El Segundo residents may be startled by smoke and flames periodically coming from the Hyperion Water Reclamation Plant the rest of the month — but there’s no need for concern, officials say.
It’s all part of scheduled maintenance work that begins Sunday, Oct. 17, according to an alert from El Segundo this week.
The plant’s Bioenergy Facility will undergo maintenance to preserve critical equipment such as pumps, breakers and compressors, the alert said.
The work, however, is standard and unrelated to the massive debris backup over the summer that caused Hyperion to flood — temporarily crippling the facility.
That flooding, in mid-July, required plant officials to send 17 million gallons of untreated wastewater into the ocean in order to prevent catastrophe. Had the plant gone entirely offline, there would have been no way to handle the 260 million gallons of wastewater it received each day, officials for LA Sanitation & Environment, which operates the facility, have said.
And the crisis was bad enough as is. Hyperion violated water-quality standards for months, the long-term impacts of which could take at least a year to determine, and an overpowering stench made residents miserable for weeks as officials hurried to repair the plant and get it fully operational again.
The stench was so bad, in fact, that Los Angeles implemented a reimbursement program for El Segundo residents so they could either stay in a hotel or buy air conditioners or air filters.
LA Sanitation said late last month that the repairs and facility cleanup had been completed.
The reimbursement program ended last month as well, though some residents during a Sept. 23 community forum said the odors remained.
The maintenance that’s set to begin Sunday, meanwhile, is a semi-annual task, officials said, and should not cause any additional odors.
The work require the Bioenergy Facility to shut down. And that may cause some digester gas — a renewable energy byproduct of the wastewater that generates power at Hyperion, but can be malodorous — to combust, producing intermittent smoke and flames.
The flaring is designed to completely combust any amounts of unused digester gas and will not cause any odor, said LA Sanitation spokeswoman Elena Stern.
But El Segundo’s Thursday, Oct. 14, alert said the work could potentially produce a smell.
Hyperion also performed four flaring operations last month. Stern, at the time, said that flaring was also unrelated to the sewage spill, but was instead meant ensure the facility was meeting AQMD requirements.