Every day, millions of gallons of sewage flow through a canyon and into the Pacific Ocean just south of the U.S.-Mexican border. This sewage, when combined with southward summer swells, has been reaching the shores of San Diego, affecting coastal towns like Imperial Beach.
The discharge from the Tijuana River is making life for the locals much more uncomfortable, bringing millions more gallons of treated and untreated sewage northward. Imperial Beach Mayor Paloma Aguirre described the situation as "the biggest environmental and public health disaster in the nation that nobody knows of," according to a Reuters report. Imperial Beach was recently deemed the most polluted in the country by the Surfrider Foundation.
