Politics & Government

Agency Denies Surfrider Claims on Weeklong, 60-Mil Gallon Sewage Spill

Environmental group says government failed to notify the public about spill, plant malfunction.

The government operators of South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant sought Friday to refute a claim by the Surfrider Foundation that an equipment problem sent tens of millions of gallons of untreated sewage into the ocean near Imperial Beach over the past week.

According to the International Boundary and Water Commission, the April 4 spill at the San Ysidro sanitation complex lasted for 2 1/2 hours and left 2 million gallons of sewage pooled in a drainage area that leads to the Tijuana River.

A week later, however, the Surfrider Foundation’s local office issued a statement contending that the overflow was ongoing and had fouled the waterway and nearby ocean with upwards of 60 million gallons of untreated wastewater.

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The nonprofit group also asserted that “neither the IBWC nor county water officials deemed it necessary to alert the public of the sewage spill and malfunction.”

Representatives of both government agencies disputed those claims.

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Sally Spener, a spokeswoman for the binational commission, said the only untreated wastewater released due to the computer problem at the treatment
plant escaped the system between 12:30 a.m. and 3 a.m. on the day of the mishap.

The Surfrider accounts gained wide attention after a report in Voice of San Diego

“I live my life watching where the [sewage] plume is going, because I don’t want to get sick; I don't want to surf in somebody's sewage,” West was quoted as saying. “I’m supposed to know.”

The differing accounts of the size of the spill apparently stemmed from an indirect outcome of the accident. The malfunction prompted sanitation crews to begin pumping treated effluent from Mexico into the river as a means of reducing peak flows at the San Ysidro facility, according to Spener. 

That change was necessary to prevent further sewage spills while equipment repairs were under way, she said.

The treated wastewater being put into the waterway on a temporary basis, at a rate of 6 to 7 million gallons per day, is classified as “reclaimed” and generally used for irrigation in Mexico, according to Spener. 

Its purification level is higher than the U.S. standard for secondary wastewater treatment, she added.

Officials hoped to have repairs completed at the San Ysidro plant within several days, Spener said.

In terms of notifications about the sewage release, the IBWC alerted the county health department and Office of Emergency Services, as is standard is
such cases, the spokeswoman said.

Mark McPherson, chief of land and water quality for the DEH, said his department did not issue a coastal advisory specific to the spill because the affected stretch of beach—south of the river mouth in Border Field State
Park—already had been posted for pollution, due to contaminated runoff in the wake of rains last month.

The county agency did put out a new health alert on Tuesday, when prevailing ocean currents reversed and began sending the impurities to the north into the surf off Imperial Beach, McPherson said.

Due to ongoing challenges in handling sewage treatment and heavily polluted urban runoff around the U.S.-Mexico border, the river running between the two countries in the San Ysidro area is perennially polluted, according to McPherson.

“We treat all flows from the Tijuana River as sewage,” he said.

Whenever the waterway's flows are sufficiently strong to reach the estuaries alongside the ocean, the county posts contamination alerts south of the river mouth, the direction the ocean currents generally go, McPherson noted. 

Those warnings thus remain in effect for much of any given year.

City News Service contributed to this report.


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