It's pretty much like a good, old bucket brigade.

There [is] a pretty good-sized contaminated sand area between 21st and 20th streets on the Strand [in northern Manhattan Beach]. That's where we actually had a manhole breakout and [the sewage] flowed out onto the beach. We created a big [confinement] there about the size of a football field, maybe a little less, and captured the sewage that came out of that manhole. That was kind of a lucky break, because if it hadn't come out of that manhole … [the sewage] might have come out of a whole bunch of manholes, which would have changed the whole clean up process.

When the rupture occurred, the sewage stopped coming out of the other manholes and only through the rupture at 21st Street.

The first thing that happened leading up to such a large spill was that at about 6 or 7 in the morning the telephone alarm system crashed and we don't know why. It's operated by the phone company and we are working with them to understand why that happened. The telephone alarm system monitors about 20-plus self-operating pump stations west of the Long Beach Freeway.

Basically lakes of sewage were created.

The exact sequence [of events] that occurred here we don't know. Most likely there was some kind of an electrical failure, maybe in the electricity panel, because the backup pump capacity and power should've kicked in and done the work … but the pumps were not receiving electricity and they shut down, and that's when the flooding started.