More Storms en Route; May Delay Sewage Pipe Repair

San Diego County should suffer only partly cloudy conditions today, but come Wednesday night and Thursday, areas from the beaches to the desert will be lashed with heavy rains and wind as the first of three spring storms roars in from the Gulf of Alaska.

Wilbur Shigehara, a forecaster for the National Weather Service, said another storm is expected to arrive Sunday, with one more after that--the most potent of the three--pounding the coastline by the middle of next week.

Such forecasts are like manna from heaven for drought watchers but bad news for city officials scrambling to repair the damaged sewage outfall pipe, which continues to spew up to 180 million gallons a day of partly treated effluent into the waters off Point Loma.

Deputy City Manager Roger Frauenfelder said Monday that the city hopes to have the pipe repaired by the target date of April 4, but that the weather, especially the threat of heavy winds and high ocean swells, remains a concern.

The 100-by-300-foot repair barge repositioned itself Sunday after ocean swells forced it farther north Saturday, Frauenfelder said. The Point Loma treatment plant will be shut down from 2 a.m. to 6 a.m. today, he said, so that nine of 21 new pipe sections can be installed.

Frauenfelder said the shutdown, which he described as “a tricky operation,” is necessary to reattach new pipe onto old. During the repair period, workers at the plant are logging 12-hour shifts, seven days a week, he said.

“Already, the weather has prevented us from completing some of our pipe-laying operations,” Frauenfelder said. “We have been able to apply some additional ballast rock on some of the sections we have installed. But, at the moment, it is delaying us.”

Most of the work is going on 3,150 feet from the cliffs of Point Loma, where the outfall rupture was first detected Feb. 2.

The overflow of 12 million gallons a day of raw sewage from Tijuana, mixing with contaminated rain runoff, has kept bacterial counts high in the waters off the border area. Samples taken Sunday revealed high readings at the Point Loma plant and just north of there.

Forecaster Shigehara said the oncoming storm should bring “howling” winds and rain by Wednesday night, with snow at 6,000 feet.

“We’re looking at two weeks of fairly steady rain,” Shigehara said. “We’re now starting to see more puddles, which indicates the grounds are quite soaked--every drop of rain is going to run off. We’ll start to see a lot of urban street flooding.

“We need to pay attention to such things. We’re starting to see a lot of water leaking from hillsides, and the additional rains may cause even more mudslides. This pattern could carry over into mid-April--it shows no signs of letting up now.”

Shigehara blames the wet weather on El Nino, which creates warmer ocean waters and fiercer storms in the southern half of the state rather than Northern California, where such weather usually hits first.

“We have high-level winds that are very strong over our latitude,” Shigehara said. “And they appear to be getting stronger. As far as rain goes, we’ve already surpassed all our expectations for March.”

Shigehara said an agricultural advisory for San Diego County urges farmers to harvest as many of their crops as soon as they can, without waiting for dry weather or dry land.

“We’re telling them the rain may be here for two more weeks. The weather is really keeping them off-balance,” Shigehara said. “We’re telling them they should do their work and pick berries, whatever, as soon as possible. Don’t wait for a dry spell, because they may not get it, at least not for a while.”

Shigehara said the onset of storms could bring hail, even tunnel clouds and mild tornadoes. He said San Diego is vulnerable to such conditions in winter, pointing to a tornado in San Carlos in March, 1991, that uprooted trees and tore roofs off several houses.

“The tornadoes we get are not like the ones in the Midwest--Midwesterners laugh at ours,” he said. “But this is the type of (weather) pattern that attracts tornadoes. I wouldn’t be surprised on Wednesday night and Thursday to see hail and severe thunderstorms.

“We’re looking at a succession of pretty good storms here, and you can blame it all on El Nino.”