S.D. Warned of Pipe’s Corrosion 2 Years Ago : Spill: City officials say the wear didn’t cause the break. Gov. Wilson declares a state of emergency.

Engineers warned city officials here two years ago that a sewage outfall pipe was corroded and could cause the kind of massive spill of partially treated sewage that continued Thursday.

In other developments:

* The multiple rupture of the huge pipeline kept spewing as much as 180 million gallons a day into the water less than a mile from shore, but repair work had to be put off until today at the earliest as a winter storm pounded the coastline. More storms are expected.

* Gov. Pete Wilson declared a state of emergency, qualifying the city for state aid in helping to pay for an estimated $10 million in repairs.

* Tests showed fecal coliform bacteria counts at least three times higher than the legal limit, and the figure was expected to rise. Four and a half miles of the city’s coastline remains under quarantine because of health risks.

* Experts said repairs to the ruptured pipeline could take much longer than the six to eight weeks first predicted.

Questions about the condition of the pipe were raised Thursday by Ladin Delaney, who was executive officer of the state Regional Water Quality Control Board in early 1990. He said an engineering report, made after he requested that the city investigate the condition of the pipe, revealed serious corrosion.

“Obviously, I had concerns about the integrity of the pipe, or I wouldn’t have asked them to investigate,” said Delaney, who retired last year after 29 years with the agency.

County Supervisor and mayoral candidate Susan Golding called a news conference Thursday to assail city officials.

“I don’t think any of us want to be known as a county where you surf on sewage,” Golding said. “The city’s own consultant told them that this pipe had major problems and could rupture. It seems like the city could have done more, and they didn’t, and I’d like to know why.”

City officials, however, adamantly disputed claims that corrosion of the 9-foot-diameter pipe, built in 1963, triggered the spill. They say it was caused by settlement on the ocean floor combined with strong currents during recent low tides.

The furor over the cause of the spill raged on the same day that President Bush arrived to publicize an immunization program for children.

Nineteen 25-foot long sections of the reinforced concrete pipe came apart Sunday night. Each section of pipe weighs 30 tons. The ruptured pipe is spewing partially treated sewage at a point 3,150 feet offshore at a depth of 35 feet. The effluent has received “advanced primary” treatment, which removes 80% of the solids.

The unbroken pipe carried effluent 2.2 miles out to sea, at a depth of 220 feet. Officials had been considering extending the pipe an additional 12,000 feet, to more than 4 miles, and placing it in a tunnel beneath the ocean floor.

The outfall is literally the end of the line for sewage from 1.7 million of the county’s residents.

Experts said Thursday that the pipe may be severed in at least three additional sections and that the job of putting it back together, by repairing existing pipe and adding new fixtures, could take much longer than six to eight weeks.

A Boise, Idaho, company on Thursday joined forces with a Long Beach firm to send a barge, capable of lifting 600 tons at a time, into the area of the spill, about three-quarters of a mile from the rocky cliffs of Point Loma.

But their work was put off until at least today because of a winter storm that pounded the San Diego coastline. Officials said two other storms are expected to follow Thursday’s heavy rain, which could postpone the start of repair efforts until Saturday or Sunday.

In the meantime, San Diego Mayor Maureen O’Connor pleaded with residents to follow a 10-point conservation plan that includes three-minute showers, limited toilet flushing and washing machine use, recycling bath and sink water, and not using garbage disposals.

Deputy City Manager Roger Frauenfelder said initial results from more than a dozen sampling stations along 4 1/2 miles of quarantined coastline and throughout San Diego Bay revealed heavy contamination in an area extending from the tip of the Point Loma peninsula to the site of the spill, about half a mile north.

Frauenfelder said results in that area revealed counts of fecal coliform bacteria three times higher than the legal limit.

By late Thursday, however, Gary Stephany, an official with the county’s Department of Health Services, said readings from the tip of Point Loma to a point 2 miles north were as much as 16 times higher than the legal limit.

The coastline from the tip of Point Loma to Ladera Street on the western edge of Sunset Cliffs remains under quarantine because of health risks to swimmers, surfers and divers, Stephany said. Dozens of surfers continued to ignore the warnings Thursday.

