Huntington Tap Water Passes First Tests

Initial tests show that massive, long-term underground sewage leaks in Huntington Beach did not contaminate the city’s drinking water supply, city and state officials said Friday.

The city’s failure to report those leaks to health and water authorities, as required by state and federal laws, led city officials to plead guilty to three misdemeanor counts in Orange County Superior Court last month.

As part of the plea agreement, the city promised to follow through with earlier commitments to analyze the effects of the leaks and clean up any contamination.

The city hired Komex H2O Science Inc., a Huntington Beach-based consultant, to conduct five sets of samplings at 10 monitoring wells in March and April. Three sets have been completed; the remainder will be done this month.

“The preliminary results indicate that [ground-water contamination] is not an issue,” said Wade Major, a Komex environmental engineer. “However, we need the other two data points to really complete the study.”

Researchers sampled water from 10 wells about 50 feet deep, testing for two species of bacteria, one virus, four forms of nitrogen, two types of phosphorous and total organic carbon. They found no bacteria or viruses, and carbon, phosphorus and nitrogen were at normal levels.

The leaks occurred in a municipal system that handles 32 million gallons of sewage a day. City officials knew about leaking sewer lines at least five years ago but failed to report them to the county and state.

In 1996, workers estimated that 71,374 gallons of sewage were leaking each day, totaling more than 6.6 million gallons by year’s end. Current city officials, however, dispute those numbers. Work to repair the crumbling lines did not begin until 1999.

In late March, the city pleaded guilty to violating state water laws by failing to report the leaks to state and county health officials. A criminal prosecution of a municipality over such matters is rare.

The city was sentenced to five years’ probation, during which officials must cooperate with a cleanup order issued in December by the state’s Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board. It also was ordered to spend $250,000 to assess and clean up the damage.

“It looks pretty good at this point from the city’s perspective,” said Kenneth Theisen, a sanitary engineering associate with the regional water board.

The fate of the missing sewage is unknown, but it probably was filtered by sand and dirt before reaching the ground water, he said.

“It’s similar to a septic tank,” he said. “The ground can absorb and treat a certain volume of waste water.”

State and local officials don’t believe the sewage leaks were related to the city’s crippling beach closures during the summer of 1999.

The Komex study is expected to cost $160,000. The city already spent $1.9 million to fix leaking downtown sewers, said Huntington Beach spokesman Rich Barnard.

The city is also on the verge of beginning a $1.9-million project to “slip-line” 52,000 feet of pipes--put new piping inside the old piping--and refurbish 2,500 manholes in the Huntington Harbor area that are susceptible to seawater intrusion. The project is being paid for by grants from the Orange County Sanitation District and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The city also is seeking $2 million from the sanitation district and Prop. 13 funds to do another seawater infiltration project in 2002 in the harbor area, and will probably seek a couple of hundred thousand dollars in federal community block-grants for maintenance downtown.

Public hearings are expected in late summer over a proposal to charge homeowners a $5- to $6-a-month sewer fee to repair and maintain decaying lines--some of which date to 1910. The city will need $127 million over 20 years to rehabilitate and maintain the sewer system.

If approved, the fee will go into effect in October, Barnard said.

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Trouble Spots

Sewer breaks