City Assailed on Outfall Line Break Secrecy : Pollution: Officials seek to keep cause of major break in sewage outfall pipeline from being made public.

Environmental groups expressed outrage Tuesday at the city of San Diego’s decision to keep private--at least for now--a long-awaited report on the cause of the massive sewage outfall rupture that closed area beaches for two months earlier this year.

The Regional Water Quality Control Board voted unanimously Monday to rescind its earlier demand that the city submit to it an independent report into the causes of the break, which fouled the coastline with up to 180 million gallons of partly treated sewage daily between February to April.

“This is utter nonsense!” Robert Simmons, a lawyer for the Sierra Club, said Tuesday. “Clearly, it’s a matter of profound public interest as to what caused the rupture, and whether the repairs that have been made will prevent a recurrence.”

Lee Olsen, president of the San Diego Council of Divers, also blasted the decision, saying the city is “thwarting regulatory agencies” that “need the best information possible” in determining whether the city’s plan to extend its existing (sewage) outfall “is even a good idea.”

Mayor Maureen O’Connor said Tuesday she intends to ask Chief Deputy City Atty. Ted Bromfield to make the report public. But as Paul Downey, the mayor’s spokesman, said, “She doesn’t have the authority to make him do it if he doesn’t want to.” The full City Council can order that the report be made public.

“There’s been a couple of misconceptions here,” Bromfield said. “First of all, no report exists--yet--and at Monday’s hearing we took the position that the regional board did not have the authority to compel us to order an independent inquiry.”

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By a 7-0 vote, the regional board overruled its executive officer, Art Coe, who asked that the city be fined $88,000 for failing to produce an independent report by the predetermined date of May 4.

Coe said Tuesday he considers “the case closed.” He said the board had been swayed by Bromfield’s argument that forcing public disclosure would “put the city in a compromising position . . . in the face of litigation” stemming from the outfall rupture.

Bromfield said the city is defending itself against two claims, one by fishermen who claim their livelihoods were damaged by the spill and another by a scuba diver who claims personal injury as a result of toxic effluent bubbling from the ruptured outfall pipe 3,150 feet offshore at a depth of 35 feet.

He said the city fears additional claims.

The spill, which damaged 19 sections of the 9-foot-diameter pipe, combined with heavy rains to force the closure of 20 miles of coastline for most of the period between Feb. 2 and April 4, when $16 million in repairs were completed.

Coe said his original order pertained only to “ a report” and not necessarily the $350,000 inquiry being conducted by the Menlo Park firm of Failure Analysis Associates, which also investigated the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger and the collapse of the Hyatt Regency hotel walkway in Kansas City.

Coe said he personally felt disclosure was necessary “because the sections of the pipe that have not been replaced are going to be with us for quite some time, and most likely, new pipe is hanging onto the ends of those sections.

“It’s important to know what the cause of the problem was, to see if a significant risk of failure exists in the future.”

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With the approval of a federal judge, the San Diego City Council recently approved more than $1 billion in citywide sewer improvements, including an extension of the outfall from 2.2 miles out and 220-foot-deep to more than 4 miles out at a depth of 330 feet.

Simmons, the Sierra Club lawyer, said the “public’s right to know supersedes any interest the city may have in stonewalling to offset future liabilities. But clearly, we will demand its disclosure,” at a federal court hearing on Aug. 28.

Simmons is representing the Sierra Club in U.S. District Court, where the environmental group is a party to a long-standing lawsuit that pits the city against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the regional water quality board over the city’s sewage treatment policies.

Simmons said that, at the last hearing in federal court, Judge Rudi M. Brewster “quickly and firmly rejected the position (that the findings of Failure Analysis) be kept confidential” and said they must be available to all parties in the case, because, obviously, they’re relevant to the issues involved.”

But Bromfield differed angrily in his interpretation of Brewster’s remarks: “Part of the transcript I submitted (at Monday’s hearing of the regional board) was the statement by Judge Brewster, on March 20, that we not be compelled to produce the report . . . to make it public.”

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City Manager Jack McGrory could not be reached for comment Tuesday, but Deputy City Manager Roger Frauenfelder, who oversees the city’s water and sewage agencies, said the public deserves to see the report.

“Apparently, we won’t get the report for some months yet, but when we do, my opinion is that the public should have the right to know what’s in it,” Frauenfelder said.

Bromfield said that, once the report is finished in several months, he intends to keep it private and present it to a closed session of the City Council, which has the authority to decide whether it should be released.

“My obligation is simply to prepare the city for a proper defense against any claims,” Bromfield said.

“We’re not hiding any information. We’re making sure the experts can do their job without having their preliminary conclusions critiqued in the press,” he said. “They’re entitled to a full investigative effort and I’m not going to put a time frame on them.”

Bromfield said that although taxpayers are footing the $350,000 cost of the report, those same taxpayers are being protected against potential losses in lawsuits by having the report kept private as long as possible.

Simmons called such a stance “ridiculous,” adding, “Anyone suing the city would see the report immediately, as part of the (legal) discovery process, just as we’ll see it by asking for it in federal court.”

Some of the findings have surfaced already--in Brewster’s courtroom. The cause most often talked about is “air entrainment,” a buildup of pressure in the 29-year-old pipe that, finally, caused ruptures over a 500-foot length.

When the rupture was first detected in early February, fouling near-shore beaches and provoking not just closures but a quarantine on marine life, the city rejected air entrainment and blamed the break on an “act of God” or a ship.

Olsen of the divers’ association said the rupture has had a devastating effect not only on the livelihoods of divers and fishermen but also “on the whole marine food chain, so adversely affected by the dumping of toxins that consume oxygen.

“How much damage we can’t really be sure of,” he said, “because the city is also refusing to cooperate with the efforts of (the state Department of Fish and Game) to assess the impact of the spill on marine life.”

Simmons said “an act of God” is not the reason marine life has suffered.

“I have documents from the regional board that we obtained back in February of 1990 that indicated the board and the city knew air entrainment was a problem back then,” said Simmons, a law professor at the University of San Diego.

Frauenfelder, the deputy city manager, said he had heard the most likely cause for the rupture was “a combination of air having accumulated over a period of time, and in conjunction with that, wave forces that accelerated the erosion of the outfall.

“But in testimony given (in Brewster’s courtroom), we learned that Failure Analysis does not believe the break was caused by operator error (at the Point Loma treatment plant) or by the physical deterioration of the pipe,” Frauenfelder said.

Simmons said he believed human error did lead to the buildup of a massive air bubble and the subsequent rupture, hence the city’s reluctance to make the report public.

“It’s quite relevant for us to know what’s in that report,” he said. “The city is embarking on a court-ordered extension of this outfall--a multimillion-dollar project. If, indeed, the air-entrainment problem and whatever human error led to it has not been completely resolved, so that it’s not a risk in the future, then there’s a serious risk to all of us.

“There’s a lot more at stake here than the city’s liability,” Simons said. “There’s the integrity of the beaches and of the near ocean. We have to be sure there is absolutely no risk of repetition, for that would be disastrous and something we can’t tolerate.”