After an insidious “attack” aimed at Southern California Beaches, the mayor of Imperial Beach has accused Mexico of of launching a deliberate “Chemical Attack” against the citizens and beach-goers of this small community. Mayor Serge Dedina, said today that officials in Tijuana, Mexico deliberately engineered the sewage spill that resulted in a massive plume of waste polluting Southern California beaches last month.
That opinion was supported by another local official who said the “spill” appeared to be a deliberate move on the part of Mexican officials. The spill dumped more than 140 million gallons of sewage into the Tijuana River in Mexico, which then flowed into the Pacific Ocean on the U.S. side of the border. The international incident was not found amusing by residents of the area.
U.S. Officials said the spill, which Mexican officials claim was an accident, spanned an almost 3 week period starting on Feb. 4 and lasting until Feb. 23. Mexico says the spill was the result of an accident that occurred during repairs to a major sewer pipe. That excuse was also reported by the International Boundary and Water Commission.
But according to Serge Dedina, the mayor of Imperial Beach which is located about 10 miles outside Tijuana, said the spill looks like it was “deliberate.” he told the Los Angeles Times in an interview. Dedina went on to explain: “It saves (the Mexican agencies) a lot of money in pumping costs, and ultimately, they can get away with it and do it all the time, just on a much smaller scale.” This time, it was not just a leak, in fact, he described the incident as nothing short of a “tsunami of sewage spills.”
Normally, the San Diego County beaches, would have had to be closed by a spill of such magnitude, but they were already off-limits to swimmers and surfers due to runoff from the recent string of heave rain storms that has plagued the area Dedina said. Such spills are not exactly common place, but the do happen. For example, the Imperial Beach was closed for several days in 2012 after another pipe broke in Tijuana. That spill dumped nearly 3 million gallons of raw sewage into the ocean.
Dedina said last week his office will seek an investigation into the spill and its aftermath, adding that U.S. officials “must make fixing sewage infrastructure a priority and issue of national security.” Dave Gibson, an executive officer of the San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board, agreed with Dedina’s assessment. He said, “at least a notification would be a good neighborly thing to do, to let us know what was coming down the river before it got here so we could alert the public.”