El Segundo moves to sue L.A. over massive Santa Monica Bay sewage spill, foul odors
February 19, 2013
This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2013, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
No matter how much money and time is spent to study what went wrong in a storm that dumped more than 7 million gallons of raw sewage into Los Angeles Harbor in July, the facts show the city is still at fault.
The state of California has spent millions of dollars on clean-up, and the city has spent millions more to try to force the cleanup. The federal government and the nation’s largest corporations are spending millions too.
But there is no question about one thing:
If a government agency hadn’t done the deed, and an industry had to pay to make it come to fruition, there would be no contamination at all.
The city has never been on notice of how much sewage was pouring into the port before the storm. It never took notice, because until the day of the storm, it had been a quiet part of the city’s harboran area that rarely, if ever, made the news.
Instead, the most noticeable thing about this sewage spill was what it didn’t do.
It didn’t harm local wildlife, it didn’t threaten the health of anyone on the streets or the ocean, and it didn’t interfere with any of the millions of tourists who come to the city each year.
When city officials and the state of California spent $2.1 million cleaning up and preventing any future damage to the harbor, the sewage was never thought to be a threat to anyone else.
But without it, the entire harbor system would have been destroyed.
No one is sure how much sewage was discharged but it could have been as many as 25 million gallons, according to state officials.
It was certainly far more