High country news The Great River becomes a great sewer Bruce Selcraig June 13, 1994
[Written in 1994, when the el paso smelter was fully geared up with world's 2 largest con top furnaces, secretly burning illegal haz waste $$$$$. The H.S. students and their teachers were not warned. Now 30 plus yrs later , we wonder how much cancer in class of 102. How many birth defects. [And why the article did not cover usa side of pollution, including sewage?? /s ]
(Reposted Under fair use)
The Great River becomes a great sewer
Bruce Selcraig
June 13, 1994
Texas high school students analyze the Rio Grande
River By Diane SylvainFORT HANCOCK, Texas – Red-headed Jimmy Frank Rogers, a junior and an agile receiver on
Fort Hancock High’s six-man football team (school enrollment: 102), straddled some spindly
salt cedar on the steep banks of the Rio Grande and surveyed what was once the Great River.
“I’d guess maybe 20 yards across,” ofered Rogers, tugging at his Texas Aggies ball cap. The
Rio Grande, here some 50 miles downstream of the El Paso/Juarez metropolis, was barely a
foot deep where it wasn’t dry altogether.
“Down here,” observed Rogers’ science teacher, Ted Woodruf, “the Rio Grande is a bit of a
misnomer.” And, he added, without disagreement from his lively class, “a bit of a cesspool at
times.”
Last month Woodruff and seven students joined some 60 other high school science classes in
Texas, Mexico and New Mexico – over 2,000 students – in testing the quality of the Rio
Grande along a 1,500-mile course from the high sierra of northern New Mexico, near Taos, to
its demise at the Gulf of Mexico.
It was the fourth year for the binational efort called Project del Rio. The Santa Fe-based
program monitors the river three times each spring in one of the largest mass testings of a
river in the world. What the students found was pretty dismal.
The Rio Grande, listed last year as the country’s most imperiled river by the conservation
group American Rivers, is fouled by nitrates, phosphates and “off the scale” pH levels in
many areas. Human and animal wastes along much of the Mexican border make any skin
contact with the river dangerous.
“To be honest,” said Project del Rio’s normally upbeat director, Lisa LaRocque, “I don’t see
anything comforting about the results. The good news is that the students produced their
best data ever.”
The river’s worst health problem continues to be high levels of fecal coliform. While not
pathogenic, fecal coliform often indicate the presence of organisms that carry hepatitis,
dysentery, typhoid and cholera. Raw sewage in the river has been a problem for many years
because the largest cities on the Mexican side have antiquated sewage treatment plants, or
none. In Nuevo Laredo, where ocials say the city’s rst sewage treatment plant is at least a
year from completion, about 70 percent of its half-million people ush their wastes directly
into the Rio Grande.
“Some parts of the river are so dirty,” says Project del Rio’s U.S. coordinator, Craig Heacock,
“that it’s not a good idea to have the students test it. In those cases they sometimes pay the
coyotes (men who ferry people across the border illegally) to get a water sample for them.”
Dr. Laurance Nickey, director of the El Paso City-County Health and Environmental District,
says Juarez ocials have told him 55 million gallons of raw sewage and industrial pollutants
leave the city of 2 million each day.
“They discharge it into irrigation canals that parallel the Rio Grande for 18 miles and serve
some 60,000 acres of farmland,” Nickey says. “When it’s not used for irrigation, the canals
are rediverted into the Rio Grande – in fact, a few miles upstream of Fort Hancock.”
The reason those Fort Hancock students see such a meager river much of the year is that the
vast majority of the Rio Grande is given to agriculture through irrigation canals. But on the
Mexican side below Juarez, those irrigation canals – called the aguas negras, or black waters
– are also the avenues of disease.Dr. Nickey, who like many older El Pasoans swam and shed in the river as a child, says that
in 1992 the rates of hepatitis A and dysentery doubled and tripled, respectively, in El Paso
County. Several cholera cases were reported on the Mexican side two years ago, and on the
day the students tested last month, the El Paso newspapers were reporting a case of polio in
Juarez – the rst in three years.
More than just a well-intentioned science program, Project del Rio has won support from
industry, government and community groups for its reliability. The non-prot project is
funded largely by the Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA’s Mexican counterpart,
known as SEDESOL, U.S. and Mexican corporations along the border and the San Franciscobased Tides Foundation.
Despite its non-partisan approach, Project del Rio’s test results inevitably take on a political
context. Some opponents of the North American Free Trade Agreement say the river’s
condition indicates how unprepared Mexico is for massive industrialization. Ironically, some
of Project del Rio’s sponsors, among which are chemical rms, auto makers, waste haulers,
pharmaceutical companies and a steel mill, represent industries that have been among the
border’s worst polluters.
LaRoque, a former Peace Corps worker with a master’s degree in environmental education
from the University of Michigan, concedes that because the students are not testing for
substances like solvents, pesticides and heavy metals, the companies have little fear of being
singled out as polluters.
“I applaud the Project del Rio students,” Nickey says, “but I’m very concerned about our
river. If the U.S. government can give hundreds of millions of dollars to Afghanistan and all
the other “stans,” why in heaven’s name can’t they give Mexico some sewage treatment
plants?
“I just hope,” pleads Nickey, “that the students’ ndings will raise the consciousness of those
people who live along another river – the Potomac.”
Lisa LaRocque can be reached at Project del Rio, 1345 Camino de los Lopez, Suite B., Santa Fe,
NM 87505 (505/471-7788).
The writer lives and writes in Austin, Texas.