Others were more cognizant of what one expert called a “major environmental disaster” and that another labeled a “failure of catastrophic proportions.”

“This is the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez (oil spill) for us,” said John Shea, president of a local professional divers association. “It’s not oil, so you can’t see it . . . but fishermen know what’s caused by ocean pollution.”

Surfers and divers who enter the polluted water “are not using their heads,” Shea said. “There are too many diseases to contract, and we don’t know the short- or long-term effects on the (marine life) out there.”

Contact with the fecal coliform bacteria in such contaminated water can result in a variety of waterborne diseases, ranging from gastrointestinal disorders to dysentery, hepatitis, typhoid and, in extreme cases, cholera.

Mike Devine, chief of environmental health services for San Diego County, said high tides Wednesday and Thursday were causing “extra high (bacterial) counts” in the morning but that the counts diminished later in the day. Devine said the tides, coupled with the rain, “may make (today’s) results look crazy.”

He said the sewage is flowing south on the surface but north at deeper depths. So far, Devine said, test results in beach areas north of Point Loma and in San Diego Bay have been negligible. He warned, however, against eating shellfish, lobsters or sea urchins harvested near the area of the spill, a mile north of Cabrillo National Monument.

“There’s a tremendous potential for great damage to the near-shore environment,” said John Grant, an environmental specialist with the state Department of Fish and Game’s Office of Oil Spill Prevention and Response, which is monitoring the rupture.

Grant said biologists have concerns about marine life in and around the beds of giant kelp beds, which some biologists have compared to the world’s rain forests.

The biologists worry that solids gushing from the broken pipe will bury stationary or slow-moving plants and animals that live in and around the kelp.

“There is the potential for the kelp forest to die . . . from a lack of light” and because the effluent “robs oxygen from sea water,” Grant said.

In defending the condition of the pipeline Thursday, Deputy City Manger Frauenfelder and other city officials said it had performed “flawlessly” in 28 years of operation. He conceded the warning of engineering reports as far back as February, 1990, but said corrosion had “nothing to do” with causing so many sections of the pipe to dislodge.

Gregory W. McBain, vice president of Engineering-Science Inc., the La Jolla firm that conducted a study of the pipe for the city, said that, while corrosion was evident in major portions extending from the shore to 2,900 feet out, he believes settlement of the ocean floor, coupled with high swells, triggered the spill.

But Robert Simmons, a law professor at the University of San Diego, who represents the Sierra Club in a lawsuit against the city over its sewage system, said Thursday the condition of the pipe had been an issue for years.

“I remember testimony indicating a potentially serious problem with the outfall pipe,” Simmons said. “Inspectors found air trapped at the top of the outfall, which exponentially accelerates corrosion and severe weakening of the welds at the joints of the pipe.

“All the testimony, and various other reports, indicated the situation demanded immediate attention, as far back as early 1990. And, I remember letters from Frauenfelder, saying, in effect, ‘We’re aware of the problem, and we intend to take steps to eliminate it.’ ”

San Diego’s sewage controversy became the subject of intense public debate Thursday, as Assemblyman Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica) called a news conference in Sacramento to lay part of the blame on Wilson.

Saying the “sewage has come home to roost,” Hayden accused Wilson, who was San Diego mayor in the 1970s, of having led the fight to obtain a waiver from the federal Clean Water Act.

Bolstered by testimony from local scientists, Wilson helped persuade Congress to grant the waiver allowing San Diego to dump its partially treated sewage far out into the ocean, rather than build a costly secondary sewage treatment plant as required under the environmental law.

And in San Diego, County Supervisor Brian Bilbray laid the blame on Mayor Maureen O’Connor.

“The mayor has totally botched the sewer system,” Bilbray said.

“It is decimating our reputation. We are viewed as a jewel on the Pacific, and this is tarnishing our reputation significantly.”

Times staff writers Greg Johnson, Ralph Frammolino, Jonathan Gaw and Marla Cone contributed to this report.