City May Opt to Run Outfall Pipe 4.4 Miles : Sewage: Low construction bids make option attractive. Judge grants city a 72-day extention to draft a plan.

A federal judge Friday granted the city of San Diego a 72-day extension in which to draft a final plan for extending its existing sewage outfall pipe to 4.4 miles offshore, a plan now preferred by city officials because of unexpectedly low construction bids.

At a hearing before U.S. District Judge Rudi M. Brewster on Feb. 28, city officials said they are leaning toward an expensive plan for tunneling 500 feet down and running the entire outfall well beneath the ocean floor.

But, early this month, the city received construction bids for the outfall extension project, the lowest of which came in at $55 million, as opposed to the $90 million the city expected before the current recession.

In a closed session Wednesday night, the San Diego City Council agreed to pursue the outfall extension and, for now, abandon the tunneling project that could have cost as much as $700 million, by some estimates.

“A depressed economy certainly contributed to the low bids,” Chief Deputy City Atty. Ted Bromfield said Friday.

The plan submitted to Judge Brewster would extend the Point Loma outfall another 11,500 feet, beyond its current 2.2-mile range and replace the existing 29-year-old pipe--several hundred feet of which remains shattered--with new pieces of reinforced concrete.

“We would isolate the waste field from Point Loma kelp beds in a two-step process,” Bromfield said. “We would do this by adding an extension onto the existing outfall in conjunction with paralleling the existing outfall with new pipe after the extension is finished. We would then have new pipe throughout the entire four-plus miles.”

The judge agreed that the city’s plan sounded “viable” but failed to grant even preliminary approval to extending the outfall. He asked the city to offer a final report in 72 days and a progress report at a hearing on May 22.

The broken outfall pipe continues to spew up to 180 million gallons a day of partly treated sewage into the ocean, 3,150 feet from the shores of Point Loma, at a depth of 35 feet. The $10.8-million repair project is expected to be completed by April 4, barring bad weather.

The sewage break was first detected Feb. 2 and is thought to have been caused by external forces, such as settlement on the ocean floor combined with heavy wave action; human error at the Point Loma treatment plant or a ship’s anchor gouging the pipe.

The break is being investigated by the Menlo Park firm of Failure Analysis Associates, which investigated the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger and the collapse of the Hyatt Regency hotel walkway in Kansas City. Its report is due sometime in May.

After Friday’s hearing, city officials took Brewster to the 32nd Street Naval Station for a firsthand inspection of several damaged sections of the outfall pipe. Eighteen sections of the 9-foot-diamater pipe, each weighing 50 tons, are being replaced.

Bromfield, the city’s legal representative, said 72 days are needed to review the results of the independent investigation and “make sure the extension is a worthwhile and feasible project, and secondly, to alert us to any problems in putting pipe above the sea bed.” He said the outfall extension could be completed by the summer of 1994, whereas tunneling beneath the ocean floor could not be done until 1997 or 1998, “at the earliest. Not isolating a waste field until then is a difficult thing to ask a federal judge to do.”

Friday’s action was the latest round in a suit filed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in July, 1988. The EPA is charged with enforcing the Clean Water Act, which mandates that every city in the country employ, at a minimum, secondary treatment of sewage.

San Diego’s method is advanced primary, which removes less of the suspended solids in the effluent--in San Diego’s case, about 80%.

In earlier hearings, Brewster had ordered the city to extend the pipe by June, 1994, to prevent sewage-borne bacteria from drifting back into the fertile Point Loma kelp beds, which environmentalists argue may have already been jeopardized by the current spill.

After the rupture, Brewster delayed his own order Feb. 28, saying he wanted to make sure the existing outfall was stable enough before extending it further. The outfall is designed to deposit the sewage 2.2 miles offshore, at a depth of 220 feet. The system serves 1.7 million people.

“We want to take the waste field well beyond the kelp beds,” Bromfield said. “By taking it 4.4 miles offshore, we make sure the waste field doesn’t drift back in and affect divers and others with potential pathogens in the water.”

Brewster ordered all parties in the case--the city, the U.S. Justice Department (which represents the EPA), the Regional Water Quality Control Board and the Sierra Club--to be back in court at 9 a.m. May 22 for the city’s progress report.

Robert Simmons, attorney for the Sierra Club, said his initial reaction to the extension plan was favorable. He said extension is far preferable to tunneling, which he predicted would cost as much as $700 million. Bromfield said city engineers had estimated the cost of tunneling at about $200 million.

Simmons said, however, that it is premature for the Sierra Club to endorse the city’s plan. The Sierra Club wants three basic areas “more fully explored.” These include:

* The entire cost. The $55 million will pay only for the outfall extension. Building new pipe parallel to the existing outfall “would cost a lot more and was not supplied by the city (Friday morning),” Simmons said.

* The environmental impact of extending the outfall.

“The ocean floor in that area has already been seriously impacted and can’t easily tolerate new injury,” Simmons said.

* Whether the use of stainless-steel collars on existing pipe joints can save money. The Sierra Club wants to know if, by adding stainless steel collars to the existing outfall pipe, the expense of new pipe parallel to the existing structure can be avoided.

“But on the whole, we were receptive, and extending the pipe is a much better idea than tunneling, if only because of cost,” Simmons said.

Friday’s rain created another problem for the city, forcing the 100-by-300-foot repair barge to move farther north because of high ocean swells. Deputy City Manager Roger Frauenfelder said Friday that no work will be done today.

“This storm concerns us, because we’re missing a day now,” Frauenfelder said. “We won’t get any work at all done (today). We hope to resume Sunday, weather permitting. We’re still shooting for April 4, but it’s not good in terms of staying on schedule.

“Storms heretofore have driven the waste-water plume north, and we’re concerned about that also. Each of the preceding storms, in driving the plume north, has caused high bacterial counts as far up as Ocean Beach.

“The latest forecast is for rain through (today), with another storm coming in Sunday or Monday. Then a third one may hit toward the end of the coming week. So, no, none of this is good for staying on schedule.”