SAN DIEGO (CN) — California public officials, scientists and coastal advocates rang the alarm over the continued pollution of the Tijuana River into the Pacific Ocean and nearby communities on the Mexican border, describing the situation as one of the worst public health and environmental disasters in the country and around the world.
“Since 2018, over 200 billion gallons of sewage have crossed our border,” Paloma Aguirre, who serves on the San Diego County Board of Supervisors, told an audience at a California Senate Environmental Quality Committee hearing in San Diego. “That is a gigantic amount of sewage you don’t hear about anywhere in our nation. It is the biggest public health and environmental crisis in the western hemisphere.”
She said the situation has been compared to the public water crisis in Flint, Michigan, a national scandal that exposed failures in the government and left that city’s residents without safe drinking water for years…