District faces a penalty for wastewater spill

Alicia Robinson

The Orange County Sanitation District faces a $160,000 penalty for

spilling nearly 1.6 million gallons of treated wastewater from a

Huntington Beach pump station into the Santa Ana River on Labor Day

weekend.

Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board staff members

recommended the penalty Monday, but board members have the option of

reducing or eliminating the penalty if the sanitation district

requests a hearing.

“In this case, although this is probably a unique incident [and]

not something we have seen before ... we believe that it could have

been prevented or minimized had the district taken better precautions

and more effectively responded to the incident that occurred,”

regional water board spokesman Kurt Berchtold said.

The sanitation district is reviewing the complaint and has not yet

decided whether to request a hearing on the issue or simply pay the

penalty, said Bob Ghirelli, the district’s director of technical

services.

A report from the water board found that the Sept. 4 spill

occurred when a brief power failure in the Southern California Edison

power grid was followed by problems with backup generators at the

Huntington Beach station. Partially treated and disinfected

wastewater backed up at the plant and flowed into the Santa Ana

River, which led the Orange County Health Care Agency to close

beaches from 52nd Street in Newport Beach to Magnolia Street in

Huntington Beach.

The penalty includes $100,000 of civil liability, and the

remaining $60,000 can be devoted to an environmental project.

Following the spill, the sanitation district began looking at its

procedures to prevent future spills, and it’s likely the water board

took that into account when setting the penalty, Ghirelli said. The

maximum penalty allowed would have been $16 million, he said.

“We’ve done a lot of internal reviews and have come up with a

number of recommendations for improvements in our in-plant

communications among staff, modifications that we will make to

equipment, improvements to our emergency procedures and training,” he

said. “I think they saw that we are trying to take action to improve

the situation for the future.”

The sanitation district is not a chronic violator, Ghirelli said,

pointing out that the last spill from one of its treatment plants

into the Santa Ana River was 30 years ago.

* ALICIA ROBINSON covers business, politics and the environment.

She may be reached at (714) 966-4626 or by e-mail at

alicia.robinson@latimes.com.