30 Miles of Beach Closed After Huge Sewage Spill

At least 16 million gallons of raw sewage has spewed into the ocean from a sewer main that ruptured in Thousand Oaks, prompting officials to close 30 miles of beach in Ventura and Los Angeles counties.

Heavy flooding in Arroyo Canal washed out 30 feet of pipe along one of two trunk lines to the city’s sewer plant Tuesday morning and crews have been working around the clock to stem the flow, said Don Nelson, the city’s director of public works.

City crews have built an access road into the creek bed and a dam to divert the creek water around the rupture, Nelson said. They have recovered three sections of the missing pipe but need to find a third before they can reconstruct the line, he said.

“It is the most adverse of situations,” Nelson said. “You have sewage that is running out of that pipe and you’re trying to connect that pipe at the same time in a stream bed that is flooded.”

As crews searched the rain-swollen creek--portions of it under 15 feet of water--for the missing section of pipe, workers from Thousand Oaks’ Hill Canyon Wastewater Treatment Plant collected water samples to test for fecal coliform and nitrogen levels.

This incident surpasses a 10-million-gallon spill in 1995 from the same treatment plant.

Los Angeles County officials weren’t apprised of the spill until Thursday morning when a lifeguard at Leo Carillo State Beach called to ask if it was safe to go into the water after he noticed signs posted along Ventura beaches, said Jack Petralia, the director of environmental protection for the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services.

Officials promptly closed a nine-mile stretch of beach south of the Ventura County line, including Leo Carrillo and Zuma beaches.

The Los Angeles Water Quality Board sampled ocean water along county beaches Thursday, but it could take several weeks to get the lab results back and reopen the beaches, officials said.

“It’s clearly a significant spill,” said Dennis Dickerson, executive officer of the Los Angeles Water Quality Control Board. “We are investigating the situation and trying to identify what the facts are.”

In Los Angeles County, no spills over a million gallons have been reported since 1994, Petralia said.

Correspondent Cathy Murillo contributed to this story.