Our Laguna: Woes mount for neighbors of sewer project

And they thought King Tut’s tomb was jinxed.

The rehabilitation of the aging Bluebird Canyon Lift Station on the corner of Calliope and Glenneyre streets has been plagued with delays and unforeseen complications — even before the project got underway. Plans that were being drawn to start the project at the end of summer in 2008 and wind it up by the end of the year, crashed with a disastrous spill Oct. 29, 2008.

“Any time you are undertaking a project on an old facility, you run into the unexpected,” said Water Quality Director David Shissler. “It’s like pulling a thread on an old sweater and the whole thing starts to unravel.”

The project hasn’t been a walk in the park for the city or residents. Renovation finally got started in March and was supposed to be over this month. It is behind schedule and over budget.

City officials now estimate the project will cost about $1.8 million, $300,000 more than the original projection, and won’t be completed until mid-October.

“I have lost my mind,” said Annette Stephens, whose property abuts the pump station parcel. “And so have my neighbors. I am getting very little sleep and even with the baffles the city installed after I complained, the noise is still pretty bad.”

The noise is generated by a portable bypass pump, which operates 24/7, while crews work on the electrical, mechanical and wetwell equipment inside the station. The portable and back-up pumps are parked on the Galen cul de sac below Stephens’ home on Glenneyre and the Calliope Villas. Galen is the access point for the project. Twenty-foot-tall sound walls of plywood and batting were erected on three sides of the portable pump to try to muffle the noise.

Aware of the distress the portable pump would cause some of the neighbors, City Manager Ken Frank offered them a $120 dinner at a restaurant of their choice.

Stephens said forget dinner, she wants to be relocated.

“I can’t hear my television set without turning it up so loud I am starting to go deaf,” Stephens said. “And I can’t open my windows because of the smells.”

The city offered to install air conditioning for Stephens, but she said her windows won’t accommodate a unit.

Stephens has coped with the lift station problems since she bought her property in 1969.

“I have lived through the pump going out in the middle of the night,” she said. “My electricity used to be tied to it [lift station] and when it went out I would call and tell the city. I hear every blowout and contact the city. But I am not sure I am going to survive this.”

It’s been one thing after another for almost 18 months, she said.

“The biggest delay on the project — almost a month — was caused when the contractor hit a water line,” Shissler said. “Some repairs would have had to be done anyway, but we are negotiating what he is responsible for.”

Besides the added expense, the mishap turned the schedule upside down, Shissler said.

Unfortunately, the unexpected is to be expected in this kind of project.

“We ran into large steel columns used to build the original station and old sewer lines that we had no record of and water lines were not where we expected,” Shissler said. “We were trying to keep the old station together and there were instances when what we were working on was falling apart.”

The most recent hang up: Protective concrete covers for manholes were poured four inches too high. They will have to be removed and redone so the roadway can be repaved.

Delays began while the rehabilitation plan was still on the drawing board, although that may have been a blessing.

Damage to the facility sustained in the repairs to the nearby North Coast Interceptor after a spill in April 2008 provided a clearer picture of some of the challenges of the project.

“April made us more aware of the problems we were facing,” Shissler said.

Then in the early hours of Oct. 29, the lift pump station abruptly shut down. Some 580,000 gallons of sewage spilled into the ocean before frantically working crews were able to stem the flow.

“Recovery from the Oct. 29 event took several months,” Shissler said. “There was a lot of electrical damage.”

Work finally began on the lift station in March. Shissler said the small size of his department also contributed to the delay.

He is the only civil engineer on the staff.

The completion date was estimated at mid-August, since re-revised.

The delays forced Jane and Claude Mouchard to put their plans to sell their Calliope Villas condominium on hold.

“We had put it up for sale, thinking it [renovation] was going to be a two-month project,” she said. “We haven’t even been able to hold an open house, because we can’t show the condo with a port-a-potty [for construction workers] at the Calliope entrance to villas.”

The smells emanating from the project also would alienate buyers, she said, although they dissipate once inside the Mouchards’ condo. Not helping: Construction equipment on Galen has prevented Waste Management from collecting trash, although residents have been promised a pickup in a week.

With all her woes, Jane Mouchard still has a kind word for workers.

“They have been very sympathetic,” she said.

Shissler said everyone is sympathetic and is trying to get the project done as quickly as possible.

The project has also been a pain for locals who habitually drive on Glenneyre through town.

Signs alerting the public to the project gave a whole new meaning to the word “occasional”: as in warning about “occasional street closures” from early March to early June.

Glenneyre was closed to all traffic in early May, according to city project manager Will Holoman.

“We kept it open as long as possible,” Shissler said.

Traffic was detoured. Glenneyre reopened on the Fourth of July weekend to accommodate holiday traffic and then closed again.

“The closure definitely hurt business,” said Ed Postal, owner of Barnaby Rudge bookstore, half a block away from the intersection of Calliope and Glenneyre streets. “Customers told me about the difficulty in getting to the store from the north side of Glenneyre and finding a parking place when they did.”

Glenneyre vehicle traffic heading south was reduced by the detour to South Coast Highway via Cress Street.

“And they didn’t change the lights on Cress so only a couple of cars made it through and back up was terrible,” Postal said.

Two lanes on Glenneyre were opened in late July. The final tasks in the rehabilitation will be the restoration of the street and landscaping the station parcel.

Updating and rehabilitating the city’s cranky sewage system has been a top priority on the city’s capital improvement plan. About $16 million has been spent in the past six or seven years, Shissler said.

“All these improvements have sharply reduced the frequency of sewer spills in Laguna Beach,” Frank said.

And that translates into money saved. The Bluebird spill in October was costly to clean up and the city was fined $70,000 by the state Regional Water Quality Control Board that oversees most of Laguna.

City officials think the Bluebird lift station is well worth the money spent on it, even if other projects have to be postponed to meet the costs.

“It is the single most important thing we have to do to the sewer system,” Shissler said.

For more information about the Water Quality department, visit www.clbwq.net. For more information about the Bluebird Lift Station project, click on Projects.

OUR LAGUNA is a regular feature of the Laguna Beach Coastline Pilot. Contributions are welcomed. Write to Barbara Diamond, P.O. Box 248, Laguna Beach, 92652; call (949) 380-4321 or e-mail coastlinepilot@latimes.com