Rain forces delays as cleanup continues after Yuba County pipeline failure

Nearly two weeks after a major pipeline failure at the Colgate Powerhouse in Northern California's Yuba County, the weather has been making things even more difficult for crews who are trying to get a handle on the situation.

There has also been major concern surrounding the health of the Yuba River following the incident.

Yuba Water Agency suspended operations on Tuesday due to safety concerns with incoming rain. But before operations were suspended, some crews were able to access the powerhouse just briefly to assess initial damage.

"And I was very surprised to see that it wasn't fully inundated with mud or water. The damages are significant, there is a lot of work to do to recover from this incident, but it could've been much worse," said Willie Whittlesey, general manager of the Yuba Water Agency.

Luckily, worst case scenario isn't what we're seeing following the penstock pipe failure above the Yuba Water Agency's Colgate Powerhouse. But it could take months to get a grasp on the full scope of the situation.

"Once this storm passes, we'll get our crews back on the surface of Englebright to do the clean-up work and will continue to analyze the incident site itself to make it safe to re-enter to do recovery work," said Whittlesey.

Yuba Water said there is no risk of flooding, even with this rain, because the Bullards Bar Dam remains unimpacted and intact.

The nonprofit organization South Yuba River Citizens League, or SYRCL, is doing its own work. The organization is taking independent water samples at Rice's Crossing, an area where the pipeline's impacted water flows through.

"For us, because we have been doing water quality monitoring throughout the watershed for 25 years now, it was pretty easy for us to look at those results and say, 'OK, this is normal, we're not worried about this,' versus, 'Hey, this is something we should keep watching,' " said Aaron Zettler-Mann, executive director of SYRCL.

Something they're keeping an eye on is the high turbidity levels, which account for how dirty the water is. It's similar to humans trying to breathe when air quality is low during fire season, but here we're talking about fish and other life under the water.

"It's going to make it harder for you to breathe. You can imagine the stuff you're breathing is thicker," Zettler-Mann said.

"Immediately the next day after the incident, we started cleaning up the surface of Englebright reservoir and established oil booms and then log booms, hard booms to contain that debris in one location," Whittlesey said.

Yuba Water says crews still have a long road ahead when it comes to cleanup.

SYRCL says hundreds, probably thousands of juvenile salmon were killed as a result of the pipeline failure, but their death wasn't due to water quality. It was because of a sudden drop in water flow during the incident.

"Because it was such a rapid change, they got stuck in the gravel. They couldn't get out," Zettler-Mann said. "It was a lot, and especially having had such success with adults coming back and spawning this year, it's felt like a bit of a gut punch."

But the good news is, it was a one-time thing. An emergency valve needed to be manually shut off, but there was a couple hour delay because of the incident.

"That valve is operated remotely from colgate powerhouse itself. And unfortunately, the operator of the powerhouse was evacuating to save himself and couldn't remotely operate that valve," Whittlesey said.

SYRCL says they'll continue testing the water daily until the turbidity levels drop within normal ranges.