surf-threatens-homes/

Environmental and Health Concerns Don't Stop at U.S.-Mexican Border

2010-02-25T07:41:00.000-08:00

The border between the United States and Mexico is fortified with walls and fences and patrolled by aircraft, remote-sensing technology, and an increasing number of border patrol agents.

But just putting up barriers doesn't break the deep-rooted economic and cultural ties between the two countries. And it doesn't stop the environmental and public health concerns that straddle the border and demand solutions from both nations.

At the recent American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in San Diego, scientists described how the Los Laureles Canyon, which stretches from Tijuana to the San Diego wetlands, is ravaged by pollution. This causes public health problems for impoverished Tijuana residents and environmental problems that affect migratory birds and people on both sides of the border.

Hiram Sarabia of the UCSD NIEHS Superfund Research Program describes the canyon as an “urban observatory” that mirrors thousands like it along the 2,000-mile length of the border. Debris, wastewater, and contaminated dust and soil from a large swath of Tijuana funnel into the canyon streams, which ultimately empty into the Tijuana estuary and then the Pacific Ocean on the U.S. side of the border.

The debris-filled, dusty hillsides of the canyon, home to 65,000 Mexicans, are within several miles of the opulent hotels and popular beaches of downtown San Diego, though most Americans have never been there.

As Kim Larsen documented in a Fall 2009 cover story for OnEarth, impoverished Mexican residents typically have little access to quality health care, and public health issues that arise in Mexico also impact U.S. residents. The United States spends about a million dollars a year dredging the estuary, and the pathogens and toxicants streaming through the canyon into the estuary and local beaches have other financial and health costs.

Tijuana’s population increased quickly and exponentially in recent decades, largely to fuel the maquiladora sector, which are factories owned by U.S. and foreign companies that line the Mexican side of the border. Shantytowns sprung up with little infrastructure or planning, meaning roads are unpaved and there are no sewage systems. Soapy water and raw sewage run in streams of “agua negra” running through the canyon, where kids play and stray animals drink.

Pathogens from raw sewage, dead animals, and other sources accumulate in the water and in the dust that permeates Tijuana and washes into the estuary. Canyon residents are at high risk for Valley Fever, a bacterial disease spread through dust. Residents in the “colonias” (or villages) hugging the canyon hillsides report high incidences of skin and respiratory disease and eye irritation.

Meanwhile, toxicants including PCBs, PAHs, heavy metals, and dioxins are rampant. Water and air emissions and solid waste from maquiladoras make their way into soil and streams. Illegal dumping of hazardous chemical and industrial waste is widespread. And heavy metals and chemicals slough off from the tires, trashed appliances, and other discards used to build retaining walls and shacks throughout the canyon.

These old tires and washing machines symbolize the interlocked fortunes of the United States and Mexico in this region: they are likely to be manufactured by American companies in Mexican maquiladoras, then sold to U.S. consumers, then returned to Mexico on the second-hand market, then reused to bolster crumbling shantytown cliffs. Ultimately, toxics from these products flow through the canyon back into the United States.

Scientists and advocates say environmental and planning policy at the border is a messy realm, with a serious dearth of agencies, policies, or legal frameworks to facilitate infrastructure and environmental improvements. The North American Free Trade Agreement, which took effect in 1994, was supposed to create mechanisms for environmental protection and bi-national cooperation, but that has not been the case in any meaningful way.

San Diego State University professor and author Lawrence Herzog said the maquiladora industry bears much responsibility for addressing the environmental and health problems in Los Laureles canyon and beyond.

“The U.S. and multinational corporations who use the border to profit have not stepped up to the plate to pay for the advantages they are gaining from the region,” Herzog said. “Why aren’t the multinational companies that are making billions from cheap labor paying for infrastructure and the problems they’re creating?”

Some solutions are relatively simple and inexpensive. Scientists and advocates are involving U.S. volunteers and Tijuana residents to pave roads with hexagonal concrete tiles, which cuts down on dust and erosion. Oscar Romo, with NOAA’s coastal training program, has worked with locals to build strategically engineered retaining walls out of tires.

Romo said this doesn’t create contamination like the haphazard tire retaining walls, and it diverts tires from ending up in the estuary. He said his project reused 10,000 tires in a month, while the government of Baja state has only removed 2,000 tires in a year.

Scientists are also mapping and analyzing contamination and sedimentation patterns to better understand the challenges and possible solutions. Keith Pezzoli of the UCSD NIEHS Superfund Research Program said that while U.S. agencies spend about a million dollars a year dredging the Tijuana estuary, “with a fraction of that amount of money you could do a proactive intervention in the (Tijuana) hillsides to stabilize the land.”

Sarabia said that scientists gathering information and working with community groups in Tijuana can help build the political will and grassroots process needed to address the canyon’s problems on a number of levels.

“Our role builds capacity of the community to identify, prioritize and address contamination and public health problems,” said Sarabia. “You can’t make decisions in a vacuum. We need to work closely with the community, to provide incentives for them to work with us, and our projects have the potential to create jobs in the community.”

By Kari Lydersen, OnEarth Magazine

Plans to step up Navy training worry neighbors

2010-02-24T12:55:00.000-08:00

Noise, environmental issues on Silver Strand
By Janine Zúñiga, UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
Tuesday, February 23, 2010 at 12:02 a.m.

K.C. Alfred
Members of Beachmaster Unit 1 conducted drills last week at the Navy’s Silver Strand Training Complex.

Photo by K.C. Alfred
The Navy wants to increase training activities at Silver Strand to 5,343 from 3,926 annually.

The Navy plans to increase training activity off the Coronado coast in order to meet accelerated sailor deployment demands and an increase in Marine Corps personnel requiring training.

PUBLIC HEARINGS
The Navy wants to bolster its activity at the Silver Strand Training Complex and has issued a draft environmental impact statement concerning the changes. It will hold two public hearings on the matter.
• The first will be held from 6 to 7:30 p.m. today at the Imperial Beach Community Center, 825 Imperial Beach Blvd.
• The second will be held from 6 to 7:30 p.m. tomorrow at the Coronado Community Center, Nautilus Banquet Room, 1845 Strand Way.
Anyone wishing to submit comments to the Navy can send them to:
Naval Facilities Engineering Command, SouthwestAttn: Mr. Kent Randall – Silver Strand Training Complex EIS.1220 Pacific Highway, Building 1, 5th FloorSan Diego, CA 92132

A Navy landing craft moves through the crashing waves of the Pacific Ocean and toward the beach. Precision is required because the surf zone can be demanding.
During the training operation in southern Coronado last week, members of a 300-person Navy team responsible for moving combat troops and equipment from ship to shore and providing them with logistic support controlled the landing craft.
“It’s a realistic training environment, and by practicing in these conditions, we can get better and better at it,” said Cmdr. Todd Perry, commanding officer of Beachmaster Unit 1.
To meet heavier training demands, the Navy is proposing ramping up activity at the Silver Strand Training Complex, including more helicopter flights, firearm discharges and use of sensitive land. That has some residents and environmentalists worried about what it will mean to neighborhoods, delicate bird habitat and vernal pools.
The Navy is studying the environmental effects of increased use of the 540-acre site where land, beach and offshore wartime training has been conducted for more than 60 years.
According to a draft environmental impact statement, the Navy proposes to increase the frequency of training activities to 5,343 from 3,926 annually. The Navy hopes to increase the number of helicopter sorties to 2,200 from 778 a year and firearm discharges to 1,400 from 150. It plans to use, with some limitations, the nesting areas of endangered birds and allow training on foot over vernal pools when dry.
While some proposed changes may occur immediately, most would happen over the next several years.
The Navy is looking for public comment on its plan; it has the final say on how it addresses the effect of the increased training.
“The amount of extra training they’re proposing would be quite noticeable and really change our quiet neighborhood,” Imperial Beach resident Jeff Foster said. “If it makes a big impact on the peace of the neighborhood, it won’t be a desirable place to live.”
Jim Peugh, conservation leader for the local chapter of the National Audubon Society, said that though he hasn’t read the Navy study sitting on his desk, his initial concerns are about the increased access to three ocean-to-beach training lanes that are off-limits from April through September, during the nesting season of the endangered California least tern and Western snowy plover. Access would only be allowed, however, if other shoreline areas are occupied, unavailable or less suitable for training.
“They have a lot of training lanes at North Island and Camp Pendleton,” Peugh said. “We can’t afford to lose tern habitat.”
Peugh said tern habitat at Mission Bay has had “lousy results” for years. He said a Navy program to protect nesting sites along the Silver Strand isthmus has been very successful. He said that a significant portion of the entire least tern population is at Silver Strand and that its protection is important.
Delphine Lee, project manager with the Navy’s Pacific Fleet, said no habitat would be lost. She said the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, which is completing its review of the study, allows the Navy to “impact up to 450 nests a year.”
“There’s certainly a possibility of nests being hurt, but we had 1,700 nests last year and only 20 to 30 were adversely affected,” said Lee, who added that even if training were conducted in those three lanes, it’s likely no nests would be bothered.
The Navy is holding information and comment sessions for the public today and tomorrow. The first is at the Imperial Beach Community Center, the second at the Coronado Community Center. Both are from 6 to 7:30 p.m., and both will be preceded by an open house at 4 p.m.
The draft report found minimal effects in an array of areas, including land use, air quality, marine biological resources, fish, birds, and public health and safety. Cumulative effects to geology and soils “would be negligible,” the study found.
At the southern end of the Silver Strand Training Complex, near Imperial Beach, the study found that training would “increase the number of intrusive noise events.”
Foster is expecting a dramatic increase in noise from the number of proposed helicopter sorties.
“The gist of the report is that helicopter sorties will increase but the decibel level is the same, therefore there is no impact,” Foster said. “It ignores the fact there are more.”
Lee said the service wants all those with questions about the plan to forward their concerns. All comments received by March 9 will be addressed and incorporated into the final environmental report.
Navy officials say they need to supplement training to meet “aggressive schedules” for sailors and Marines at the complex sandwiched between Silver Strand State Beach and Imperial Beach. Naval Base Coronado is the West Coast hub for naval amphibious operations.
The training complex opened in the early 1950s, and those who train there include Navy SEALs, ordnance disposal teams and assault craft units. Troops with the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force also conduct exercises.
City officials in Imperial Beach and Coronado say they are reviewing the draft document and would not comment before their studies are completed.
According to the Navy’s study, new types of training for detecting mines, as well as for amphibious and special-warfare operations, are being proposed at the training facility. The Navy plans to train in vernal pools north of Imperial Beach when the pools are dry. Lee said the Navy would establish a plan to monitor the pools, which are shallow depressions that fill during storms and provide a seasonal breeding ground for various species, some of them endangered. Officials say more Naval Special Warfare personnel and Marines are being trained in Coronado.
At the training operation at the complex last week, about 25 sailors on shore guided vehicles to and from the landing craft, which held about a dozen sailors. The rest of the Navy team remained aboard the dock landing ship Pearl Harbor just offshore.
“It’s much more difficult than it looks because of the surf and the underwater currents,” said Perry, who added that most of the sailors in the training exercise would be deployed to the Western Pacific. “They need to train in actual conditions.”

No B.S. Network Meeting

2010-02-23T19:42:00.000-08:00

Tijuana River Network- meeting notes- February 18, 2010
WiLDCOAST office, Imperial Beach
Attendees: Laura Silvan from Fundacion La Puerta, Margarita Diaz from Proyecto Fronterizo, Roderick Michener from Surfrider, Dan Kesler, Danielle Litke from TJ Estuary, Rachael Dorfman from SF, Angela Howe from SF National, Jeff Knox from TRCC, Carmen Romo from Calidad de Vida, Gabriel Sanchez from Calidad de Vida, Claudette, Morgan Justice-Black from ILACSD, Jay Novak from TRCC, Dan Watman from Border Encuentro, Ben McCue from WiLDCOAST and Dan Murphy from Surfrider
Agenda:
1) Welcome and Introductions/Check In

2) Reviewed purpose of the network: “To renew the Tijuana River by working together (suggested adding Internationally) for a solution giving a voice to the community by engaging in cleanups, outreach, education and advocacy to address the root cause of the Tijuana River pollution.”

3) Groups discussed purpose for being at meeting:

Border Encuentro: identified with the “borderless” focus of the network; discussed how B.E. has taken a more environmental focus in their activities.

Fundacion la Puerta: sharing information with other groups working on TJ River Watershed issues; Learning from the experiences of others; and identifying opportunities for engagement/collaboration. Laura mentioned that the network should not strain groups by taking on additional projects but rather should work together in ways that increase the effectiveness of member groups’ current projects.

I Love a Clean San Diego: Partnering with other groups on cleanup events and sharing opportunities for collaboration.

Proyecto Fronterizo: (similar purpose as Fundacion la Puerta)

Surfrider: Working with other groups to improve the border region’s beach water quality; and improve the ability of the water testing program to improve water quality policy.

Tijuana Calidad de Vida: Sees network as bringing out partnerships with others to increase the quality of life of residents in Tijuana.

Tijuana Estuary Volunteer Program: Working through the network to increase the effectiveness and scope of the Estuary’s volunteer program with the overall goal of improving the watershed.

Tijuana River Citizens’ Council: Working with other groups to carry-out clean water advocacy in the watershed to decision makers.

WiLDCOAST: networking with other groups to share information, learn, collaborate, and explore new partnerships to improve the health of the watershed and the nearshore coastal environment.

a) Roderick mentioned a idea for the name of the network – Border Area Clean Action Network
b) The group agreed we need to emphasize the International aspect of the Network. Do we want to use Border in the name? Our main purpose together as a group is (Environmental) Stewardship. Somehow we need to incorporate this into the purpose statement and the name.

