Officials to Consider Lifting Quarantine Along the Coastline

City officials and county health authorities plan to meet today to consider lifting the 20-mile quarantine of area coastline that has been in effect since the rupture earlier this month of a massive sewage outfall pipe.

Deputy City Manager Roger Frauenfelder said Monday that weekend readings of bacterial counts were well below the legal limit, except at the tip of the Point Loma Peninsula and at the site of the sewage spill, 3,150 feet from the E.W. Blom Wastewater Treatment Plant.

Although readings at the Point Loma plant were below the legal limit most of last week, Frauenfelder said they were 68 times the safe standard in counts gathered Sunday. He said officials will decide today whether to reduce the area of quarantine to 4 1/2 miles of coastline.

The Coast Guard detected the spill Feb. 2, and, since then, up to 180 million gallons a day of treated sewage--from which 75% to 80% of the solids have been removed--has continued to foul beaches from the tip of Point Loma to Ladera Street at the edge of Sunset Cliffs.

Originally, only those 4 1/2 miles of coastline were quarantined after high readings of fecal coliform bacteria were recorded. But when floodwaters caused an overflow of raw sewage from Tijuana, high counts necessitated a beach quarantine from the U.S.-Mexico border to the mouth of the San Diego River.

Readings in Imperial Beach and Coronado, and along the Silver Strand, have been consistently below normal for more than a week, Frauenfelder said, prompting officials to consider lifting the 20-mile closure.

Frauenfelder said the binational pump station that normally diverts 12 million gallons a day of raw sewage from Tijuana to the San Diego “metro system” should be “turned back on as early as today,” which should “reduce bacterial counts in those areas even further.”

In other developments, city officials said the 100-foot by 300-foot barge anchored at the site of the spill continues to lift damaged sections of pipe. Twenty-two sections, each 25 feet long and weighing 30 tons, have been irreparably damaged.

Frauenfelder said 25 new sections, each 20-feet long and 9-feet in diameter, will replace the damaged pipe. He said interior inspections of the pipe, from the shoreline to 5,800 feet offshore, were completed Monday.