Fix crews managed to stop the leak by evening but the pipe split again on Tuesday, sending sewage into the Los Angeles River which carried it into the Pacific. The leak happened Monday afternoon after a pipe burst in downtown Los Angeles, with an estimation of only 100,000 gallons leaking out.
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Workers stopped the spill in a commercial district filled with warehouses around 11 p.m., and cleanup efforts went through the night, said Heather Johnson with LA Sanitation.
The leak was finally stopped at 10 p.m., but crews remained at the site to fix the cracked pipe, said Adel Hagekhalil, assistant director of Los Angeles Sanitation.
Days after a sewage leak, beaches in Long Beach will remain closed until a second set of samples come back clean.
An estimated 750,000 gallons were contained or vacuumed up, but officials feared some of the rest may have reached Long Beach harbor.
A buried pipe some 20 miles away in Los Angeles collapsed Monday, causing a blockage that belched 2.4 million gallons of stinky sludge onto streets and into storm drains, officials said.
“The lab results look good”, he said.
The first round of water tests Tuesday morning were conducted by the Long Beach Department of Health and Human Services and showed only slight elevations of bacteria at two of 15 testing sites.
Crews are working to contain the spill, but don’t have a timetable for how long it will take. “The bummer is I have people coming from all over the world”.
A sewer pipe collapsed in Boyle Heights, releasing the sewage along with trash and other junk that flows through the drainage system.
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The cause of the collapse wasn’t clear. “It just did not wait for us”, Hagekhalil said.
