juLY 7, 2022

A Year of Catastrophic Spills 

July 11th marks the one-year anniversary of one of the most devastating sewage spills to plague our coastlines in decades. The initial spill led to the Hyperion Water Treatment Plant releasing 12.5 million gallons of raw sewage into the plant’s 1-mile outfall pipe. It took the City of LA Sanitation Bureau (LASAN) more than three weeks to bring the plant’s operations back up to required treatment standards, with additional discharges of partially treated sewage continuing throughout that period. 

Less than six months later, under the watch of the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts (LACSD), around 8.5 million gallons of sewage flooded residential streets in the City of Carson, draining into the Dominguez Channel from which it flowed into the ocean through the Port of Los Angeles. Although these treatment plants were run by different local agencies, the end result was the same: untreated sewage despoiling our beaches and coastal waters, threatening public health, and damaging the marine ecosystem. 

Initial Responses 

The public agencies charged with overseeing these facilities took these spills seriously and have invested resources to understand and explain to the public what went wrong in both instances, as they should. The reports for the Hyperion spill and the Carson spill identified a myriad of deficiencies – from lack of adequate staffing and training to operational and capital shortfalls. Bruce Reznik, LAW’s Executive Director, proudly served as an advisor on the ad-hoc committee for the Hyperion spill and helped guide the report’s recommendations for remedial actions that can be taken to prevent future catastrophic sewage spills. 

Following these incidents, we have also seen an increase in investment to correct these problems. For example, the City of Los Angeles has approved a budget increase for capital improvements to the wastewater system to $369 million for the 2022-23 fiscal year---including over $58 million in projects at the Hyperion plant---which will expedite capital improvements and support the addition of 41 LASAN staff. 

But one year after the Hyperion spill and more than six months after the Dominguez Channel spill, we still don’t know what penalties will be levied by the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board (LA Regional Board) in response to these disasters. Despite the two agencies' laudable response to the spills, it remains critical for our regulatory bodies to hold them accountable to serve as a deterrent and fully address the harms caused by the release of untreated sewage into the environment and our communities.  

Previous LA Waterkeeper Litigation Led to Wastewater Improvements  

LA Waterkeeper has a long history of fighting mismanagement in our region’s wastewater systems, and that work has significantly reduced the rate of sewage spills in LA County. In the early 1990s, wastewater infrastructure in both the City of LA and other cities within the county was antiquated and crumbling. Sewage spills were occurring nearly twice a day, disproportionately in historically under-resourced communities. LASAN, which at the time managed approximately 450 million gallons of wastewater a day through more than 6,700 miles of pipeline, was a major source of these problems.  

In 1998, LA Waterkeeper sued the City of LA, and after five years of grueling litigation, LASAN admitted responsibility for 3,670 sewage spills and committed to investing in infrastructure improvements and to restoring damaged wetlands and creeks. The improvements transformed the city’s sewage system from one of the worst in the western US to one of the highest performing in the nation, with more than a 90% reduction in spills since 2000. 

Sending a strong enforcement message 

Although the number of sewage spills has gone down dramatically over past decades, it is not much of an improvement if there is a greater frequency of catastrophic incidents. It’s clear that the size and scope of last year’s incidents require a strong reaction from the agencies that oversee wastewater treatment to ensure not only that chronic spills continue to decline, but also that there is sufficient capital investment and improvement in operational controls to detect the potential for larger sewage spills and prevent them before they can occur.  

The statutory maximum penalty for sewage spills is $10 per gallon plus $10,000 per day of violation. While we are not recommending anything close to this maximum, we are calling on the LA Regional Board to impose an aggressive penalty of $3 per gallon for the Hyperion spill plus $10,000 per day for the weeks that the plant was not fully operational and continued to discharge partially treated wastewater into the ocean in excess of applicable limits under the facility’s Clean Water Act permit. This approach would result in a total of $37.7 million in penalties.  

While nearly $40 million is a significant penalty, we believe it is warranted in this case. The Hyperion spill was a devastating event that fouled our coastline and harmed nearby communities for weeks (if not months). The operational failures leading to the spill were preventable and, in hindsight, quite foreseeable. Moreover, this was not the first large spill at Hyperion in recent memory; 2015 saw another major incident at Hyperion following an unexpected heavy storm in September that resulted in 30 million gallons of partially treated wastewater discharged into the Pacific Ocean and four days of beach closures. 

Staff Efforts Commendable, But System Failure Requires Robust Response 

Importantly, the Hyperion spill truly could have been much, much worse. Absent the heroic response actions by staff, a more catastrophic failure could have brought the entire treatment plant down and undermined wastewater treatment for millions of Angelenos for an indeterminate period of time.  

Levying these types of fines against public agencies provides more than just motivation for managers to do better. It gives us a chance to make significant reinvestments in the facilities themselves, and to remediate the environmental and community harms done. The best way to achieve progress in preventing future catastrophic incidents is through accountability. 

As such, we recommend the LA Regional Board impose penalties as follows: 

• $1.00 per gallon + the $10,000 per day (or a total of $12.7 million) is a direct penalty that goes to the State Water Resources Control Board (State Board)’s Cleanup & Abatement Account. While this is a very large number – more than five times the total liability in the settlement for the 2015 Hyperion spill – we believe such a penalty is necessary to send a strong message that such spills will no longer be tolerated.  

• $0.50 per gallon (or $6.25 million) would go towards remediating the harm done from this spill in the form of Supplemental Environmental Projects (or SEPs), such as habitat restoration or building green infrastructure to promote greater water resilience. 

• $1.50 per gallon spilled (or $18.75 million) - reinvest in the Hyperion wastewater system to ensure spills like this never happen again. Such measures, known as Enhanced Compliance Actions (ECAs), should be on top of the increased investment already made over the past year to respond to the immediate spill, which will ensure the improvements continue to be made.  

Breaking penalties into these categories serves several critical purposes. First, the actual fine provides needed deterrence to move away from a ‘fix on failure’ approach, which disincentivizes proactivity in monitoring and improving wastewater operations. Under LA Waterkeeper’s suggested approach, most of the assessed penalties stay local to remediate harms done, while reinvesting in our wastewater system to avoid future spills and move us towards a more resilient water future.

It is worth noting that our preferred approach is inconsistent with current State Board guidance on enforcement penalties, which limits SEP and ECA portions of a settlement to 50% of the total liability assessed. While we support the State Board guidance for smaller spills and fines to deter chronic small violations, we believe more flexibility should be provided for larger penalties to ensure the majority of funding goes to address the problem locally. 

A More Resilient Wastewater Future   

Our twin crises of water pollution and water scarcity offer us an opportunity to re-envision our wastewater system, particularly in the wake of the disastrous spills in 2021. To prevent future catastrophic incidents, we must transform our current ‘pump-and-dump' approach to water management into a more resilient model by transitioning to a state-of-the-art wastewater purification system that will allow us to reclaim and reuse our wastewater and move our region closer to water independence.