Alleged Failure to Report Sewage Leaks to Be Investigated

The Orange County district attorney’s office will look into allegations that Huntington Beach failed to report massive sewage releases during the 1990s, a spokeswoman said Monday.

“We are taking this issue very seriously,” said Tori Richards, a spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office. “It’s alarming. If there is enough evidence to support these allegations, then we will file a case.”

The office received a complaint earlier this year and will review an investigation by the California Regional Water Quality Control Board before deciding whether prosecutors should open a formal probe, Richards said. The office would not reveal who had lodged the complaint.

At issue is whether Huntington Beach withheld information during the initial search for the cause of contamination that fouled the waters off the city’s shore for two months in the summer of 1999.

State water quality officials have said they plan to issue a cleanup order, demanding that Huntington Beach determine what happened to the sewage that leaked from old, broken pipes in the downtown area.

Huntington Beach officials esti

mated in 1996 that 71,324 gallons of raw sewage oozed from broken sewer lines each day, city memos show. More than 6.6 million gallons of sewage probably leaked, according to a draft copy of a cleanup order that will be issued later this week.

On Monday, environmentalists and water quality officers said the extent of the sewage leaks raises new questions about the source of the contamination that closed four miles of shoreline for two months in the summer of 1999.

Mark Massara, director of coastal programs for the Sierra Club in California, said Huntington Beach leaders repeatedly have blamed urban runoff from inland cities and counties as well as birds in the Talbert Marsh in Huntington Beach for polluting the ocean.

“Culpability strikes a lot closer to home,” Massara said Monday. “The problem might not be so much related to bird feces as human feces.”

There is no evidence that the leaked sewage contributed to the contamination that closed the beaches. Scientists studying the problem have discounted the theory, saying the ground water in that area of the city flows inland--not toward the coast. However, researchers point out that they were unaware of the magnitude of Huntington Beach’s problem last year when they began studying the beach pollution.

Last fall, Huntington Beach stepped up a $2-million project to reinforce its decaying sewers in the downtown area with plastic piping. The decision came three years after the Huntington Beach City Council first became aware of the cracked, decaying sewer lines.

City Council members said Monday that they became aware of “gaping holes” in the city’s sewer lines in 1996, but decided against a sewer maintenance fee to finance improvements to the system.

“We didn’t think there was an immediate danger to the public or to public safety,” said Assemblyman Tom Harman, a Republican who served as a Huntington Beach councilman before being elected to the Assembly last month. “In retrospect, we could have acted a little more promptly to cure the problem sooner, but remember we were just coming out of a recession.”

Councilman Ralph Bauer cited the lack of evidence that the sewage had reached the ocean, but said the city had made a mistake by failing to report the leakage to the water quality board.

“To some extent, it has come back to bite us,” he said.

Officials with the water board agreed.

“The city should have been more forthcoming as that investigation [into the cause of the beach closure] was proceeding,” said Kurt V. Berchtold, assistant director of the water board’s Santa Ana region. His agency has jurisdiction over Huntington Beach.

“In fact, the city was one of the main parties stressing the need to address the ocean contamination issue, so they should have been providing every piece of information they had relative to that problem.”

A draft of the agency’s cleanup order contends that leaked sewage might have reached the ocean. “The leaked sewage is discharged to ground water in areas where ground water could migrate to and impact the quality of near-shore ocean waters,” according to the draft of the order.

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Longtime Leakage

City officials failed to report the leakage of millions of gallons of raw sewage from Huntington Beach sewer lines during the 1990s, according to state water quality officials.

Source: State water quality investigators.

Graphics reporting by BRADY MacDONALD / Los Angeles Times