City Defends Pipe Break as ‘Act of God’

With a rare criminal inquiry hanging over their heads, city officials said Wednesday that an act of God--not a violation of law--led to an 86-million-gallon sewage spill this month.

“We haven’t committed any crime,” City Atty. Mark Sellers said. “We have had an unprecedented weather event that caused a torrent of rainwaters to break this [sewer] line. It’s not a crime to be struck by an act of God.”

The U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles ordered the city this week to turn over to a federal grand jury all records and photographs relating to sewage spills from pipes leading to the Hill Canyon Wastewater Treatment Plant dating to 1985.

The subpoena gives Thousand Oaks until March 17 to comply, but Sellers said the order is so broad it would require copying 100,000 pages of documents at a cost of $20,000.

He plans to meet with FBI investigators next week to request a narrower scope of investigation--a highly unusual criminal inquiry of a city and its top officials.

The FBI refused comment on the case Wednesday. But Thom Mrozek, spokesman for the U.S. attorney, said that such examinations into possible criminality of city officials are rare.

The Thousand Oaks probe is the only publicly acknowledged FBI criminal investigation of a Ventura County municipality for at least a decade.

At the heart of the inquiry is why Thousand Oaks delayed replacing or repairing the city’s main sewer line although it had broken in 1989 and 1995, spilling 13 million gallons of sewage.

Under the federal Clean Water Act, cities and city officials can be charged with criminal acts if they willfully or negligently break the law by releasing untreated sewage into a public waterway. The law also prohibits endangering people with such discharges.

Violations for negligence--which could be alleged because of a delay in action--can be punished by a fine of $2,500 to $25,000 per violation per day, or by imprisonment for not more than one year, or both, according to the statute.

Willful violations--which could be alleged because of warnings of potential hazards--carry fines of $5,000 to $50,000 a day and a prison sentence of up to three years, or both.

In a separate, concurrent investigation the city also faces stiff fines if state water officials conclude the City Council failed to act even though it knew another giant sewage spill might occur--and that the spill resulted in environmental damage.

Karen Caesar, spokeswoman for the Regional Water Quality Control Board in Los Angeles, said the federal inquiry caught her office by surprise, and could make the state’s own investigation more difficult.

“Things get thicker” Caesar said. “This just sort of hit us today. We hadn’t anticipated it. This may complicate things, but they’re not taking our place. We’ll just proceed as we do normally.”

The water board is still gathering information, she said. The city’s final report on the spill is not due until March 15.

On Feb. 9, the state ordered the city to mend the broken line, clean up the mess and make sure the pipeline does not break again. The city plans to repair 6,000 feet of the 30-inch main and lay a second line next to it this summer at a cost of $4.5 million, then do $4 million more in improvements to another section in summer 1999.

The main, which ruptured Feb. 3 when surging storm waters undercut it, was repaired 10 days later--but not before 86 million gallons of raw sewage were discharged into the Arroyo Conejo and flowed more than 15 miles to Mugu Lagoon and the ocean beyond.

Some City Council members have blamed each other for delays in reinforcing or replacing the aging sewer line. But the city’s official position is that the failure to replace the line the past two summers as scheduled was not due to city politics.

Improvements were “deferred due to necessary legal, planning, budgetary and financial requirements,” city Public Works Director Don Nelson told state officials in a letter.

Mayor Mike Markey said the city notified the proper environmental authorities about the spill and that he is not alarmed by the investigation.

“It’s a simple system. You give them [investigators] what they want and answer their questions. I’m comfortable with that,” he said.

Kelley is a Times staff writer and Murillo is a correspondent.