California’s Most Polluted Beach Is Making Change, but Residents Are Still Suffering the Effects

Progress continues in ending the Tijuana River’s cross border sewage pollution, yet residents are still living with the health and environmental crisis left behind.

In Imperial Beach, California, a boy holds his bat behind his shoulder as he prepares for the swing; cheers are ringing out all around him, and for a moment, nobody is talking about the smell.

Outside the baseball diamond, at a small snack bar, his mother, Reshae Cuevas, is taking orders for hot dogs and yelling out orders. She’s lived in Imperial Beach since 2005, and doesn’t want to live anywhere else, even if her health suffers because of it.

“Right now, it’s all good, but when it gets dark, that’s when you’ll smell it,” Cuevas said.

The smell that Cuevas refers to is pervasive in Imperial Beach. Ask any resident about “the smell” and responses range from “rotten eggs” to “Port-a-Potties” to “strong chemicals.”

It’s the result of millions of gallons of raw sewage and waste being dumped into the Tijuana River only about two miles away from the baseball diamond.

In this small town, Cuevas is joining the growing number of families who are speaking out about the worsening waste dumping along the Tijuana River, which residents say has caused illness and ravaged the quality of life in an otherwise sleepy town.

The mayor of Imperial Beach, Paloma Aguirre, has dedicated much of her platform to advocating for this issue, which long went unheard on a federal level.

Over the border, the lack of regulations for sewage infrastructure means that many homes will have their waste funneled into the Tijuana River. Worse, the rise of maquiladoras in Tijuana, or manufacturing factories that produce products to be shipped overseas, has resulted in thousands of gallons of chemical waste being dumped into the river as well. On the American side, a sewage treatment plant meant to clean water has fallen into disrepair.

Recently, things have looked up. California senators lobbying the federal government have finally been promised the millions of dollars needed to fix the South Bay sewage treatment plant. However, repairs on such a large scale are expected to move slowly, and as the pollution continues, residents suffer the effects.

In September 2024, there was a glimpse of hope: Beaches along the Imperial Beach coastline opened up for the first time since December 2023. The county Board of Supervisors unanimously voted on a local emergency declaration on the pollution. San Diego news stations were alight with hopeful stories on the reopening. However, by November 15, the Imperial Beach shoreline was closed once again for bacterial advisories. Even more northern beaches, including Ocean Beach, Mission Beach, and La Jolla Cove beachline received advisories as of mid-November.

A new generation of Imperial Beach is growing up without the beach being a normal part of life. Parents like Cuevas are demanding change moves faster.

Even with the pollution flowing a few blocks down, Cuevas is out taking orders and pouring chili on hot dogs for her neighbors watching the ballgame. Imperial Beach has a deeper history for her.

“I found my biological family who lived in IB and have been in IB since the '50s. So a love for a community that I generally grew in love with just expanded because the family was down there and we reconnected on a different level. But, I mean, it's bigger than that. I'm with Little League and our community, it's such a heart. Everyone comes together for the kids,” she said.

Many residents have called Imperial Beach a tight-knit town. It’s the southernmost city on the West Coast, meaning Imperial Beach is the last stop in San Diego County before reaching the border city of Tijuana, Mexico. With a population of a little over 25,000, it’s common for residents to know each other. Neighbors gather around events like the “Baseball by the Beach” games, and in years past, they gathered by the ocean. But lately, it’s been nearly impossible.

Imperial Beach’s major beaches have been closed due to pollution for over 1,000 days in total as of 2024, according to the Imperial Beach mayor’s office.

It’s for good reason, according to San Diego County’s interim public health director, Dr. Ankita Kadakia. She said that bacteria levels in the water due to the sewage have reached a dangerous high. But as of now, she said, nobody knows what the long-term effects of the sewage exposure are.

The pollution is visible: reports of plumes of brown water, an abundance of trash in the Tijuana River Estuary, and residents observing that wildlife has nearly disappeared from sight on Imperial Beach’s shores.

Sewage Warning Advisory: Keep Out of Water

Jennifer Sweany was born and raised in Imperial Beach. She remembers a time when seals played in the water around the iconic Imperial Beach Pier and the area was alive with the sounds of wildlife.

“There used to be seals and everything,” Sweany said. “I would walk at the end of the pier with my dad and we would see seals barking at us, playing with the fishing rods because they're babies. But now there's no seals, no animals.”

For Sweany, the beach was the center for weekend recreation—barbecues, sunset walks, fishing, and cooling off in the water. But once the pollution began to cause beach closures, these fixtures of coastal life dwindled away.

“I used to see people catch fish all the time, like little rockfish that hang out at the bottom of the pier. But now, no one's catching anything there,” Sweany said.

