Pipes break repeatedly in Tijuana, and its main water source — the Colorado River — is drying up.
The city’s water supply crisis is pushing its leaders to consider recycling sewage for drinking, especially as residents face the possibility of water rationing this summer. To learn from a city already in the water reuse business, Mexican officials toured Oceanside’s Pure Water facility on Tuesday.
“What if you take this wastewater, right, and you clean it enough so you can drink it?” Rudy Guzman, who oversees the purification facility, told officials during the tour. “Crazy idea, right? But we did it.”
Four years ago, Oceanside became the first in San Diego County and the second in California to open a state-of-the-art purification facility. It turns 3 million gallons of recycled wastewater per day into drinking water for residents, accounting for 20% of the city’s drinking water.
Mayor Esther Sanchez said years of severe drought forced Oceanside and other communities in the western U.S. to think about creating a local water supply, one that could help them rely less on the Colorado River and prepare for future droughts.
“When we realized that, of course, we’re in a desert, this could possibly continue to happen, we had to find another way of supplying or adding to our water supply,” she said.
Sanchez said she believes a water-reuse approach for Tijuana will work, as it has for her city.
“The only way to get there is through sharing information and having this ongoing dialog,” she said.
According to a May report by the Institute of the Americas, Mexico now faces one of the most pressing water crises in the Western Hemisphere, with more than 75% of the country experiencing drought conditions and more than 100 aquifers classified as overexploited.
In Tijuana, water scarcity has reached a point where residents are repeatedly faced with water cutoffs because the city’s aging pipelines break down often, said Gina Arana, a Tijuana city councilmember. The city’s crumbling water infrastructure has not kept pace with its rapid population growth to more than 2 million people, she added.
Under old water reuse programs Mexico had developed several years ago, Arana said, Tijuana treats some wastewater for green spaces and industrial use, but not for drinking.
She said water recycling and purification could also help Tijuana become less reliant on the Colorado River and reduce the amount of wastewater crossing into the San Diego region.
Richard Kiy, president of the Institute of the Americas, who helped officials from the two cities convene for the Oceanside site visit, agreed.
“If they could begin reducing some of that flow that's currently going across the border, that would not only help Tijuana become more water resilient, but it would also begin to alleviate a political problem that not just Tijuana has, but Mexico has with the United States,” he said.
Arana said the San Diego region is showing Tijuana that residents must also play an important role in conserving the city’s water supply.
Tijuana officials plan to meet with other cities in the region and Mexico that are investing in water recycling.
