Spill closes ocean

The city has hired outside consultants to determine the cause of a spill that spewed 580,000 gallons of sewage onto city streets and into the ocean Wednesday morning.

City crews worked for more than eight hours to stem the flow of sewage from the Bluebird lift station at Glenneyre and Calliope streets. Coastal waters for two miles on either side of the spill — from Crescent Bay to the north and Camel Point to the south — were closed by the county Health Department and will remain closed until the bacteria count returns to normal limits.

“We have hired the highly regarded Dudek engineering firm to tell us what went wrong and how to prevent it from ever happening again,” City Manager Ken Frank said. “We know a pipe pulled away from its fitting. The question is why.

“Two members of the firm have already been here, and we expect a report by next week.”

Dudek is the firm the city contracted to design a major overhaul of the Bluebird pump station, with construction due to start in February at an estimated cost of $1 million.

The spill will not hasten the overhaul of the pump station into which flows sewage from the north of the city and above it except Arch Beach Heights, Frank said.

“We are making some modifications to strengthen a couple of areas in the pump station,” Frank said.

A by-pass was installed by 6 p.m. Wednesday, but it caused some traffic problems on Glenneyre Street and will be relocated.

“We lost a couple of motors and we will take them out to rehab and hopefully have them reinstalled by Sunday,” Frank said.

Two new pumps are due to be installed in December, both of them immersible, which means they won’t quit even if sewage comes up around them.

Updating and rehabilitating the city’s sewage system has been a top priority on the city’s capital improvement plan.

“This incident occurred despite extraordinary efforts by the city over the last several years to improve the maintenance, operation and reliability of the city’s complex sewer system,” according to a joint statement issued Wednesday by Mayor Jane Egly and Mayor Pro Tem Cheryl Kinsman.

“Over $10 million has been spent on improvements to prevent sewer spills. In fact, a contractor working over the last two weeks just installed two new pumps and a rehabilitated motor earlier this week in the Bluebird pump station.”

The city could be fined if found at fault for the spill, according to Brian Kelley, senior engineer of the state Regional Water Quality Board that oversees most of Laguna.

“It could be 1 cent a gallon, 10 cents a gallon or up to $1 a gallon,” Kelley said. “There is a provision for the city not to be held responsible for the spills, but typically, contractors are under the supervision of city staff and the city could still be held culpable.”

The fines escalate depending on such factors as the number and severity of spills.

Wednesday’s spill closed city beaches for the second time this year, but did not force the closure of South Coast Highway as did the spill in April, when 60,000 gallons of sewage poured onto Woods Cove beaches. The April spill was blamed on a deteriorated clamp in the North Coast Interceptor that channels raw sewage to the treatment plant in South Laguna.

Repairs to the interceptor adversely affected the near-by Bluebird pump station, which was shut down to relieve pressure on the main line and required some repairs.

The price tag for the April spill was $250,000. Frank said Thursday he had no idea yet what Wednesday’s spill will cost the city.

“We just have to do what we have to do,” Frank said.

Frank was alerted to the spill at 2:15 a.m., just minutes after it was discovered. It is described as the second worst spill in Southern California in almost a decade, exceeded only by the 2 million gallons of sewage pumped out of a Manhattan Beach facility in 2006.

In a news release issued at 4 a.m. Wednesday, Frank reported that by the time city crews arrived, sewage had flooded the station, flowed onto the adjacent Galen Drive and was going down the storm drain that empties at Bluebird Beach. Frank said at 10:30 a.m. that a county official estimated the spill at 100,000 gallons, considerably less than the final calculation.

Egly and Kinsman lauded the efforts of city crews who worked throughout the early morning to contain the spill. Crews from South Coast Water District also provided immense help, city officials said.