Tijuana River Pollution Quiz

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

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

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

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'

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

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

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.