It’s only the first of six monitoring stations that will be placed along the border region near where sewage flows through the Tijuana River watershed, but in the three months since it was installed, it has confirmed what South Bay residents long suspected: The air they are breathing is unhealthy. What, they wonder, will the other five monitoring stations show? And how will the data collected be used to remedy the decades-long, unchecked discharge of contaminated water from the U.S.-Mexico region? Since late September, six monitors came online at a station the San Diego County Air Pollution Control District built on the property of San Diego Fire Station 29 in San Ysidro. The air-quality monitors are measuring, on an hourly basis, the quantities of the potentially toxic gas hydrogen sulfide, which has a characteristic rotten-egg odor. Their data shows that people have repeatedly been exposed to low levels of the gas that sometimes exceed state and federal air quality standards.

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