State to fight CMC sewage penalties

The prison says the fine is excessive and it responded heroically in minimizing damage

By David Sneed

The California Men’s Colony prison faces another $175,000 in fines for more polluted discharges from its sewage treatment plant.

This is the latest in a long string of wastewater violations at the prison west of San Luis Obispo.

However, there’s a new twist this time around. The state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is planning to challenge a $40,000 fine for a sewage spill that took place in January.

The matter is set to go before the Central Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board when it meets in San Luis Obispo on Sept. 4 and 5.

Chris Swanberg, legal counsel who handles environmental cases for the corrections department, said the fine is excessive because the state has spent $27 million upgrading the prison’s sewage treatment plant, and plant operators acted decisively to minimize the amount of sewage released during the January spill.

The spill occurred Jan. 27 when a new emergency generator failed during a power outage and 20,000 gallons of sewage overflowed into Chorro Creek.

A quick-thinking plant operator waded into a pool of raw sewage and unplugged a drainage line that diverted the sewage into the old treatment plant.

“By my estimation, our people are heroes,” Swanberg said. “We could have spilled 400,000 gallons very easily.”

The actions by plant operators, coupled with the fact that state water officials have judged the environmental damage caused by the spill to be minimal, means the prison’s culpability is negligible, Swanberg said. This will be the basis of the challenge.

Chorro Creek was storm-swollen at the time of the spill and the sewage was quickly diluted.

However, the spill prompted county health officials to close Morro Bay to swimmers for four days and prohibit sport shellfish harvesting for weeks longer.

The prison’s old sewer plant dated to World War II and was responsible for more some 150 discharge violations in recent years.

The new plant is expected to eliminate most of those problems, but operators are having difficulty disinfecting the ef fluent, said Harvey Packard, enforcement coordinator for the regional water board.

Since July 2006, the prison has violated water disinfection standards 45 times.

The discharge was either not disinfected enough or was chlorinated too much, Packard said. These violations carry combined mandatory penalties of $135,000.

“We are going to be asking them to figure out what the problem is and fix it because they cannot continue to discharge that kind of stuff into the creek,” Packard said.

Prison officials will not challenge these penalties, Swanberg said.

Instead, they will propose that the fine money be spent on a special environmental project, rather than have it go into the state’s general fund.

The law allows this as long as the money is spent on a program that helps offset the environmental damage caused by the violation.

Swanberg is working with the Morro Bay National Estuary Program to come up with a project.

“We are trying to come up with something specific to Morro Bay,” he said.

Two previous CMC fines have been used to fund environmental projects. These projects were the removal of derelict boats from Morro Bay’s Windy Cove and the construction of five miles of fencing along tributaries to Chorro Creek to keep out livestock.

The prison is spending another $5 to $10 million to upgrade the new plant’s disinfection system to meet the newer, stricter federal discharge standards, which the facility has been violating, Swanberg said.

He expects the prison to continue to have disinfection problems for the next couple of years as plant operators tweak the system to meet the new standards.

“We are operating on the cutting edge of technology with this plant,” Swanberg said. “But before the plant was even finished, we knew we were going to have some disinfection problems.”

Reach David Sneed at 781- 7930.