PUNTA BANDERA, Baja California, Mex. (Border Report) — The Punta Bandera Wastewater Treatment Plant was built in 1978, long before Tijuana turned into a city of 2 million residents.
The facility is located on the coast about 6 miles south of the border, and it’s supposed to treat at least 25 percent of the city’s raw sewage.
But for many years, due to disrepair and neglect, it’s been discharging millions of gallons of effluent into the Pacific Ocean on a daily basis.
“This plant for the last 20 years has impacted us tremendously, every single day this area discharges 40 million gallons of sewage into the coast,” said Imperial Beach Mayor Paloma Aguirre.
According to Aguirre, the pollution flows from south to north with much of the pollution and bacteria ending up on her city’s beaches, creating what she called a “health crisis.”
Two of several raw sewage holding ponds at the Punta Bandera Wastewater Plant in Northern Baja. (Jorge Nieto/Special for Border Report)
“It’s the worst it’s ever been because in the past we’ve had ocean users, surfers and beachgoers getting sick, but now we have reports, and we’ve been keeping track of the data … people getting gastrointestinal infections who are not near the coast.”
Aguirre attended the groundbreaking ceremony along with Baja California Gov. Marina del Pilar Avila Olmeda and U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Ken Salazar.
“We’re finally seeing that action that is required when you have this kind of sewage flowing into the Pacific Ocean,” Salazar said.
Money for the project is coming from funding allocated by the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement.
Salazar said the project is long overdue.
“For the longest time it had been neglected, sewage was flowing directly into the Pacific Ocean that is not good for the environment, not good for the people, not good for the binational relationship.”
U.S. Rep. Juan Vargas, D-California, who represents Imperial Beach and the border area impacted by the sewage from Mexico, called the plant’s renovation “the first of many stops needed to reduce and manage cross-border pollution flowing into the United States”
“I commend the governor of Baja, Marina del Pilar Ávila Olmeda and President López Obrador for making this issue a priority by allocating $37 million to this project. I look forward to continuing finding binational solutions that reduce transboundary pollution into the Pacific Ocean and the Tijuana River Valley,” he said.
The Punta Bandera renovation project is supposed to be done by the end of September.
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