Toxic Tijuana River crippling one of California’s most affordable beach towns

What was once one of San Diego County’s affordable vacation towns has been forced to close its beach for more than 1,000 days. An acrid smell lingers in the air, and the sewage and chemical pollution surging from the Tijuana River are visible from space. 

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It’s more than enough to ruin an afternoon of lounging on the sand, but it’s not just an inconvenient environmental problem. Businesses in Imperial Beach, a beach town of around 25,000 people between San Diego Bay and the Mexican border, are feeling the impact as the town goes ghost.

“No one wants to come here, and it’s really sad,” Jen Crumley, owner of the ice cream shop Cow-A-Bunga, told SFGATE. “It’s just really empty. It’s a beautiful beach. It’s gorgeous. I just wish that we can get it cleaned up.”

While the public health risks are very real — tens of thousands of people are getting sick from the millions of gallons of sewage polluting the water every day and from toxic “sewer gas” — this long-standing crisis is also draining the local economy. In 2023, San Diego County, with assistance from the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce, conducted an economic impact study to quantify the effects of the Tijuana River crisis on local businesses. Preliminary results found that 74% of businesses were negatively impacted by pollution. Half of those businesses have lost over $100,000 in revenue, and the city is losing $500,000 every year from the lack of tourism. 

The fallout has become so critical that the county is moving forward with a more in-depth study set for release this fall that will measure the crisis’s financial impact on the South Bay. In a statement to SFGATE, Paloma Aguirre, a San Diego County supervisor and champion of the issue, hopes the study will prompt a stronger and faster effort to clean up the waste.

“We need hard, undeniable data to prove exactly how severely this environmental and public health disaster is strangling our community’s financial livelihood, because that concrete data is our strongest tool to work with the state and federal administrations to finally deliver the emergency funding we deserve,” she said.

Businesses struggle to recover

Beautiful beaches are a huge draw for visitors coming to San Diego. But three years ago, public health officials closed the beach due to the chronic, untreated sewage spewing from the Tijuana River from Mexico and spreading all the way north to Coronado. The crisis is also airborne, with many children developing asthma and gastrointestinal problems. Mike Hess, owner of Mike Hess Brewing, told SFGATE that as beachgoers have stayed away, his Imperial Beach location has lost more than $1 million annually.

“Imagine that you are coming in from Arizona or from anywhere else in the country … and you’re looking at going to a beach town and you Google beaches or Imperial Beach, you know, it’s quite affordable,” Hess said. “You start digging in, and then you look, and you say, ‘Oh, I can’t go in the water. Why would I go there?’ That’s the conversation that’s happening thousands of times a month.”

Without visitors making their way to the beach, Crumley said her business near the pier sees minimal foot traffic. Without those tourists, the ice cream shop has become heavily reliant on local residents to patronize the business. As the beach remains closed, both Hess and Crumley have had to cut back on staff, many of whom are locals.

“If no one’s going to the beach, we’re scared,” Crumley said. “It’s our livelihood at stake for sure.”

Imperial Beach has always been a more affordable place to stay when visiting the San Diego area. Lodging starts at less than $100 per night, much less than some of the ritzier places in the county. And while it’s farther away from traditional San Diego tourist attractions, visitors appreciate the small-town feeling. With the loss of tourism, Crumley has also seen a downturn in her vacation rental. 

“It’s been empty, so we’re not getting as much business as we used to, and it’s just been rough across the board,” Crumley said.

Investors back out

While local businesses are already struggling, new investors have lost interest in moving into the area. Kenia Zamarripa, vice president of international and public affairs for the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce, told SFGATE that the crisis has swayed investors to look elsewhere.

“We have had potential investors that come and visit our regions for foreign direct investment or maybe national, and when we talk about South Bay and the many benefits in the workforce, et cetera, it’s a quick Google search that prompts the … pollution issue,” Zamarripa said. “And that is oftentimes just hindering that opportunity in terms of the companies or the investors not wanting to be exposed or expose their workforce.”

