Million-Gallon Sewage Spill Exacts Million-Dollar Penalty

Goleta West Sanitary District is facing the consequences of flooding more than one million gallons of raw sewage into the Goleta Slough right before a four-day storm dropped more than 10 inches of rain in the watershed above. In a settlement that is still pending, the district will pay $1.5 million for a new program to improve drinking water in wells around the county, rather than the penalty of $10.7 million that could have been imposed, according to the settlement agreement reached with the Central Coast Water Board.

The Spill

When Goleta West’s Brian McCarthy and Joey Hilliard met at the airport property bordering the slough the morning of February 17, 2024, they found a mucky brown mess on the grassy edge. The day before, a contractor had been doing repairs late into the day at the pump house near Goleta West headquarters at the edge of UC Santa Barbara. As was standard practice after a repair, McCarthy, Goleta West’s superintendent, and Hilliard, who steps into that job next year, had returned to walk the main lines that Saturday in the daylight.

Goleta West serves Isla Vista and points north and west with more than 6,000 connections along 62 miles of pipe. A 24-inch force main takes wastewater under pressure from the pump house, across 1.25 miles of slough, and up to the treatment plant at the Goleta Sanitary District across from the airport. The pressurized main was found to be in good condition in 2002 and 2022 by a third-party contractor; such pipelines normally have a lifespan of 60-100 years.

After switching the 24-inch pipe’s flow over to a parallel 18-inch line, Goleta West crews cleaned out the main and vacuumed up about 69,000 gallons of sludge. Goleta Sanitary, a different entity from Goleta West, did what they could to help remove the waste before the predicted atmospheric river moved in. McCarthy said that they’d checked their flow telemetry to establish that the 24-inch force main had been leaking since about 7:22 p.m. the night before.

A four-foot section of pipe was replaced, and a small hole was found on the underside of the pipe. The district’s spill report stated the pipe likely had been damaged during its installation some 46 years prior. “[T]he anti-corrosion seal of the asphaltic coating on the outside of the pipe as well as the metal surface of the pipe” were affected, allowing a localized corrosion from the surrounding “severely corrosive soils,” the settlement states.

The Penalty

While the untreated sewage that flowed into the slough and out to the Pacific Ocean caused major harm to aquatic life — both plant and animal — and possibly to humans surfing or swimming in the ocean, Goleta West’s potential $10 million penalty was reduced because of the actions it took and its cooperation during the investigation. The settlement agreement reflects that McCarthy immediately and repeatedly called the spill in to state authorities, correcting the hotline’s first 1,000-gallon assessment to 30,000 gallons and ultimately to 1,071,000 gallons. He called County Public Health to apprise them of the sewage spill, though the department didn’t get the message until after the weekend. He also stood at the Board of Supervisors podium for a public update on the massive spill.

In calculating the penalty for violations of the Clean Water Act, the regional Water Board set the amount of harm at “major” and took into account the closure of the beach for 23 days. The settlement document also noted that Goleta West has reserves of $3.2 million and could afford to pay an administrative civil liability amount of $1,551,145 for the 14-hour discharge.

A 30-day public comment period is ongoing for the settlement, which has yet to be finalized by the Central Coast Water Board, though Hilliard thought that date would be in February 2026. 

The proposed settlement was made public in mid-October, and already commentary has come from the dais of the Board of Supervisors. During the last two highly attended oil-and-gas hearings — one in which onshore oil would be outlawed in Santa Barbara County over time, and the other to deny the transfer of Exxon’s oil facilities’ ownership to Sable Offshore Corp. — Supervisor Bob Nelson each time accused local enviros of “selective outrage,” claiming that seven times more poop went into the ocean from the Goleta West sewage spill than oil in the 2015 Refugio spill.

The Project

The $1.5 million will go to create a project with the goal of improving drinking water from domestic wells in underrepresented communities. Santa Barbara County has about 1,000 wells whose water is used in homes, and a number have water considered unsafe to drink because of chemicals or harmful bacteria. Through contractor Stantec Consulting Services, wells serving at least 100 households are to be sampled and 30 identified for a water filtration system. For wells that are too expensive to fix or filter, bottled water is an alternative.

McCarthy called it a unique settlement for a unique and exciting project. Unsafe drinking water is to be filtered or cleaned, either where it enters a household’s water system or at the tap. As it is a pilot project intended to be emulated elsewhere, a good amount of documentation and process tracking will take place, McCarthy explained. Roughly a third of the funds are projected to go to providing bottled water ($100,000) or filter systems ($400,000) for households using the affected wells, and the rest to finding and analyzing the wells, coming up with treatment plans ($200,000), and reporting on the results.

The focus will be on underrepresented communities — or households that are disadvantaged economically or environmentally — that use wells across the county, from Cuyama and Casmalia to Isla Vista and Santa Maria.

The Supplemental Environmental Project, or SEP, only runs for 48 months, but water is a daily necessity. At the end of the program, Stantec, with project partner Santa Barbara County Promotores Network, is to teach participants how to keep up the filtering of their drinking water at their own cost. Alternately, the settlement document said funds to continue the project might be found through state or local government or groups.