January 11, 2024
Imperial Beach in San Diego County is one of the most polluted beaches in the United States. The water is polluted. The air is polluted. And local leaders think no one with the power to help cares.
“Our local beach here behind me has been closed every single day this year,” said Imperial Beach Mayor Paloma Aguirre. “It's devastating. We have an entire generation of kids that are now college age that don't know what it is to have clean water at their hometown.”
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The problem begins just south of Imperial Beach, on the other side of the international border. There, Tijuana, Mexico is growing faster than its infrastructure.
“In Tijuana, they always seem to be fixing the same broken pipe,” said environmentalist -- and former mayor of Imperial Beach -- Serge Dedina, Ph.D. “There is always a pipe broken, there's always some problem. And the problem now is 365 days a year, seven days a week, 24 hours a day.”
Dedina accused Tijuana and Baja California government leaders of not taking care of the city’s sewer system to the point that the system has collapsed, allowing raw sewage to enter the United States through the Tijuana River and the Pacific Ocean.
“And no one’s going to say a word about it,” he said.
Aguirre said Imperial Beach is hit by roughly 40 million gallons of sewage from Tijuana every day.
“You have anything from heavy metals in the water to chemicals to chlorinated pesticides,” she said. “There's traces of feces in the water.”