Briefly in the news

Beaches from Huntington to Newport Beach were reopened Sunday, three

days following a sewage spill that dumped approximately 1,000 gallons of raw sewage into the ocean, said Larry Honeybourne with the Orange County

Health Care Agency.

The spill occurred at 9 a.m. Thursday when a pump station at Canyon

and Wilson streets in Costa Mesa experienced a power outage, causing the

sewage to back up at a well at the station and then overflow into the

Greenville Banning Channel, which parallels the Santa Ana River channel,

Honeybourne said.

Beaches from Highland Street in Newport to the Talbert Channel in

Huntington Beach were closed.

“[The sewage] came out of a manhole at the pump station, followed

gravity down the street curb and gutter and into the storm drain system,”

Honeybourne said. “The sewage came down the Greenville Banning Channel

and flowed through flood gates underneath the Pacific Coast Highway

bridge and into the Santa Ana River channel before going out to the

ocean.”

A backup generator was brought in while Southern California Edison

repaired the transformer, said senior maintenance worker for the Costa

Mesa Sanitary District Gerald Vasquez.

Vasquez added that most of the sewage had been contained when he

arrived at the pump station at 9 a.m.

“The pumps were off for an hour or two, and that was it,” Vasquez

said.