Today is probably not the day to go for a swim anywhere along the LA River. Overnight, more than a million gallons of sewage were spilled, as the LA Times reports. A sewer pipe collapsed in Boyle Heights, releasing the sewage along with trash and other junk that flows through the drainage system.
Sewage from the spill may have flowed as far as Long Beach, where all beaches were temporarily closed by officials concerned about public safety. Nothing has been spotted washing up on shore just yet, but health officers and scientists are running tests to confirm if anything reached the ocean. It may be that the natural vegetation growing in and around the river trapped much of the solid waste before it reached that point, but that, of course, could create other challenges for cleaning the wetlands up after this event.
Early indications are that the pipe likely collapsed because it had not been significantly updated since installation in 1929 and simply crumbled due to old age and modern demand. Crews are now at work to create a permanent bypass system which will divert sewage past this old pipe.
“We’ve been doing very well,” Adel Hagekhalil of Los Angeles Sanitation told reporters. “This was an accident, but we’re investigating what happened.”
Back in the El Niño storm season of 1998, a similar spill hit the river, unleashing over 30 million gallons of sewage and setting the record for the largest leak into the LA River. Since then, not much has been released until now—though with aging infrastructure, it could happen again anywhere along the 51-mile stretch.