4) Organization leads
a) ACTION ITEM: Add each lead to the Listserve and Margarita will maintain

5) Discussion
a) TJ Estuary Visitors Center has many volunteer activities in the Border Field Area. March 13th – adding natives
b) Every Second Saturday of the month there are volunteer opportunities at the Estuary
c) Laura from Fundacion La Puerta mentioned bringing her volunteers across the border to a second Saturday event.
d) Group agreed that Border Field Area should be a good place to bring volunteers for awareness and education of the sediment basins, border wall…etc
e) Need to set up some trainings with the different Group Volunteers for outreach and awareness to Public Officials.
f) Carmen mentioned there are many programs focused in the Los Laureles Sub-Watersheds. They meet every 3 months – Consejo de Admin Programa Parcial de Mejoramiento de la sub cuenca de los laureles.
g) Need to hold meeting in Tijuana (scheduled for March) and Tecate.
h) Organize separate goals and missions and how we align the network goals. We all have something in common. We are all concerned about the TJ River Watershed. We need to empower ourselves.
i) Need to plan for more watershed improvement projects

6) Work Plan Activities

a) ACTION ITEM: Each network monthly meeting should have training component (ex: water policy/enforcement in U.S. and MX; watershed dynamics 101; Media advocacy, etc.). WiLDCOAST will work with Tijuana Calidad de Vida to schedule the training for the March meeting on a U.S./MX comparison of water quality policy/enforcement.
b) ACTION ITEM: The hosting of Network meetings will be shared between groups. Groups that are willing to host a meeting should propose what month they would like to host and send to paloma@wildcoast.net
c) ACTION ITEM: Need to calendar all events in one place. One stop place for all the events. Morgan mentioned the www.SDLN.org has a calendar of events that we could potentially add to. The site is currently maintained by Jeff Smith from the SE lagoon.
d) ACTION ITEM: Need to decide on a all-day cross-border watershed tour from San Diego-Tecate-Tijuana. Paloma will send out potential dates to the group.

7) October “Tijuana River Action Month”
a) Nesting Season runs from February 15th to September 15th and cleanups in the River Valley and at the River Mouth need to take place outside of these dates. WiLDCOAST and TJ Estuary discussed making October “Tijuana River Action Month”. This is also the month that Coastal Cleanup Day, Fiesta Del Rio, and the Dempsey Holder Contest take place. All events will focus on the need to address pollution in the watershed through a shared, borderless approach.

8) Create Calendar of cleanup events
a) Discussed under line item 4 (g). Group to utilize www.SDLN.org until formal website and calendar has been established. Also, each individual group has their own sites, calendars, blogs, Facebook accts…etc

9) Next meeting : Tijuana Calidad de Vida proposed to host our next meeting in Playas de Tijuana.
Using http://www.doodle.com/5ybxfibzrtd2unmg to determine the date.
a) ACTION ITEM: Dan and Carmen to figure out group shuttle logistics.

10) Adjourn

Tijuana River Valley Recovery Team Workshop

2010-02-23T19:38:00.000-08:00

Meeting notes from Friday, January 29, 2010 – 9am to 12

Lowest Atmospheric pressure ever recorded.
Mouth of the river -> Sand covered channels south of the river mouth. Tidal exchange keep lagoon healthy.
Goat Canyon Flows – sediment basins: capacity of sediment basins is 55 to 60,000 cubic yards
Binational Action Team Priority Projects:
Study sediment loads. This should be the #1 priority. Funding is currently the issue. Prioritize which of the five main Tijuana canyons contribute the most and what mechanisms will work best and where to locate them (characterization study). Los Salces Canyon (Yogurt Canyon), Los Laureles (Goat Canyon), Matadoro (Smugglers Gulch), Central, Main Channel . This would require negotiation with Mexico.
End goal of restoration of River Valley and Estuary
Understand the hydrology of the river valley. Studies that have been done of the hydrology
Legislation at the state level is what we need
Place trash booms/sediment basins in each of the five canyons, in order of importance (i.e. each canyon would have a cost and be an individual project). Trash study of where its coming from and cut off the flow. Issues have been addressed in the 2012 meetings.
Purchase conservation easements to protect undeveloped areas and reduce sediment loads.
Implement a Tijuana tire reutilization program to use tires where they are generated for building projects that create engineered retaining walls that will stabilize a defined number of acres, shredding for pavement, creating cells to confine trash in landfills and other uses.
Establish a plastic recycling program that includes recycling centers and redemption funding for turning in plastics. There are currently no government sponsored recycling programs. Carme’s group is looking at private grants. Need to reduce the flow of plastics. Sutdies have been done on the sediment and trash.
Border Action Team:
Design and implement a Smuggler’s Gulch sediment basin and trash capture facility. The design would be completed in a defined period of time and would include the location, size & design of the basins, need for CEQA & other studies, information about how complement the downstream configuration.
Upgrade existing goat canyon sediment basin to increase capacity and identify costs to cover ongoing operation and maintenance costs, including disposal of sediment.
Design and implement Main River channel sedimentation basin and trash capture facility.
Raise portions of Monument Road to elevate it above flood areas, act as a buffer to project marsh areas and Border Field State Park. Work should be integrated as part of the Smuggler;s Gulch plan.
Install flow monitoring systems in the main river channel, Smugglers Gulch, Goat Canyon, Silva’s Drain and Stewart’s Drain
Cleanup Action Team
Completely characterize all trash, sediment, and pollutant sources in the Tijuana River valley that provides a basis for the “Cleanup Action Plan.” Characterization should include:
Trash – type, quantity, value, removal methods. Present on website and link it to the TJ River Recovery Team website.
Sediment – location, quantity, removal methods. URS is currently conducting this study. Test Pits and borings report. Flow gauges placed at sediment basins for trash characterization.
Pollutant source – location, source, levels, removal/treatment methods
Estimated Cost - $1 million
Complete a hydraulic and hydrology study of the Tijuana River valley to provide information as to the quantity and type of sediment and trash deposited in the Tijuana River valley. Estimated cost: $750,000
Develop a plan to dispose of and/or reuse sediment from past, current and future deposits on an ongoing basis. The team believes this can be a cost neutral action with good planning and agency cooperation. The plan would include communicating effectively between the cleanup agencies following
They can provide high quality reclamation products that can be used by other agencies, local area residents, Mexico, etc.
Cost offsets can be achieved by negotiating contracts with material suppliers to excavate and process high value material.
Material deemed suitable can be used to replenish South San Diego or Tijuana Beaches with material that would have been naturally deposited.
Restoration of the Nelson/Sloan Quarry could be met with materials removed from the Tijuana River valley.
Both Local residents and area agencies could benefit from materials made available to construct storm water control devices and property elevation.
Remove sediment on a continual basis. With an effective reclamation plan the costs for removal can be mitigated and offset as stated above. This includes maintenance, placement/location and removal of illegal fill. Estimated cost: $20 to $25 million over ten years for the above items.
List Tijuana River Valley properties that would be best purchased for long term mitigation. Properties not agency held should be compiled in an effort to analyze which properties have the most potential for inundation and where acquisition would facilitate clean up.
Restoration Action Team
Develop a restoration master plan and guiding principles to unify various plans, visions, and project lists plans, (e.g. ACOE plan, Estuary and County Habitat Plans, etc.) Key factors will be flood control and design, identification of specific restoration projects like exotic invasive removal and work to ease permiting hurdles. Include coordination and management funding to implement.
Unify the various agencies/parties plans and projects for the river and estuary.
Verify the “models” used in the plans and projects.
Develop an ecosystem-scale monitoring and assessment program that includes flood control and gauging.
Remove the fill on the Peggy Brown property to restore river elevation. Fill was unpermitted and property is no deeded to the county. The fill is a bottleneck to floodplain function and river flow.
Restoration Action Team projects already funded and being implemented at Recovery Team level.
Develop and enhance GIS, web, data portals to improve information dissemination (includes identifying and archiving and mapping past, present and proposed projects and plans mentioned in Retoration Action team list)

Proposed aqueduct would quench Baja wine valley

2010-02-04T21:39:00.000-08:00

TIJUANA — As they watch millions of gallons of treated Tijuana wastewater flow into the Pacific Ocean each day, Baja California authorities say they have a better idea: Why not pipe it to the Guadalupe Valley, Baja California’s winemaking region, where the water table has been falling even as the area has risen in international renown?

Gov. José Guadalupe Osuna Millán’s government is proposing a 46-mile aqueduct that would carry the treated water from eastern Tijuana to the vineyards and olive groves in the small agricultural valley north of Ensenada.

“If we wanted to use all the treated water in the city, we’d be hard-pressed to find places to put it, no matter how many green areas we had,” said Efraín Muñoz, head of the State Water Commission, Baja California’s water planning agency.

Miles from Tijuana’s crowded hillsides, winemakers in the picturesque Guadalupe Valley say they’re running out of water, and that is threatening the future of a region responsible for 90 percent of Mexico’s wine production.

The valley shares its wells with the city of Ensenada, and the growing demand for urban and agricultural uses has put unprecedented pressure on the aquifer.

The Guadalupe Valley would not be the first to use reclaimed water in its vineyards. Napa Valley has been using treated wastewater in some vineyards for at least a decade, said Jeff Tucker of the Napa Sanitation District.

Hugo D’Acosta, owner of the Casa de Piedra winery and a member of the Baja California Wine Growers Association, offers cautious endorsement for the pipeline proposal.

The reclaimed-water project could offer a solution, he said, “if and when it’s well-executed and meets the needs of the valley.”

D’Acosta and other vineyard owners have become increasingly wary of encroachment by housing developments and fear that without strict zoning regulations, the pipeline could encourage large-scale projects that destroy the valley’s vocation.

“I see it as feasible, but also very dangerous,” D’Acosta said of the proposed aqueduct.

This is not the first proposal aimed at using Tijuana’s wastewater. A U.S. company, Bajagua, for years proposed building a treatment plant in Mexico with $170 million in U.S. government funds, then selling up to 59 million gallons of reclaimed water a day. But the San Marcos company’s much-debated proposal failed in 2008 when the International Boundary and Water Commission opted to instead upgrade its existing San Ysidro treatment plant that treats 25 million gallons of Tijuana sewage a day.

Collecting and treating Tijuana’s sewage has been the subject of binational efforts for decades. The city’s spills and overflows risk contaminating San Diego County beaches and threaten the Tijuana River estuary, a federally protected wetland. Although dry-weather flows have largely been eliminated, cross-border sewage flows during wet weather continue to shut down South Bay beaches.

Last year, officials on both sides of the border celebrated when Tijuana’s state-operated utility, the CESPT, inaugurated the Arturo Herrera sewage treatment plant in eastern Tijuana.

The opening launched Tijuana’s first comprehensive wastewater-reuse program, and the inauguration of a pipeline carrying 470,000 gallons a day from the plant to nearby Morelos Park.

The CESPT is completing a second treatment plant nearby called La Morita, and is planning a third one, Cueros de Venado. The three plants would feed the Guadalupe Valley aqueduct up to 25 million gallons a day of wastewater treated to a secondary level, which is acceptable for irrigation purposes.

Muñoz, the Baja California water planner, said the Guadalupe Valley pipeline proposal has a good chance of becoming a reality, but it faces several hurdles.

Because the state government can’t afford the project’s $169 million price tag, it is turning to the private sector. The winning bidder would recover its investment by selling the water. But to keep water rates down, federal funds are also needed, Muñoz said.

The state hopes to put to the project out to bid this year and begin construction in 2011, Muñoz said.

Before reaching the Guadalupe Valley, some of the water would be diverted to the Valle de las Palmas outside Tijuana, where a satellite city is under construction. Additional amounts would be delivered to agricultural communities along the way, with the remainder stored at a reservoir planned at the valley’s northern end, Muñoz said.

The water would receive further treatment before being delivered to growers, allowing it to be used in spray and drip irrigation systems.

Even with the Guadalupe Valley pipeline in the planning stages, Muñoz is looking ahead to a second project to use the rest of Tijuana’s treated wastewater.

He envisions a coastline pipeline that would supply communities with irrigation water for their green spaces.

“It would be much cheaper than the drinking water we are now using,” Muñoz said.

By Sandra Dibble, UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

2010-02-03T21:39:00.000-08:00

Top photo: Goat Canyon trash boom, bottom photo: Dairy Mart Bridge. 1/30/10, courtesy of WiLDCOAST

2010-02-03T21:28:00.001-08:00

The following was posted on the website for Proyecto Fronterizo....

ATTENTION Tijuana residents, citizens, boys and girls, students, teachers, researchers, scientists, legislators, authorities. We all have to do with this environmental catastrophe.

Three weeks ago, local environmental organizations have witnessed a sudden rise of plastic pollution along Tijuana's shoreline. After two coastal cleanups during January 2010 1.3 tons of trash, composed mainly by plastics and more specifically by polystyrene, have been removed from the beach.

The first case was Cañada Azteca, where an impressive amount of such plastic material accumulated and was removed by a hundred people, including neighbors and volunteers from organizations joined by the Community Project Salvemos la Playa (Save the Beach) during an Emergency Coastal Cleanup on Sunday January 17th. Six hundred kilos were removed. That's 6 kilos each.

The second case was last Saturday, January 30th during the celebration of the first International Beach Conservancy Day at Playa El Vigía, which turned out to be more alarming. Back at Cañada we were able to restore the place but this time it was practically impossible due to the presence of millions of plastic particles. We're talking about an almost mile-long beach full with plastic containers, beverage bottles and caps, disposable cutlery and huge amounts of polistyrene (foam). Here more than 700 kilos were removed (that's 11.6 a piece). Not only was it overwhelming because of the vast extension buy also because of the particle's small size and the fact that it easily mixes with the beach's natural elements like sand and algae.

We truly believe this is an environmental catastrophe.

Through this message we want to raise some questions for us all. Questions that can help us solve this catastrophe TODAY but also in the FUTURE.

How do we clean up ALL THIS WASTE and stop it from affecting marine life?

How do all this plastics get to the ocean? How can we reduce or refuse its use?

What's the relation between this tragedy, drought, population growth and recent rainfall?

Do we have the courage to modify our consumption habits?

Are we willing to legislate around this matter? Are we willing to enforce laws?

Are we going to stay with our arms crossed, again?

What have you got to do with all these?

January Tijuana Sloughs Clean Up

2010-02-02T12:40:00.000-08:00

Special thanks to those who came out to the rescheduled beach cleanup at the Tijuana Sloughs on Saturday. We collected about 660 lbs of trash in 2 hours and had about 100 volunteers show up. We would like to hold more of these Sloughs beach cleanups in the future and will be posting dates on the Surfrider calendar soon. Check out the rest of the pictures here.

Toxin probe eyes link to Tijuana

2010-02-01T21:57:00.000-08:00

Nearly six years ago, environmentalists and government officials on both sides of the border cheered as cleanup efforts began on the site of Metales y Derivados, a notorious former American-owned lead smelter in Tijuana whose neighbors long had complained of health problems, including birth defects, that they blamed on the toxic-waste site.

As part of an agreement, roughly 2,000 tons of lead-contaminated soil and other waste removed from the site was trucked north to the United States for disposal. As it turns out, some of it wound up in a Central California toxic-waste dump that is now at the center of controversy over a suspected cluster of birth defects in families living nearby.

