City Fires Sewer Plant Contractor to Avoid Delays

Hoping to head off new fines over ocean sewage disposal, the Los Angeles Board of Public Works on Monday fired a major contractor on the massive Hyperion treatment project near Playa del Rey for missing deadlines and poor performance.

The board terminated Continental Heller Corp. after city engineers complained that the firm’s failure to finish work on time could force Los Angeles to violate a new agreement with the Environmental Protection Agency to halt sludge dumping in Santa Monica Bay by the end of next year.

Another contractor on the Hyperion Energy Recovery System project--which is being built to replace sludge dumping with a complex process of sewage treatment and burning--will be selected to take over the work of Continental, city engineers said.

If the new firm is selected shortly, the project will remain on schedule, city officials said. “We will meet the deadline comfortably,” Chief Deputy City Engineer Richard Wainer said.

Deadlines Missed

Meeting the Dec. 31, 1987, deadline is the latest in a series of promises by the city to stop pumping sludge, a concentrated form of sewage, into Santa Monica Bay. Los Angeles officials already have missed deadlines in 1980 and 1985 but agreed to the new timetable last month as part of a proposed consent decree negotiated with the EPA and state water quality authorities.

Halting the sludge dumping is just one element of the proposed decree, which still faces a hearing in federal district court Dec. 16. It would also require the city to have the entire Hyperion Energy Recovery System operational by the end of 1989 and to ensure full “secondary treatment” of waste water by the end of 1998. (Secondary treatment is a costly process that removes toxic chemicals, fecal material and other solids from sewage.)

Until the Hyperion plant is fully operational, the sludge will be trucked to an inland landfill.

Continental, one of several large contractors working at Hyperion, was responsible for a relatively small part of the entire project--a plant to house steam turbines that will create electricity by burning a powder refined from dried sewage. But testing of the turbines needs to begin this spring or else construction on other elements of the sewage-treatment process will be delayed, city officials said.

The firm had completed nearly all the work called for in $34.5 million worth of city contracts before relations soured. Only $1 million to $2 million worth of work remained to be completed, Wainer said.

City’s Complaints

But city supervisors said at a hearing Friday that Continental frequently missed meetings and that the firm’s poor planning and inadequate staffing threatened to throw the overall Hyperion project off schedule.

Company officials did not appear at the Monday meeting, where the Board of Public Works voted to end the contract. But on Friday, Executive Vice President Chris Edwards said the city created the trouble by adding a series of new requirements while construction was under way.

A telephone call to Edwards at his Sacramento office Monday was not returned.