The Tijuana River, for the second year, has made a not-so-impressive list, as one of America’s Top 10 Most Endangered Rivers of 2025.
And the urgency has increased – the river, which crosses the U.S.-Mexico border, rose to No. 2, up seven spots from 2024.
“This is not a badge of honor,” said Ramon Chairez, director of education and environmental advocacy at Un Mar de Colores, an Encinitas-based advocacy group connecting underserved youth to the ocean. “This is a warning, a cry for help, and a call for urgent action.
The list was made by American Rivers, a national environmental organization focused on protecting and promoting the health of rivers in the U.S. Each year, the group releases the rankings to shine a spotlight on threats to clean water and to drive advocacy.
Officials from the group, along with community leaders, environmental activists and physicians, gathered this week for a press conference at a ranch in the Tijuana River Valley about 200 yards from the “hotspot” where dangerous levels of hydrogen sulfide gas have been detected.
The Tijuana River Valley long has been an environmental concern, and the South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant was intended to handle the polluted flows over the border.
But the plant has been overwhelmed, and since last year residents have complained of noxious smells emanating from the valley, and worse, health complaints from breathing in the contaminated air. Residents have called on all levels of government to respond, from San Diego County on up to former President Joe Biden, and now President Donald Trump.
In addition, according to a news release from the Surfrider Foundation, since Jan. 1, nearly 10 billion gallons of contaminated water have flowed through the river into the Pacific Ocean off Imperial Beach. The beach has been closed due to contamination for over 1200 consecutive days.
Imperial Beach Mayor Paloma Aguirre added Gov. Gavin Newsom to the list of those she wants to respond, suggesting that working-class South Bay communities have “been forgotten for far too long.”
“I call upon our governor and our president to take immediate action because if this were happening anywhere else in the nation, especially in affluent communities, we would have had interventions already,” she said.
Some of the assembled experts also explained how the pollution has come to affect air quality as well.
Hydrogen Sulfide gas released from contaminated water when agitated, they said, can reach unsafe levels due to a process called aerosolization. The hotspot for aerosolized gasses in the South Bay is located in a residential neighborhood with several schools.
And the levels of the gas detected in Nestor – or “the smelly smell, the porta potty smell” – as Dr. Kimberly Prather from UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography described it, are not just elevated. They are “4,000 times higher than typical urban levels,” she said.
“Science is under siege right now. We’re under attack. People are trying to say science doesn’t matter, but in this case, science backs the voices,” Prather said. “It validates the voices of the community.”
And health problems not only have been reported, in an ongoing survey by the San Diego State University School of Public Health, they are witnessed by physicians in the community, particularly when there are higher levels of hydrogen sulfide gas.
“It’s like clockwork,” said Dr. Matt Dickson, owner of South Bay Urgent Care. “In the afternoon we see kids with wheezing, with headaches, with nausea. We’re seeing teenagers and 10 year olds with migraine headaches. It just doesn’t happen normally. Elderly people with chronic lung conditions, we see them on a daily basis.”
Phillip Musegaas, executive director of San Diego Coastkeeper, was blunt in his conclusions. He noted the presence of not just sewage in the river water, but industrial chemicals from “everything from pesticides to paint thinner,” including benzene, toluene and acetone.
“Don’t think about this as a river,” he said, but “as an open sewer.”
The river not only flows to the Pacific, but also San Diego Bay, and Bobby Wallace, of the Barona Band of Mission Indians, warned, that without intervention, the pollution from the Tijuana River is “going to keep traveling. And as the expansion of people keeps happening, it’s going to get worse and worse.”
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