The waste trucked in from Tijuana, about 20 tons in all, constitutes a minute fraction of the toxic materials deposited in a landfill just outside Kettleman City, an agricultural community off Interstate 5 halfway between Los Angeles and the Bay Area. Still, news of the health concerns there, which have prompted a state investigation, have those who pushed for the cleanup in Tijuana shaking their heads.

“We feel terrible,” said Amelia Simpson, director of the border environmental justice campaign with the Environmental Health Coalition in San Diego, which worked with the U.S. and Mexican governments on the cleanup. “It is another low-income community, and in this case, Latino.”

On Friday, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger directed the California Department of Public Health and the state’s Environmental Protection Agency to send experts to Kettleman City to expand their investigation into what could be causing a higher-than-normal percentage of birth defects.

The state health department’s study is under way, with analyses of medical records for birth defects, cancer and asthma and monitoring of drinking water. The probe will include interviews with residents and reviews of soil samples, with initial findings expected to be made public Feb. 9.

According to a health survey that activists conducted in the small town, five of the 20 infants born between September 2007 and November 2008 to Kettleman City residents had a cleft palate or lip, and three of them have died.

“The question is, is there a cluster, and is there an environmental link?” said Al Lundeen, a spokesman for the state health department.

There was never an official study linking birth defects in Tijuana’s Ejido Chilpancingo, a poor residential area, to the adjacent Metales y Derivados site that sat exposed for years, long after the plant was closed.

“People never made a formal complaint because in our community, it is a stigma,” said Magdalena Cerda, a community organizer with the Environmental Health Coalition. “All of the cases we knew of, they kept them a secret.”

Cerda, who worked directly with residents near the Tijuana site, said health problems in the Chilpancingo community included cases of children born with hydrocephalus, an abnormal buildup of cerebrospinal fluid in the brain, and spina bifida, a defect in which the spinal canal and backbone do not close before birth.

Lead poisoning also interferes with development of the central nervous system and can cause learning and behavioral difficulties in children, who are particularly susceptible to the toxin.

Environmental activists have filed suit to stop a planned expansion of the Kettleman City site, which is owned by Chemical Waste Management Inc. and is believed to be the largest toxic-waste dump in the West.

While no one can say with certainty what is causing birth defects there, the director of the San Francisco-based environmental group Greenaction, which is involved in the lawsuit, said more monitoring of the site is needed.

“Monitoring is not what it needs to be, and we think the dump should never be expanded,” said Bradley Angel, executive director of the group.

Helen Herrera, a spokeswoman for Chemical Waste Management, said that the company supports the state’s health study but that there is no evidence linking the site to birth defects.

Metales y Derivados, which recycled vehicle and boat batteries brought in mostly from the United States, operated during the 1980s. The contamination was discovered in the early 1990s; in 1994, owner José Kahn moved to San Diego to avoid arrest after Mexican authorities shut down the business and tried to charge him with breaking environmental laws. Kahn has since died.

For years afterward, the property remained littered with 55-gallon drums and other containers filled with lead waste. More than a decade’s worth of efforts on behalf of environmental organizations on both sides of the border resulted in an agreement between the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and its Mexican counterpart, Semarnat.

In June 2004, a portion of the waste from Metales y Derivados was sent to Kettleman City, according to a federal EPA report. As part of the binational cleanup deal, because Metales y Derivados was a U.S. company operating in Mexico under the North American Free Trade Agreement, the waste had to be removed to the country of origin. The rest of the roughly 2,000 tons of waste taken from the site and exported north went to a toxic-waste dump in Nevada.

More toxic waste would have been shipped back to the United States had it not been for the cost, said Saul Guzman, an official with Semarnat in Tijuana.

“That was the first solution, but it cost too much money,” Guzman said. “There was enough to move the first 2,000 tons, but there wasn’t enough money and we had to do what was most economically feasible.”

The alternate solution was to entomb an estimated 42,000 tons of remaining contaminated soil and waste beneath a concrete cap; about a year ago, a ceremony was held reopening the 4-acre site for use as a public park. The final cleanup cost was about $2 million, with the federal EPA contributing about $80,000.

By Leslie Berestein, UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

Cross-Border Researchers Look For Message In Bottles

2010-01-26T09:20:00.000-08:00

Last week's storms drenched Tijuana and forced more than 160 people from their homes. But the rain has helped a group of researchers who want to extend the life of San Diego's Tijuana Estuary.

The researchers have stationed themselves in a Tijuana canyon called Los Laureles.

It's a few miles from the border fence. About 80,000 people live there.

Since Monday, researchers have released more than 160 plastic bottles into the torrents of rainwater coursing through the canyon. That rainwater drains down into the Tijuana River Estuary.

Oscar Romo is the lead researcher on the project. He says they'll map the bottles' final resting places.

"So, the map would show me the plume of both where the solids and trash are going," Romo said.

Romo says that will help create a strategy to reduce storm impact on the estuary and the Tijuana neighborhoods in Los Laureles Canyon.

He says the study will help officials on both sides of the border know what infrastructure is needed to contain trash, sediment and runoff.

Romo hopes to apply the bottle study to other Tijuana canyons that also drain into the Tijuana River Estuary.

By Amy Isackson

KPBS

Storms trash Calif. beaches, bring snow to AZ, NM

2010-01-25T19:45:00.000-08:00

SEAL BEACH, Calif. - The sky was blue and the sun bright for the first time in days after a week of powerful Southern California rain storms, but all Victoria Macey could see was the mountain of steaming trash and twisted debris on her favorite beach.

"I'm completely shocked. From our house, all we could see was gorgeous clouds and then we come down here and there's so much trash, it's really sad," Macey said as she photographed a sopping plastic baby doll propped atop an overturned end table. "I can't believe how many shopping carts there are. That's what blows my mind."

The mounds of soggy sofa cushions, rusted shopping carts, plastic children's toys, dented refrigerators and hundreds of plastic cans and food wrappers were just one calling card left by a week of punishing rain that pelted Southern California and went on to tangle with Arizona and New Mexico.

About 35 miles to the north of Seal Beach, hundreds of residents who evacuated from wildfire-scarred communities in the San Gabriel Mountain foothills north of Los Angeles returned home Saturday to assess the damage and remove mud and debris from their properties. There were no reports of major damage despite widespread concerns about mudslides and debris flows from the relentless rain.

About half of the 500 residents of a small western Arizona farming community who were evacuated after floodwaters swept through the town Thursday, returned Saturday. Muddied streets and damaged homes and businesses remained, and La Paz County sheriff's spokesman Lt. Glenn Gilbert said the community was in cleanup mode. Many said they were happy to survive the storm.

On Saturday, the Yavapai County Sheriff's Office announced the body of 6-year-old Jacob Baudek, who was swept away by rising by floodwaters in central Arizona Thursday, was spotted by hikers along the Agua Fria River and recovered from the river bank.

At higher elevations, forecasters warned of blowing and drifting snow and issued winter weather and wind advisories for southern New Mexico, with heavy snow expected in the Gila and Sacramento mountains. In the Guadalupe Mountains of southeastern New Mexico, wind gusts could top 90 mph on Saturday. More than 2 feet of snow have fallen in the Chama area in northern New Mexico, while parts of southwestern New Mexico got 27 inches of snow.

In Northern California, a rare tornado warning was issued Saturday in the San Francisco Bay area's Contra Costa County after a trained weather spotter reported seeing a funnel cloud. The National Weather Service said the cloud was seen about 9 miles south of Oakley, but it weakened without touching down and the agency's warning expired.

Harsh winter weather also hit the Dakotas, where thousands of people were without power after icy weather toppled miles of power lines. A winter storm carrying freezing rain and snow pushed through the region with blizzardlike conditions expected to develop over the weekend and into Monday.

Another smaller storm was forecast for Southern California beginning Tuesday evening and would last about two days, said National Weather Service meteorologist Steve Vanderburg.

But that storm was the farthest thing from the minds of weather-weary Southern Californians, who ventured to the region's famous beaches by the dozens on Saturday to bask in the sunshine and balmy temperatures. Many were shocked to find the trash from the storm's urban run-off and picked gingerly through tangled garbage to reach the water.

Fifty-two cities in the Los Angeles metropolitan area drain into the San Gabriel River bed and litter and garbage flow tens of miles to the ocean each time there's a heavy rain, said Kim Masoner, who founded Save Our Beach 10 years ago to combat the problem. Earlier, the couple worked with more than 1,400 volunteers to remove 12 large trash bins of debris from the river's mouth.

On Saturday, Steve Masoner pulled a waist-high white plastic rocking horse from the mess and propped it on the rocks lining the river mouth. His wife added a soggy Spiderman doll and a cracked SpongeBob SquarePants bike helmet and a swimming pool skimmer to the pile before helping her husband wrestle apart two shopping carts.

Similar scenes played out on beaches in Long Beach, Newport Beach and San Diego where the Los Angeles, Santa Ana and Tijuana rivers empty into the sea. Many surfers said they would avoid the water because of concerns about bacteria from storm run-off.

Meanwhile, the Surfrider Foundation canceled its beach cleanups through the end of the month near the Tijuana River because the hazardous waste created too much of a liability.

"Even if they do have gloves and masks, it's too dangerous," Dan Murphy, of Surfrider, said of the beach volunteers. "Whatever the trash is on the beach, it's been flowing in the sewage and it's covered with the stuff."

GILLIAN FLACCUS The Associated Press

Tijuana River residents prepare for the worst

2010-01-21T14:59:00.000-08:00

Click here for the video and here's a link to some photos taken on Jan 19th and 20th.

Network Meeting Minutes from Jan 13th

2010-01-15T15:35:00.000-08:00

January, 13th, 2010
Present: Surfrider, T.R.C.C., Proyecto Fronterizo, Fundacion la Puerta, WiLDCOAST
Next Meeting: February 18th , 2010 at 6:30pm at WiLDCOAST office

Visions for this Network:
Better collaboration between all parties, power outreach, access to information, keeping the issue at forefront. Improvement of the Tijuana River Valley on water quality, trash and sediment, the problem has no barriers, it is one bio-region, one watershed. More cleanups and water quality transparency in information by CESPT. More outreach and education. To have a shared purpose, responsibility, and awareness through community action

Decision making process:
By consensus agreement

Organizations that will be involved
Surfrider
TRCC
Proyecto fronterizo
Fundacion la puerta

Potential new organizations to be recruited:
Border meetup
Coastkeeper
I love a clean San Diego
Tijuana Calidad de Vida

Communications:
Communication process: we discussed using social networking such as Facebook, Twitter and SMS texting externally and via a list serve internally.

Network goal
To renew Tijuana river by working together for a solution giving a voice to the community by engaging in cleanups, outreach, education and advocacy to address the root cause of the Tijuana River pollution.

Common themes discussed throughout meeting:
Prevention support: Maquiladora pollution, find alternative and innovative solutions at source
Contacting our representatives
Social networking as a means to engage new people

Network should engage in:
Bi-national cleanups: Have all of our cleanups be bi-national
Community outreach and education to schools: kids for clean water, PROBEA, colleges and universities
Advocacy training: bi-national social engagement by elected officials, how to write letters etc.

Things to work on for next meeting:
Names for the network
Who we will be the lead from your organization
One pager for bullet point platform

Next meeting is scheduled for Thursday, February 18th at 6:30pm, WiLDCOAST offices in Imperial Beach

The Water Pollution Cop

2010-01-09T21:51:00.000-08:00

Dave Gibson is the new chief of the San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board, the agency that's responsible for enforcing federal and state clean water laws locally. He took over the top spot in November from John Robertus, who retired.

He's in charge of the agency that monitors, regulates and occasionally fines those who discharge into local waterways -- from sewage treatment plants to shipyards. Gibson, a former entomologist who's worked at the board for a decade, is now the region's top water pollution cop.

His agency is coordinating the long-stalled cleanup of toxic sediment in San Diego Bay, an effort that it recently scaled back, drawing criticism from those who've advocated for a thorough cleanup of the old pollution from industry and government. It's also been involved in addressing one of the region's longest-standing, largest pollution problems: the litter, dirt and sewage from Mexico that sweeps into the Tijuana River Valley with each winter rainfall, fouling the coastline from Imperial Beach to Coronado.

We sat down to talk about the health of the region's waterways, bay and border pollution and whether he'd eat a fish caught in San Diego Bay.

Why did the board back off on the amount of toxic sediment it's requiring removal of from San Diego Bay?

I don't consider it backing off, I consider it a more surgical approach. When we did a more rigorous analysis, we found that by reducing the footprint we could remove the vast majority of contaminated sediments that were contributing to impairment of San Diego Bay. In other sections of the shipyard the contaminated sediments were buried at significant depth. They're essentially locked up.

How deep?

As much as eight feet. As long as the area's not dredged and ship traffic doesn't disturb it, that material is safe where it is. We took a rigorous analysis of what it would take to remove the most toxic sediments, where we could be assured of having an actual cleanup, in real-time, in the foreseeable future, without a lot of legal impediments along the way. That's a significant factor. It may not be perfect, but it's certainly protective of water quality.

Most importantly, we don't just check it one time and walk away. There's a monitoring program that the responsible parties will implement. They're charged with diagnosing whether the cleanup has been effective.

If the parties who are responsible for the pollution -- and they're the parties who're also fighting the cleanup effort -- are charged with monitoring their own mess and figuring out whether they've triggered the need for a greater cleanup of their own mess, isn't that a case of the fox watching the henhouse?

It is. However, it's what the law allows us to do. Self-monitoring reports are firmly established in the federal Clean Water Act. We've used them in this region since the 1970s. We've very rarely found deliberate obfuscation in those reports. I suspect the parties simply believe it's legally risky to do that. They may not offer information if we don't ask for it, but the information is submitted under penalty of perjury.

Would you eat a fish caught in the bay today?

I would, but I wouldn't do it very often. And I'd be cautious about what I ate. It's extremely important in this process that we do the socially responsible thing and protect not only the ability of industries on the bay to do business, we also have to ensure that the person who chooses to fish on the bay and eat that fish every single day can do that safely without compromising his or her health.

Does this cleanup do that?

It does that. But it's one part of a bay that has many sites that are contaminated. There are many sites around San Diego Bay that were affected going back to the early 1900s. Those legacy pollutants are difficult and problematic to address, but we have to do it.

