TUSTIN : Sewage Sludge Spill Closes Red Hill Ave.

Morning rush-hour traffic along a stretch of Red Hill Avenue was snarled for several hours Wednesday after about four tons of treated sewage sludge spilled from a truck, police said.

The spill forced commuters to be routed onto Tustin Ranch Road and resulted in a rush-hour backup of about a mile. Red Hill Avenue reopened at 9:30 a.m.

A driver for a Redlands-based agricultural company, which recycles the sludge into fertilizer, was hauling about six tons of the sewage in a tractor-trailer when the spill occurred at 1:58 p.m. near the Santa Ana Freeway, said Tustin police Lt. Houston Williams.

“The driver said he had to slam on his brakes to avoid hitting another car which apparently ran a red light,” Williams said. “The sudden stop caused the sludge to shift forward.”

The driver, David Littlejohn, 51, was not injured during the incident but was bathed in sludge when some of it sloshed through the back window of his truck cab, Williams said.

Littlejohn, a driver for Pima Gro Systems Inc., had picked up the sewage from the Orange County Sanitation District’s Fountain Valley plant and was on his way to the company’s processing facility in Riverside County, said Joe Dunagan, manager for technical services.