Tecolote Sewage Spill Prompts Change

San Diego will reprogram its phone system and expand its sewer line inspection policy to try to avoid disasters like last month's 1.5 million-gallon spill in Mission Bay, City Manager Michael Uberuaga said Friday.

The city became aware of the Tecolote Canyon spill Feb. 28, but a Regional Water Quality Control Board member reported leaving a message about it more than a week earlier, on Feb. 19. The message apparently was deleted without being heard, 10News reports.

Improperly routed city phones and errors in dealing with voice-mail messages were blamed for the delay, and Uberuaga said that the city is looking into "personnel actions" associated with the spill response.

"While we can't control all the causes of sewer spills, we can control our response to those spills so they are timely and complete," Uberuaga said.

He said that he will appoint a new general manager to oversee water and wastewater operations and improve coordination between the departments. In addition, vulnerable sewer lines in canyons will be inspected after all significant rainfalls, he said.

In a memo to the mayor and the City Council, Uberuaga outlined the problems that delayed detection of the spill:

• The RWQCB member called during the Presidents' Day holiday, Feb. 19, and city phones were misprogrammed so that the call didn't reach the city's emergency dispatch center as it should have. Instead, the call was apparently routed to a message line.

• When staff returned the next morning, they didn't realize that there were messages waiting because phone center status boards showed no messages pending. And staffers didn't know that emergency calls had been improperly routed the previous day.

• It wasn't until Feb. 21 that workers realized that they had messages from the holiday, and staffers began reviewing them to determine if any were emergency related. Most of those reviewed weren't for emergencies, and those that were had been dispatched.

• Therefore, staff "independently concluded" that the remaining messages weren't emergencies or were redundant and "inappropriately deleted" them without listening to them.

• The RWQCB again reported the spill Feb. 28, and the city cleared up the blockage of debris that apparently caused the pipeline in Tecolote Canyon to overflow. The RWQCB also informed the city that it had reported the same blockage earlier.

A personnel investigation is being done to determine what action should be taken "pertaining to the decision to delete those messages," Uberuaga wrote in the memo to the mayor and the council.

"This represents a critical failure of the customer service operations and constitutes unacceptable behavior," Uberuaga wrote.

Phones are being reprogrammed to make sure that emergency calls are answered on holidays.

Previous Stories:

• March 6, 2001: Mission Bay Given Clean Bill Of Health
• March 2, 2001: Sewage Spill Shuts Down Mission Bay