Your predecessor, John Robertus, led an effort to deal with some of the trash coming across the border into the Tijuana River Valley. Do you plan to continue? And as a region, can we ever expect that issue to be solved?

Yes and yes. Our agency's long been aware of the issues in the Tijuana River Valley. We took a stand on sewage -- it had afflicted residents for long enough. We also need to address trash and sediment. We can address the symptoms of the problem. We can't change what happens in Mexico. I think in the long run we'll see solutions to those problems. But there's a difference between a problem and a dilemma. You can solve a problem, not a dilemma. The trans-border issue of sediment and trash, the economic disparities, all amount to significant dilemmas. We can't simply solve them -- but we can address them on our side of the border.

Over time, there's certainly been progress addressing border pollution. Beaches in Imperial Beach aren't closed in summer any more. Are there metrics to track success going forward? Not having to do tire cleanups as frequently as volunteers do?

Flood control is one metric. It's a significant problem. Being able to remove certain sediments that have exacerbated flooding is another. Then there's the trash. And anyone who's seen the photographs can see the magnitude -- enormous amounts of plastic debris. Being able to track the reduction over time, and the amount of effort that (Imperial Beach-based environmental group) Wildcoast has to go into to remove it, is another useful metric.

Give San Diego County's water quality a grade. How clean is the water in our streams, waterways and ocean?

That is really the most important question and one of the more difficult ones to answer. The health, what we've been able to find so far, is not very good. It's not what I hoped it would be. When we look at water chemistry in our watersheds, we see a significant amount of impairment. We recently added over 100 water bodies to the list of impaired water bodies. It keeps growing.

When we look at the biological integrity of our rivers and streams, as we've done over the last 10 years, about 78 percent of the sites assessed scored poor or very poor. When we look at the biology of the streams, they tell us they're not doing particularly well. It's a question of how we change our activities on land so that we're more protective of water quality.

Is that a failing grade for the county?

I don't think it's a failing grade for the county any more than it is for much of the nation. It is one of those dilemmas. When we do things on land, it has impacts on water quality. We cannot live and do business and have an economy and not have impacts on water quality. We have to manage that dilemma. That's the fundamental mission of the regional board.

Though there's growing evidence of trace amounts of endocrine disruptors, personal care products and drugs in our ocean and waterways, they're not regulated by the state or federal government. Should they be? Or what questions need to be answered first?

They certainly will be regulated. I think we're probably five to 10 years away from seeing real regulation of those products. But the methods for analysis (of those chemicals) are still under development. It's not a matter of taking a jar of water into the lab and analyzing it. For some of these products, we don't have that analytical method yet to use in a regulatory context.

-- Interview conducted and edited by ROB DAVIS

Tire Removal at Border Field State Park

2010-01-06T12:16:00.001-08:00

January 5th was the first of two tire removal projects at Border Field State Park. Many thanks to the volunteers that showed up to help and Chris Peregin and Danielle Litke of the Tijuana Estuary for coordinating the event. The second is this Friday, Jan 8th (Contact Danielle Litke at dlitke@parks.ca.gov or 619-575-3613 x 330 for further info.) Click here for more photos.

TJ River Valley Water Quality Monitoring

2010-01-06T12:08:00.000-08:00

Click here for more pictures from the last testing. Next one is Sat. Jan 16th. Contact Dan@surfridersd.org and adrian.alexander79@gmail.com for more information and to sign up.

Tijuana River Valley residents prepare for second storm

2009-12-23T16:23:00.000-08:00

Click here to see the video

Solving border pollution woes

2009-12-18T09:21:00.000-08:00

Along the U.S.-Mexico border, in the aftermath of the recent massive rainstorm that hit Southern California, is the debris trail — used tires, plastic bottles, plywood, and discarded dolls. It starts in the canyons of Tijuana and ends up along U.S. beaches from Imperial Beach to Coronado, and on the ocean floor. There is no other outlet along the Pacific Coast of North America that sends more plastic, sewage and urban refuse into the ocean than the Tijuana River during a rainstorm.

Thanks to the foresight and advanced planning of agencies working along the border, there has never been a greater effort to reduce the amount of sewage and garbage flowing into the Tijuana River Valley and into the Pacific Ocean. Much more still needs to be done, however, to finally put an end to the devastating flooding and cross-border pollution that plagues the communities and beaches of South County.

A recently dug city of San Diego pilot channel saved ranchers in the Tijuana River Valley from being hit by mudslides caused by the Department of Homeland Security’s massive earthen border barrier. Mayor Jerry Sanders SignOnSanDiego Topics Topics and Councilman Ben Hueso had the foresight to secure emergency permits to save valley homes, farms and ranches from the damage associated with the inexpert earthen border barrier engineering.

One of the growing problems that plagues the Tijuana River Valley after it rains is the glut of thousands of used tires that wash across the border. These tires are imported into Mexico from California by the millions each year. The recent signing of SB-167, sponsored by State Sen. Denise Ducheny, D-San Diego, and signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger SignOnSanDiego Topics Topics will permit the state of California to begin to work with Mexican agencies to develop cost-effective solutions to halt the tidal wave of tires that clogs sewage collector systems, recreational areas, sensitive wetland habitat and eventually ends up in the ocean.

Under the leadership of recently retired Regional Water Board chief John Robertus, the Tijuana River Valley Recovery Team has brought together the multiple government agencies that oversee the valley. Under the recovery team, for the first time these agencies have developed a joint work plan in tune with the needs of South County residents to clean up and restore the Tijuana River Valley. At a recent workshop during a “Green Borders Conference” held at the Tijuana Estuary Visitor’s Center, task force members and University of San Diego staff led an effort to bring residents and government officials from both sides of the border together to make the much needed planning effort one that is truly binational.

There is still much to do. U.S. agencies should support the efforts of the city of Tijuana and the state of Baja California Norte to expand their new system of low-cost sewage treatment and water reclamation plants. At a cost of between $10-15 million each, these plants represent the best hope for stopping the flow of wastewater across the border and into the ocean. Additionally the International Boundary and Water Commission and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency SignOnSanDiego Topics Topics can help Mexico finance efforts to permanently stop the flow of treated sewage into the ocean at the San Antonio de los Buenos site six miles south of the border. That wastewater way makes its way north to Imperial Beach during the spring and summer south-swell and south-wind season.

Ultimately, agencies and elected officials will have to be even more creative and visionary if we are to solve the most pressing environmental problem in California and along the entire U. S-Mexico border. They should look north to efforts in Los Angeles to make the concrete and garbage-laden Los Angeles River more of a natural waterway. Cross-border engineers need to apply a resource conservation ethic to managing the Tijuana River watershed. The concrete Tijuana River in Mexico should be restored into a revitalized urban green space and waterway that integrates the need for flood control, pollution reduction and creating more desperately needed recreational space for Tijuana residents.

After all, on a sunny morning before winter rains hit, there is no more stunning location in San Diego County than the mouth of the Tijuana River. The river mouth is where I often surf beautiful waves with my two sons, lifelong friends, leopard sharks and a resident pod of bottlenose dolphins. That piece of our wild coastline, and the watershed that gives it life, are surely worth restoring and preserving to benefit generations to come in both Mexico and the United States.

By Serge Dedina

Farmers, ranchers assess damage after rains

2009-12-18T09:17:00.001-08:00

SOUTH COUNTY — As the Tijuana River Valley dries out during a respite from two late-fall storms, city officials and border-area farmers and ranchers are assessing the damage.

Last weekend’s storm added to the pools of water, mud and debris in the river valley lingering from a Dec. 7 storm. That downpour was one of San Diego’s heaviest in years, dropping record-setting amounts of rain throughout the county. Fortunately, it wasn’t a repeat of last December’s devastating flooding from moderate rain that resulted in ruined crops, hay, equipment and the deaths of livestock.

Most people escaped without much damage from the most recent storms and said it could have been worse. They credited the city of San Diego for clearing trash and vegetation from clogged flood-control channels and preventing a repeat of last year. City crews also dredged sediment, which flowed down a large earthen berm recently built by the federal government.

However, at least a few locals say they suffered damage to fields and are losing money on property that can’t be rented while under water. Both say flooding from the recent storms came from a “pilot channel” off Hollister Street near Monument Road that breached its berm. City officials have not yet cleared out that section.

Wide stretches of the Kimzey Ranch on Hollister Street at Monument Road, including stables and pens where four horses and nearly a dozen goats drowned last December, were under about a half-foot of water or filled with mud this week.

“It wouldn’t have happened if the city would have cleaned the pilot channel out first,” said rancher Dick Tynan, who is losing about $2,600 per month in rent on land that’s “mucky.”

Farmer David Egger, who is suing the city for damages from last year’s flooding, said 10 acres of topsoil were ruined by Dec. 7 flooding. He estimates the loss at up to $100,000.

“Without the pilot channel cleaned out, it backs up and gets higher and higher and gets to a point where it goes over the top of those berms,” Egger said.

City crews began clearing out Tijuana River Valley channels in October after receiving emergency permits from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers SignOnSanDiego Topics Topics.

Tony Heinrichs, director of the city’s Storm Water Department, said before the early-December storms, crews had been working seven days a week to clear out the 1,600-foot Smuggler’s Gulch flood-control channel. He said they had nearly completed the western portion of the 5,400-foot pilot channel but still must complete the eastern side.

“Had the rains not come, we thought by the end of this month we’d be finished,” Heinrichs said. “But now we have to wait a few days to dry out. If we have a week’s worth of good weather, we’ll be able to get back out there definitely by next week.”

Heinrichs said city crews’ top priority will be to clear the rest of the pilot channel and the sediment from Smuggler’s Gulch.

Horse owner Kim Warriner and her husband, Kirk Coles, checked out the Smuggler’s Gulch channel last week. It sits below an earthen berm made from 1.5 million cubic yards of dirt, the site of a new border fence. Homeland Security waived federal and state laws for the fence construction last year, including for drainage and erosion controls.

“This was 10 feet deep,” Warriner said. “Now, it looks like it’s been filled with 4 feet of sediment.”

The National Weather Service SignOnSanDiego Topics Topics expects warm, dry conditions through at least Sunday. Long-range forecasters believe that a wet season is likely because of the emergence of El Niño conditions in the central Pacific. The heaviest rains may come in February or March.

Heinrichs said getting the work done quickly is the city’s goal. The emergency permit expires Feb. 15.

By Janine Zúñiga, UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

A Tire Runs Through It

2009-12-08T09:52:00.000-08:00

Beneath a bridge on Dairy Mart Road in the Tijuana River Valley, a lonely soccer ball races by, tumbling end over end with the flow of the river. It's made a quick journey across the border today and within moments, will disappear behind a group of trees and high weeds.

It's lonely now, but it won't be for long. Coming right behind it is a two-liter Coca-Cola bottle -- then a tire, a jar of whey protein supplement, a piece of Styrofoam and a mattress.

They're all headed north. On this rainy day, when downpours fall across Tijuana, too, the water awakens dormant litter that's been tossed aside in Mexico.

Eventually, when the water recedes and the flooding signs are put back on the side of the road, the magnitude of the litter will be clear. In January, reporter Rob Davis and I visited the Tijuana River Valley to see the impact that hard downpours have on the area.

Mounds of trash consumed a once clean valley. At the time, Davis put it this way:

A mile north of the border fence, Mexico's garbage stands five feet high in places, a pointillistic rainbow made of plastics. Royal blue oil containers. Green soda two-liters. Lavender fabric softener bottles.
There, in the Tijuana River basin, a wide channel that serves as the main drainage basin for Tijuana's storm water runoff, a stack of garbage stretches almost a quarter-mile long. The plastic bottles have washed across the border and gotten stuck in plain sight.

Monday, nearly a year after photographing the aftermath, I waded through the mud and pouring rain to see firsthand how the trash arrived.

At first glance, the garbage flow seemed unremarkable. An old doll here, a paper plate there. But then, clusters of plastic bottles came past. Within a 10-minute span, at least 20 tires floated through the cross-border canyon called Smuggler's Gulch.

The slow trickle of litter adds up. But the scale of the problem won't be as clear until the water dries up. Then the job can begin -- yet again -- to clean up the valley that can't escape the rain.

-- SAM HODGSON

Click here for more photos.

Scientists take aim at cigarettes

2009-11-10T08:36:00.000-08:00

CIGARETTE BUTTS

They have two parts: a plastic filter and the remnants of a smoked cigarette.

They’re considered the No. 1 littered item in the world, and more than 1 million are collected annually in beach cleanups nationwide.

They’re targeted by groups trying to raise cigarette taxes for more litter-control projects.

They’re toxic to fish.

Source: cigwaste.org

Cigarettes don’t just kill people, they also kill fish.

So said San Diego State University researchers who are trying to build a case for labeling cigarette butts as toxic hazardous waste. That tag would prompt more rules to reduce their presence in the environment, though the bigger effect may be in public perception.

The San Diego scientists will present their conclusions today at the 137th annual meeting of the American Public Health Association in Philadelphia. They have submitted their results for publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

“It’s another way of looking at cigarettes as a societal hazard,” said Tom Novotny, a professor of public health at SDSU. “If we reframe the butts as toxic hazardous waste, that adds another opportunity to change the social acceptability of smoking.”

Robert Best, regional director of the smokers’ rights group Citizens Freedom Alliance in Ventura County, is skeptical.

“This is just another attack on smokers and an attack on the entire tobacco industry, including farmers and distributors, in the midst of an economic crisis,” Best said. “We already have littering laws in the state of California that say you cannot throw any trash out on the ground or in the waterways.”

In recent years, community and health activists have won bans on smoking at beaches from California to New Jersey. Lawmakers acted partly out of concern about secondhand smoke and partly to reduce the amount of cigarette butts discarded at parks and other places. In July, San Francisco added a 20-cent fee to each pack of cigarettes to cover the cost of collecting spent smokes.

Novotny and his collaborators in the Cigarette Butt Pollution Project want more controls on what they call the most littered object on Earth. Trillions of cigarettes are smoked worldwide each year, and more than 1 million butts are collected annually during coastal cleanups in the United States, according to the project.

Novotny wondered about the butts’ effects on waterways. He turned to Rick Gersberg, a professor of public health at SDSU who specializes in water pollution.

Gersberg, a former smoker, was intrigued enough to review the scientific literature and determine that there were no published studies addressing cigarette butts and fish.

It’s different “if I pour a little vial of carcinogenic chemicals on the street — just a tiny amount,” Gersberg said. “(But if) hundreds of thousands of people were doing so many times a day, wouldn’t someone worry about it? Probably so.”

