One of the best things about living in California is the beaches. Relatively warm water, good waves, swaying palms, and approximately one-million surfers in the water at any given moment. But the water quality can be slightly concerning sometimes, and recently an enormous sewage spill made that concern more than slight. Eight-and-a-half million gallons of raw sewage spilled into a channel that ends up in the Los Angeles Harbor. It was enough to prompt officials to close a stretch of beaches from Huntington Beach to the south, to Rancho Palos Verdes in the north.
“A spill of this magnitude is dangerous and unacceptable, and we need to understand what happened,” Los Angeles County Supervisor Janice Hahn said in a statement. “The recent storm undoubtedly contributed, but we need infrastructure that doesn’t fail when it rains.”
On Thursday afternoon, workers in Carson noticed something drastically wrong with a 48-inch sewer line after the heavy rain. Sewage poured into the Dominguez Channel, which empties into the Los Angeles harbor. The overflow flooded residential streets in Carson. “It is just flooding the street with fecal matter and toiletries,” one Carson resident told ABC7 News. “… the odor is really, really bad, contaminating our neighborhood.”
Although crews tried, they weren’t able to stop the sewage from escaping until Saturday, when five bypass systems were installed. By then, a whole lot of sewage had made its way into the ocean. The L.A. County Department of Public Health decided to close the stretch of beaches on Friday, for obvious reasons, and they’re waiting until tests of the water return to safe bacterial levels to open them back up.
