INSIDE: L.A. County Department of Public Health director apologizes over sewage spill.

Los Angeles County’s public health director apologized Tuesday for what she said was an inadequate response to the sewage spill at the Hyperion Water Reclamation Plant earlier this month.

“I want to apologize to the board and the public for our failures at the Department of Public Health for not responding to this appropriately,” Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer told the L.A. County Board of Supervisors. “There aren’t any excuses. There were multiple failures. Most have already been fixed.”

Ferrer’s comments came during a discussion on a report that detailed the severity of flooding that occurred at the Hyperion plant, near El Segundo, the ensuing sewage spill into the ocean and the delays in notifying the public.

Trash and other debris began to overwhelm the plant about 2 p.m. By 8 p.m., plant managers made the decision to release the untreated sewage to prevent the facility, operated by L.A. Sanitation & Environment, from being completely flooded with waste. Roughly half the plant was flooded anyway.

The sewage was released from about 8 p.m. July 11 to 4 a.m. July 12, with 17 million gallons pouring into the ocean, forcing South Bay beaches to close for several days. But despite public health inspectors arriving at the plant within two hours of the sewage being released, signs alerting beachgoers did not get posted until around noon on June 12, and an official public notification and press release did not go online until around 5:30 p.m. that day.

Among the biggest mistakes, which Ferrer recognized in her public comments and the report detailed, came when a duty supervisor did not respond properly to initial reports shortly after the plant began releasing the raw sewage.

The report also said there were communication breakdowns, poor training and a lack of priority and “urgency” that plagued the response from the Department of Public Health.

A health department strike team, for example, called its supervisor around 11 p.m. July 11 to say “nothing more at the Plant was needed from them,” the report said, even though sewage would continue flowing into the ocean for the next five hours. And on Monday morning, the spill was not the focus of leadership meetings at the health department.

“An incident of this magnitude should have gone to a branch director immediately,” Ferrer said. “So the strike team should not have left (the plant) without reaching one of our branch managers, which means it would have automatically been raised at the morning meeting.”

Inspectors also may not have been fully trained on water pollution issues and relied too heavily on the plant staff, Ferrer said.

“There were lots of failures,” Ferrer said, “including the one you noted, where the person responding after hours failed to process the concern that was raised properly.”

But most of the concerns, Ferrer said, have already begun to be addressed. The department was improving training and making sure that one of four branch directors are rotating on-call duties to ensure “there is never a failure like this again,” Ferrer said.

L.A. County Supervisor Janice Hahn, who effectively was the first to announce the spill publicly through Twitter, said the response should have been faster. Even L.A. County Lifeguards learned about the spill through posted signs around and not through any official channels.

“This incident was considered by our environmental county health team to be an immediate beach closure event,” Hahn said Tuesday. “Immediate in this case should have meant 9 p.m. Sunday, July 11, when two environmental health inspectors arrived at the plant, witnessed half the plant overwhelmed with sewage and saw it going into the ocean.”

At issue, Hahn said, was the failure of the county to close the beaches and keep the public safe from potentially dangerous water.

“The failure to get that done raised questions for me,” Hahn said, “and the public deserves to know the answers.”

Levels of contaminants dropped below a level to allow beaches to reopen about four days after the spill, but the aftereffects — as plant officials make repairs to the facility — have lingered, including a stench caused by the work being done there that, Hahn said, has left nearby residents miserable.

“The whole plant has been flooded, the equipment has been compromised,” the supervisor said, “so I’m still concerned about our public’s health in El Segundo and the surrounding area.”

Los Angeles city has offered hotel vouchers or air conditioning units for affected residents.

“Our Department of Public Health has to continually monitor the situation, to test the water, monitor the odor issue,” Hahn said, “so residents can return home.”