Thousand Oaks Officials Deny Negligence in Sewage Spill

With a rare criminal inquiry hanging over their heads, Thousand Oaks city officials said Wednesday that an act of God, not a violation of law, led to a massive sewage spill this month that closed 30 miles of beaches in Los Angeles and Ventura counties.

“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.”

Floods caused by storms burst a 30-inch-diameter sewer main Feb. 3, sending upward of 6 million gallons of effluent daily down the Conejo Creek and into the Mugu Lagoon and the ocean. The spill, which was not fully repaired for more than 10 days, caused health officials to close nearly 30 miles of beaches.

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 back to 1985.

The subpoena gives Thousand Oaks until March 17 to comply, but Sellers says the current 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 to request a narrowing of the scope of the investigation--itself a highly unusual criminal inquiry against a city and its top officials.

The FBI refused to comment on the case, but records show that the Thousand Oaks probe is the first publicly acknowledged criminal investigation of a Ventura County municipality by the FBI.

At the heart of the inquiry is whether Thousand Oaks purposely delayed replacement or repair of 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 sewage into a public waterway without it being treated in accordance with a state permit.

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 by both, according the the statute.

Willful violations--which could be alleged because of warnings from the state 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 investigation, the Regional Water Quality Control Board in Los Angeles ordered the city Feb. 9 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.