West Covina to Pay $52,000 in Chlorine Spill : Environment: A chemical release killed thousands of fish and other wildlife in a nearby sanctuary at Mt. San Antonio College. The tentative agreement requires formal approval.

The city of West Covina will pay Mt. San Antonio College $52,400 under a tentative agreement on a chlorine spill that killed thousands of fish and other wildlife at the college’s popular wildlife sanctuary.

The agreement, which must be approved by the West Covina City Council and the college board at meetings later this month, calls for the city to pay the college for the labor, materials and staff it will take to restock and restore the sanctuary over the next four years.

“We thought their proposal was very reasonable,” West Covina Public Works Director Harry Thomas said. “We wanted to try to get this problem resolved as soon as possible. We felt we had an obligation.”

The city will also change its policy of dumping chlorinated water from pipelines into nearby storm drains, Thomas said. “In the future, we will control the releases of water whenever we’re doing this,” he said, explaining that contaminated water will be collected on the work site and taken to a disposal area.

The chlorine spill was discovered Nov. 14 during construction of a West Covina Water Department pipeline near the corner of Temple and Grand avenues in Walnut. The West Covina Water Department supplies water to 25% of the land in Walnut.

Employees of W. A. Rasic Construction of Arcadia, which had been hired by the water department, were flushing the pipeline with chlorinated water to kill bacteria inside it as required by the health department. When the chlorinated water drained out, it was released into a storm drain in the street, Thomas said.

Although the chlorine mixture was diluted when it entered the storm drain, it was more potent than swimming pool water and extremely toxic to bacteria, fresh-water fish and plant life, Thomas said.

Ed Biederman, general manger of the Walnut Valley Water District, said that it is common for chlorinated water to be released into storm drains but that most of the time the chlorine is substantially diluted and dissipates naturally before it reaches the ocean, he said.

In this case, no one was aware that the storm drains along Amar Road and Temple Avenue supply water to the 10-acre wildlife sanctuary, which includes a pond, swamp, small lake and a stream that provide a refuge for birds, frogs, fish and plant life.

The sanctuary has been in place for more than 25 years and hosts hundreds of community visitors each year as well as schoolchildren on biology field trips, said Larry L. Redinger, dean of the natural sciences division at the college. But even he and his staff did not realize that all the storm drains fed into the sanctuary, he said.

Because the sanctuary is well-concealed from the road, Thomas said, West Covina inspectors did not realize that it was there. The drainage basins where the chlorine was dumped “look exactly like catch basins from the normal storm drain system,” he said.

When college security guards noticed the Rasic employee working on Saturday, Nov. 14, at 7 a.m., a violation of Walnut’s city work hours, they notified the college and the city of Walnut. Contractors in Walnut are only allowed to work from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., Monday through Friday, unless they have received an exemption ahead of time, said Jack Istik, Walnut’s deputy city engineer.

Istik went out to the site about noon on that day. “The upper pond area was just covered with dead fish, thousands of them, on the surface. It was a real tragedy,” he recalled.

Redinger said the chlorine dumping may have been going on for two or three days before it was noticed, since fish that are exposed to chlorine do not die instantly.

“Our swamp was wiped out, the lake was impacted and the stream was decimated,” he said. One pond remains largely intact because the chlorinated water did not invade it.

College biology students, who used the sanctuary for experiments and observations, will not be able to do much work there for several years, he said. He also worries about the migratory birds that used the sanctuary as a stopover in a largely developed area.

Rasic Construction is a family-owned company whose business has been hurt by the incident, said a woman at the firm who would identify herself only as Mrs. Walter Rasic. “We are hired by the city. You ask them what happened,” she said. “We’re a small company trying to feed our children.”