[ad_1]
When the United States first proposed building a plant to treat Mexican sewage in the 1970s, they asked for it to be large enough to treat 100% of Tijuana’s wastewater. Gradually, the plant was cut to a quarter of its original size and simplified to be cheaper to build, with plans to upgrade it over time. David Gibson, executive officer of the San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board, said the IBWC plant was obsolete when it was completed in 1997. “The design decisions made in the 1990s for that treatment plant are still being paid for today,” Gibson said. With no taxpayers to pay for its maintenance, the plant has also fallen victim to the Darwinian logic of the federal budget, receiving just $4 million in maintenance payments from 2010 to 2020, during a period when border security has appropriated billions of additional dollars. “It’s like buying a nice Corolla or a nice Ford in 1997, but you never rotate the tires, never change the oil,” Gibson said. The plan now is to make overdue repairs and double its capacity. But Gibson said current funding is “less than half” of what’s needed to make the economic model work. He worries the region is about to repeat its nearly 100-year history of wastewater treatment, where “infrastructure was installed only a decade or so later and couldn’t keep up with demand.”
Still, Gibson echoed a sentiment I’d heard from nearly every American official—that the only surefire way to solve Tijuana’s sewage problem was to build infrastructure on the American side. In that sense, Tijuana’s sewage treatment seemed destined to be like the extension of the border wall, a constant intervention at the river’s mouth rather than at its head, no matter the price. “I don’t think Mexico overall has the resources to solve their problem,” IBWC Commissioner Genna told me. “After all of this is built, how do we make sure we have the resources to move forward with this?” she asked, referring to the upgrades on the American side. “Assuming we catch up. Once we catch up, we’ll have to answer that question.”
Almost everywhere you look, America’s border politics are driven by a deep-seated myth: With enough money and willpower, you can eventually seal these countries off from each other like condos sharing a 1,954-mile wall. Decades of militarization One of the great obstacles of the border is that it makes Mexico invisible to U.S. residents. The same is true of cross-border industrial development: Impenetrable to money and airplane parts, impenetrable to everything else. Straddling one of the world’s busiest land crossings, the Tijuana River stubbornly defies that narrative, serving as a reminder that both sides of the border are one place. Once feces is in the water, no amount of barbed wire can keep it out.
[ad_2]
Source link
