SAN DIEGO (KGTV) – People in Imperial Beach and the area around Tijuana River Valley say the smell of the air isn’t great.
“Horrible. I can tell. I can tell every night when it dumps. It’s a certain time,” said John Sklodowski, who has lived in Imperial Beach 11 years.
“I don’t know, it smells kind of gross,” added Sammy De Leon, who has lived In Imperial Beach for nearly a year.
In October, the San Diego County Air Pollution Control District set up the sensors in San Ysidro to test for gasses creating the odor in the air cause by the sewage situation with the Tijuana River.
The odor sensors are detecting fairly concentrations odors in the community’s air, per the district.
“Within like the first week, week and half, that we deployed them, we noticed that the first concentrations of the first sensor we put out there, was exceeding the California Air Resources Board ambient air standard for hydrogen sulfide which is one of the pollutants these sensors measure,” said David Sodemam, Monitoring Division Chief at SDAPCD.
Since then, they’ve seen steady levels of the gas creating that nose nauseous.
But Sodeman said while they can figure out how much odor is in the air, figuring out how it’s impacting someone’s health needs more context.
“Hydrogen sulfide is not typically found in the atmosphere at high levels just because it’s related to decomposing organic materials which is typically not a problem in first world nations,” Sodeman said. “So, this is kind of a unique situation. It’s not as well studied like say particulate matter or ozone.”
Sodeman told ABC 10News they’ve heard from people how the odor’s impacted their health.
They hope to have the right way to get the data to further support their situation.
“We don’t want to take like a one-hour exposure level and say, ‘We’re not exceeding that therefore there shouldn’t be any health effect,’ because the residents aren’t being exposed to that level for one hour. It’s a lower concentration. But it’s going to be over a consistent, more longer time frame,” Sodeman said.
Some hope these sensors can better inform the powers that be to provide a solution to make them breathe easier.
“I’m really interested to see what sort of device that actually does that and what sort of numbers they come up with,” Sklodowski said. “I don’t want to breathe it in more than I have to fish in it or swim in it.”
“I’ve heard a lot of things that they’re going to do; they’re going to change this and that. At this point it’s like well another thing to wait and see,” De Leon said.
