South San Diego Water Quality Workshop

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

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

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

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