Sewage Test Reports at Escondido Plant Falsified by Officials

Top officials at Escondido’s sewage treatment plant, which pumps 11 million gallons of waste water into the ocean off Cardiff each day, altered key testing data given to state and federal regulators during a three-month period earlier this year, according to documents made available to The Times.

Beginning in January, the plant’s laboratory supervisor adjusted results of a test that serves as a major indicator of the cleanliness of effluent piped into the ocean, according to the documents, provided by an employee at the treatment facility.

The changes, entered on monthly reports sent to federal and state environmental officials who monitor the performance of sewage treatment plants, made it appear that the potency of sewage leaving the plant was lower than it may actually have been.

Officials with the California Regional Water Quality Control Board, which monitors sewage plants along with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, said the alterations appear to violate the federal Clean Water Act of 1972, which imposed stringent treatment standards on sewage dischargers.

“Based on what I see here, they are disguising the facts and violating conditions of their permit simply by not being entirely forthcoming with their figures,” David Barker, a senior engineer with the Water Quality Control Board, said after reviewing the documents provided to The Times.

Barker, who stressed the plant’s actions posed no threat to the public health, said he intends to send an inspector to the Escondido facility to commence an investigation today.

Officials at the treatment plant said they have done nothing wrong.

Laboratory Supervisor Myung J. Kim, who completes the monthly monitoring reports, maintained that he used “good judgment” and data from other, related tests to compute the results forwarded to the regulatory agencies--results that were sometimes vastly different from those recorded by lab technicians who conduct the test on a daily basis.

“Your legitimate concern, I understand. But there is no cover-up here. There is no scheme going on,” Kim said in an interview. “We had a problem with (the test) from January to March and the numbers were coming out abnormally high. I did not want to report bad data, so I used my best judgment to find the appropriate number.”

Kim’s supervisor, Assistant Utilities Supt. Glen Peterson, said the explanation is a valid one.

“It doesn’t make sense for us to report data that is totally out of line or different from other (test) data,” Peterson said. “Doing our best to make a recalculation is, I would say, a common practice, a legitimate practice.”

But Barker disagreed, noting that if the plant “had a problem with their test that may have produced faulty numbers, then they should have told us from the start rather than make assumptions and randomly change these figures. This sort of thing is unacceptable.”

If an investigation reveals inaccurate, untruthful or incomplete reporting of data by the Escondido facility, the plant could be subject to fines as high as $10,000 per violation or even imprisonment of those employees responsible for the violations, state officials said. In addition, the EPA would be notified.

“In California, the state requires these plants to send us legitimate, accurate data as part of a monitoring program,” Barker said. “We rely on them to conduct these tests in an honest and consistent way. We take a very dim view of results that are altered in any way and may not reflect what’s actually in the effluent.”

Richard MacManus, founder of a citizens’ group fighting the impending relaxation of sewage treatment standards at the Escondido plant, took a harsher view.

“This is deplorable,” said MacManus, who heads the Cardiff-based People for a Clean Ocean. “This certainly supports our contention that we cannot rely on others to protect our ocean’s interests.”

According to plant employees, the facility’s troubles began in January when the so-called BOD test, one of the primary indicators of sewage strength, mysteriously began producing results that were abnormally high.

In sophisticated secondary treatment systems like that employed by Escondido, microorganisms are used to consume waste particles. The BOD, or biochemical oxygen demand test, measures the amount of oxygen consumed by those microorganisms in the process of digesting waste material present in the sewage.

Along with a test measuring the level of suspended solids, the BOD screening is one of the major measures of the purity of treated waste water leaving the plant. Dischargers also are required to test for heavy metals like chromium, cadmium and arsenic and other potentially toxic substances.

Under its sewage testing program, Escondido’s plant must maintain treatment standards adopted both by the EPA and the state Water Quality Control Board. If limits on certain pollutants--including the BOD--are exceeded, the plant can face reprimands from the agencies or fines assessed either through the courts or through an administrative hearing process, Barker said.

