Beach to Stay Closed Until Spill Tested

A 4 1/4-mile stretch of Orange County beach will remain closed until at least Monday while health officials await test results to determine the extent of contamination from a 250,000-gallon sewage spill from a treatment plant here, authorities said Thursday.

Orange County Sanitation Districts officials, meanwhile, pegged the cause of Wednesday afternoon’s spill to the failure of a gate that channels sewage around the Fountain Valley plant to another treatment plant four miles away in Huntington Beach.

A stainless steel rod holding up the five-ton metal gate at the treatment plant snapped, causing the gate to slam shut, according to Blake P. Anderson, the district’s director of technical services.

When the gate dropped, Anderson said, the sewage backed up into an underground collection channel used by six feeder lines into the Fountain Valley plant.

The sewage then filled up the channel, backed up into the feeder lines and eventually overflowed into streets, storm drains and even the basement dressing rooms of the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa. Surrounding streets and the Euclid Avenue off-ramp from the San Diego Freeway were closed for several hours while sanitation crews worked to clean up the mess.

Although district work crews were able to cap the leak in one hour, the 250,000 gallons of lost sewage represented the worst such spillage involving the district since 1982, when 3 million gallons of sewage spilled from a collapsed sewage line along Coast Highway in Newport Beach.

Anderson said technicians are working to determine the cause of the rod’s failure, adding that this was the first such malfunction in the plant’s 19-year history.

“It just makes us sick when we have an overflow like this,” Anderson said.

The agency is also considering installation of an automatic spill-monitoring system, Anderson said, because this leak was discovered only when an employee leaving the district at 5 p.m. Wednesday happened to notice sewage spewing out of a nearby manhole. Had the spill occurred in the early morning hours, Anderson said, it likely would have taken much longer to detect.

Although this spill occurred several miles inland, Anderson said that significant amounts of sewage flowed into the ocean through storm drains near the mouth of the Santa Ana River. The Orange County Environmental Health Agency subsequently closed the 4 1/4-mile section of coastline between Beach Boulevard in Huntington Beach and the Newport Pier in Newport Beach.

Bob Merryman, director of the Environmental Health Agency, said samples of ocean water in the affected area were taken late Wednesday and Thursday and that they are being tested for the presence of sewage-related bacterial organisms. Such organisms pose a potential health threat to swimmers, causing infectious diseases such as hepatitis, Merryman said. Sampling will continue Saturday.

The earliest test results won’t be back until at least Monday, at which time Merryman said, a portion of the beach may be reopened.

“It could be the middle of next week or longer before we reopen the rest of the beach,” he added.

How long the beach remains closed will depend on how quickly the sewage is cleansed from the ocean naturally through wave and tide action, Merryman said. Although the spill occurred Wednesday, it may take days for all of the sewage to dissipate, he added.

On Thursday, the closed beach was populated primarily with people jogging, walking or riding their bikes along the shoreline path. Lifeguards placed signs along the beach informing potential swimmers and surfers that the water was off-limits. An advisory about the closed beaches also was broadcast on local surf report hot lines that surfers call to monitor ocean conditions.

The surf was low--between 2 and 3 feet--which tended to keep surfers out of the water anyway.

But the sewer leak did not stop about 20 fisherman from casting their lines from the Newport Pier Thursday morning. Ken Hoff, on vacation from Seattle, caught eight small fish but said he would feed them to his cat because he wondered whether the fish were safe for human consumption.

“I’m an outdoorsman, and I don’t like this at all,” Hoff said, referring to the sewer leak. “I hate to see this kind of thing happen.”

Some people at the beach were also concerned about the animals that live in or around the potentially polluted ocean.

“I fear for the birds,” said Janet Jones as she looked at the flock of sea gulls hovering above the waves in Huntington Beach. “This is the first sunny day since the rain. It’s a shame.”