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Christopher Harris still remembers the melted rubber soles of a Border Patrol officer’s work boots from a few years ago. “They were brand new,” Harris, a retired Border Patrol agent who worked in San Diego for more than two decades, said Thursday. “He brought me his boots (after chasing illegal crossers somewhere in the Tijuana River Valley) and said, ‘I just went into this puddle of sludge and water and immediately noticed my feet were burning.
’” Other agents reported suffering blisters, red splotches and chemical burns after coming in contact with cross-border pollution. But these reports aren’t new. More than six years ago, water-quality testing conducted by U.
S. Customs and Border Protection in the canyons that empty into the river valley found all sorts of hazardous chemicals, such as the banned pesticide DDT and hexavalent chromium, the most toxic form of the metal chromium. “It’s not just sewage; it’s horrendous chemicals, too,” Harris said.
He and others think something big needs to be done to cleanse the river valley of years of pollution flowing from Mexico into the U.S. through the lower Tijuana River: designating the area a Superfund site.
Should it be named one? Would it qualify? The San Diego County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday is expected to consider whether to petition the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to inspect the Tijuana River Valley and determine if it qualifies for federal assistance to clean it.
“I believe that, in addition to fixing the treatment plants, which, of course is urgent, we need to simultaneously be pursuing a long-term solution to get this estuary cleaned up and protect the health of our entire community,” said county Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer, who is bringing the proposal to her board colleagues. “Even once we fix the discharge problem, there could be a decade’s worth of garbage bubbling up.” A Superfund designation is the latest push in a long list of attempts to address various aspects of the cross-border sewage crisis and reclaim an area that holds significant ecological value and is home to thousands of people, most of whom are Latino.
But the process is costly and lengthy. Some believe it is worth it; others question if it’s the right approach. When the public learned in the 1970s about the risks posed by contaminated sites such as Love Canal in Niagara Falls, New York, and the Valley of the Drums in Brooks, Kentucky, Congress responded with the creation of the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act, otherwise known as the Superfund program.
The program allows the EPA to identify and, if necessary, remediate hazardous substances. It also makes the parties responsible for polluting the sites to pay for the cleanups. According to the federal agency’s website, when there is no viable responsible party, Superfund provides the funding through environmental excise taxes on chemicals.
The Superfund Chemical Excise Taxes are expected to generate $14 billion in revenue by 2031 when it sunsets. The agency expects more than $2 billion will be available for the program in fiscal 2025. There are several steps to determine if the site qualifies for the designation.
It starts with petitioning the EPA for a preliminary assessment to confirm that a site is contaminated with hazardous waste and that it poses a risk to people’s health and the environment. If so, the EPA conducts a site inspection, which can include groundwater, soil exposure, surface water and air, and can then score the location from 0 to 100 under its Hazard Ranking System. If a site scores at least 28.
5, it is eligible for the National Priorities List, which lists the most serious places for long-term cleanup. States can also designate a place as a top priority site to be added to the national list without a ranking score. If the EPA proposes a site for the national list, the public would have a 60-day window to provide comments, to which the agency would need to respond before issuing an official notice that the location made it onto the list.
As of Oct. 1, more than 1,300 sites were on the list, 42 are proposed and nearly 460 have been removed, according to the EPA’s website. In California, there are 114 sites and Camp Pendleton Marine Corps Base is the only one in San Diego County.
Camp Pendleton made the list in 1989 because of “(i)ndustrial and other support operations (that) have generated hazardous wastes, including waste oils, contaminated fuels and other petroleum products, cleaning solvents, and pesticide rinsate,” according to the EPA. Much has been completed as part of four long-term remedial phases to clean soils and groundwater, including capping an on-base landfill, but not all remedies have been completed, according to the federal agency. It can take two or three years to determine if a site qualifies for the national list and cleanups can take decades, which is why some say petitioning should start immediately.
The Tijuana River, from the U.S.-Mexico border to the Pacific Ocean, is already on a list: the EPA’s Clean Water Act List.
It was added because of the millions of gallons of untreated wastewater from Mexico it has carried daily for years. Multiple reports, in addition to the Border Patrol’s, have found hundreds of chemical contaminants in the river water and soil. Earlier this year, San Diego State University released a white paper noting that one of its analyses detected the presence of 392 organic chemical contaminants, 175 of which “appeared in the U.
S. Environmental Protection Agencies Toxic Substance Control Act.” A 2020 report by the International Boundary and Water Commission, which manages treatment plants at the border, found compounds often used in the metal plating industry.
“It is our responsibility to get the EPA out here to assess as quickly as possible whether or not there is an issue,” Lawson-Remer said. A Superfund designation can bring necessary attention and action to clean up places harming the health of people and the environment, but it can also have long-term impacts for those living, working or recreating in and around areas labeled some of the most polluted places in the country. Some in the Tijuana River Valley Regional Park Community Garden say they have battled years of stigma that whatever is grown there is unsafe, Daniela Mejia, who works at the garden, said in a recent interview.
Some in the local equestrian community wonder if cleanup efforts would require them to relocate, which would be difficult given what they say are limited places in the county for horses. Imperial Beach Mayor Paloma Aguirre thinks the effort is worth trying for the sake of the communities’ health. Last month, in renewing calls to President Joe Biden for declaring the issue an emergency, she said designating the river valley a Superfund site would provide the legal framework and federal funding for a comprehensive cleanup.
“The stigma, if you will, is the least of our problems, because what we need is immediate and swift and comprehensive intervention,” said Aguirre. “It’s important to hear everyone’s voices and not be insensitive to them, but at the end of the day we need help.” There is also concern that there could be a struggle to effectively clean up the area if the pollution isn’t contained, which could be exacerbated if there are future infrastructure breaks on either side of the border or devastating rainstorms.
If the EPA approves assessing the Tijuana River Valley, the initiative would follow another federal government effort already underway. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is slated to begin a three-day community survey on Oct. 17 to learn how residents have been impacted by the sewage crisis and what resources they may need.
The Board of Supervisors meeting starts at 9 a.m. Tuesday.
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