SAN DIEGO (KGTV) - Some may be used to the smell living in the Tijuana River Valley.
“6:15 am I go for my early morning walk. As I open the garage door, that’s normal you do smell; you can smell the river. You smell that every day. This morning it was a little more powerful,” Fred Threats said.
That extra pungency probably coming from the estimated 302,000 gallons of wastewater began spilling from the Hollister Street pump station just after midnight Monday.
“The leak and the spill occurred due to a failed pressure relief value,” Morgan Rogers of the USIBWC San Diego Field Office said.
Rogers is the area operations manager for the U.S. International Boundary and Water Commission.
He said the spill stopped on Tuesday and the Hollister pump station has been taken offline.
“We had some Vactor trucks out there today cleaning up all of the standing wastewater puddles,” Rogers said.
A new valve has been ordered to resolve this issue with hopes of the pump station hopefully being back online next week.
Rogers tells me there’s an ongoing obstacle they’re deal with our neighbors on the other side of the border.
“We believe that the valve failed because of the excess sediment we’re getting in the wastewater from Mexico. That contributed to the failure of the valve and the sediments an ongoing problem,” Rogers said. “This is something that we’re trying to deal with our Mexican counterparts as we speak.”
With Hollister out, wastewater that would've been fed by two canyon collectors to the pump station are now going into Tijuana River.
"There is a smaller pump at Hollister associated with a smaller surge tank. And we maybe able to get that into operation this week which means can turn one of the canyon collectors back in service,” Roger said.
"This has been going on since the 70s, okay. Until they plumb Tijuana, it's going to stay the same,” Threats said.
