San Diego County residents launch second suit over alleged sewage treatment plant failures

Residents of Imperial Beach in southern San Diego County filed a lawsuit Tuesday against the operators of an international wastewater treatment plant — alleging that the site has failed to contain a cross-border crisis that has long contaminated their community.

The plaintiffs said they are seeking to hold the plant’s managers accountable for severe environmental and public health effects that have resulted from an influx of untreated sewage, heavy metals and other toxic chemicals.

Imperial Beach, which sits just a few miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border, has long been the recipient of untreated wastewater that comes from the Tijuana metropolitan region and ends up on the beaches of San Diego County.

Residents filed Tuesday's lawsuit against Veolia Water Operating Services, Veolia Water North America-West and Mark Wippler, an employee of Veolia. The company operates the border-adjacent South Bay International Water Treatment Plant, which treats some of Tijuana’s sewage stateside and is owned by the U.S.-Mexico International Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC). 

While the South Bay plant has long been broken and in need of significant overhaul and expansion, the IBWC — a bilateral entity run jointly by the U.S. and Mexican federal governments — has lacked sufficient funds to make this happen.

Congress in 2020 allocated $300 million toward renovating the site, but officials maintained that the plant needs $150 million more to function properly. President Biden then asked lawmakers last fall to authorize an additional $310 million, but that approval never occurred.

Instead, Congress approved a $156 million sum as part of this year's $1.2 trillion budget

IBWC officials announced that they had broken ground on a critical infrastructure improvement project at the site in September.

"We are committed to doing everything possible to enhance the health of communities along the U.S.-Mexico border and permit safe entry to the beaches," Maria-Elena Giner, commissioner of the IBWC's U.S. contingent, said in a statement at the time.

Nonetheless, residents are pursuing legal action, stressing that the community has for years contended with water alerts, hazardous swimming conditions and persistent health effects from exposure to pollutants.

Since 2018, community members have tallied more than 500 illegal discharge incidents from the South Bay plant, resulting in more than 1 billion gallons of raw sewage flowing into the Tijuana River and the Pacific Ocean.

Tuesday's filing is the second such lawsuit launched by Imperial Beach residents against South Bay's operator, Veolia Water, in the past two months.

The first, submitted on Sept. 6, was a class action suit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California.

The complaint alleged that defendants failed "to remedy or at least ameliorate polluted waters off the coast of Imperial Beach," leading to a situation in which residents are unable "to freely enjoy the waters of their beach community." Accusing the defendants of negligence and causing a nuisance, the plaintiffs are demanding damages "in an amount in excess of $300 million."

In the second lawsuit, filed in the San Diego County Superior Court of California, individual residents accused the defendants of negligent behavior that has led not only to property damage, but also to personal injury.

The plaintiffs alleged that the defendants knew that the contamination "would cause a significant risk of injury and illness," accusing them of acting "recklessly and with conscious disregard to human life and safety."

Responding to the new lawsuit, Adam Lisberg, a spokesperson for Veolia North America, said in an email that while he and his colleagues were reviewing the complaint, they could "already state that these allegations are meritless."

"Veolia North America has done its best to help operate the South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant in the face of increasingly challenging circumstances," Lisberg continued. "The overwhelming cause of the odors and pollution affecting Imperial Beach is the excessive and uncontrolled sewage flows from Tijuana, much of which never even enters the South Bay plant."

Lisberg noted that over the past 15 years, Tijuana's population has surged by almost 30 percent, while the city's infrastructure has failed to keep pace with that growth. The South Bay plant, he explained, was not built to withstand uncontrolled wastewater flows and damage from debris, which have collectively "overwhelmed the capacity of the plant and impacted its performance."

"This situation needs to be improved with stronger cross-border collaboration and holistic problem-solving at the local, state and federal levels," Lisberg added.