On the pier, some fishermen continue to line the railing, sitting with an eye on the line, waiting to see a tug. Jorge Arrollo walks down the pier on days off from work, pulling along a cart of fishing gear. He once sold his fish for a profit; these days it’s extra shifts. The wheels bounce against the wooden planks as he walks to the end, greeting fellow fishermen already setting up their lines.

“My father was a fisherman,” Arrollo said. “I’ve been fishing for 40 years.”

He moved from Mexico to Imperial Beach 20 years ago, and said he’s seen major changes in that time.

“The fish are leaving. There’s just not as much as there used to be. And you can’t eat the fish you catch. It’s all contaminated,” he said.

After a while, Arrollo finally felt a tug on the line. He pulled his fishing pole and wound the line up rapidly. Other fishermen looked on, curious. When the line finally emerged, there was a fish the size of a finger flapping on the hook.

“I caught one,” he said. He smiled wide and looked at the fish, waving it for the others to see.

Of course, he won’t eat it. Today, the water is clearer than usual, a light aqua color. But Arrollo said there’s been many times where he could see a muddy brown plume of water emerge from the river mouth and float around the pier.

“The other fishermen say it’s dirty, contaminated ... People are worried. Nobody comes to swim, and we always have to throw the fish back out,” Arrollo said. “I like Imperial Beach, I don’t want to leave. Hopefully they fix the pollution.”

Not only does sewage flow into the ocean—sewage in the Tijuana River also flows into the natural wetlands of Imperial Beach.

Nestled in marsh and scrubland and local neighborhoods is the Tijuana Estuary, a nature reserve for research and conservation. At the estuary, scientists and visitors observe black-tailed jackrabbits in the grass, snowy egrets dipping their nose along the water, and arrow goby fish burrowing in the mud.

Increasingly, this environment is exposed to floods of polluted water during storms and even during regular flows, leaving surrounding residents concerned for a refuge for nature at the heart of their town.

Dr. Jeff Crooks, Tijuana Estuary Reserve research coordinator, said he is constantly reminded of the sewage at the estuary, and explains that as sewage decays in the water, it eats up the underwater oxygen supply that animals need to survive.

“We’re definitely seeing lower abundances or almost disappearances [of fish] in the estuary. Not completely gone, but ... we’re definitely seeing an impact on fish, crabs, worms, all of that. A lot of that is oxygen. There's just not enough,” Crooks said.

He’s concerned that if the situation continues for much longer, there will be more fish deaths and rot in the water. The environment is usually hardy, but he says as time goes on and the sewage continues to flow, it will become harder for the native wildlife to bounce back from.

“It’s depressing, it’s exhausting,” Crooks said. “It's sad to know these things that we've been working on are taking a beating. Leaning back though, wetlands are remarkable systems, and they’re resilient. I look forward to one day being part of the restoration of these systems.”

In the early 2000s, Leon Benham moved into a home with his wife in Imperial Beach, where they went to high school together decades earlier. Their home borders the wetlands of the estuary. He said he looked out into the water and remembered the times he swam there as a young man.

“We’ve been here a long time. When we were kids, this whole back bay was full of water and we would fish and swim and have all of this area here,” Benham said. “It just really rocks me that it’s as bad as it is.”

He says that a few years ago, around Christmas time, he looked out to the estuary and saw dead fish everywhere. Where he would usually grow plants year round, welcoming the rain, floods from rain bring pollution into his own backyard.

Not only does the environment take the hit, but the health of the community has as well. When not volunteering for her son’s Little League, Cuevas works with foster youth at a local organization. She recalls times when her son could barely sleep because he was throwing up all night.

“And it's to the point where we're sick. My staff are constantly asking me if I'm OK ... I've had this lingering cough. My son has been sick. And it's not just me. It's everybody around,” said Cuevas. “The constant smell. You wake up in the middle of the night. You have to have your windows and doors closed.”

Viruses and bacteria, including SARS CoV-2, E. coli, and hepatitis, have been detected in the ocean around Imperial Beach, according to research from CBP. The study also added that metals, chemicals like pesticides, cyanide, and herbicides, and volatile organic compounds, were detected in the Tijuana River runoff.

A 2022 study published by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography revealed that a strain of bacteria called norovirus is estimated to have infected the water around the entire border region, which the study projects could call illness in some swimmers. Norovirus is known to cause severe vomiting and diarrhea, and could lead to serious health complications. In a 2023 Scripps study that shook the community, researchers found that sewage particles can enter the air through sea spray as waves strike the shore.

Cuevas says that after a particularly bad storm, she and her son were left severely sickened by the pollution in the water.

“I mean, so sick to where I couldn't pick up my phone and call somebody for help,” Cuevas said. “I had a moment of fear. What the heck am I going to do?”

