City Decides It’s Time to Cut Sewers’ Fat Intake

The enemy is grease--great big gobs of food grease.

It is poured into the San Diego city sewer system and wreaks havoc throughout its thousands of miles of underground pipes. Quick to harden in the relatively cold swill, the grease clings to the chipped and pitted walls of aging pipes, clogging up the joints and blocking the normal flow of sewage.

Now it’s time to fight back, San Diego city officials figure.

On Monday, the City Council will be asked to approve an ordinance that water department officials say is their biggest volley yet in a newly declared “war on grease.”

The ordinance would make it a misdemeanor for any San Diego restaurant to operate without installing a special grease trap in sewer pipes between the kitchen and the city pipes under the street.

The trap, actually a concrete box that serves as a baffle in the pipeline by skimming grease off the top while allowing water to escape through the bottom, would cost an average restaurant less than $1,000 and could hold up to 100 pounds of grease, according to a city report. A commercial waste hauler would have to empty the trap two to four times a year, a service that could cost each restaurant owner $150 to $300 annually.

City water officials have targeted restaurants for this ordinance because there is a “remarkable” correlation between grease blockages in the sewer system and the concentration of restaurants using the sewer lines, said Rod Rippel, director of the industrial waste program for the city’s Water Utilities Department.

“If you take all the other kind of obstructions that you can get--roots, debris, rocks, things that have been introduced into the sewer--and you put them on a map, they sprinkle all over,” Rippel said.

“When you take those incidents that result from grease, you see they cluster . . . all the places where there are concentrations of restaurants.”

The clusters are in sewers in La Jolla, down the coast of Mission Beach and in the Hillcrest area. There are also grease problems in the sewers under El Cajon Boulevard and University Avenue between Balboa Park and 54th Street.

Many of the eating places in these areas were unaffected by a 1984 change in the city code requiring new restaurants to include the traps.

All this adds up to a big mess for the city sewer lines: Grease blockages account for about half the 1,400 sewer stoppages treated yearly by city water crews, who are called out to clean the afflicted sewer lines. Of the 700 grease-related blockages, about 300 lead to backups that send raw sewage surging through private toilets or out into public streets.

Since it costs the city an average of $250 every time a crew is called out to unplug a line, Rippel said cutting down on the number of grease-related problems will save taxpayers a tidy sum.

Yet fighting the war on grease won’t be cheap, either.

To make sure that restaurants comply with the grease-trap requirements, the water department is asking council members to approve the addition of five positions, including three field investigators, at a cost of $285,000 a year.

Even before asking the council for Monday’s legislation, the water department has taken steps to deal with prominent restaurants that have been identified as the biggest grease offenders.

Negotiations initiated by the city have convinced the White Sands Retirement Home in La Jolla to install a grease trap, said Rippel; the Bahia, Catamaran and Hyatt Islandia hotels in Mission Bay have also agreed to include traps in their remodeling programs, he said.

“We’re not encountering opposition,” Rippel said. “The restaurant people are very concerned. . . . They recognize that there is a problem and, reluctantly, they recognize that they may be involved in it, and they’re looking at how they might exercise good citizenship with a minimum cost to their constituency.”

Steve Militello, chief engineer for the Bahia and Catamaran, said grease traps were installed at both hotels last year.

In the case of the Catamaran, the grease trap was required by the new building code as part of an extensive renovation that was completed last June. Militello said the resort put in a large, 1,500-gallon trap.

A smaller, 100-gallon trap was installed at the Bahia in August. The job required digging down to the main sewer line leading from the hotel to install the smaller trap, a job that cost about $3,000, Militello said.

The trap for the Bahia was not mandatory, since there was no renovation and the hotel was built before building codes required the grease-catching device. At first, Militello considered fighting the city’s request for the Bahia, but then relented.

“If the city is believing that they’re seeing a problem and they present it to me, I’m not going to fight something like that,” he said. “Sure, if we would have been talking $100,000 or $50,000, we would have been talking a different story. But for that amount of money ($3,000), I can’t see fighting.”

The ordinance before the council would require all restaurants to seek a “food establishment waste-water discharge permit,” which would be granted only to those food places where a grease trap has been installed. It also requires the restaurant to keep a record of when the trap is emptied.

Restaurants found releasing grease into the sewer system would be liable for all damage to pipes or resulting from sewage backups into private property. Violation of the ordinance, including falsification of grease trap records, is a misdemeanor and could result in a fine.