Channel Contamination Traced to Firm

A paint residue that contaminated about 400,000 gallons of water in an Irvine flood control channel came from a furniture manufacturing firm in Tustin, a county official said Wednesday.

Nira Yamachika of the Environmental Management Agency said a clogged pipe at the Steelcase Inc. plant on Warner Avenue apparently caused the water soluble latex to back up into storm drains and then flow into the channel.

The spill, which occurred sometime between noon Saturday and early Sunday morning, did not involve a substance that would pose a threat to wildlife, Yamachika said. It just caused a pretty big mess,” she said.

Yamachika said the plant, which manufacturers commercial furniture such as desks and filing cabinets, has a four-phase filtration process through which paint residue passes before entering a sewer line that is designated to handle industrial waste, which is not supposed to go into storm drains or flood control channels.

“It appears now, although it hasn’t been confirmed, that paint has just blocked that line,” Yamachika said. “They are trying to clean it out to determine exactly what caused it.”

Meanwhile, the Orange County Sanitation District has asked Steelcase to demonstrate that the contaminated water is suitable for discharge into its sewage system in accordance with the conditions of the company’s discharge permit.

The concern, according to district spokesman Blake Anderson, is that there may have been other contaminants already in the flood control channel that mixed with the Steelcase spill, possibly rendering it toxic.

“Our judgment at this point is that it is suitable for discharge,” Anderson said Wednesday. “A toxicity test done on the material found that it was nontoxic and, therefore, that it’s probably treatable.”

Noting that the plant is monitored on a regular basis by the district, Anderson said the “normal routine discharge” complies with the plant’s permit for using sanitary sewer lines.

The spill is still under investigation by the Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board, and no decision has been made on whether action will be taken against Steelcase, according to James Anderson, the board’s executive officer.

“At this point we would, at a minimum, ask for recovery of what was expended from the cleanup fund,” Anderson said. “That’s approximately $15,000. Whether we go forward with an enforcement depends on an evaluation of the cause, who was responsible and what caused them not to notify anyone they were having a spill.”

‘In the Planning Stages’

EMA’s Yamachika said Wednesday that Steelcase apparently is in the process of replacing the current filtration system. “They indicated to me that it was something already in the planning stages to be done,” she said.

The spill was discovered Sunday afternoon, and the county Hazardous Materials Response Team dammed the channel near Main Street and Jamboree Boulevard, a mile and a half downstream from the Steelcase plant, to keep the milky white substance from flowing into San Diego Creek and then into the environmentally sensitive Upper Newport Bay until it could be identified.

Pumping trucks removed 400,000 gallons of water from the channel and transferred them to storage tanks at the Irvine Ranch Water District, where tests showed that the substance was a water soluble paint.

“And that was confirmed once we found the source,” Yamachika said.