Mr. Mayor, Madam City Administrator and City Council Members:

I wanted to inform you about a particularly troublesome sewer blockage on one of our larger sewer lines (36" diameter) as it ties into a large EBMUD intercepter sewer (108"" diameter) in West Oakland. We've been working on this since early Monday morning, and we will be working into the night to try and fix this before the next storm arrives later this week. Our Sewer Maintenance staff, along with our Engineering staff and an on-call contractor are working closely to resolve this; the Incident Commander for this event is our Engineering Design Manager, Fuad Sweiss. There are several large pumps currently deployed at this site, and the situation appears to finally have been stabilized.

Particularly worrisome was the fact that a nearby PG&E vault was flooded and as a result of this backup, and some of it's transformers were out; this vault is one of the main nodes in the electrical system that supplies power the the EBMUD waste water treatment facility. The vault is being drained and sandbags provided at its perimeter, to prevent it's flooding, should any of the pumps fail and flooding recur. This is more a precaution, since we do anticipate this to happen.

The attached Incident Report provides more details, along with a photo of the site and a digitized portion of our sewer maps, for your reference. I will keep you posted on our progress or on any other developments, should they materialize.