Stretches of seashores in Los Angeles are closed after 17 million gallons of untreated sewage spilled into the ocean following a mechanical failure at a water remedy plant Sunday.

Operators of the Hyperion Water Reclamation Plant, a sewage remedy plant positioned on Santa Monica Bay, mentioned that they have been forced to discharge untreated sewage Sunday by a pipe that dumped it a mile (1.6 kilometers) offshore and solely 50 toes (15.2 meters) beneath the ocean’s floor. (The plant’s usual pipe discharges handled sewage 5 miles [8 kilometers] offshore and 190 toes [58 meters] deep into the ocean.) A Hyperion consultant mentioned it was probably the most sewage dumped out of that particular brief pipe in a decade. The spill, in response to the plant’s operators, was solely 6% of the plant’s every day load of sewage.

The Los Angeles County public well being division issued warnings telling residents to keep away from swimming at sure seashores. It additionally mentioned it had collected water samples to check for micro organism and seashores may open again up if assessments come again clear. Preliminary assessments taken Monday don’t present excessive ranges of fecal micro organism, however seashores stay closed till extra testing will likely be performed.

“We have heard from many concerned folx that they were at the beaches on Sunday evening and Monday all day without any knowledge of the spill, or any ability to take precautions,” Heal the Bay, a conservation group, mentioned in a Q&A posted on their website. “Bacteria and viruses in raw sewage are extremely dangerous to people and can carry a variety of diseases. Debris such as tampons and plastic trash, when released into the Bay, can harbor bacteria and can cause entanglement of wildlife, but it seems in this case those debris were successfully filtered out of the spill before it made it to the Bay.”

What occurred at Hyperion that brought about the massive sewage dump is somewhat unclear, plant operators said. On Sunday, screens within the remedy vegetation unexpectedly began clogging with a bunch of particles, blocking your entire remedy course of. Plant operators mentioned that they tried rerouting the sewage by a storm drain system to attempt to hold the remedy course of going, however the sewage was merely an excessive amount of and the plant’s overflow system was pressured to discharge the 17 million gallons by the brief pipe over an eight-hour interval.

The Hyperion plant—which has been round since, unbelievably, 1894—is Los Angeles’ largest remedy plant. Each day, the plant makes use of that 5-mile pipe to dump 260 million gallons of handled wastewater, which is enough to fill the Rose Bowl 2.5 times over, deep into the Pacific Ocean.

Even although the untreated sewage that spilled this week is a public well being hazard, there’s an actual debate available over whether or not or not the handled water might be helpful to a state in an endless, historic drought. Last August, a Los Angeles court mandated that California’s Water Resources Control Board wants to guage whether or not it’s “wasteful” and “unreasonable” to dump all that water within the ocean when it might be used elsewhere. City leaders have made wastewater recycling a priority, with the aim of drawing 70% of Los Angeles’ ingesting water from handled wastewater by 2035. And with a devastating drought sapping reservoirs throughout the state (and the West for that matter), addressing the water disaster can’t come quickly sufficient. Even if the answer sounds somewhat gross.