The Goleta West Sanitary District revealed Tuesday that its massive sewage spill started on Feb. 16, six days before county health officials closed nearby beaches and notified the public.

Miscommunication and changing spill estimates apparently contributed to the delay.  

Goleta West General Manager Brian McCarthy told the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors that the district reported the spill Saturday morning to the California Office of Emergency Services as an estimated 30,000 gallons.

“From sometime Friday night (Feb. 16) to 8:30 a.m. Saturday, there was a spill,” McCarthy said. “That’s the entire flow from west Goleta Valley coming through our force main to the treatment plant. So it’s a substantial spill.”

County Public Health Director Dr. Mouhanad Hammami said CalOES forwarded the spill news to the county that day, but reported it as a 1,000-gallon spill onto a grassy area near the Goleta Slough.

Because of the location near the Santa Barbara Airport and the quantity — and unlikelihood that it would reach ocean beaches — the county didn’t order beach closures or notify the public, Hammami said.

Environmental Health Services Director Lars Seifert said the county didn’t know the spill was more significant until Wednesday. It sent out beach closure information on Thursday morning and notified the public of a 500,000-gallon spill.

On Friday, Goleta West revised the spill estimate upwards to 1,025,000 gallons.  

The sanitary district apparently didn’t have the contact number for the Public Health Department’s hazmat hotline, and instead contacted CalOES to report the incident.

Hammami told the supervisors that the need for a direct number did not delay county action. He said the 30,000-gallon estimate (which is large enough to warrant beach closures) wasn’t disclosed to the county until Wednesday.

However, McCarthy contended that the district reported a larger spill amount from the beginning.

“The initial report to OES was incorrectly recorded. The initial report was 30,000 gallons. To us, that’s a huge spill,” he told supervisors Tuesday.

The spill was detected at 8 a.m. Saturday and stopped at 8:30 a.m., he said. District staff “called in resources to deal with the spill as well as we could.”

The estimated spill amount changed from 30,000 gallons to 500,000 gallons to 1,025,000 gallons last week as the district investigated, McCarthy said. That million-plus-gallons represents about 55% of an average day’s flows into the treatment plant.

Goleta West’s wastewater system uses the Goleta Sanitary District treatment plant at 1 William Moffett Place, across the street from the airport and about a half mile inland from Goleta Beach.

It’s unclear how much communication the district and the county had on the days in between the initial spill report and the Wednesday report that prompted beach closures.

Hammami said Public Health has checked in with sanitary districts to make sure they have the correct contact information to report spills.

Supervisor Laura Capps, who represents the Goleta Valley, said she looks forward to the investigative report.

“Clearly there are some discrepancies on reporting, on amounts,” she said, and issues with interagency communication.

Spill Investigation

The sewage spill apparently happened right after Goleta West had pump station repairs finished by a contractor.

There was a bypass system in place during the repairs, and then the pump station and force main were put into service late Friday evening, McCarthy said.

District staff agreed to check on the site early Saturday (Feb. 17), and that’s when they detected the spill, he told the Board of Supervisors.

The estimated amount of spilled sewage changed as more information was gathered, he added.

“Once water has been contaminated, it is wastewater, it’s considered sewage,” he said.

The district will submit a report on the spill to the Regional Water Quality Control Board soon, McCarthy said, and expects its wastewater operations to return to normal by the end of the week.

Goleta Beach Remains Closed

The ocean at Goleta Beach is still closed to the public this week while the county does water-quality testing, Hammami said. People should not swim or surf in the waters there during the closure, he added.

The county has a beach water quality status hotline at 805.681.4949.

Supervisors asked questions about notifications and how long it could take for the water to be safe for swimmers again.

“We would anticipate over the next week or two, bacterial levels we see in the ocean back down to within standards,” Seifert said.

Ted Morton of Santa Barbara Channelkeeper said this is the largest sewage spill recorded in the Santa Barbara area in recent years, by a long shot. The next largest ones reported in the last decade were 9,000 gallons, he said during public comment after the spill report.

The huge increase in spill amount estimates “doesn’t build public trust,” he said, and asked the county to investigate why it took so long to report the spill to the public.

Hillary Hauser of Heal the Ocean said the sanitary district investigation will hopefully answer some questions about how it happened and how to prevent it in the future.