She described not being able to sleep from constantly throwing up, wheezing for breath, and feeling weakness to the point that walking to a neighbor’s house seemed like a Herculean task. Her son suffered similar symptoms, and Cuevas fears for what might’ve happened if they hadn’t recovered.

Cuevas is not alone in this experience. Residents from across Imperial Beach have echoed her sentiments of feeling short of breath, having headaches, and throwing up due to the smell of the pollution.

Where Is it Coming From?

Phillip Musegaas, executive director of San Diego Coastkeeper, a San Diego environmental justice nonprofit, said the pollution is coming from two main sources: maquiladoras and a lack of upkeep of sewage infrastructure.

“That caused a lot of untreated sewage to either be discharged directly in the ocean or pumped to the broken South Bay sewage treatment plant, not really properly treated and then discharged to the ocean. So at this point, it’s essentially an open sewer,” Musegaas said.

Richard Gersberg, a water quality researcher at San Diego State University, said the factories also encourage makeshift homes to be built around them without proper plumbing, further exacerbating the raw sewage entering the Tijuana River.

“Japan, Korea, and the U.S., and Taiwan, were building hundreds of maquiladoras. And Tijuana was growing very fast. Faster than it is now,” Gersberg explained. “Colonias, which are undeveloped, populated areas with no sewer systems and no water system [were built quickly]. So people were just living in shacks, basically, and still do, but less so. And there's no sewerage, so they would go out in the canyon.”

In a report by the San Diego Coastal Commission, “sewer system deterioration and pump station mechanical failures” have resulted in an average of 10 million gallons of sewage per day, or about 8,300 gallons per minute, being dumped from the Tijuana metropolitan area into the Tijuana River.

Progress Is Slowly Underway

Residents were calling on Governor Gavin Newsom to declare a state of emergency for years. In October 2023, Newsom responded to the claims. He said no.

According to a letter from the governor’s legal affairs secretary, a state-level emergency proclamation is “not necessary” as the river pollution is a federal emergency. Residents expressed frustration by the lack of action from the governor’s office.

“What I hope would happen is that our elected officials would get together and do the right thing, identify solutions on our side of the border that are tangible,” resident Darnisha Hunter said.

After additional letters from the mayor, Newsom appeared to do just that, visiting Imperial Beach in October 2024 to attend a briefing on the upcoming renovations planned for the South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant and to tour nearby wastewater treatment facilities.

While this is a move in the right direction, Mayor Aguirre said, she continues to urge Newsom toward an emergency declaration.

“[Fixing] the plant is not going to reduce our crisis, it’s only going to reduce the effluent that goes offshore,” Aguirre said in October.

In early 2024, Aguirre lobbied for $310 million from Washington in order to pay for repairs to an American sewage treatment plant along the Tijuana River. Congress instead approved $156 million. Aguirre acknowledged it wasn’t the full amount aimed for, but said, “it’s getting us there.”

“It’s heartbreaking,” Aguirre said in summer 2024. “I’ve gone through the gamut of officials not wanting to acknowledge that there’s an issue to now acknowledging that there is one, but there’s not enough resources and funding.”

After more push from senators, the additional emergency funding finally fulfills the amount needed to repair the plant along with plans to restore a non-functioning sewage pipe along the border, Imperial Beach is moving closer to change. However, this progress might face obstacles as the Trump administration is moving to limit environmental support from the first day in office.

Among Trump's executive orders were the reversal of national environmental services, disbanding the National Climate Task Force, and ordering that America withdraw from the Paris Agreement. With the national focus moving away from the environment, the future of Imperial Beach is uncertain.

Two Sides of the River

In Tijuana, some residents near the river are reportedly unaware of the pollution downstream.

This is partly because the river on Tijuana's side is lined with concrete. In 1973, the Corps of Engineers proposed turning the Tijuana River into a completely concrete channel, like the Los Angeles River, but San Diego environmentalists, including the San Diego Sierra Club, opposed it to protect natural wetlands. Mexico went forward with the plan to build the concrete lining on its side.

Today, environmentalists believe this may explain the different pollution impacts on Tijuana and Imperial Beach residents.

Carmen Romo is the director of Tijuana Calidad de Vida, a Tijuana nonprofit that aims to increase quality of life for residents through outreach and environmental activism. She said that while visiting residents alongside the river channel, she found that many did not consider it a river at all.

“The kids will go out and the canal, it's just in front of the schools. Even their parents, they will just throw trash in there. Whatever is not useful ... so you don't see it. When we were asking, ‘Do you know that you live in a city that 's rivereña?’ It's coastal. It does have a river, and they don't even recognize it,” Romo said. “They said there's a canal, a concrete channel. Then you throw things there, they disappear because water takes them away. That's their perception, and that's the natural way.”

These perceptions of the river encourage pollution to only continue. Romo found that even animal waste was being diverted into the river.

