Regional water board says Hollister is in violation for not
reporting sewage backups in time
Hollister has again violated state water quality laws, according
to the Regional Water Quality Control Board.
Hollister has again violated state water quality laws, according to the Regional Water Quality Control Board.
This time it’s for being lax in reporting a slew of sewage backups and spills that occurred throughout the city between September and December, said an official of the state agency.
“There have been seven different spills in that time, all apparently caused from blockages, like grease balls, in the sewer lines,” said Matt Fabry, representative of the Central Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board in San Luis Obispo. “At least two of those spills weren’t reported within the 30-day limit.”
State law requires cities to report any sewage spills of less than 1,000 gallons within 30 days of the event. Spills that are 1,000 gallons or greater must be reported by phone within 24 hours.
Fabry suspects that another Hollister spill, one over 1,000 gallons, would not have been reported at all had it not been for several local residents who contacted his office. The spill in question was the sewage backup that occurred in front of the Wiebe Motel off of San Felipe Road Dec. 13.
A power failure at the San Felipe lift station – a pump in the city’s sewage line — caused raw sewage to bubble out of storm drains and toilets, making for a very unmerry holiday season for the owners of the motel and its patrons.
According to Fabry, city officials said the backup consisted of about 300 to 400 gallons of raw sewage water, but he doesn’t know how Hollister came to that conclusion. Public Works Director Clint Quilter said his staff reported that the spill was “less than a thousand gallons.”
“We’ve had some confusion with our reporting,” added Quilter. “We’ve had staff changes.”
Other citizens say the spill was way more than what city staff reported.
One of those citizens happened to be Supervisor Richard Scagliotti. He and his daughter were driving along the frontage road right at the time the sludge was filling a nearby ditch and flooding across the street.
Scagliotti notified the water board about the mess, as did local slow-growth activist J.J. Vogel. Fabry then asked the city’s Public Works department for details on the spill, and said he didn’t think the city would have bothered to report it had he not inquired about it.
“Given that they didn’t send me any reports on the other spills, it was unlikely I was going to get a report on this one,” said Fabry.
Fabry said that the city Public Works department sent back an e-mail saying that the sewage backup was minimal and that the problem at the lift station was solved. It apparently wasn’t good enough for the water board, which sent back a “notice of violation” to the city asking for details about the spill and about the lift station.
Fabry said that the water board’s main concern is that there are discrepancies in the spill amounts from what the city reports and what Scagliotti and Vogel reported. If the spill at the San Felipe lift station was indeed 1,000 gallons or more, the city should have reported it immediately.
“Maybe the city engineers just eyeballed it,” said Fabry. “We’re just trying to verify the size of that spill.”
The water board is now requiring city engineers to provide some key data regarding the San Felipe sewage backup in order to get a grip on how significant it was. Among other answers, the water board wants an estimate of the sewage flow to the lift station during the time when the pumps went down.
That might not be so easy considering that the city has already admitted they lost the blueprint configuration to operating the pump station, which is why the backup pumps did not kick in when the power went down. They didn’t have the backup switch turned on at the time of the power failure.
Hollister has until Jan. 22 to provide the more detailed information requested by the state water board. If the city misses the deadline, the water board may consider lobbing another fine on Hollister, said Fabry, though he could not be specific as to dollar amounts.
