San Diego County will provide air purifiers to people who live and work near where sewage and toxic chemicals spill over the U.S.-Mexico border from Tijuana and have reported feeling ill from noxious odors.
On Tuesday, the county Board of Supervisors unanimously approved Chairperson Nora Varga’s request to buy up to $100,000 worth of equipment and develop a program to distribute them to those in need.
“Ambient odors coming from the (Tijuana) river have had a negative impact on the quality of life of South County residents, including our small businesses,” Vargas said in a statement. “This is very concerning, but as a board member for the (Air Pollution Control District), I know that obtaining air purifiers for the communities affected by the pollution will help them immediately mitigate odors and improve living conditions, especially during the summer.”
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Residents and businesses in South County’s southernmost communities, such as Imperial Beach, Nestor, San Ysidro, Otay Mesa West and the Tijuana River Valley, have reported constant rotten egg odors affecting their health and way of life. Many have said they suffer from chronic coughs, migraines, asthma and nausea. They have said their symptoms tend to stop when leaving their neighborhoods.
To mitigate the sickening odors that often leak inside their homes, residents have sealed off their chimneys, spent hundreds of dollars on air purifiers, or created makeshift filters. Others have relocated. Some people have even bought hand-held gas monitors, which have detected levels of hydrogen sulfide, a top chemical component of sewer gas, in their homes.
Concentrations of wastewater gases have been measured above the state’s nuisance odor standards in San Ysidro, according to data from a monitoring station the San Diego Air Pollution Control District began running in late September. California sets its air quality standard at 30 parts per billion (ppb), which is intended to be protective against headaches and nausea, and the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration at 10 ppb.
The Air Pollution Control District is working to install more monitoring stations in South County, including in Imperial Beach, Otay Mesa West and at the South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant.
Vargas said the air purifiers are “an immediate, short-term measure to provide relief while broader, innovative solutions are being pursued.”
How many the county plans to offer and how people can receive them is unclear, though that should become known with the development of the program. Officials also have yet to say when they would like the effort launched.
In 2022, the county created a similar program, dubbed the Portside Air Quality Improvement and Relief Program. It offered portable air purifiers and indoor air monitoring systems to households disproportionately exposed to air pollution, such as Barrio Logan, Logan Heights and National City.
Some have criticized these programs as temporary approaches that don’t solve the root cause of the issue, in this case the failing and underfunded wastewater treatment plants that allow sewage flows to taint the Tijuana River and Pacific Ocean.
“This is an unfortunate issue that we have to deal with because this is another example of the federal government failing to address an issue that’s under their sole discretion,” said county Supervisor Jim Desmond. “This is like a band-aid on a symptom, but I think we’ve got to do something here for our residents locally.”
For many in South Bay, any aid can make a difference. Samantha Snow of Imperial Beach said the program will help many who “have to sleep with the windows closed because the smell is so strong, but also don’t have air conditioning or can’t afford to run their AC.”
“Every day we have this terrible smell, like you’re next to a porta-potty,” she said. “We have a purifier for each room, but it’s a burden to buy them and keep the filters up to date. But it’s important to have clean air.”
Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors vote came two hours after Imperial Beach Mayor Paloma Aguirre held a news conference in her city, renewing calls to Gov. Gavin Newsom to declare the issue an emergency.
The governor has acknowledged that the matter is a crisis, but has said that a state of emergency would not address the problem. Instead, he has focused on advocating for federal funds to fix and expand the South Bay wastewater plant.
Aguirre challenged Newsom’s stance.
In a Tuesday letter to him, she said the governor could provide relief under an emergency declaration, including “deploying medical staff to serve the impacted communities and cleaning up polluted state property in the Tijuana River Valley and Border Fields State Park” or he could identify the needs “of our communities to avoid preventable disease and property damage stemming from this pollution.”
Also on Tuesday, San Diego Congressional leaders announced that they introduced an amendment to the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act to establish a new federal program to combat cross-border pollution. The Tijuana River Public Health and Water Quality Restoration Program aims to improve coordination between all agencies working to address the problem and provide grants for public health and water cleanup projects.
