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Several plaintiffs living near El Segundo sued the city of Los Angeles on Tuesday for allegedly exposing people to poisonous hydrogen sulfide and other dangerous toxins during and after the wastewater spill from the plant. Hyperion treatment in 2021.
The city’s LA Sanitation and Environment plant suffered an outage on July 11 when all of the debris filtering machines, also known as bar screens, became clogged and inoperative, causing some to flood. 72 acres of raw sewage, according to the lawsuit.
The Los Angeles Superior Court complaint alleges that the bar screens were in fact unreliable and were designed to be run through an automatic control system that has proven to be unreliable. The complainants further allege that LASAN knew the automatic control system was suspect in 2019, but chose to run the bar displays in manual mode in fast forward without any additional monitoring added for these faster speed operations.
“We will be reviewing the complaint and have no further comments at this time,” said Rob Wilcox, spokesperson for the city attorney’s office, in response to the lawsuit.
To contain the flooding, LASAN dumped 17 million gallons of untreated sewage into Santa Monica Bay, which subsequently led the California Water Board to issue 47 citations between July 17 and August 31, according to the trial.
In reports to the State Water Board and the United States Environmental Protection Agency, LASAN claimed that the sewage overflow was the result of excess waste in the system. sewer from an unknown source, but responsible surveillance would have identified both the volume and the source of any debris before it reached Hyperion, according to the costume.
Hyperion’s bar screens had previously failed once in April and agency officials should have known disaster was inevitable, the lawsuit said.
“This is a massive spill of raw sewage from one of the largest water treatment facilities in the world,” plaintiffs counsel Alexander Wheeler said.
“The warning signs were glaring before the spill, and now the people of El Segundo are paying the price for LASAN’s disregard for public safety.”
Hydrogen sulfide is one of the many gases created during the breakdown of organic material in wastewater and even at low levels it irritates the nose, throat and eyes and causes headaches, nausea. , vomiting and fatigue, indicates the combination.
“LA Sanitation knows how dangerous hydrogen sulfide can be, and yet they have done nothing to protect people from exposure,” said lawyer for another plaintiff, Mark Bloom. “Even with all the warning signs, LASAN did not invest in meaningful repairs after the bar screens clogged not once, but twice.”
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