Beaches still closed after sewage spill

Alex Coolman

NEWPORT BEACH -- The water from Orange Street to Talbert Channel in

Huntington Beach remained closed Wednesday in the wake of Tuesday’s

5,000-gallon sewage spill.

County officials will reopen the beaches when tests indicate it is safe

to do so, said Larry Honeybourne, program chief of the Orange County

Health Care Agency’s water quality division.

“We need a couple consecutive days of clean samples before we reopen the

beach,” he said.

The sewage flowed into the ocean early Tuesday morning after a pipe broke

at an Orange County Sanitation District pump house in Costa Mesa. The

smelly contents of the pipe gushed into storm drains and traveled to the

sea through the Greenville Banning Channel, which runs parallel to the

Santa Ana River.

Michelle Tuchman, a spokeswoman for the sanitation district, said the

district maintains a regular program of preventive maintenance to prevent

such ruptures.

The pipe that broke, she said, was about 30 years old.

“Those pipes were scheduled to be replaced within the next couple of

years,” she noted.

Though the sewage made for smelly area beaches, Honeybourne noted that

such spills are not considered to be the culprit in the kind of long-term

contamination that plagued Huntington Beach last year.

The source of that problem is suspected to be related to urban runoff:

the brew of pesticides, fertilizers, animal droppings and oil residue

that flows into the ocean daily via storm drains.

“There’s been some degree of mixing of apples and oranges” in the

discussion of Tuesday’s spill, because of confusion about the different

sources of contamination, Honeybourne said.