The Regional Water Quality Control Board has ordered an investigation into San Diego County’s largest sewage spill since 2000. The board hopes to determine the cause of the estimated 14 million gallons of waste that poured into San Diego Bay for two consecutive years from Navy barracks at the 32nd Street base. The leak was stopped Nov. 17, the same day it was discovered.
In 2004, construction workers improperly connected a sewage line to a storm drain at Palmer Hall, a 12-story barrack accommodating 1,032 sailors.
As a result, raw sewage emptied unnoticed into Chollas Creek, which runs into nearby San Diego Bay. A team of Navy Seabees who were working on an adjacent, unrelated construction project discovered the leak last month.
Navy spokesman Kevin Dixon confirmed that Soltek Pacific, the construction company responsible for the error while building Palmer Hall, is contracted for other Navy projects. Dixon would not comment on whether the Navy will continue working with the contractor in the future.
On Dec. 1, the Regional Water Quality Control Board, the state agency charged with enforcing the authority of the California Water Code, issued the Navy a Notice of Violation for its two-year discharge. The notice orders that the Navy submit a technical report to the board no later than Dec. 20. No additional information was available as of press time.
In the report, the Navy must explain how the incident occurred, describe steps it will take to identify similar drain connections at the facility and prevent future sewer line cross-connections, propose a plan for monitoring water quality in Chollas Creek and San Diego Bay adjacent to its station, and include a clean-up plan to mitigate water quality impacts to Chollas Creek that occurred during the two-year period.
However, that’s about all the board can do. Water resource control engineer Melissa Valdovinos wrote the Notice of Violation and said monetary fines are out of the question, as the board isn’t allowed to fine the federal government or its organizations. That leaves little else in terms of imposing consequences.
“That’s incentive for people to get their act together and we don’t have that option in this case,” Valdovinos said.
In the absence of harsher action, the board will focus on obtaining information about the spill and remediation efforts to ensure another discharge doesn’t happen again in the future.
The Navy may also be ordered to implement its own proposed mitigation plan.
However, all action to date fails to address the obvious: 14 million gallons of raw sewage has infiltrated San Diego Bay.
According to Valdovinos, there is no realistic way to rectify the contamination.
“It has been so disbursed by now,” she said of the sewage. “How do you approach cleaning up the entire bay?”
Valdovinos added that the environmental impact on the bay will also be hard to pin down, as the spill has not been the only source of pollution over the past two years.
Chollas Creek and other bay outlets suffer ongoing pollution from many different sources, much of which travels by way of storm drains and urban runoff.
For its part, the Department of Environmental Health monitors bacteria levels in all major waterways, including San Diego Bay, and shuts down recreational areas if the pollution rises above acceptable levels.
The Navy also regularly monitors water quality near the 32nd Street Naval Station, though mainly focusing on industrial runoff, not bacteria from sewage.