One reason that Mexico is able to undercut U.S. manufacturers’ prices is its lack of enforcement of its own environmental laws. Mexico’s environmental agency has laws on the books that are just as strict as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The difference is that they somehow, sorta, kinda, forget to force companies to obey them.
It’s not a new problem. And it’s getting worse. Since 2018, more than 100 billion gallons of raw sewage laden with industrial chemicals and trash have flowed down the Tijuana River, crossing into America through Navy-owned land and out to the Pacific.
The head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Lee Zeldin, is demanding that Mexico get serious about addressing a problem that is sickening Navy SEALs, school children, and closing beaches in California.
Zeldin said he would give the Mexican government a list of projects that are needed to resolve the problem. Given that Mexico has ignored U.S. demands to clean up its side of the border in the past, no one is optimistic that anything will change.
“We’re going to know whether or not Mexico is going to do its part to resolve it, and then we’ll go from there, as far as strategy and tactics,” the Associated Press quoted Zeldin as saying.
As Tijuana’s wastewater treatment plants have aged and its population and industry have boomed, an increasing amount of toxins have made their way into the river and into San Diego County — since 2018, more than 100 billion gallons of raw sewage laden with industrial chemicals and trash.
The pollution has sickened not only swimmers, surfers and lifeguards but also schoolchildren, Border Patrol agents and others who do not even go in the water. Scientists say the sewage is vaporized when it foams up and enters the air people breathe.
The Navy is reviewing whether to relocate its training site for SEAL candidates after the Naval Special Warfare Center reported 1,168 cases of acute gastrointestinal illnesses of its recruits from 2019 to 2023.
Last year, one storm that hit the San Diego-Tijuana region sent more than 14.5 billion gallons of untreated raw sewage into California from Mexico.
More than $653 million has been appropriated to deal with the pollution, but the problem has persisted largely because of delays by the Mexican government, Zeldin said.
The EPA administrator sounds hopeful for the future, but he also warned that the U.S.’s patience was wearing thin.
“What’s being communicated by the new Mexican president is an intense desire to fully resolve this situation,” Zeldin said.
“There’s no way that we are going to stand before the people of California and ask them to have more patience and just bear with all of us as we go through the next 10 or 20 or 30 years of being stuck in 12 feet of raw sewage and not getting anywhere,” he said. “So we are all out of patience.”
One of the major problems is the trash that’s flowing from Tijuana. Zeldin wants to install floodgates to collect the trash before it crosses the border and more floodgates to divert ten million gallons of sewage away from the shore.
That this problem has been allowed to reach a crisis stage is inexcusable. Millions of Californians are affected by this unconscionable dumping of trash and sewage by Mexico, as the government thumbs its nose at us dumping products, people, and garbage onto American soil.
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