Sewer Hookup Ban Threatened by Panel : Sewage Overflows Into Penasquitos Creek May Lead to Moratorium on Construction

A series of large overflows of untreated sewage from San Diego’s largest pump station has prompted state pollution-control officials to threaten to ban new sewer hookups in one of the fastest-growing areas of the city and county.

The moratorium, which would restrict development in a 100-square-mile area including Del Mar, Poway, Scripps Ranch, Mira Mesa, Rancho Penasquitos and North City West, is to be considered by the Regional Water Quality Control Board at its mid-June meeting.

The board will also consider fining the city as much as $450,000 for the repeated spills into Penasquitos Creek, plus $658,520 for the city’s failure to remove tens of thousands of cubic yards of sewage sludge stored without a permit at Brown Field.

The fines would be among the largest ever imposed by the regional board.

The pump station, known as Pump Station 64 in Sorrento Valley, has experienced half a dozen spills since January. The largest spill sent an estimated 4.5 million gallons of raw sewage into Penasquitos Creek on April 23, forcing a quarantine of Penasquitos Lagoon.

The sludge, the solid by-product of sewage treatment, has accumulated at Brown Field on Otay Mesa over the last six years. The board had ordered the city to clean it up by May 15, but city officials say they have no place to put it.

For those reasons, the board’s staff proposed at a meeting in Temecula this week giving the city until Nov. 5 to clean up the Brown Field site and imposing a penalty for past failure to remove the sludge.

It also recommended penalizing the city for the spills at Pump Station 64, and limiting future sewage flow to the station by imposing the moratorium on hookups to sewers leading to the station.

“It’s very significant,” Robert Ferrier, deputy director of the systems division of the city Water Utilities Department, said Friday. “In terms of the City of San Diego, (station 64) is by far and away the largest system.”

Ferrier said the station pumps raw sewage from northern parts of the city and county to the Point Loma sewage treatment plant. He said its problems stem from the recent installation of new pumps that have been plagued with electronic and mechanical failures.

As a result, raw sewage has spilled five or six times since January into a drainage channel that feeds into Penasquitos Creek and Lagoon. Ferrier said the station is now manned seven days a week, and backup and redundancy systems have been installed.

Ferrier insisted that the station is not overburdened. If all pumps were working, he said, there would be excess capacity. But there have been long delays in getting repairs and parts under warranty, he said.

As a result of the spills, county health officials have repeatedly closed the lagoon, which is next to Torrey Pines State Reserve. Since the sand barrier between the lagoon and the ocean was removed this week to aid mosquito control, they say another spill could cause ocean pollution.

Raw sewage poses a threat to human health because it carries disease-causing organisms, such as salmonella, and viruses like infectious hepatitis. John Melbourn, a county public health engineer, said there is no evidence that the spills have made anyone ill.

But he said the Health Services Department has received complaints from electronics firms and other businesses along the drainage channel of bad odors and corrosion of electrical parts from hydrogen sulfide gas rising from the sewage.

As for the sewage sludge, water board staff members say they have seen no evidence that it has affected ground water beneath Otay Mesa. However, Michael McCann, a board engineer, said runoff may drain into Mexico and a tributary of the Tijuana River.

The city has been storing sludge on the site since 1979, when it stopped using sludge as a “soil conditioner” for places like Mission Bay Park. Since then, stricter environmental laws have reduced cities’ options for disposing of sludge.

More and more of the city’s sludge has ended up on city-owned land at Brown Field--as much as 182,000 cubic yards, McCann said. The city has no permit to dispose of it there. City officials say they had an oral agreement with the state that no permit was needed.

Furthermore, city officials say, they have no options since the county-run landfill only accepts a small amount of sludge. Landfill officials say they cannot take more because state health officials have not decided whether to designate the sludge “non-hazardous.”

In the meantime, city officials have hired a consulting engineer to find alternative disposal methods. The alternatives include using it in agricultural land reclamation, topsoil production and as more “soil amendment.”

However, those alternatives require the approval of the water quality board and the state Health Services Department and could not be implemented immediately. Water board officials fear that it could be late 1987 before Brown Field is cleared under the plan proposed by the city.

“The Department of Water Utilities is committed to removing its sludge,” Assistant City Manager John Lockwood wrote in a report late this week. “However, it cannot achieve this objective by Nov. 5 . . . unless it can receive immediate cooperation from the state and (the Regional Water Quality Control Board) through the approval of alternative disposal methods.”

Lockwood was even more blunt about Pump Station 64: “We do not plan or schedule water main breaks, sewage backups, sewage overflows and spills, power outages or mechanical failures. But they do occur.”

Pointing out that the city has been working to correct the problems, he concluded: “To penalize us in spite of these efforts seems a bit nonconstructive.”