Gersberg helped design an experiment in which he let smoked filters soak in containers of water for 24 hours. Then he put fish in the polluted water and monitored them for five days, part of what he called a standard hazard assessment.

Half the fish died in both salt and fresh water, Gersberg said.

The bigger question is whether cigarettes have a similar effect in the real world — something that hasn’t been evaluated.

“We’d like to look at the chemicals that are actually causing the toxicity and if they are accumulating in marine life,” Gersberg said.

The $110,000 study on cigarette butts included policy analysis and biological research. It was funded by the California Tobacco Related Disease Research Program, a University of California effort to reduce the health and economic costs of tobacco use.

At UC San Francisco’s tobacco-control center, Richard Barnes has offered ideas for reducing cigarette butt litter such as levying new taxes on tobacco products to pay for litter collection, strengthening penalties for cigarette litter and suing tobacco companies to recover cleanup costs.

The nonprofit Surfrider Foundation is trying a different approach. On Saturday, the group’s San Diego County chapter will hold its sixth annual “Hold Onto Your Butt” awareness program. The event will include demonstrations and giveaways at three beach communities in the region.

The SDSU research gives Surfrider more ammunition. “We have thought for a while that toxic chemicals leach from discarded butts when submerged in water, so it’s good in some ways to see confirmation,” said Bill Hickman from the group’s local chapter.

By Mike Lee

Tijuana Biofilter

2009-11-06T10:22:00.000-08:00

This summer Urban Biofilter joined the Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve and Earth Island Institute’s Restoration Initiative on a bi-national project to restore the Tijuana River Estuary Watershed.

Urban Biofilter hosted a 30-person workshop in the Tijuana neighborhood of San Bernardo to help restore the flow of water to the local river system. As is the case with many of the informal settlements in the area, San Bernardo does not have a centralized sewage treatment system. This means that wastewater from San Bernardo simply drains through the streets to the Tijuana River Estuary, one of the last 24 estuaries remaining in the country. Each side street becomes a tributary to the main street, Calle Amanecer, which eventually flows to the estuary, dramatically impacting the water quality and aquatic ecosystem. These open channels also pose a serious health concern, as a vector for contamination, putting the local people at a greater risk of contracting hepatitis and staph infections, mosquito-borne diseases, and diarrhea.

In the course of the workshop, participants lined the channel with gravel to reduce human exposure to the water, and replanted the surrounding area with locally collected native willows to provide a natural air filter. The group also planted a small pilot crop of local bamboo.

Unlike other restoration groups working in the area, Urban Biofilter brings a holistic approach to restoration and water management. Working with communities who do not have access to municipal wastewater treatment systems to build decentralized waste treatment wetlands and ecological sanitation systems, which have the ability to yield building materials, which are in high demand. Now, Urban Biofilter is hoping to expand this pilot project to address the wastewater infrastructure of the 1.2 million Tijuana residents who live in informal communities.

For more info....urbanbiofilter.org

UCSD-TV "Los Laureles Canyon: Research in Action"

2009-11-03T14:58:00.000-08:00

There may be a border dividing us, but when it comes to the environmental challenges facing Los Laureles, a canyon that crosses the U.S.-Mexico border and spills into the sensitive wetlands of California's Tijuana Estuary, we all must deal with the consequences. That's why researchers from both countries have come together to try to affect change in a place that 65,000 people call home.

UCSD-TV Producer Shannon Bradley, in collaboration with Keith Pezzoli of UCSD's Urban Studies and Planning program, visited the region and met with researchers on both sides of the border who are seeking ways to repair the area's failing infrastructure and stop its waste from flowing down into the estuary, threatening the wildlife that depend on its pristine wetlands for survival. This inspiring story is told in a new UCSD-TV documentary premiering this month. Find out more at www.ucsd.tv/loslaureles

UCSD-TV is available on Time Warner and Cox cable Ch. 135, Time Warner Del Mar Ch. 19, AT&T U-Verse Ch. 99, and UHF (no cable) Ch. 35.

Volunteers Haul 600 Tires, Trash Out Of Tijuana River Valley

2009-10-29T22:51:00.000-07:00

About 300 volunteers from both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border hauled more than six tons of trash out of the Tijuana River Valley last weekend. Volunteers want to help prevent flooding this winter and keep trash from washing out to sea.

Surfers, ranchers, U.S. Navy Seals, students and volunteers from Tijuana pulled around 600 tires out of San Diego's Tijuana River Valley. They filled two 40-foot-long dumpsters with trash.

Ben McCue is with the conservation group Wildcoast that helped organize the clean up. He says the volunteers even dragged out a few refrigerators.

"Everything we hauled out would have been swept down further into the estuary and into the ocean eventually with the next big rain."

Rain washes garbage from Tijuana neighborhoods that don't have garbage collection across the border into the Tijuana River Valley.

The waste combined with sediment blocks drainage channels. Last winter, that caused flooding.

There's worry the newly built border fence could exacerbate flooding this winter by depositing more sediment in drainage channels.

By Amy Isackson

2009 Paddle for Clean Water Video Re-cap

2009-10-29T22:03:00.000-07:00

Click here to check it out.

A Barren Promise at the Border

2009-10-26T05:59:00.000-07:00

Had anyone else built this hillside near the U.S.-Mexico border, it would look nothing like it does. The barren hill would be alive with native plants, the earth would be solidly rooted and not a threat to tumble down into the Tijuana Estuary, a lush, 2,500-acre salt marsh that starts 600 feet away.

But along the newly constructed border fence near the Pacific Ocean in Border Field State Park, inch-thick tan clumps of seeds and mulch still blanket the ground. They haven't been watered, so no plants have grown.

Were it anyone else's project, state regulators would've required irrigation to ensure that plants grew. But the federal government is responsible for the $59 million effort to complete and reinforce 3.5 miles of border fence separating San Diego and Tijuana. The Department of Homeland Security exempted itself from eight federal laws and any related state laws that would have regulated the project's environmental impacts.

Because the project is exempt from the federal Clean Water Act, state water regulators have no jurisdiction.

Homeland Security officials sought the waiver power in 2005 to accelerate fence construction in San Diego and across the Southwest, saying that national security needs trumped environmental concerns. That power has accelerated construction from San Diego to Brownsville, as the agency has waived laws across 550 miles of the border. To date, 633 miles of fence have been built at a cost of $2.4 billion.

The department made the same promise each time it waived laws like the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act: Though we're now exempt from federal and state environmental regulation, we're still committed to the environment.

But as construction continues across the Southwest, the project's impacts in Border Field State Park and in another federal reserve further east raise questions about the sincerity of the government's commitment.

Clay Phillips, the California State Parks superintendent who oversees Border Field and the estuary, said that promise hasn't been fulfilled there. Mitigation of the fence's environmental impacts has "failed miserably," Phillips said.

Phillips worries that winter rains will wash soil off the hills into the nearby estuary he oversees, which is home to several sensitive species and already filling with sediment swept in from Tijuana. Sediment raises the level of the ground, stopping the twice-daily tidal flushing that keeps the wetlands wet.

Army Corps of Engineers contractors completed the fence separating San Diego and Tijuana in July. They filled in the notorious cross-border canyon known as Smuggler's Gulch, added a second layer of steel fencing and built a road for Border Patrol vehicles running parallel to the fence. The gulch, once a deep canyon, is now filled with an earthen berm more than 100 feet tall.

Though native plant seeds were sprayed across the berm and other newly created hillsides in Border Field State Park, Phillips said the federal government never irrigated them. Only a handful of plants grew. Other hills have none.

"They sprayed it (with seed) and hoped for the best," Phillips said. "It was a waste. A token gesture."

A U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokeswoman, Jenny Burke, said the project was built to Caltrans' erosion standards. The agency will "monitor the situation and is considering other actions as required."

John Robertus, executive officer of the San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board, the local water pollution police, said the project doesn't have all the safeguards his agency would've required. He said if the board had jurisdiction, it would've required temporary irrigation to ensure plants grew. Robertus said he, too, is concerned about the project's potential impacts on the estuary.

Fence construction has left a mark on other areas in San Diego County greater than what would've been allowed without the waiver. Further east in the federally protected Otay Mountain Wilderness, a road built along a new four-mile section of fence also left barren hills, said Joyce Schlachter, a wildlife biologist with the federal Bureau of Land Management, which oversees the area.

"When we get any rain, it's going to be an erosion nightmare," Schlachter said. Seeds have been sprayed there, too, but not watered, she said. No plants have grown.

The impacts on Otay Mountain stretch beyond possible erosion. Phalanxes of dump trucks going to work on the fence have rumbled up and down a dirt road, spreading clouds of dust as far as 30 feet away, blanketing Tecate cypress, a rare tree found only on three peaks in San Diego County. (Its range extends into Mexico.) The tree, a bushy evergreen, provides food for the Thorne's hairstreak butterfly, a rare thumbnail-sized insect that feeds only on the cypress and that has been suffering from too-frequent fires on the mountain.

Construction crews cut down more than 100 cypress that survived a massive 2003 wildfire to widen an existing road for construction vehicles, Schlachter said.

If laws hadn't been waived, the Bureau would have required construction crews to minimize their impact on the trees, she said. Homeland Security officials consulted with the Bureau, Schlachter said, then didn't follow all of its advice.

"When it came right down to it, they did what they wanted to do," Schlachter said. "And they knew they couldn't be stopped. We did not have control over it."

Kathy Williams, a San Diego State biology professor studying the butterfly, said the dust poses "potentially a really serious problem" for the Thorne's hairstreak and the cypress.

Williams has reared a small number of Thorne's caterpillars on both dusty and clean leaves in her laboratory. Results from the on-going experiment so far indicate that more caterpillars survived on clean leaves, she said.

Before construction began last year, Williams said the roadside habitat looked much healthier. She saw more butterflies last year than she did this year, though she noted that population sizes vary annually.

"Now it's obviously degraded habitat," she said, noting that rainfall may help clean the leaves. "The appearance of the quality of the site is strikingly different."

Burke, the Customs and Border Protection spokeswoman, said the agency consulted with U.S. Fish and Wildlife officials about the Otay project and routinely wets the road to keep dust down. She said Customs and Border Protection will monitor the dust and maintain the roads "to their construction standard," and could periodically apply "dust-control agents," which include sap.

Those efforts haven't always worked well. Sap was sprayed on trees beyond the road's edge, Schlachter said. Dust stuck on top of the sap, she said, making the trees' survival questionable. "They're creating more risk to the plants," she said. "That's an issue."

On at least one occasion, crews didn't water the road -- even though they had the necessary equipment on hand. One morning in June, a water truck escorted dump trucks to the work site but didn't spray any water. As the trucks wound through the wilderness past Tecate cypress, choking clouds of dust followed.

U.S. Rep. Susan Davis, D-San Diego, whose district includes Border Field State Park, said in a statement that she wants more done immediately to address the fence's environmental impacts.

"Many people, including myself, expressed strong concerns about the border fence and the implications of exempting the construction of the fence from environmental laws," Davis said. "Unfortunately, those concerns are becoming a reality. I hope the Department of Homeland Security will continue to work with Congress and local officials in finding an immediate solution and work toward a permanent one."

A representative of an environmental group that opposed the fence because of concerns about erosion said its construction reinforced the reasons for his opposition. Jim Peugh, conservation chairman of the San Diego Audubon Society, said he hopes the fence serves as an example of why environmental laws should never be waived.

"The idea of building something without seeing how you're going to maintain it -- it's just going to fail," Peugh said. "That's an insane thing to do. And this project proves that beyond a doubt."

By Rob Davis

WiLDCOAST Leads First Ever Bi-National Cleanup of San Diego's Tijuana River Valley

2009-10-22T11:10:00.001-07:00

What:
WiLDCOAST, Tijuana Calidad de Vida, and Surfrider are organizing volunteers and organizations from both sides of the border to clean-up the Tijuana River Valley before the first rain event flushes plastics, tires, and trash into the ocean.

Why:
Every winter San Diego's Tijuana River Valley is inundated with trash carried by the bi-national Tijuana River. Each rain event brings tons of ocean-bound trash and solid waste through the valley and the protected Tijuana Estuary. This poses serious environmental, health, and economic threats to our region. The event's message is clear: the only way to clean-up the Tijuana River is through cross-border collaboration.

Who:
Families, students, ranchers, surfers, Navy Seals, farmers and environmentalists from both sides of the San Diego-Tijuana border ranging in age from 7 to 77 will be working side-by-side to clean-up the Tijuana River Valley by hand.

When:
9 am - 12pm on Saturday, October 24th, 2009 (The event is also part of the International Day of Climate Action and is one of 3000 events across 159 countries to protect our environment and take a stand for a safe climate future.)

Where:
2220 Dairy Mart Rd. - West of the Dairy Mart Bridge

Directions:
Take Interstate 5 South exit on Dairy Mart Rd; Make a right onto Dairy Mart Rd; Continue straight on Dairy, pass Camino de la Plaza; Make a right onto first dirt road visible on right hand side.

Great Waves and Big Crowd for WiLDCOAST's 6th Annual Dempsey Ocean Festival and Surf Contest

2009-10-22T09:23:00.001-07:00

With more than 180 participants, the 6th Annual WiLDCOAST Dempsey Holder Memorial Ocean Festival and Surf Contest was the largest surfing competition ever held in South San Diego County. On Sunday October 18 on the south side of the Imperial Beach Pier, more than 500 spectators lined the beach to watch surfers from all over San Diego County surf beautiful 2-4' waves.

"We were absolutely stunned by the record number of participants who turned out and the amazing Aloha spirit of the crowd," said Serge Dedina, Executive Director of WiLDCOAST. "This was by far the most successful event we've run so far. And we were blown away by the spirit of giving by the County of San Diego and Billabong and by community members and businesses who sponsored dozens of children who able to participate free of charge."

The annual event was made possible by support from Billabong, whose CEO Paul Naude also donated a beautiful Rusty surfboard. A County of San Diego Community Enhancement Grant was made possible thanks to the support of County Supervisor Greg Cox who made an appearance to meet contest participants. Additional major sponsors included TNT Surfboards, Novak Surfboard Designs, Morey Boogie, Pacific Realty, Emerald City Boarding Source, Adept Process Services and Alan Cunniff Construction. Additional supporters included Katie's Coffee, Cowabunga, Surf Hut, Oakley, Volcom, Osiris, GoPro, and many others.

