Los Angeles may have to pay the city’s water quality watchdog $21.7 million for a sewage spill that occurred nearly two years ago at the Hyperion wastewater treatment plant, officials have announced.
The Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board proposed the hefty fine on Monday, April 3, against Los Angeles, which operates Hyperion, accusing the plant of violating its waste discharge permit and releasing millions of gallons of raw sewage into the ocean in July 2021.
The penalty is the largest ever proposed for such violations.
The state water board will decide within three months, at a to-be-scheduled hearing, whether to issue the penalty, according to a press release. Both parties, though, could waive that requirement.
A spokesperson with Los Angeles Sanitation & Environment, the agency that oversees Hyperion, said in a statement that officials continue working with state and federal regulators to fix any ongoing issues at Hypeiron.
The spill occurred at the city’s oldest and largest wastewater facility when debris filtering machines, designed to remove plastic and large objects from incoming sewage, became clogged and inoperable, flooding the facility and forcing plant operators to evacuate for their own safety. Hyperion officials released more than 12 million gallons of untreated wastewater into the Santa Monica Bay to prevent the flooding from spreading to the rest of the plant.
The water board, in its complaint, accused LASAN of being out of compliance with its waste discharge permit and the state water code for discharging the sewage without authorization to do so; failing to perform offshore water sampling; not monitoring and reporting issues at the plant; allowing objectionable odors to emanate from the plant; and releasing excessive amounts of untreated wastewater.
“This was a major incident, one of the largest spills in our region in decades,” Hugh Marley, assistant executive officer of the L.A. Water Board, said in a Monday press…
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