Beach, Fouled by Sewage for Years, Reopens : Environment: Section just north of Mexican border was blighted by Tijuana effluent. A system to divert its flow is now in place.

San Diego County Supervisor Brian P. Bilbray announced Monday the lifting of a quarantine on a mile-long stretch of Imperial Beach that has been closed to bathers and surfers for more than a decade.

A recently completed sewage-diversion system, described by Bilbray as “crude but effective,” has county health officials optimistic that Imperial Beach will remain clean--at least until the next heavy rains hit.

The problem stemmed from so-called “renegade” sewage flows originating in the fast-growing residential areas of Tijuana. Sewage overwhelmed inadequate Mexican pipelines and drained into the Tijuana River, which empties just north of the U.S.-Mexico border, said Gary Stephany, deputy director of the county Department of Health Services.

Although sewage problems at the river go back several decades, the most serious period of pollution began during the winter of 1980 when a heavy winter storm broke a sewage pipeline in the Tijuana River basin and flushed up to 12 million gallons of urban sewage into the water off Imperial Beach. During subsequent rainy winters, bacteria counts have, at times, exceeded county standards by more than 10,000 times the level considered safe, Stephany said.

The new system of four “interceptors,” or catch basins, traps sewage runoff in four small canyon areas before it reaches the oceanfront Tijuana River Natural Estuarine Research Reserve along Imperial Beach, an expansive natural estuary supplied by river and ocean water. Polluted water in the catch basins will be pumped either north to the sewage treatment plant in Point Loma, or south to the outfall system that deposits it into the Pacific Ocean below the border.

Officials at the federal Environmental Protection Agency said Monday that the diversion project is an “interim solution” until construction of an international sewage treatment plant in Tijuana is complete.

“This is something to get us through until the treatment plant is up and running,” said Enrique Manzanilla, U.S.-Mexico Border Coordinator for the EPA. The treatment plant is due to be completed by 1996. The interceptors and a Tijuana-based pumping station are designed to channel water to the new treatment plant.

At a news conference held in the sand on the southern end of Sea Coast Drive in Imperial Beach, Bilbray claimed that federal environmental regulators balked at the design, because the system relies in part on natural canyons to channel raw sewage. Securing funding and allaying concerns raised by the EPA took the better part of a decade, Bilbray said.

“It’s a real primitive system,” Bilbray said after joining Imperial Beach Mayor Michael B. Bixler in taking down beachfront quarantine signs with bolt cutters. “But it gets the job done.”

The $4-million solution still leaves environmentalists concerned about the water supply to the estuary, Bilbray said. Because Tijuana River water will be diverted from the estuary, environmentalists say the habitat will suffer.

EPA officials contend that natural rainfall and ocean water will supply the estuary until a water reclamation program through the Tijuana treatment plant goes into effect and returns river water to the estuary--without sewage.

In 1980 Bilbray, then mayor of Imperial Beach, drew national attention to South Bay’s sewage woes with a project named “Operation Beaver,” in which Bilbray commissioned bulldozers to dam up the Tijuana River mouth. Bilbray credited the controversial order with engaging the EPA in a discussion about tackling the sewage and diplomacy problem posed by Mexico’s waste runoff.

Bilbray earlier blamed the EPA for stalling funding to cover construction costs of the catch-basin interceptor system. He accused state and federal regulators of ignoring the sewage problem, because of what he termed traditional neglect of the largely low-income residents in the area.

“This was an environmental disaster that went on for 10 years,” Bilbray said. “The solution took so long because the problem was in a working-class, minority neighborhood, if you want to be blunt about it. If this were La Jolla or Rancho Santa Fe, there would have been hell to pay.”

The EPA’s Manzanilla said the completion time from when the project was proposed by the International Boundary and Water Commission was closer to 10 months, including technical design, securing an agreement with U.S. and Mexican governments, funding and construction.

The interceptor system is part of the comprehensive Tijuana waste management system, dubbed the “Big Pipe,” which is about two-thirds complete, said Cruz Ito, an engineer with the U.S. section of the International Boundary and Water Commission, a binational body that administered funding for the project.