In a competition presided over by Dempsey's son and honorary event chairman Peter Holder, surfers battled it out in the mixed swell sets that poured in all morning. Groms and adults surfed the clean morning conditions Although the wind turned less favorable in the afternoon; competitors were not deterred from ripping to the top in each of the 50 heats that went down on Sunday.

An early stand out was El Cajon's Vito Roccoforte who, despite not advancing his Junior Men's heat, nearly pulled a radical reverse on a south site left-hander. In the Junior Men's final, Mason Darleux dropped a 7 with two powerful forehand cracks on a pier bowl right but it wasn't enough to catch Jay Christenson who also won the Boys division final. Former Women's Longboard World Champ, Kristy Murphy, made two finals; winning the women's division and placing 5th in the Open SUP. Vincent Claunch was a standout in the Menehune Boys Expression Session with stylish lip blasts and fin hucks. Mike Gillard made three finals, placing 2nd in the Masters, 1st in the Longboard and 3rd in the SUP. Drew Erichson won the stacked bodyboard division and Jahvin Bowman took home the top rated amateur award and a year sponsorship with Morey Boogie. Erik Leksell won the top rated youth award and a slew of gear from Morey and Churchill.

This year the Dempsey highlighted the progress that has been made along the U.S.-Mexico border to clean up the coast. With a new sewage treatment plant under construction on the U.S. side of the border, three new sewage plants operating in the Tijuana-Rosarito Beach region, and the signing of legislation by Governor Schwarzenegger to fund cleaning up Tijuana, the WiLDCOAST "Clean Water Now" campaign has made a significant contribution to protecting our coast and ocean.

One of the highlights of the event that demonstrated the true Aloha Spirit of the Dempsey came during the awards ceremony, when young men's standout Jay Christenson donated one of two surfboards he had won to Imperial Beach grom Robert Tschackert a longtime WiLDCOAST volunteer. "I was blown away by Jay's generous spirit," said WiLDCOAST staffer and WQS competitor Zach Plopper. "He really showed us why the Dempsey is more than just a surfing event but a festival to celebrate our positive community-based coast and ocean conservation movement."

Effort to Block Emergency Cleanup of Tijuana River Valley Fails

2009-10-16T12:29:00.000-07:00

SAN DIEGO - An effort to halt the city's emergency work to clear clogged flood control channels in the Tijuana River Valley to prevent flooding in advance of winter rains was rejected today by a judge.

San Diego Superior Court Judge Timothy Taylor denied a temporary restraining order sought in conjunction with a lawsuit by attorney Cory Briggs, who argued the project didn't comply with California's environmental laws.

At a morning hearing, Taylor found that the flood control project met an exemption for emergencies in state environmental law, according to Alex Roth, a spokesman for Mayor Jerry Sanders.

Sanders said he was "gratified" by the judge's decision.

"Last year, with just two inches of rain, we had a very dangerous situation where we lost livestock and nearly lost some of the ranchers down there," Sanders said.

"If it hadn't been for our swift water rescue team, there probably would have been loss of life, and we want to avoid that this year," he said. "That's why we have an emergency situation."

Last week, work began to remove trash, debris, sediment and overgrown vegetation from clogged flood control channels in the Tijuana River Valley. The work is expected to be completed by Feb. 15.

The San Diego City Council declared a state of emergency for the Tijuana River Valley last month and authorized $4.4 million in stormwater funds to dredge the drainage channels.

Last winter, floods inundated the Tijuana River Valley with contaminated water, caused substantial property damage and contributed to the death of horses and other livestock.

Law firm seeks to stop cleanup of Tijuana River Valley

2009-10-15T11:50:00.000-07:00

SOUTH COUNTY – A law firm suing the city for declaring a state of emergency in the Tijuana River Valley and authorizing the removal of tons of debris will seek a temporary restraining order Thursday to stop the work.

Cleanup began last week on the river's flood-control channels, which are filled with sediment and trash after years of accumulation. The work is aimed at preventing a repeat of last December's devastating floods.

The suit alleges that the project did not constitute an emergency under San Diego's municipal codes and that the sole-source contracts awarded for the cleanup work violated city law.

Attorney Mekaela Gladden, on behalf of San Diegans for Open Government, notified the city Wednesday that the group would be asking a judge to stop the cleanup while its Sept. 17 lawsuit is being decided.

San Diego spokesman Alex Roth said the lawsuit is baseless. He said a provision in state environmental law contains an exemption for emergencies.

Gladden works for Briggs Law Corp., whose owner, Cory Briggs, has sued to stop the $21 million cruise-ship terminal at Broadway Pier and the redevelopment of the Navy's downtown San Diego headquarters.

Neither Gladden nor Briggs returned a call for comment. Others were dismayed by the suit.

“It's inconceivable that special interests would oppose clearing the original river channel, damning nearby properties to certain destruction and likely loss of life,” said John Gabaldon, president of the Tijuana River Valley Equestrian Association.

By Janine Zúñiga

Union-Tribune Staff Writer

Bare Dirt Along New Border Fence A Flood Worry

2009-10-14T12:20:00.000-07:00

State parks officials are worried the federal government's failure to grow plants on slopes where it built new sections of the border fence could mean floods on both sides of the US Mexico border this rainy season. Smuggler's Gulch is a major area of concern.

About four years ago, the US federal government waived all environmental laws along the US Mexico border in order to build the border fence. The head of the Department of Homeland Security promised, even so, the government would control erosion to protect the Tijuana River Valley and estuary.

Clay Phillips is with the California Parks Department and manages the estuary reserve. He says the bare slopes that run the length of the new fence construction are a stark contrast to the promise.

"You wouldn't find a Jack In the Box where they're adding a parking lot that would be left in this condition."

The federal government has tried to grow plants on the slopes to control erosion without success. Phillips says moderate rain will erode the bare dirt. That could clog the Tijuana Estuary and cause floods in Tijuana and San Diego.

By Amy Isackson

Imperial Beach group helps pass tire bill

2009-10-13T12:20:00.001-07:00

IMPERIAL BEACH — Environmentalists praised Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger for signing a bill Sunday that lets the state's solid waste agency spend money on projects in Mexico aimed at reducing the number of old tires polluting the border area.

Sen. Denise Ducheny, D-San Diego, sponsored Senate Bill 167 to address the environmental hazards created by thousands of used tires that wash into San Diego County during storms. The legislation frees up fees collected for tire recycling so they can fund programs designed to keep tires in Mexico from entering California's waste stream.

“(It) will allow California to work upstream in Tijuana, at the root of the problem, to stop the flow of used tires,” said Ben McCue of the conservation group WiLDCOAST in Imperial Beach. “This is a victory for the environment and a great deal for California taxpayers.”

McCue helped write the bill as part of a graduate school program at the University of San Diego. He and his classmates lobbied for its passage in Sacramento.

By Mike Lee

Union-Tribune Staff Writer

Crews clean clogged Tijuana River channels

2009-10-11T12:27:00.000-07:00

TIJUANA RIVER VALLEY – Emergency permits in hand, crews are cleaning out clogged Tijuana River channels that in December caused nearby ranches and farms to flood and animals to drown.

The San Diego City Council last month declared a local state of emergency for the river valley, which allowed the city to spend up to $4.4 million to clean out the river and channels choked with sediment, vegetation and debris.

But the work couldn't begin until the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers approved the cleanup plan.

That approval came this week.

“I'm confident the work will make a difference,” said Mayor Jerry Sanders Friday at a news conference Friday in the river valley where horses and goats drowned. “This is a short-term solution. We're working on a long-term solution with a master clean-up plan. We'll take care of it annually.”

Last December, storms caused the river and channels to overflow. Some blamed the clogged river and channels on a border fence built along a large earthen berm that lacks drainage and erosion controls. Other blamed a combination of debris and trash from Mexico and sediment from the fence.

River-valley horse and property owners say with the rainy season approaching, they are relieved the work has begun.

“It's about time,” said ranch owner Dick Tynan. “It's way past due.”

By Janine Zúñiga UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

Water exec is leaving legacy of teamwork

2009-10-04T11:39:00.000-07:00

Agency alliance works to clean Tijuana River

As the San Diego region's top water cop walked through the Denver airport in December, his eye caught a disturbing photo at the newsstand. Front pages from around the country showed a woman chest-deep in muddy water leading a horse to higher ground.

“I thought, ‘I know exactly where that is,’ ” said John Robertus, executive officer of the San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board. “That kind of hit home.”

The photo was taken in the Tijuana River Valley, the often-neglected southwest corner of San Diego County that for more than 70 years has been fouled by raw sewage, garbage and mud when rains cause the clogged waterway to flood. Homes, horse ranches and farms dot the largely undeveloped area.

That moment in the airport cemented a mission now dominating the final months of Robertus' 14-year tenure with the water board.

Robertus, who will retire in December, has forged an alliance of more than 30 agencies focused on fixing some of the most persistent problems with the county's most polluted river.

Regional environmental leaders credit him with crafting a unified vision for restoring the watershed, using his regulator's badge to make people listen and helping to attract more than $2 million in grants during recent months from state agencies.

“John is really the visionary on this,” said Carl Nettleton, a San Diego-based consultant on public policy and business issues and co-chairman — along with Robertus — of the Tijuana River Valley Recovery Team.

“We have always said, ‘It's not our trash. It's not our sediment. It's coming from the other side of the border. Shouldn't folks there do that?’ ” Nettleton said. “The (Robertus) approach is, ‘That would be great, but what could we do on this side?’ ”

The U.S. portion of the Tijuana River runs about six miles from near the San Ysidro port of entry to the Pacific Ocean south of Imperial Beach. Even in its degraded state, the surrounding greenbelt is widely viewed as an environmental prize because it's one of the largest intact estuaries in California.

The recovery team is working to intercept pollutants by installing trash screens, sediment collection basins and garbage-transfer stations. It also plans to remove decades of built-up silt and garbage so the estuary can function as it did before it became clogged.

Those projects will complement efforts made in recent years to improve sewage control and treatment on both sides of the border.

In August, Mexican officials celebrated the addition of wastewater pumps, pipes and processing plants in Tijuana. Meanwhile, the U.S. section of the International Boundary and Water Commission is expanding its sewage-treatment facility in San Ysidro, which handles wet-weather flows from the Tijuana River.

The first decade of the recovery team's work is expected to cost at least $100 million — similar to the projected bill for a major cleanup of tainted sediment in San Diego Bay. Maintenance projects would continue indefinitely.

Robertus said the federal government should cover the bulk of the tab because most of the pollution problem comes from Mexico and it's made worse by the United States creating steep, erosion-prone hillsides for the border fence.

The need for upgrades in the valley is clear.

“If you come here after the first big rain (of the season), it looks like snow in those trees as far as the eye can see because of plastic bottles,” said Clay Phillips, a top State Parks official in the river valley.

The area's residents and visitors fear not only more property damage from floods, but also the chances of a public-health emergency from diseases carried in the muddy flows.

“The issues are so complex that nobody has really figured out a way to untangle them,” said John Gabaldon, president of the Tijuana River Valley Equestrian Association. “Without someone as strong as John Robertus in there, I see it falling back into becoming impenetrable.”

For Robertus, 63, the Tijuana River initiative caps a lengthy tenure atop one of the region's most powerful agencies. The board is among nine similar panels statewide that regulate water pollution.

Robertus' no-nonsense approach makes him an archetypal executive officer, said John Lormon, an attorney for Ametek, which recently was fined by the regional water board. “He's not political. He's about water quality.”

Lormon was on the agency's governing panel in 1995 when it hired Robertus, who had just left Camp Pendleton after a 28-year career with the Marine Corps.

In his 20s, Robertus was immersed in studying the Clean Water Act at the U.S. Army Engineer School at Fort Belvoir, Va., where his class was among the first to get training in the 1972 law.

He admired the regional water board's work over the decades and saw the executive-officer position as a natural fit for his technical expertise along with his love of rivers, lakes and streams.

“As an engineer, I was trained in the art of development. When you encountered water, you could improve it — fill it in and get rid of it,” Robertus said. “I now believe that if you encounter a water body that is natural . . . then leave it alone. It's a rare, valuable asset.”

Robertus understands the Tijuana River Valley's problems better than most. His agency sued the federal government in 2001 to improve sewage treatment at the wastewater plant in San Ysidro, which doesn't meet Clean Water Act standards.

The lawsuit eventually prompted the federal government to give $88 million for various plant improvements that started in January.

Buoyed by that success, Robertus leveraged his long list of contacts to grab the attention of officials involved in the valley.

“I said, ‘Come to these meetings or I am going to issue a cleanup and abatement order,’ ” Robertus said. “They all came.”

By early this year, he met with San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders, the head of a U.S.-Mexico water commission, and representatives from congressional offices, environmental groups and local universities.

Leaders from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, California State Parks, San Diego County and other agencies meet monthly as part of the river recovery team.

Many of the groups had spent years addressing pieces of the valley's pollution problem without much coordination. They sometimes competed for money. Now, they help each other — something Phillips called the “first huge practical benefit” of the alliance.

The team's emerging plan focuses on three major areas of pollution: the main channel of the Tijuana River, a canyon called Smuggler's Gulch and another known as Goat Canyon.

Proposed fixes include placing screens along the international border to stop trash from clogging the valley's lower reaches. Those devices would be complemented by basins designed to collect sediment where it can be removed quickly.

In addition, scientists are trying to quantify the volume of sediment and trash deposited over the decades before they begin removal. They also are looking for places where existing sediment can be transferred — perhaps to the nearby shoreline — for relatively little cost.

Besides the domestic projects, the recovery team is working with agencies in Mexico to minimize and capture pollutants at their origin.

Robertus said he is confident that momentum for the coordinated cleanup strategy will continue after he retires.

“I intend to bring my grandkids down there some day, and I want them to see the unspoiled beach, the coastal river and the estuary” free of debris, he said.

By Mike Lee

Union-Tribune Staff Writer

Pink Waves Roll in Imperial Beach

2009-10-02T22:01:00.000-07:00

See the Following Flow of Pollutants post from Sept 22 for more info and click here to check out the colorful surf.

North American Development Bank signs US$22 million loan for water and wastewater works in Tijuana, Baja California

2009-09-29T11:30:00.000-07:00

San Antonio, Texas – The North American Development Bank (NADB) and the Tijuana water utility, Comisión de Servicios Públicos de Tijuana (CESPT), have signed a loan agreement for up to $300 million pesos (currently valued at about US$22.07 million) for the expansion of the water and wastewater systems in the cities of Tijuana and Playas de Rosarito, Baja California.

