City Lets Contract to Have Sludge Trucked Off Fiesta Island

City officials are one step closer to making a sizable dent in the more than 140,000-ton stockpile of solid sewage waste, known as sludge, that has slowly accumulated on Fiesta Island since 1979.

The City Council on Tuesday awarded a contract to a Los-Angeles based company to begin removing about half of the pile, which has increased by more than 90,000 tons in the last few years.

The sludge on the Mission Bay island will be transported to landfills in San Bernardino and Riverside by Tofco Industries. The $2-million project is expected to take about a year, city officials say.

The California Coastal Commission in 1981 ordered the city to begin looking for alternative sites to store the sludge. But in 1986, the commission granted the city an additional two years to remove the sludge because of difficulty in finding another location.

“The commissioners understood the new site selections would be critical and it would not be a simple process,” said Chuck Damm, assistant district director for the commission. “No one particularly wants to have sludge beds in their communities, and it is a very expensive process (to relocate it).”

Since 1963, the city’s Point Loma Waste Water Treatment Plant has pumped thousands of gallons of treated sewage 7.5 miles underground to the island, where it flows into ponds. The sludge is then left to dry for several months. Before 1979, the sludge was then either used as fertilizer or disposed of in local landfills.

The city began stockpiling the sludge in 1979 after stricter regulations forced the Water Utilities Department to begin extracting more solids from the waste and at the same time prohibited disposal of it in county landfills except for a small amount at Otay Mesa, said Alan Langworthy, metro division deputy director for the water department.

Damm said the commission ordered the relocation because it did not want the city to permanently stockpile sludge next to a major recreational area.

City officials did not know exactly what would become of the more than 70,000 remaining tons of sludge, but Langworthy said plans are under way to relocate the sludge-drying facility to a city-owned former landfill on Miramar Naval Air Station.