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. 

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.”

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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. 

FILE: A sign warns of polluted water in Imperial Beach, Calif., April 16, 2009.

The Tijuana River flows after an overnight rain, leaving debris collected in a trash boom, on Monday, Jan. 27, 2025, in Imperial Beach, Calif.

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.

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“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.

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