The preliminary study that was conducted in 2023 also found that as locals move out of the city, the city of Imperial Beach has experienced between $1 million and $1.5 million in lost property tax revenue. 

Who’s responsible for fixing the crisis?

The Tijuana River has been a point of contention for 40 years. The recurring sewage spills and chemical runoff have caused one of the worst environmental disasters in recent history. Up to 80 million gallons can pollute the water every day, and toxic hydrogen sulfide gas has averaged unprecedented numbers of 2,100 parts per billion over an hour — far higher than the state-regulated one-hour standard of 30 parts per billion, according to research from the UC San Diego Airborne Institute. And while there has been some progress, business owners and local officials say they need more immediate relief.

Aguirre, the area’s county supervisor and former mayor of Imperial Beach, has made this a top priority for her office. In April, she pleaded with Gov. Gavin Newsom, asking why he hadn’t declared a state of emergency.

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“Our South Bay business owners are in survival mode, watching their revenues collapse alongside closed beaches and empty storefronts because of the ongoing pollution,” Aguirre told SFGATE in a statement. “They shouldn’t have to carry the financial burden of a public health crisis they didn’t create.”

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However, despite 18 San Diego County mayors standing with Aguirre’s request, Newsom has maintained his stance that this is a federal issue. Environmental Protection Agency spokesperson Julia Giarmoleo told SFGATE in an email in April that this has been “a top priority for President Trump and [EPA] Administrator [Lee] Zeldin.”

The Trump administration signed a memorandum of understanding in July 2025 and Minute No. 333 in December 2025 alongside the Mexican government “to speed up project timelines and take additional actions to prevent this crisis from reoccurring down the road,” Giarmoleo said. They also completed a 100-day expansion of the South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant to prevent 10 million gallons of raw sewage per day from entering U.S. waters.

However, Hess said he met with Zeldin personally and asked him to provide grants to struggling local businesses. Those grants haven’t been issued. 

“I told them, giving us low-interest loans is not what any business owner wants. That’s not gonna help us,” Hess said. “Putting more debt onto the balance sheet is not gonna help us. If you wanna give us a grant, that’s fine, but what I really want you to do is solve the problem.”

Zamarripa said the Regional Chamber of Commerce’s main focus is advocacy to solve the problem in the long term.

“There’s infrastructure on both sides of the border that has been identified that will help mitigate pollution, several agreements between both countries in terms of what projects to prioritize and fund,” Zamarripa said. “However, there’s much more to be done, not just completing all the projects, but also making sure that there’s a long-term vision for it … and above anything, really to avoid going back to square one in a few years, once the infrastructure is completed.”

According to the Census Bureau, 53% of Imperial Beach residents are Hispanic and/or Latino. Aguirre previously told SFGATE that she felt their community, made up of “Latino, working-class border people,” has been largely ignored.

“The fact that we haven’t had a state of emergency declared for this crisis is hurtful,” Aguirre said in April.

The Navy SEALS have also been affected. Over 1,000 candidates were poisoned within a five-year period, according to Fox News. Hess is hopeful that with the spill leaking into the Navy SEALS training area and into Coronado, a much more affluent community, government officials will be encouraged to end the pollution for good. 

“That’s where all the beautiful people live,” Hess said. “That’s why nobody gave a crap when it was just IB. … It’s only when it finally got up the coast and started affecting Coronado that all of a sudden the feds get involved, which I’m fine with. Whatever it takes to get the attention.”

The Regional Chamber of Commerce said there has been some progress and that it is working diligently to resolve this.

“I would say we’re cautiously optimistic,” Zamarripa said. “I know that it can be frustrating. We continue to put this as a top priority … but this has been going on for decades.”

In the meantime, businesses are trying their best to survive in this new landscape.

“We had dreams to open up more, to open up more Cow-A-Bungas, hopefully by the beach, but it’s been rough,” Crumley said. “It’s just all up in the air.”