Sewage Leak Into Pico-Kenter Drain Is Fixed

A break in an aging sewer line beneath a Santa Monica street sent hundreds of thousands of gallons of raw sewage flowing down the Pico-Kenter storm drain toward Santa Monica Bay before the leak was fixed last week.

The leak in a 15-inch sewer line at 20th Street and Colorado Avenue was discovered Tuesday as city workers searched for the source of sewage contamination that showed up in tests taken in the storm drain last summer.

Santa Monica General Services Director Stan Scholl estimated that at its peak, 120 to 150 gallons of sewage per minute flowed from the sewer line through a nearby collector pipe into the storm drain.

“It appears that this has been leaking for at least four weeks,” Scholl said in an interview Thursday. “During that time, there’s been several hundred thousand gallons that has leaked into the storm drain.”

Once the break was discovered, Santa Monica officials dispatched crews to the end of the drain at the foot of Pico Boulevard in a last-ditch effort to stop the sewage from entering the bay.

Gasoline-powered pumps on the beachfront bicycle trail worked around the clock for much of last week to pull all water out of the storm drain and deposit it in a nearby sewer line.

Scholl said repairs to the 50-year-old sewer line, which serves businesses and residences, were expected to cost between $20,000 and $30,000. The break was the second in a dozen years in that section of sewer line, he said.

The leak added yet another chapter to the long and troubled history of the Pico-Kenter drain, which carries storm water runoff from Brentwood, much of Santa Monica and part of West Los Angeles to the ocean.

Santa Monica officials late last month posted signs on the beach prohibiting bathing within 100 yards of the drain after it was disclosed that extensive tests last summer had shown that the runoff was contaminated with human enteric viruses from sewage.

The viruses can cause illness ranging from stomach flu to hepatitis. The signs say, in English and Spanish, that the storm drain water “may be contaminated with human disease-causing bacteria and virus or hazardous chemicals washed down from urban areas.”

The test results were compiled and released by the Santa Monica Bay Restoration Project, a joint public-private partnership funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the State Water Resources Control Board. Researchers speculated that the sewage was coming from leaking sewer lines or the local homeless population.

In searching for the source of the original problem, city workers encountered high bacteria counts as they moved upstream from the mouth of the drain.

The owner of one recreational vehicle was caught dumping the vehicle’s holding tanks into the drain and will be prosecuted, Scholl said.

But city officials say the broken sewer line may have been the major source of the sewage problem in the drain. Scholl speculated that the leak had been gradually increasing over time. But he said it is unknown whether the break contributed to the presence of human viruses in the drain last summer.

Mark Gold, staff scientist for the environmental group Heal the Bay, said there is no way to prove that the recent sewer line break was related to the contamination in the storm drain 11 months ago. “I don’t think anyone can say one way or another,” he said.

Instead, Gold said, a new round of viral testing should be conducted after the drain is cleared out.

As the beachfront pumping continued at midweek, environmentalists and county health officials clashed over whether other storm drains that flow into the bay year-round should be posted with warning signs.

County officials, representing the Department of Health Services, the Department of Beaches and Harbors and the County Sanitation Districts, all argued against the warning signs, while environmentalists favored them.

The debate Wednesday at a meeting of the Santa Monica Bay Restoration Project demonstrated once again the depth of disagreement among various interests about the potential health effects of storm drain runoff.

Jack Petralia, director of the Department of Health Services’ Bureau of Environmental Protection, argued that the county cannot post warning signs in the absence of a documented health risk.

He said samples taken at chest depth in the surf near the Pico-Kenter drain show “there is no health risk that we can identify.”

But environmentalists argued that the contents of the runoff alone and the fact that children often play on the beach near the drains should be enough to require warning signs.

Cliff Gladstein, legislative aide to Assemblyman Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica), said the county takes the wrong approach by insisting on hard evidence of a health threat.

Gladstein said the storm drains carry “God knows what from the streets of Los Angeles. We simply don’t have to wait until the money is appropriated for epidemiological studies . . . to begin warning the public.”

He suggested a skull-and-crossbones sign. Others recommended the international symbol for no swimming. The county opposed any signs.

After more than an hour of debate, members of the restoration project voted to urge that warning signs be posted on the 10 drains between Malibu and Redondo Beach that flow all year. But project members could not agree on the wording and left that decision to a committee.