Broken Pipe Sends Sewage Spilling Into Conejo Creek

They argued about how to fix the city’s main sewage plant for years. Now City Council members are debating why they didn’t act in time to prevent a devastating new sewage spill.

Storm runoff early Tuesday burst an aging sewer pipe near Wildwood Park and sent millions of gallons of untreated waste water raging into Conejo Creek--the second major sewage spill in the area since 1995. Although it may not pose a danger to people, the spill could have serious environmental effects, experts said.

“This is exactly why I pushed for these repairs two years ago,” said Mayor Mike Markey. “We were trying to get the plant on line, and, unfortunately, we are right where we didn’t want to be.”

The 30-inch concrete pipe--scheduled for replacement this summer--broke upstream of the city-owned Hill Canyon Waste Water Treatment Plant at 5:30 a.m., according to Don Nelson, the city’s director of public works. The exact location of the rupture is unknown.

Workers could not get to the broken pipe to stop the flow because of creek waters rushing through narrow Hill Canyon, officials said. Each day the pipe is not repaired, 6 million gallons of sewage will continue to dump into the swollen waterway.

If the massive leak is not patched in two days, the discharge would surpass the worst spill in recent county history: a 10-million-gallon spill into the same creek from the same sewer system in 1995.

Despite the fact that millions of gallons of raw sewage are flowing into local creeks, Ventura County environmental health specialist Steve Kephart said residents don’t need to be too alarmed.

“Spills like this don’t occur every day,” Kephart said. “But it’s hard to rate” in terms of its effect.

As long as they don’t touch the water, people should be fine, he said. Typhoid, dysentery, hepatitis and forms of the stomach flu are possible diseases people might contract if they do come in contact with the pollutants.

Nelson said his department is working with the Ventura County Environmental Health Division to post warning signs along creek banks to keep people away from the contaminated water.

Once the pipe is repaired, county health workers will wait three days after the sewage flow has stopped before they can conduct water tests.

Tuesday’s storm actually helped the situation, Kephart said, because the rain dilutes the contaminated water.

But John Buse, an attorney with the Ventura County office of the Santa Barbara-based Environmental Defense Center, doesn’t agree.

“If, in fact, it’s true, then this is huge,” he said. “It poses an obvious, imminent threat to human health . . . and I can’t believe it could be compatible with the natural, ecological life” in these riparian areas.

Morgan Wehtje, a Fish and Game wildlife biologist, is most concerned about the effect on wildlife in Mugu Lagoon, where the waste water will accumulate before dispersing into the ocean.

The sewage is traveling through a system of tributaries that feeds Calleguas Creek, which ends at the Point Mugu naval base’s lagoon.

Another concern, Wehtje said, is that farmers who cultivate land adjacent to the polluted creeks may find fecal matter on their fields after flood waters have subsided.

The pipe that broke was scheduled to be replaced this summer as part of a $75-million overhaul, now in progress, of the city’s 35-year-old treatment plant.

The improvements were stalled for two years by a debate on the Thousand Oaks City Council.

At issue was whether to increase the plant’s capacity from 10 million gallons per day to 12 million or 14 million gallons per day, and who should pay for it.

Councilwomen Linda Parks and Elois Zeanah argued for a lower capacity, with the entire bill payable by developers. Councilmen Andy Fox and Mike Markey and then-Mayor Judy Lazar supported city staff’s recommendation for a higher capacity and a partial bill sent to developers.

Markey said the council needs to take responsibility for the project delay, but emphasized there were individuals who “didn’t get the vote through on time.”

Parks said the broken pipe was slated for replacement as long ago as the early 1980s. But the work had not been done by the late 1980s, when a decline in the building industry depleted developer fees, and other money was diverted to pay for construction of the Civic Arts Plaza.

“It’s not our [hers and Zeanah’s] fault there weren’t funds for the pipe’s replacement,” Parks said. “The pipe was not part of the debate about increasing sewer rates.”

Time correspondent Lisa Fernandez contributed to this story.