In January, for reasons still unknown to plant officials, the BOD level at the Escondido facility suddenly began to soar.

“I admit it, we had extremely high levels of BOD coming out, and no one could pinpoint why it was happening,” Kim said. “The (plant operators) downstairs were very upset at these high numbers. And I was upset.”

In an effort to determine what was causing the high levels, Kim ran a bevy of lab checks. Kim said he even sent samples to treatment plants in Oceanside and Carlsbad in an effort to determine whether his testing methods were at fault. In one case the other labs came up with lower BOD counts but differed from each other. In another case one of the labs came up with a higher BOD count.

After all that, the lab supervisor could still find no adequate explanation for the high BOD counts. So, based on data from other tests that usually correlate with the BOD level, Kim concluded that many of the high recordings were in error.

Consequently, for 13 days in January, the supervisor struck calculations made by a lab technician and entered lower numbers on the monthly monitoring report forwarded to the regulatory agencies.

On Jan. 30, for example, the lab technician recorded a BOD level of 62--a figure higher than the daily maximum limit of 50. Kim entered a 44. The pattern continued through February and early March, when the levels inexplicably dropped. On the daily test chart for Feb. 2, for example, the lab technician entered a level of 69; on the monthly report--the only document sent to state and federal regulators--the number is 34.

And on Feb. 18, the technician got a BOD reading of 80. Kim entered no number on the report for that day.

“The BOD can almost never get that high,” Kim explained in the interview. “If I reported that 80, I would be providing the worst false data.”

Barker conceded that the plant’s test--and consequently the BOD data--may well have been suspect. However, under terms of Escondido’s permit, administrators are required to notify regional board officials--which conduct routine inspections of local plants three times a year--if treatment troubles occur.

“Plants don’t like to report violations (of treatment standards), because there’s the possibility of penalties and it just doesn’t look good,” Barker said. “But if they’re having a problem, they’re required to let us know. They can’t mask the situation with false numbers and hope we don’t find out.”

Barker also said that the high BOD test could have indicated the presence of industrial wastes that wouldn’t necessarily have been reflected by other tests.

When asked why Escondido officials failed to report the test figures or contact the regional board when the BOD level began to rise, Peterson said, “We didn’t think they’d be interested.”

In addition, the assistant superintendent noted that “by the time they got around to responding to us and telling us we were not in compliance, it would be two months later and the sewage would be down by Baja.”

Barker countered that “is simply not their judgment to make.”

“Certainly, if there’s a violation, you can’t just turn off a sewage plant,” he said. “But just because the sewage is already in the ocean, that doesn’t mean you can violate the terms of your permit.”

In defending the plant’s handling of the test data, Peterson contends that, “whether they admit it or not, all labs have their own little practices they apply from time to time to take care of aberrations and abnormalities.”

Barker and other regional board officials dispute that assessment; they say this episode marks the first time they have seen evidence of any alteration of testing data by a San Diego County plant.

Moreover, the superintendent at Oceanside’s major sewage treatment plant said it is “flat out wrong to report data different from what you get from the test, even if it does seem too high or too low.”

“Occasionally, a plant will get an upset and the levels will go off for some reason or another,” said Inez Martinez, superintendent of Oceanside’s San Luis Rey treatment facility. “But regardless of the level, we report it.”

According to members of People for a Clean Ocean, the episode is particularly significant given Escondido officials’ application to reduce their level of sewage treatment from secondary to so-called advanced primary, a cruder method that is basically a settling process. On March 30, the Water Quality Control Board approved the application, but People for a Clean Ocean group has asked for another hearing. The board will consider the request June 16.

“I’m very anxious to see how the board reacts to the discovery that they’ve been deceived all along,” said William K. Mueller, an attorney handling the environmental group’s appeal. “If nothing else, this certainly seems to add a taint of dishonesty to this whole matter.”

Barker, however, said he did not believe problems over the BOD tests at Escondido would cloud the plant’s efforts to reduce the level of treatment, an action city officials hope will both save money and increase processing capacity.