“In the area where the pigs were, we told them, ‘Hey, let's try to bring a biodigester instead of pushing all the manure to the river’... They were like, ‘Oh, we already fixed this. We did this concrete channel.’ Now, instead of just having the rain or water run the manure into the arroyo (creek), now they have a pipe, a concrete pipe [that pours directly into the river],” Romo said.

She noted that it’s not with malicious intent that residents dump waste into the river. Often, they don’t have the income to install proper plumbing and many are uninformed of the scope of the pollution issue in Imperial Beach.

“That's the way in their mind, it's [considered] the correct way because they don't think, ‘Oh, I'm doing something that is wrong’ ... They don't think, whoever is downstream, is going to get this manure,” she said.

But Tijuana residents are not unaffected by the pollution. The homeless or those closest to the canal are prone to infections from being near the constant sewage flow.

Dr. Patricia Gonzalez-Zuniga is a physician and clinical data analyst in Tijuana. She founded Wound Clinic, which provides medical services for people living on the streets. She worked with homeless people who were living in the river canal.

“It's a hazard for people. When we had the clinic there, people were washing their clothes there with the sewage water, living right there,” Gonzalez-Zuniga said. “So a lot of gastroenteritis, digestive infections. Skin infections. I mean, that's really close to where people live, and so you cannot avoid the water that they're using to shower themselves. So I think it's a health issue, the pollution and the contamination of the water.”

She's worried for Tijuana residents who come into contact with the river of pollution in their backyard.

“As someone working in public health, it's concerning what conditions they can get without knowing. For people that are directly there, they don't have any other option,” she said. “They don't have any other way to live in a place where they have running water, they can’t just put on water. For the neighborhood, we don't know what's really in the water.”

Imperial Beach Residents Get Sicker

Darnisha Hunter moved to Imperial Beach after a walk on the beach showed her how lively the community could be.

“We walked up to the pier and there was this grassy knoll, and there were all these families out there, hibachi grills, kites. There was a church percussion section playing, and I was like, ‘How cool is this community?’” Hunter said. “People are just loving each other and sharing their day with their family and their friends. And that was eight years ago, and people are still loving each other, and they're very open and welcoming in Imperial Beach.”

Her enjoyment of the community, however, is dampened by the physical effects of the pollution. The grandmother of four feels particularly strained by the smell.

“I'm a survivor of a [traumatic brain injury], so my sense of smell is a lot more delicate than most people. I can smell things that other people can't smell. Fast forward since about 2020. Oh, it's really bad,” Hunter said. “I've woken up with really bad headaches in the middle of the night from the smell coming in. And lately it's been around two or three in the morning where everybody's asleep, and I'm waking up and I'm nauseated, I have headaches. If I have the doors and windows up, I have to shut everything down.”

Local doctors say that the smell is only a marker of a more concerning issue.

“It's beyond a nuisance smell. I've heard somebody else say, oh, it's such a nuisance to have a smell. It is not a nuisance. It's a health hazard. It's an environmental emergency and a health hazard,” Dr. Kimberly Dickson said.

Dickson and her husband, Matt Dickson, opened their clinic, South Bay Urgent Care, in 2017. Since then, they said, they’ve seen more and more patients come in with obvious symptoms of sewage related illness—especially from “the smell,” a potentially dangerous gas.

“Hydrogen sulfide gas has been studied for years. People are exposed to it in their work. Mild symptoms are itchy eyes, runny nose, and coughing. Then it starts to become wheezing. It causes nausea, headaches,” Matt Dickson said. “At higher concentrations, it can cause inability to think, memory loss ... It can be very dangerous in high concentrations. The EPA had one sensor up (in Imperial Beach), and the hydrogen sulfide levels were above the state standards.”

The Dicksons, who also live in the area, worry for their own family’s health as they see the situation get worse.

“Our kids are both now in college. Our daughter, when she goes away to college, she's fine. She doesn't wheeze. When she comes back, she wheezes every single time. We've started noticing a pattern,” Kimberly Dickson said. “The kids nowadays, they're missing going to junior guards. They're missing all these outdoor activities. They can't go to the beach, they can't go surfing. And it's beyond a bummer for them, they're really missing out because of it.”

Reshae Cuevas still goes to her son’s baseball games. Her snack bar is constantly bustling with activity as orders from neighbors and friends pour in. She wants to stay in Imperial Beach and raise her son in this sleepy beach town for the rest of her life, but with the process of repairing the damage only beginning, she worries for the long term effects left behind.

“People are angry. Angry to where we work really hard to live where we live, and we've worked hard to build the community that we have. And to see it hurt on a consistent basis is heartbreaking,” Cuevas said. “So what do you do? And I can't do anything except say something and maybe sign a paper. So who else can help us?”