The loan proceeds will be used for the first phase of the US$37.75 million project, which includes the construction of two water storage tanks with a total capacity of 2.4 million gallons and the installation of water distribution and sanitary sewer lines in areas currently without service in Tijuana. Water service will be provided to four subdivisions, benefiting 30,000 residents, while sewer service will be provided 46,300 residents in five subdivisions.

The project was certified by the Border Environment Cooperation Commission (BECC) on July 21, 2009, and upon completion will reduce environmental and health hazards associated with inadequate drinking water services and sewage disposal, thus providing a cleaner, healthier environment for local residents.

In addition to this project, NADB is supporting four other wastewater projects in Tijuana, which represent a total investment of US$79.8 million and will benefit an estimated 601, 000 residents by providing adequate wastewater collection and disposal services. As a result, approximately 20.88 million gallons of sewage a day is being properly treated prior to discharge into the Tijuana River and/or Pacific Ocean, which also benefits the southern California coastline.

Bank participation in all five projects consists of US$36.9 million in grants through its Border Environment Infrastructure Fund (BEIF), which operates with funding from the U.S. Environmental Protection (EPA), as well as US$35.5 million in loans.

“Over the 15 years the Bank has been in business, CESPT has shown itself to be a sound utility, committed to developing water and wastewater infrastructure befitting a city of the size of Tijuana” stated NADB Managing Director Jorge Garcés.

NADB is currently helping finance 129 environmental infrastructure projects throughout the U.S.-Mexico border region with almost US$982.9 million in loans and grants.

Following the flow of pollutants

2009-09-22T12:23:00.000-07:00

Ocean-monitoring project will help researchers to predict beach closures

IMPERIAL BEACH – Dozens of scientists, engineers and volunteers in wet suits and immersed in 67-degree water are setting up sensitive equipment along Imperial Beach's shoreline to better understand water pollution.

The work is part of a $1.5 million experiment that may help manage beach closures along the entire California coast.

Scientists with UCSD's Scripps Institution of Oceanography say the goal of the Imperial Beach Pollutant Transport and Dilution Experiment is to track how pollutants are moved by waves, currents and tides.

On Monday, investigators dropped floating devices called drifters, which move like dye, into the Pacific Ocean. Dye testing is set to begin Monday.

Drifters and dye both simulate pollution. However, drifters provide better data for how fast pollutants spread along the shore while dye better monitors cross-shore movement.

The drifters and nontoxic dye will be released from the Tijuana River to just north of the Imperial Beach city limit, depending on the swell and other conditions.

Scientists say the markers will be carried by currents and form a plume as they head toward the sensors. Measurements of waves, current, depth and the dye will track the rate at which the plume widens and dilutes.

Falk Feddersen, one of three principal investigators and a Scripps scientist, said researchers hope to have the raw data analyzed so it can be presented in February at the 2010 Ocean Sciences Meeting in Portland.

“We will have a much better understanding of how pollutants get diluted in the water and how quickly they are transported if there's a spill or sewage in the surf zone,” Feddersen said.

Feddersen said a similar experiment in Huntington Beach in 2006 helped Scripps scientists improve sampling techniques but was limited in scope. This time, he said, “we're really going to dial it in.”

Feddersen said if pollutant movement is better understood, a model can be created to provide water-quality updates for ocean users. He said the updates could be made available online, much as current wave conditions are.

Six tripods holding sensors and meters sit anchored in the water off Ebony Avenue, marked by tall poles topped with colorful flags.

Researchers installed more equipment in the water and on the beach that will help gather and relay the information to Scripps hourly. Data will be collected for about one month. The experiment will run through Oct. 31.

The study was designed for dry-weather conditions when the Tijuana River flow is light and beach use is heavy. Imperial Beach was selected for its long, straight coastline and history of water pollution when it rains.

All-terrain vehicles will be used to survey the beach and specially equipped Jet Skis will collect data offshore. Warning signs are posted.

The study was funded by the National Science Foundation, California Department of Boating and Waterways, Office of Naval Research and California Sea Grant.

Feddersen said two recent meetings to discuss the study brought out locals who asked tough questions.

Ben McCue, a program manager at Wildcoast, an Imperial Beach-based conservation group, said he appreciates that Scripps reached out.

“This will give us one more tool to understand when the water is clean and when it is not,” McCue said. “The more people know, the better.”

By Janine Zúñiga

Union-Tribune Staff Writer

Council could declare emergency for area prone to flooding

2009-09-13T08:19:00.001-07:00

TIJUANA RIVER VALLEY — The San Diego City Council on Tuesday will consider declaring a local state of emergency for the Tijuana River Valley due to the possibility of severe flooding that could create “an imminent threat to life and property.”

Under the declaration, city officials could spend up to $4.4 million in storm-water funds to excavate several of the river's clogged drainage channels this month in advance of the rainy season.

In December, four horses and nearly a dozen goats drowned as moderate storms caused water to overflow the river and channels that were choked with sediment, vegetation and debris. Adding urgency is a prediction of El Niño conditions that could mean a wet winter for San Diego.

“We know based on what happened last winter that if the same or worse storms happen, there is a potential for a lot more flooding,” said Tony Heinrichs, director of the city's Storm Water Department. “We want to get in there now and dispose of the sediment so the flood-control channels operate as flood-control channels.”

John Gabaldon, president of the Tijuana River Valley Equestrian Association, said his group is pleased with the proposal.

“It's necessary, and if it passes, it will prevent devastation and the loss of some very vibrant businesses down there,” Gabaldon said.

Heinrichs said a recently completed portion of a U.S. Department of Homeland Security border fence in an area known as Smuggler's Gulch greatly changed the hydrology of the area just north of the U.S.-Mexico border.

The valley routinely gets tons of trash and debris when it rains, but Heinrichs said the project allowed more sediment to clog nearby storm-drain channels.

“We also believe the water flow itself increased in velocity, which causes scouring action and leads to potential flooding problems,” he said.

Homeland Security waived federal and state laws for the fence construction, including for drainage and erosion controls.

Heinrichs said that while the city seeks the emergency declaration, it also is asking regulatory agencies to expedite emergency cleanup permits.

The city also will consider asking Homeland Security officials Tuesday to affirm that the order waiving all laws for the fence project extends to city flood-control work in the area. That would help streamline the permitting process, Heinrichs said.

On Wednesday, Mayor Jerry Sanders and Councilman Ben Hueso met in Washington, D.C., with Homeland Security and Army Corps of Engineers representatives. Mayoral spokesman Darren Pudgil said the meetings were productive, with both agencies pledging to work “to improve the situation in the valley.”

Heinrichs said there is a long-term plan to have the Army Corps conduct studies of Tijuana River Valley flooding issues that would lead to improvement projects to stop the annual deluge of trash and debris.

Finally, the city has been working for two years on a multiyear master cleanup permit that would allow the work to proceed year-round as needed. The master permit involves all flood-prone areas of the city.

The city expects to receive the permit by the end of the year. However, Tijuana River Valley horse owners and farmers have complained that would be too late. The river and some channels were not cleared after December's rains and remain clogged.

Dick Tynan, who owns Kimzey Ranch on Hollister Street and Monument Road, where many of the animals drowned, said he has heard residents threatening litigation if they lose livestock and crops again.

“A lawsuit could be possible,” Tynan said. “That is very, very likely. Two inches of rain will kill this valley if it's not cleaned up.”

Heinrichs said he is hopeful that council members will declare the local emergency.

“We want to do what we can to protect life and property,” he said. “When you actually have horses and goats drown and the (county's) Swiftwater Rescue Team saving people and animals, it's fresh in people's memories.”

By Janine Zúñiga

Union-Tribune Staff Writer

Coastal Clean Up Day!

2009-09-10T22:13:00.000-07:00

Saturday, September 19th 9am-12pm
There will be clean up sites all over San Diego County and the Tijuana River Citizens’ Council will be hosting a site near the Dairy Mart bridge in Imperial Beach. Please join us at this location if you can, it’s definitely an area that needs the help. Check out cleanupday.org/cleanupsites.htm?ID=E&ID2=170 for details and to register.

Researchers Study Ocean Pollution Off Imperial Beach

2009-09-09T10:03:00.000-07:00

SAN DIEGO — UC San Diego researchers are trying to find out how pollution travels in the ocean off of Imperial Beach. The area has a history of water quality problems after rainstorms.
The researchers are using a non-toxic pink dye to track how pollution travels in the ocean from the border to the southern boundary of Silver Strand State Beach.

Other tools will be used to measure and track the dye including drifting devices with built-in GPS antennas.

Scripps Institution of Oceanography researcher Falk Feddersen says the the goal is to understand how currents and waves affect pollution.

"Does it dilute more or less at low tide or at high tide?" Feddersen asks. "Does it dilute more or less if the currents are really strong or very weak? These are the kinds of general questions that will be phrased more mathematically and statistically, but these are the kinds of questions that we're going to address."

Researchers will also use various instruments mounted on tripod frames in the surf west of Imperial Beach Boulevard.

The field experiments will continue through the end of October.

By Ed Joyce

18th Annual Paddle for Clean Water Festival

2009-09-04T23:40:00.000-07:00

On Sunday, September 13th, 2009 beach lovers and ocean enthusiasts unite for clean water as The Surfrider Foundation San Diego Chapter hosts the 18th Annual Paddle for Clean Water Festival presented by Clif Bar. The event starts with free breakfast at 9 a.m., features a paddle around the Ocean Beach Pier at 10 a.m., then the festival continues until 5 p.m. at the Ocean Beach Pier parking lot. Full schedule is listed below.

This 18th year of the Paddle for Clean Water promises a full day of fun for everyone featuring booths highlighting environmental awareness and action, local artists and eco-friendly vendor; free massages; free surf lessons, a free surfboard demo from Holeman Surf Designs, a kids’ fun area featuring arts and crafts activities, food, great bands and a Stone Brew beer garden for folks age 21 and over.

The paddle around the OB Pier at 10 a.m. features all sorts of paddlecraft – surfboards, bodyboards, kayaks, outrigger canoes, etc. – in a non-competitive paddle out and around the Ocean Beach Pier to raise awareness to pollution problems along San Diego’s coastline. The event will also include breakfast for all paddlers starting at 9 a.m., along with special guest speakers, live music, a huge raffle with a Holeman Surf Designs surfboard as the grand prize, a beach cleanup, and bands all afternoon.

The decline of near-shore water quality remains one of the biggest threats to our world’s beaches and coastlines. In addition to destroying marine habitats, it poses a significant risk to the health and welfare of beachgoers. Two Surfrider campaigns will be highlighted this year:

* No B.S. - The No Border Sewage coalition to clean up the waters around the Mexico border
* San Diego’s water supply and how it relates to the marine environment – Know Your H2O!

9am: Light breakfast is served for all paddlers - FREE!
10am: Paddle around the OB Pier
11am: Group photo, guest speakers and raffle
11:30am: Live music begins with The Professors
11:30am: Stone Brew beer garden opens in parking lot & Kids arts and crafts area opens on grassy area near lifeguard tower
12:35pm: Pullman Standard
1:40pm: C Money and The Players Inc.
2:45pm: Tribal Seeds
4:00pm: Iration
5:00pm: Festival ends

Scripps will study how pollutants travel in ocean

2009-08-31T11:35:00.000-07:00

IMPERIAL BEACH: Surfers and other beach users are invited to a meeting Wednesday to hear about an experiment that will study how pollutants are moved by waves, currents and tides.

The study by scientists from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography will run from Sept. 8 through Oct. 3.

The goal of the Imperial Beach Pollutant Transport and Dilution Experiment is to understand how pollutants such as bacteria get transported and diluted in the surf zone. The information could be used to manage beach closures in California.

The focus of IB09, as the study also is known, will be on dry-weather conditions when the Tijuana River flow is small and beach use is heavy. Scientists will place dye in the water and note how it gets discharged.

The experiment site is from the Tijuana River to just north of the Imperial Beach city limits. The site was selected for its long, straight coastline and history of water-quality problems.

The meeting will be held from 6 to 7:30 p.m. at the Dempsey Holder Safety Center, 950 Ocean Lane.

For information, e-mail mokihiro@ucsd.edu or go to cdip.ucsd.edu/ib09.

Free hepatitis A vaccination offered to beachgoers

2009-08-23T19:49:00.000-07:00

IMPERIAL BEACH — Surfers and bodyboarders come to Imperial Beach to catch the best waves. But if they swim in contaminated waters, they're at risk for catching something else.

Hepatitis A, along with other disease-causing pathogens, can flourish along South Bay beaches as northbound ocean currents funnel polluted water from the Tijuana River into the Imperial Beach surf.

That's why, for the first time, health workers teamed up with environmental protection advocates Saturday to offer free hepatitis A vaccination to interested beachgoers.

Jim Knox, 61, started surfing at Imperial Beach even before the pier was built in 1963. He was one of 75 people who signed up for inoculation.

Knox said everyone should take advantage of the opportunity.

“I've never gotten sick from the water, but I've been lucky. I know plenty of other surfers who have gotten hepatitis A,” said Knox, who was shuttled to the nearby Imperial Beach Health Center for his shot after registering with recruiters. “I think (the vaccine) is an excellent idea for everyone because I know not everyone stays out of the water when they're supposed to.”

Three years ago, San Diego State University researchers reported that hepatitis A was present in 80 percent of water samples taken off the Imperial Beach Pier.

In a 2007 survey, the nonprofit environmental group Wildcoast – a co-sponsor of Saturday's event – found that three out of five regular ocean users in Imperial Beach reported illnesses caused by water contamination.

“Our goal is to educate the public about hepatitis A and tell them that if there are signs warning of polluted beaches, especially after rain events, they need to obey the signs,” said Paloma Aguirre, a Wildcoast program coordinator.

Imperial Beach isn't the only coastal area that suffers from contaminated water.

“You can get hepatitis A anywhere, on any beach. Water flows,” said Dr. Daniel Johnson, a family physician at the Imperial Beach Health Center. “Imperial Beach is just being more proactive about it.”

Hepatitis A, a highly contagious liver infection caused by the hepatitis A virus, affects the liver's functions. Although some people with hepatitis A never develop symptoms, others may feel as though they have a severe case of the flu with fever, jaundice, vomiting and stomach pain.

