Dead Cats, Toxins and Typhoid

By Michael Riley/Mexicali

For twelve years Biologist Phil Gruenberg has watched a foul parade float down the New River, a bile-green waterway that slices across the Mexico- California border. While scooping up water samples near the border town of Calexico, Calif., he has seen dead cats and chickens bob past, along with tires, slaughterhouse waste, laundry suds and human feces, and once, a dead man's body. The unseen horrors are, if anything, even more disturbing: the New is saturated with toxic chemicals and teems with disease-causing viruses and bacteria. Warns Imperial County Health Department Officer Dr. Lee Cottrell: "It's an environmental disaster waiting to happen."

The New River did not even exist until 1905, when the flooding Colorado River dug a new channel that arched south of Mexicali, Mexico, then back north into California. But it has made up for lost time. Says Gruenberg: "It's the most polluted water in California, and perhaps in the U.S." The Colorado connection has long since dried up, but a 75-mile river still flows, carrying its poisonous flotsam into California's bountiful Imperial Valley, past lettuce and cotton fields, and finally emptying into the Salton Sea, a popular fishing and swimming site near Palm Springs. Fishermen and residents alike have complained about pollution in the Salton Sea, and the U.S. Geological Survey stopped taking river samples two years ago. Reason: the water is too unhealthy to handle. But despite repeated promises from the Mexican government, little has been done. "The problem," says Environmental Protection Agency Official Richard Coddington, "is that there's an international border, and Mexico has sovereignty on that side of the line. We wish they'd ask us to help."

The river's problems begin in the boomtown of Mexicali, which since 1970 has more than doubled its size, to an estimated population of 1 million. There, an overburdened sewerage system dumps millions of gallons of raw waste daily into the 30-ft.-wide stream. Other contaminants are added to the stew as the river continues northward, churning through a garbage dump, past cattle feedlots and dairies, and within yards of ramshackle slums. On the edges of town, such classic polluters as food-processing and chemical plants dump ! organic wastes, pesticides, solvents and other chemicals into slime-filled ditches that drain into the river. About 100 toxic substances, including mercury and such known or suspected cancer-causing agents as PCBs, toxaphene and benzene have been identified at the border sampling site.

In addition to these poisons, the river harbors at least 28 varieties of viruses and an unknown number of bacterial strains, including typhoid, cholera, hepatitis and the three known types of polio virus. According to Gruenberg, bacteria levels routinely reach 1,000 times the maximum level set by the EPA as safe for bodily contact. Though no one uses the water for drinking or irrigation, infected drifts of foam from Mexican laundry detergents are sometimes scattered by the wind, and Cottrell fears an epidemic is inevitable. At greatest risk are illegal immigrants, who occasionally venture into the polluted suds to swim under the border's chain link fence.

Since 1946 the U.S. and Mexican governments have made both joint and independent attempts to tackle the New River's problems. The latest plan, approved but with no set implementation schedule, is a $1.2 million collaborative venture to be funded equally by the two countries. The project would provide Mexicali with a new sewage-pumping plant, plus backup pumps and a truck equipped to remove muck from waste pipes.

Experts on both sides of the border agree, however, that this will barely make a dent in the problem. California has therefore allotted $150,000 to explore its own options for cleaning the river. Among the ideas under consideration: erecting a screen big enough to stop the passage of dead animals, covering the river in a huge culvert along the populous border region, or possibly diverting the entire watercourse to a nearby waste- treatment site. According to a 1985 study, the cost of a thorough cleanup could reach $400 million.

Meanwhile, Mexicali has agreed to move livestock and people away from the riverbanks and to open a toxic-waste disposal site later this year. The Mexican government has also threatened to fine or shut down the city's polluting factories, some of which belong to U.S. companies that crossed the border in search of cheap labor and loosely enforced environmental laws. Vows Fernando Menendez of Mexico's Ministry of Urban Development and Ecology: "You can be sure the cleaning of the river is going to be accomplished in two years." Gruenberg and other veteran river watchers have their doubts. It will take more than promises to turn the fetid tide.