News & Moves: June 10, 2008

One excess of the go-go years of the mid-2000s just came back to affront California giant Shea Homes, which recently agreed to pay $100,000 to the Riverside County District Attorney's Office and $200,000 to the Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board for an illegal discharge of dairy wastewater containing manure from a Shea development site in San Jacinto, Calif.

Don't brush this off as somebody else's problem until you check your own site work logs. These laws are on the books all across the country. The Shea site had containment ponds holding the dairy wastewater. Under state law, Shea was required to develop and implement a Storm Water Pollution Prevention Plan (SWPPP) with control measures to prevent any discharge of polluted water into local rivers and streams. But on April 25, 2005, a Shea subcontractor demolished the ponds, allowing 108,000 gallons of manure-laden wastewater to enter a storm drain leading to the San Jacinto River. The discharge was exacerbated by an explosion at the site when the contractor struck a pressurized natural gas line.

"It seems almost comical," says Reed Sato, director of the Office of Enforcement for the California Water Resources Control Board. "Shea gave no direction to the contractor as to what should happen to the wastewater once that firm demolished the structures holding it back. It would have been a relatively simple matter to develop a plan for this facility."

Shea declined to comment for this report.

In the midst of the market frenzy in early 2005, Shea missed that direction opportunity. Today, the firm is paying for that mistake, and probably making sure pollution prevention plans are in place for all future conversions of former dairy farms.