Hepatitis A vaccines are safe for children older than 1 as well as for most adults, including those with compromised immune systems, Johnson said. A second booster shot is needed in about six months, and that combination should provide lifetime immunity.

People who couldn't get a free hepatitis vaccine Saturday will have more chances in the coming days. The Imperial Beach Health Center is offering free vaccines until supplies run out, thanks to a grant from the San Francisco-based Tides Foundation.

For more information, call (619) 429-3733.

By R.J. Ignelzi

Union-Tribune Staff Writer

July 9 No B.S./Coalition Meeting Summary

2009-08-13T14:22:00.001-07:00

July 9, 2009 No B.S./Coalition Meeting
Wildcoast office, Imperial Beach
Attendees: Dan, Sara, Jay, Ben, Scott, Paloma, Johnny, Joseph, Danielle, Belinda, Clay, Dick, Ryan, Kyle, Scott, Gavin, Roger

June River Valley clean up - successes/ideas for next year and planning for the Fall Clean up:
Possibly get tools donated next year. Wheel barrows were difficult to push through sand - maybe use quads or three wheelers with a sled? Park Rangers may not approve but they have a gator that we could borrow. TRCC wants to register the Sherwood Forest area for Fall clean up. Volunteer efforts are not needed in all areas, the Estuary has contracted services that go in with trucks to clear certain spots. Need to do more to get local community (surfers!) to come out: contact press before hand, radio announcements (also in Spanish), Tommy Hough. Make an effort to get more school kids and younger people to attend (Montgomery Middle, Mar Vista), first through eighth grade is key. Take advantage of the county and Surfrider’s interactive watershed models for kids that explain runoff, storm drain, etc. And the Estuary has place based education where schools come to them. Get in touch with Boy/Girl Scouts, Junior Lifeguards (they earn patches the like the scouts do). Troubled youths, Camp Hope, people that need to do community service hours: contact Volunteer San Diego and tell them we need volunteers. Contact companies that encourage (and sometimes pay) their employees for volunteer work. Maybe contact church groups, Young Democrats. Southwestern College has environmental programs and a student group that might be interested. Get the birders comfortable so they can get behind the clean up, nesting season ends 9/15, need to coordinate w/ Danielle and Jim Peugh at Audubon Society. Other ways to encourage participation: offer giveaways, after party for volunteers. For Coastal Clean Up Day, I Love a Clean San Diego has inland sites, the Estuary is set up for Border Field and Sloughs, need to email the Recovery Team to see if there is any overlap.

USIBWC Citizens’ Forum: Thursday, July 16th 6:30-8:30pm at the Tijuana Estuary Meeting Room (310 Caspian Way, Imperial Beach, CA 91932) - Various Environmental Agencies speaking and public comment

US Open Sandcastle Competiton in IB - Saturday and Sunday, July 18th and 19th, 10am-5pm, Surfrider will have a booth set up and will need volunteers. Purpose is to raise awareness and education of border sewage and pollution and to recruit more volunteers and potential coalition members. Need to coordinate with Ben and Jay about getting large pictures of trash/pollution to display.

Paddle for Clean Water - Surfrider Education and Awareness Event - Sunday, September 13th 9am-5pm, No B.S. and Know Your H2O will be the featured campaigns at the event in Ocean Beach. Need to create posters and brainstorm other ideas for awareness, speakers, etc.

Green Borders Initiative - Meeting on June 29th at USD to discuss a binational vision for the Tijuana River Watershed. Key members of the coalition were in attendance to discuss issues and goals for a solution. There will be future meetings to plan for the Conference which will be held on November 18-20.

Tijuana River Valley Recovery Team Workshop - Next meeting open to public, Friday, July 31, 2009, Policy Committee Meeting, 10am-noon, SDRWQCB 9174 Sky Park Ct #100, San Diego, CA 92123 858 467 2952, info@TJRiverTeam.org

Clay Clifton: Ocean water program coordinator for city health department, notifies of contamination events, spills, runoffs etc.

The plume doesn’t cause much of the readings and smelly events since it’s three miles off shore and coming from 90 feet of water. It’s the river that’s the problem and has the worst measurements with regard to health risks and it’s only in the summer that it’s not an issue. In the winter the IBWC outfall is not considered because of the impact of the Tijuana River.

Sewage in Mexico has more surfactants (soaps, detergents) and these can’t be treated out, surfactants deplete oxygen so there are limits in US but these phosphates are still used in Mexico.

In the summer of 1998, when river flows exceeded the capacity of the river diversion, the Imperial Beach shoreline was closed to water contact for 52 days between July 1 and September 30.

3 major tasks to be done, 5-10 years with reasonable budget, state funding, raising money, what are the attainable goals?
-keep on agencies and programs, EPA 2012 program, potable water for TJ
-upgrade wastewater infrastructure in TJ
-how to facilitate what’s next on the list, watch dog capability of NGOs
-Ask what the status is of 2012 programs.
-County and city of SD - $ for routine trash and sediment removal

Suggestions for what an advocacy group can do: we can talk directly to elected officials, be aware and keep making it a priority, hold politicians accountable, bringing it out in the open. create awareness, measure problem, gear towards solution. Our groups can be the advocate, testing shows involvement and dedication, invite elected officials to go out with BWTF, show next generation and how their health and environment are connected. Focus: how to collect data and bring to elected officials and media. Links to different studies, data reports and fact sheets

3 samples are collected by the US in Mexico (northern baja) for IBWC, results sent to DEH, no public view of the samples coming from northern baja, put river data on Scripps website during wet season??

BWTF - do a testing at Dairy Mart Bridge and Hollister, follow county protocols, between December and January and give the data to the Union-Tribune, only have to test for bacteria, don’t have to have cutting edge stuff, important to get community out there and making issue more visible and make sure it stays there, keeping it going thru the winter.

Notes from meeting with Clay

-In the Summer, 96 locations of testing, 55 samples collected by DEA.

-Lots of County Politics

-No Flooding during Dry season

-EPA -> Border 2012 - Potable Water

-Wastewater Treatment Plant -> facilitate improvement of wastewater treatment.

-Need to enact watchdog efforts to keep the local politicians in check

-County, City of San Diego are stakeholders

- Montior the bacteria levels in the TJ River (Hollister Street and End of Saturn)

-Data Collectors -> John Van Ryan/ Sheri ??? - Stormwater collectors

-Need to use the spreadsheets with data that comes out of the testing - Use the test results to write letters, make videos showing the efforts we are taking to test and get people involved down there

-Elected officials do the testing with the BWTF

-Historical Data -> 1 or 2 people who can request data (Form letter and phone calls)

Officials at border hail wastewater diversion system

2009-08-04T05:53:00.000-07:00

Mexico's discharges won't flow into U.S.

TIJUANA — Two new water treatment plants in eastern Tijuana have been praised as critical for some of the city's newest neighborhoods. But they also created a binational problem: How to keep the treated discharge from flowing across the border and harming a federally protected U.S. wetland?

Yesterday, authorities celebrated the solution – a computerized system of pumps and pipes designed to keep the treated water inside Mexican territory and deliver it to the Pacific Ocean miles south of the border at Punta Bandera.

Authorities from Mexico and the United States gathered amid tubes, pools and motors of Pump Station No. 1, a 40-year-old structure near the border fence that is now an important part of the project to divert the treated water from the United States. Officials said the solution highlighted their interdependence as they address issues in the Tijuana River watershed that spans the border.

“This is a model that we must follow in terms of cooperation between our two countries,” Baja California Gov. José Guadalupe Osuna Millán said. The state and the Mexican federal government are sharing the $5.3 million cost.

For years, cross-border sewage spills from Tijuana into San Diego County led to beach closings north of the border. While dry-weather sewage spills have largely been eradicated, wet-weather flows have continued to lead to closures.

With a combined capacity of 20 million gallons per day, the Arturo Herrera and La Morita treatment plants are key to relieving Tijuana's overburdened main facility at Punta Bandera. Arturo Herrera began operating in March; La Morita is to open later this year.

But without the diversion system, their discharges would flow into the Tijuana River channel, potentially devastating the Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve in Imperial Beach. The federally protected wetland is a saltwater marsh vulnerable to freshwater flows.

Oscar Romo, coastal training director at the estuary, said the estuary's ecosystem has already been altered by some freshwater intrusion from canyons near the border. But the new system will avoid further intrusion and “would probably relieve some of those changes,” Romo said.

The new system, set to begin operating later this year, involves two parallel pipes. One will carry the treated flow to be released directly into the ocean. The second will carry wastewater for treatment at Punta Bandera. Currently all the water, treated and untreated, is sent in a single pipe to Punta Bandera.

By separating the treated water and sending it directly to the ocean, the strain on the Punta Bandera plant should be reduced.

By installing the new system, Baja California authorities are complying with a U.S.-Mexico treaty requiring that dry-weather flows not cross the border. That is necessary to obtain funding from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which has spent nearly $40 million on sewage infrastructure projects in Tijuana and Rosarito Beach.

“If they were sending water across, this would be a violation of the . . . treaty,” said Doug Liden, an environmental engineer with the EPA in San Diego.

Osuna said Baja California officials eventually hope to pipe the treated water to the Valle de Guadalupe, the state's main grape-growing region, for irrigation.

“I hope that the efforts at cooperation with treated water and sewage collection systems and the environment could be achieved with public security, for contraband, weapons and cash,” Osuna said.

By Sandra Dibble

Union-Tribune Staff Writer

Report Shows Beach Water Quality Jeopardizing Health

2009-07-29T15:29:00.000-07:00

SWIMMING IN OUR OWN SEWAGE

We may think of San Diego County's beaches as five-star attractions. But an environmental group says the water quality at many of our beaches get lower ratings. Part of the problem is the lack of testing.

The Natural Resources Defense Council tracks beach closings, advisories and water quality for more than 6,000 beaches across the country.

"This is the fourth year in a row that we've seen more than 20,000 closing advisory days across the country," says Noah Garrison, an attorney with the NRDC's water program in Los Angeles. "And what that shows us is that problems with beach water pollution are simply not going away."

He says many of us are swimming in our own sewage as runoff flows through storm drains to the ocean.

"The stormwater source essentially takes rainwater or water that comes from discharges from construction and industrial sites or even from people's sprinklers as they over water their lawns," Garrison says. "And that runoff flows into the streets and into gutters and storm drains picking up animal waste, trash and toxic pollutants before it flows out to receiving waters, the beach or lakes."

Sewage spills are another source of contamination.

Garrison says there were 460 beach closure advisories in San Diego County last year.

"That was affected by the closing of sampling programs or the reduction in monitoring programs and also by drought conditions which meant there was less rainfall," Garrison says.

He says several beaches had higher levels of bacteria and other pollutants last year than in 2007.

"The Tijuana Slough National Wildlife Refuge is a consistent violator, upwards of 20 percent annually of the samples exceed water quality or public health standards. Also there was a number of sewage releases at Imperial Beach last year. So that's a persistent issue."

He also says Shelter Island at the San Diego Bay is another area where water quality was unhealthful last year.

NRDC's report also provides a five-star rating guide for 200 of the nation's most popular beaches.

The rating is based on indicators of beachwater quality, monitoring frequency and public notification of contamination.

No beaches in San Diego County received five stars.

But three received four stars including Pacific Beach at Grand Avenue and Oceanside municipal beach.

Garrison says funding for beach water testing is critical to let people know which areas are safe or not for swimming.

BECC-NADB Board of Directors certifies and approves US$30 million in funding for 6 new border projects

2009-07-28T13:22:00.000-07:00

(San Antonio, Texas) The Board of Directors of the Border Environment Cooperation Commission (BECC) and the North American Development Bank (NADB) held its semi-annual meeting today at which 6 projects totaling US$38.1 million were certified and approved to receive US$28 million in loans and an additional US$2.37 million in grants. These projects wil benefit a population of 723,546 residents of the border region.

These projects include 5 separate water and wastewater improvement projects for the Mexican communities of Tijuana and Playas de Rosarito, Baja California. The Comisión Estatal de Servicios Públicos de Tijuana, (CESPT) is responsible for providing water and wastewater services to both Tijuana and Playas de Rosarito. CESPT is undertaking 4 separate projects to expand its wastewater collection and treatment systems for the areas of Colonia Aztlán, Colonia Independencia and Colonia Lomas de Rosarito in Playas de Rosarito., as well as to expand the Rosarito I Wastewater Treatment Plant. A fifth project being undertaken by CESPT will expand the potable water system in Tijuana, including the construction of two new storage tanks with a capacity of 2.4 million gallons. The project will also expand wastewater collection in Tijuana, providing connections and new service for 15, 667 residences. All together, these projects represent a total investment of US$37.8 million by CESPT for Tijuana and Rosarito. The NADB is providing a loan for $380 million Pesos (US$27.96 million at an exchange rate of $13.59 Pesos to the Dollar). CESPT is also receiving grant funds in the amount of US$2.2 million from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Border Environment Infrastructure Fund (BEIF), administered by the NADB.

The BECC-NADB Board also certified a project for the expansion of the water distribution system in Colonia Esperanza, Chihuahua. The project, with a total cost of US$ 333, 444 will provide new waterlines, 360 new residential water connections, and will install a chlorine disinfection system. The project is receiving US$166,722 in grant funds from the EPA’s BEIF program.

Despite challenging market conditions over the last year, the BECC and NADB continued to develop, finance and construct needed infrastructure projects throughout the border region in both Mexico and the United States.

“Given the current conditions that are restricting sources of financing, the Bank, together with the BECC, is emerging as a solid alternative for financing environmental projects for the border,” stated Chairman of the Board, Lic. Ricardo Ochoa Rodríguez, Head of International Affairs Unit, Mexican Ministry of Finance and Public Credit.

The Board of Directors heard reports from the BECC and NADB, outlining recent project and financial activities, including the recent complete capitalization of the Bank by the U.S. and Mexico.

“On behalf of the United States Treasury, we welcome the final capital contributions by the United States and Mexico, which fulfill the financial obligations of our two countries to the NADB,” stated co-chairman of the Board, Karen Mathiasen, Director of the Office of Multilatral Development Banks for the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

In its 14 years of operation, BECC has certified 159 environmental infrastructure projects along the U.S.-Mexico border, which represent a total investment of approximately US$3.23 billion. NADB is providing approximately US$964.5 million in loans and grants to support 128 of those projects. BECC-certified and NADB-financed projects are estimated to be benefiting almost 12 million residents of the U.S.-Mexico border region through improved infrastructure for a cleaner environment.