What's in the water at BUD/S?
Untreated sewage from Tijuana has forced the closure of beaches near SEAL HQ.
Training to become a SEAL takes place in the waters just north of Tijuana, Mexico where untreated sewage has been leaking into the ocean for years.
Some of that sewage makes its way to the beaches where the SEAL trainees spend hours upon hours in the ocean water in what they call “surf torture.” Many trainees have told me that diarrhea and vomiting from stomach flu is common in SEAL training, known as BUD/S.
“We were so sick from the water being contaminated,” one former trainee told me. “During Hell Week, everyone was shitting their pants.”
In Imperial Beach, just south of Naval Special Warfare, the beaches have been closed for most of this year due to sewage spills spills and contamination. In Coronado, to the north of SEAL HQ, bacteria in the water closed beaches for weeks on end.
Commander William Tisdale, a spokesman for Naval Special Warfare Command, says SEAL instructors keep an eye on county testing data and try to anticipate water quality issues into training schedules. Training can be moved or rescheduled training if there are water quality concerns, but it rarely happens.
All San Diego-based Navy units that conduct training in the local San Diego Bay and ocean areas, including the Naval Special Warfare Center, analyze county data regarding water quality to make informed, risk-based decisions and employ mitigation measures to minimize any impact to training and the health of our Sailors. To date, the pollution has caused infrequent, short-term impact to training evolutions, which have been delayed, moved, or cancelled when necessary.
Naval Special Warfare lies on an island between the ocean and San Diego Bay. Tisdale says that training in the waters of the Bay are impacted more often than training in the ocean.
The NSW Center reschedules or moves San Diego Bay evolutions more often than ocean ones because San Diego County routinely issues standard advisories for the bay due to storm water runoff from rain. Any unanticipated water-quality concern means an event is rescheduled or moved to a different location.
Some 35 million gallons of raw sewage from Tijuana flows into the ocean every day, according to a study with UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Stanford University and the US Environmental Protection Agency. Most of that traces back to a wastewater treatment plant in Mexico, researchers found.
“We saw with our own eyes: you pump in dye, and it’s rapidly transported along the coast,” said Falk Feddersen, the study’s lead author and hydrodynamics expert at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, told The San Diego Union-Tribune.
The more time someone spends in the ocean, the greater the chances for illness, and SEAL trainees spent a lot of time in the water.
The Biden administration has budgeted $300 million to stop the sewage from polluting San Diego County beaches, but that’s not enough to fix the problem. The San Diego County Board of Supervisors declared a state of emergency last month and called on President Biden to do more.