Homes all across the county will soon be filled with the smells of Thanksgiving feasts. Those smells so common to many of us, turkey and ham, potatoes and yams, apple and pumpkin pie.
Those smells trigger our brains to remember past Thanksgiving over the years.
But sadly for many families in some of the communities in the South Bay, like Imperial Beach, Nestor and San Ysidro, the smells they smell when they open their doors and windows is a very different smell, a very nasty odor.
The smell of raw sewage. This week, just days before Thanksgiving, the San Diego County Air Pollution Control District on Monday issued an advisory warning that levels of sewer gases were above state thresholds and were detected near the Tijuana River Valley.
The district’s air monitoring equipment had recorded concentrations of hydrogen sulfide in some neighborhoods, a toxic gas that smells like rotten eggs.
One resident told a reporter for the San Diego Union Tribune. “The smell isn’t as strong as it was a few months ago but it’s still noticeable and worrisome,” she said.
What is really worrisome is that in spite of efforts by local leaders over far too many years and despite multiple lawsuits and seemingly endless pleas to both Republican and Democrat administrations to fix the problem, it remains a big problem.
The residents can only hope that by this time next year, the problem will have been fixed, finally, and residents will have more to be thankful for.
(Photo reporting partner 10News)
