Weeklong runoff put at 36 million gallons By Terry Rodgers UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

February 29, 2000

SAN DIEGO -- An estimated 36 million gallons of raw sewage flowed undetected into the ocean for up to a week until the spill was discovered yesterday and public health officials closed a mile of beach between the Ocean Beach Pier and the San Diego River. The contamination, which officials say started when a sewer main clogged sometime during a three-day storm that began Feb, 21, is one of the worst discharges of raw sewage in city history.

"In the 10 years that I've been here, this is the largest one," said Dave Schlesinger, director of the city's Metropolitan Wastewater Division.

Despite the enormous volume of the spill, city officials say the toxicity of the water reaching the beaches has been diluted by the torrential flow of urban runoff into the rain-swollen river.

Because the normal rain runoff is known to be polluted anyway, county health officials had already posted contamination warnings at the north end of Ocean Beach before city officials discovered the surging sewage yesterday sometime between 10 a.m. and noon. The spill was brought under control by 4 p.m., city officials said.

How many beachgoers, swimmers or surfers may have been exposed to the raw sewage before the incident was detected is impossible to estimate, officials said.

Ocean Beach will remain closed and posted with contamination warnings for at least three days, said Chris Gonaver of the county's Department of Environmental Health.

"This is certainly a large spill," he said. "We want to make sure the bacteria levels come back into a normal range before we remove the signs."

Today, county officials will test the ocean off Mission Beach and possibly expand the quarantine area if high levels of bacteria are found.

San Diego has been in trouble over sewage in the past.

In February 1996, a court ordered the city to pay $1.3 million in cash and in-kind services for alleged sewage law violations. The settlement came in the wake of a state agency's charges that the city responded late to reports of a leak from a pumping plant into Los Peqasquitos Lagoon and grossly understated the amount spilled.

Also, in 1991, the state fined the city $50,000 after 5 million gallons of sewage spilled into the San Diego River in March.

Raw sewage typically contains high volumes of micro-organisms that can make humans sick. "Primarily it's the viruses we're concerned about," said Gonaver.

Typically, the most virulent are a group of viruses called enteroviruses, which, if swallowed by humans, can cause flulike symptoms and intestinal disorders, he said. "Raw sewage is more of a threat to public health than what we would find in storm runoff," he said, "because we know there are organisms in human sewage that can make people sick."

The sewage spill was difficult to see because the clogged section of pipe is at the base of a 70-foot canyon near San Diego State University just north of Interstate 8, city officials said.

Sewage repair crews believe the spill occurred after a tree fell and severed the top of an above-ground manhole, which allowed a 21-inch sewer main to become jammed with branches, rocks, mud and other debris.

The broken manhole was discovered yesterday morning by city sewer crews who suspected something was wrong when an in-pipe volume meter indicated that the flow toward the sewage treatment plant in Point Loma was decreasing when it should have been increasing.

The sewage first flowed into Alvarado Creek in the College Area before it reached the San Diego River.

City Councilman Byron Wear, who represents Ocean Beach, Mission Beach and Pacific Beach, called the spill "a freak of nature."

"I don't know of any way you could have foreseen a tree severing a manhole," said Wear. However, the councilman, who planned to tour the site of the severed pipe this morning, said he will ask City Manager Michael Uberuaga to determine if the city can invest in a system that could have provided earlier detection.

Word of the spill spread quickly through Ocean Beach and among the businesses that rely on the allure of the sea to entice customers.

"That's pretty bad," said Daniel Espinoza, a front desk clerk at the Ocean Beach Motel on Newport Avenue. "Most of the people who stay here come because of the beach."

Bright orange and black warning signs posted in the sand every 20 or 30 yards did not stop some people from going into the water. At nearby Dog Beach, lifeguards repeatedly warned surfers out of the water late in the afternoon.

James Weisinger, a third-grade teacher who has lived in Ocean Beach for 15 years, said he has seen more and more such warnings.

"I've seen the quality of the environment decline at such an alarming rate in my lifetime, it makes me sad," he said, his 18-month-old son, Nathan, perched on his back. "I pretty much stay out of the water. I'm afraid I'll get hepatitis."

Sara Morabec, an office worker from Rancho Bernardo, said she comes to Ocean Beach every week to collect her thoughts. But she won't be going into the water anytime soon.

"I think it's horrible," she said, sitting at the foot of the Ocean Beach pier. "Pollution is destroying what the vast majority of San Diegans love about this place."

Inside the Jungle Java Coffee and Garden Shop, customers and employees were dismayed to hear about the spill.

"We support a lot of the surf contests out here, so we're very concerned," said cashier

Julie Forrey. "Don't we have maintenance people to check this stuff? That's terrible." Caltrans is expected to close one lane of westbound Interstate 8 this morning to allow repair crews to bring in a crane to make yesterday's temporary repairs permanent. The raw sewage spill triggered the largest health department response along the San Diego shoreline since an undersea pipe ruptured off Point Loma in February 1992, releasing an estimated 250 million gallons per day of treated sewage into the ocean off Point Loma.

More than 20 miles of shoreline from Ocean Beach to the U.S.-Mexico border was quarantined.

Schlesinger, chief of the city's sewage division, defended his agency's actions in detecting the most recent incident and said he immediately notified county health officials and the state Regional Water Quality Control Board.

He said he doubted the city will face fines in this case because it acted as quickly as it could after the source of the spill was found.

"We did everything we could to repair it as quickly as possible," he said. "The problem is that it was occurring over a period of days when no one knew it."

http://www.uniontrib.com/news/metro/20000229-0010_1n29sewage.html

-- Carl Jenkins (Somewherepress@aol.com), February 29, 2000

Answers

NO sh*t!

Recaption this one 'NATURE DECLARES FORCE MANEURE"

-- Squirrel Hunter (nuts@upina.cellrelayutower), February 29, 2000.

Or how about THE SH*T HITS THE SAN"

-- Squirrel Hunter (nuts@upina.cellrelaytower), February 29, 2000.

Wow! All those hundreds of thousands of people who live there, in a desert,in a man made and man maintained completely artificial environment, all of them creating the pollution, and they wonder why the water gets "polluted" sometimes. Imagine that! Oh, I forgot,only the "other guy" pollutes! Why, my feces and car exhaust and trash are always pristine!

-- weall (are@guilty.hypocritical.humans), February 29, 2000.