Local News in Brief : Water Treatment Plant Spills Sewage Onto Woodley Avenue
An operator error caused 500 gallons of sewage to spill out of the Donald C. Tillman Water Reclamation Plant onto Woodley Avenue in Sepulveda Basin Monday, city sanitation officials said.
The spill occurred at 12:15 p.m. and was cleaned up by 4 p.m.
The incident posed no public health hazard because the sewage was already heavily chlorinated, Del Biagi, director of the Los Angeles Bureau of Sanitation, said.
The plant, which opened a year ago, began releasing recovered waste water into the Los Angeles River last Tuesday after more than a year of tests and modifications to ensure that the water meets purity standards.
“We’re in a debugging period,” Biagi said.
Biagi said the spill was occurred when a computer control system was unable to turn on a backup pump after an intake pump stopped working.
An investigation established that the backup pump was inadvertently left on the manual setting so that the computer could not turn it on, Biagi said.
About 1,000 gallons of effluent escaped while plant operators ran from the control room to turn on the backup manually.
Operators contained about half the spill inside the plant.
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