Pump Station Was Being Updated

The Manhattan Beach pumping station that failed Sunday, causing the biggest sewage spill in Santa Monica Bay in a decade, had experienced problems with outages in the past and was being rehabbed with new electrical controls.

In 1976, a power outage at the same pumping station caused a 200,000-gallon spill. An outage in 1985 resulted in a 35,000-gallon spill.

As workers continued to assess the damage from the spill and beaches from El Segundo to the Palos Verdes Peninsula remained closed, Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts officials acknowledged Tuesday that they have been concerned about some of the aging electrical panels at pumping stations that served the coast. The one that somehow cut off the pumps Sunday is about 30 years old.

“We have older plants. We are trying to learn from events and prevent a recurrence in the system,” said Philip Friess, head of the sewage department for the sanitation agency. “When we identify the exact cause of failure at this plant -- if there is the potential for similar events at any other plant -- we will take rapid action.”

Officials stressed that they still have not pinpointed the cause of the power problem at the pump station on 27th Street, so they were not sure if it was just age that caused the electrical panel to fail.

On Sunday, a series of electrical snafus caused the station to shut down and sewage to back up, but officials are most concerned about the failure of an alarm system to immediately tell headquarters personnel of the problem.

In the last year, backups in the sewer lines have caused some minor spills. But in all those cases, alarms went off and crews were able to fix the problems without a major spill, officials said. In this incident, they got no warning.

The telephone system connected to the alarms at roughly 20 South Bay pumping stations didn’t work Sunday morning when the spill occurred, sanitation agency spokesman Joe Haworth said. Officials think that failure was unrelated to the electrical problem at the pumping station that caused the spill.

For the last few years, the sanitation agency said, it has been aggressively upgrading many of its 44 pumping stations with more modern technology to communicate with a main pumping station and to control the pumps. One improvement would allow workers in a main facility in Long Beach to automatically control the pumping of sewage. Currently, if there is a problem at a remote station, workers must go to it to fix it.

That became a major problem Sunday because sewage overflowed from manhole covers, onto beaches and into homes before workers could control the flow. Officials estimate that 1.7 million gallons spilled and that as much as 100,000 gallons of sewage made it to the ocean.

At the 27th Street pumping station, electricians, still surrounded by bits of scum left by sewage, spent Tuesday trying to figure out why the alarm and pumping mechanism failed. Though most of the station’s electrical panel is about 30 years old, a portion is 16 years old.

“In any kind of mechanical or electrical system, age is a problem,” Howarth said. “There are not a lot of people flying C-47 planes built in the 1930s, are there?”

For the last month, a contractor has been replacing the electrical system at that station on weekdays. But Friess said there was no evidence that the contractor’s work caused any electrical problems.

Southern California Edison, which supplies electricity to the plant, said its lines supplied continuous power to the pumping station Sunday morning.

“Edison provides power up to the meter,” spokesman Gil Alexander said. “If that facility experienced power problems, those problems would have been on the customer’s side of the meter. Our records indicate both of the lines that provide power to the meter -- the primary line and the backup emergency line -- both were functioning normal.”

The records from Edison conflict with information that crews have extracted from the plant, leaving sanitation officials puzzling over how the pumps lost power.

“If we lose both of those [Edison circuits], we have a switch that senses the loss of power and the standby generator comes on,” Friess said. “Our automatic transfer switch did activate. Our generator did come on. It did activate for about two hours.”

Even though the power came on, the pumps didn’t function.

At the beaches, sanitation workers with rakes and skip loaders picked up debris, sprinkled chlorine and spread sand to dry in the sun. Officials from the county Department of Health Services inspected the main spill site near 21st Street in Manhattan Beach, as well as smaller spills in that city and in Hermosa Beach.

Preliminary samples of ocean water collected by sanitation crews showed “reasonable levels” of bacteria in most of the beach areas, said Dr. Jonathan Fielding, director of public health for the county. But near the big spill in Manhattan Beach, bacteria levels were on the borderline of being unsafe. Officials were still waiting for the results of their own samples, which should be available today.

“We’re not going to make any decisions [about reopening beaches] until we see those,” Fielding said.

Mitch Ward, mayor of Manhattan Beach, looks forward to reopening the shoreline.

“Normally the interviews I give are about our A-rated beaches, which is constant year-round,” he said with a bitter laugh. “This is a very rare situation. From all the history I’ve read, we’ve had no occurrences like this.”

He hopes to get some answers to the problem when someone from the sanitation department addresses his City Council on Tuesday night. He wasn’t angry.

“With aging infrastructure, things always happen,” he said. “Getting angry without knowing what happened is premature.”

At the beach, some people carried on as if nothing had happened, ignoring signs reading “Beach closed. Avoid water contact.” At El Porto Beach, a popular surfing spot in Manhattan Beach, more than a dozen surfers took advantage of the beach closure to enjoy the nearly deserted water.

Juan Tueros of Redondo Beach said his wife -- a nurse -- warned him about increased chances of contracting conjunctivitis from polluted water. But he wasn’t concerned and stayed in the water an hour.

“It’s not crowded; it’s good surfing,” he said.

Chabib Jawad, 31, was told twice by lifeguards to get out of the water, but he refused. After all, the Morocco native said, he had surfed in sewage in Africa.

“This is my day off,” he said. “It’s my city. I have to get in he water. It’s an addiction.”