Cassandra's Imperial Beach retirement home on the waterfront has gone from her dream home to a nightmare.
“You’re smelling the poop, right,” she questioned as she steps onto her balcony.
The Imperial Beach resident is among the many people in the area, along with Nestor and other South Bay residents, who say they're experiencing health issues as a result of the cross-border sewage problem.
“In the last year and a half or so, my lungs have becoming just deteriorating. I have chronic bronchitis. They found interstitial lung disease,” Cassandra told NBC 7.
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As a result, she says she's now forced to use her inhaler on a near-daily basis, in addition to frequent urgent care and neurologist visits.
Cassandra says her neurologist believes some of her health concerns are a result of where she lives.
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Imperial Beach Mayor Paloma Aguirre has heard the cries for help, which is why she's heading up a new task force of doctors and researchers to find out the correlation between the sewage spills and air quality, as well as the impact it's having on people's health.
“We’ve talked plenty about the gases and odors and odor monitors, but that's, again, a very narrow scope. We're not looking at all the other things that we're seeing, right, that could cause acute to chronic, you know, types of ailments that nobody's really looking at comprehensively," Aguirre said. "So, we're going to start.”
Doctors Kimberly and Matthew Dixon of South Bay Urgent Care told NBC 7 in November of last year that they'd found an unsettling pattern affecting the health of people living near South County beaches, especially after rainstorms and malfunctions with wastewater treatment equipment.
“It didn't seem to discriminate against people who weren't in the water,” said Dr. Kimberly Dixon. “Normally if we were to see a big sewage spill, we would see a large increase in illness from people who were in ocean water. These were not patients who were going in the ocean.”
Aguirre hopes the task force's findings will help not only find what's ailing people but to help get them state and federal financial assistance.
“We cannot wait another 10 or 15 years for solutions. This is reaching a critical point, and that's why we're asking for the governor’s and president's assistance," Aguirre said.
In the meantime, Cassandra says she'll continue to only use bottled water and run her air purifiers until the sewage problem she believes is sickening her and others is cleaned up.
“It’s about awareness. I want to get it right for the next few generations to come," Cassandra said.
Aguirre says in the next couple of weeks, the task force will start rolling out a self-reporting survey to give them a healthy sample size of the issues impacting people who live there.
