Officials Brace for Rain to Add to Sewage Woes : Weather: Potential downpour could cause accumulating sludge from treated sewage to overflow drying ponds on Fiesta Island.

Everyone from weather forecasters to county health authorities was playing wait-and-see Friday as a slow-moving storm brought trickles of rain, but the storm was expected to be much livelier today and Sunday.

Beaches extending from the international border to the mouth of the San Diego River in Ocean Beach--a distance of 20 miles--remained under quarantine because of sewage spills and contaminated rain runoff. But several days of dry weather prompted health authorities to reopen areas of Mission Beach.

The massive rupture of the huge sewage outfall pipe entered its 34th day Friday, continuing to spew as much as 180 million gallons a day of partly treated waste into the ocean 3,150 feet from the cliffs of Point Loma, at a depth of 35 feet.

A new problem continued Friday as officials scrambled to find space for rapidly accumulating sludge from treated sewage that threatens to overflow drying ponds on Fiesta Island. Ordinarily, sludge is pumped 8 miles from the Point Loma treatment plant to Fiesta Island.

There it’s placed in ponds, dried in the sun, and, in six months or longer, trucked to a composting facility in Riverside County. But showers and ever-decreasing temperatures, which threaten to get lower this weekend, are slowing the process because the sludge can’t dry out.

In the meantime, the ponds continue to fill, which only adds to the city’s sewage woes. Officials hope to get permission from the California Coastal Commission to temporarily install mechanical sludge dryers.

Eventually, the city hopes to replace the ponds by installing equipment at the Miramar Naval Air Station that would do the job faster, but the Navy has yet to approve the idea.

“Recently, with the drought, there just hasn’t been a lot of rain, so we’ve used Mother Nature to dry the sludge,” Alan Langworthy, deputy director of the city’s water utilities department, said Friday. “We’re used to a lot of sunshine playing to our best interests.

“This is the first time in years that we’ve had consistent rainfall, which has an effect on the drying of the sludge. Plus, we’re treating (12 million gallons a day) of raw sewage from Tijuana, so we keep getting more sludge, and Fiesta Island has just about reached its capacity.”

Sewage-related contamination continued to foul area beaches Friday, with high counts of fecal coliform bacteria posted once again at the tip of Point Loma and at the E. W. Blom Wastewater Treatment Plant. Those readings were blamed on the Point Loma spill.

Counts well above the legal limit were recorded once again at Imperial Beach and Coronado, and all along the Silver Strand, the result of an overflow of raw sewage from the Tijuana River into the ocean. The flow was down to 25 million gallons Friday but was expected to rise with the weekend rain.

Ruth Covill, a spokeswoman for the San Diego County Department of Health Services, said the good news was that, after posting high readings in the wake of Monday’s record rains, Mission Beach was reopened Friday. The quarantine was also lifted on parts of Mission Bay.

Covill said contaminated storm-water runoff, the culprit in both Mission Beach and Mission Bay, continued to be a problem in north and east areas of the bay, which remained posted, warning divers and swimmers to stay out.

“We’re also seeing a reduction in Ocean Beach, where counts had been high because of the outfall break, but readings could go back up again with rain (today) and Sunday,” Covill said. “Up to now, that’s been the pattern, depending on the weather.”

Covill said a spill of about 4,000 gallons of raw sewage occurred Thursday morning near the 32nd Street Naval Station, but was stopped later in the afternoon. A line that carries sewage from ships to the local sewer system broke under a pier, but it was soon repaired.

A spokeswoman for the California Highway Patrol said Friday afternoon that “we’ve been having accident after accident after accident, but at this time, we don’t believe they’re weather-related. We’re gritting our teeth about Friday night, though.”

A forecaster for the National Weather Service said showers were expected off and on through Friday night, ending sometime tonight or early Sunday.

“We won’t have as much widespread rain, but we could have a better chance of thunderstorm activity, because the air is colder and much more unstable,” forecaster Dan Atkin said. “It should be colder, which means snow around the 5,000-foot level, just above Julian.”

Atkin said that a few hundredths of an inch of rain fell Friday, with Poway and the Wild Animal Park posting the highest readings.

By Friday afternoon, “the storm was not as bad as we thought it would be,” Atkin said. “But we should have rain throughout the weekend, with amounts being widely varied throughout the county, because of the nature of the storm. Whatever happens, it won’t be dry, or isn’t likely to be.”