EBMUD Finds More Spilled Cement; Cleanup to Take Longer

Photos: 1. Workers using pickaxes to break up hardened cement. 2. Workers cleaning up spill at new location. Photos by Erin Baldassari via Bay City News

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Efforts to clean an Oakland creek that was contaminated with cellular cement on Wednesday will take longer than expected after crews found more cement upstream, officials said today.

A neighbor notified representatives from the East Bay Municipal Utility District Thursday evening that there was another large section of the Glen Echo Creek covered in cement, Fish and Wildlife spokesman Andrew Hughan
said.

The newly discovered cement is roughly half a mile from the portion of the creek where cleanup crews focused their efforts on Thursday. Hughan said the area is 150-200 feet long and roughly 3 feet wide.

“This is not great news,” Hughan said. “The good news is that it’s fairly well contained and it’s only about 3 feet wide.”
Hughan said the spill’s impact on wildlife in the area has been minimal. At this point, the Fish and Wildlife Service’s investigation is informational, not criminal, he said.

“It’s not a human safety hazard and it’s not necessarily a threat to wildlife but it can’t help,” Hughan said. “We’re asking people to stay away from it, keep your pets out of it and for God’s sake, keep your children out of it.”

The cleanup, which was anticipated to be completed Monday, is now expected to take longer, EBMUD spokeswoman Abby Figueroa said. Just how long the cleanup will last will be determined later today as crews conduct a survey of the creek, she said.

On Wednesday evening, Figueroa said subcontractors for EBMUD, Cell-Crete Corporation, were working to plug and fill a 2-mile-long pipeline when a valve was accidentally left open and workers poured cement into the storm drain, which flowed out into the creek.

As much as 106 cubic yards of cement -- enough to fill 12 cement trucks -- might have gotten into the creek before it was shut off, Figueroa said. The exact amount of spilled cement is subject to further investigation.

EBMUD had planned to fill in the degraded 1930s-era pipeline that supplied water to roughly 13,000 homes in the Oakland hills with cellular cement, which is a “light and fluffy” form of cement.

Figueroa said the valve in question was a “non-standard” valve, meaning it turns in the opposite direction of standard valves. There is at least one other non-standard valve the agency has identified along the pipeline, but Figueroa said it’s unclear how many others are among the 70,000 valves in the water utility’s district.

“There may be others. This is a challenge for us with 70,000 valves in our system,” Figueroa said. “You sometimes just don’t know until you find them.”

Work on the pipeline plugging and filling project has been suspended, but Figueroa said the contractor, Ranger Pipelines, Inc., will continue to do some work on the replacement pipeline that has already been installed.

Just who is to blame for the open valve is a question EBMUD general manager Alexander Coate is hoping to answer after the environmental cleanup has been completed.

There is no estimate at this time for how much the cleanup will cost or who will pay, Coate said.

“We’re working right now to find out who’s responsible and will be dealing with those issues later. It generally takes a fair amount of time to resolve the legal issues,” Coate said. “We’d like to not distract ourselves with finding the guilty until after we make sure we protect the environment.”

--Bay City News

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