An 8-Month, $1M Fix Became an 8-Year, $19.3M Sewer Repair in Arecibo

Seated at the tables where the Puerto Rico Aqueduct and Sewer Authority’s (PRASA) Board of Directors meets each month, the agency’s Infrastructure Office team appeared on April 28, 2023, to request, for the fifth time, an amendment to extend a contract and increase its value by nearly another half-million dollars.

It was one of 12 times the team appeared before the board to ask for more money or report on the status of repairs to the sewer line that crosses the fast-moving Río Grande de Arecibo and collapsed under the storm surge generated by Hurricane María.

“So that Change Order E [to the contract then in force] can be approved — and hopefully this will be the last one,” board Chairman Héctor del Río Jiménez said as he recorded the approval of the amendment.

But it would not be the last time.

The project, which had already been allocated at least $5.5 million, ultimately grew to $19.3 million.

The sewer trunk line in question is a pipe about 3 feet wide, with the capacity to carry roughly 6 million gallons a day of wastewater from homes, businesses and industries in Arecibo and part of Hatillo to the treatment plant in Arecibo. According to the agency, the structure sits 20 feet beneath the sand and collapsed at three points after Hurricane María, when the Río Grande de Arecibo surged. During that event, the river reached a depth of 35 feet, according to the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE).

As a temporary measure after the hurricane damage, a provisional pipe was installed as a sanitary bypass to keep wastewater flowing while the main sewer line was rehabilitated. Residents of Arecibo have watched governors Ricardo Rosselló, Wanda Vázquez, Pedro Pierluisi and now Jenniffer González Colón come and go, and the temporary pipe is still there.

The exposed line has been painted different colors over the years, as if to disguise its long-standing presence from the hundreds of people who exercise along the Avenida Víctor Rojas bridge and come upon the long stretch of plastic pipe that takes over part of the sidewalk.

The pipe sits along one of the busiest access roads into the urban center. At the entrance to historic buildings such as the former customs house, El Fuerte de Arecibo — known as Paseo de las Damas — Casa Ulanga, Casa Trina Padilla de Sanz and several restaurants, officials placed the generator that powers the pumps moving wastewater through the bypass. For years, the noise, smoke and stench have been constant, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The provisional pipeline has become so permanent that the security guards posted to prevent the generator from being stolen have set up a kitchen and even a resting area there.

The Centro de Periodismo Investigativo (CPI) found that work related to this repair was delayed for multiple reasons. First, the initial contractors hired were not qualified to solve the problem, according to statements made at the PRASA board meeting in December 2019. Second, the agency’s Infrastructure Division underestimated costs, issuing projections on three separate occasions that fell well below the actual cost of the repair. Third, there were setbacks in obtaining construction permits from the USACE because the work fell within its jurisdiction.

After eight years of work, the federal agency confirmed that what was ultimately done was to rebuild the pipe in the same location where it stood before the 2017 hurricanes.

The sewer line reconstruction is 98% complete, and the authority projects the work will finish between August and September 2026, more than eight years after it began. It was rebuilt in the very same place, where the Río Grande de Arecibo empties into the Atlantic Ocean — a coastline battered by heavy surf and affected by erosion.

“If the design does not incorporate safety margins substantially greater than those used before 2017, there is a real risk that an event similar to or greater than Hurricane María could once again compromise the integrity of the infrastructure. Climate change does not only mean sea-level rise, but also greater intensity of rainfall events over short periods, more abrupt river surges, and increased erosion and scouring. In structures buried beneath active channels, scouring is one of the main failure mechanisms,” engineer Carlos Fournier Morales, president of the College of Engineers and Surveyors of Puerto Rico, told the CPI.

“The College emphasizes that public investment in this type of infrastructure should respond not only to restoring the system, but to adapting it. Otherwise, we could once again face prolonged interruptions to sewer service, additional reconstruction costs and environmental risks from wastewater discharges,” he warned.

He clarified that his comments were based on documentation provided by the CPI, not on a review of the project’s technical documents.

In early February of this year, volunteers with the group Yo Amo el Tinglar witnessed a spill of waste and wastewater at Abacoa Beach, where there are currently 18 nests of leatherback turtles and other species. The spill came from the pipe that diverts waste across the surface while the buried line is being rehabilitated, and those who saw it believe it happened because of rough surf.

That leak has since been addressed, but it was the second time in the past eight years that such a large spill occurred.

“There have been other times when the pipes have broken, or at least wastewater has seeped out, although it had never reached the nests — only this time,” said Myrna Concepción Torres, the organization’s coordinator in several municipalities along the north coast.

That experience adds to those of residents, business owners and visitors in La Puntilla, a waterfront sector in Arecibo’s Barrio Pueblo, who have dealt with recurring foul odors, the day-and-night noise of the generator, and people injured after tripping over the temporary bypass that has been in operation for eight years.

“For about four years it was like that — you couldn’t sit out on the balcony. Back then they also hadn’t yet put extensions on the smokestacks, and the diesel fumes came right onto the balcony,” Jaime Ferrer Reyes said, describing the noise and smoke from the generators that keep the pumps running.

The 70-year-old Arecibo resident moved to La Puntilla before Hurricane María, drawn by the view of the river and the Atlantic Ocean. But not long after he moved in, the reconstruction began.

“Two elections have gone by, and everybody says that as soon as the election is over, we’re going to fix it, and neither time did they fix it,” Ferrer Reyes said of candidates for mayor and for the Legislature who represent Arecibo. “At this point I just laugh about it, because there’s nothing else left to do.”

“It Was Like Trial and Error”

PRASA declared an operational emergency and, in 2018, hired a company to inspect, clean and repair the La Puntilla wastewater pipe. After reviewing video of the public corporation’s December 2019 board meeting, the CPI found that engineers Carlos González and José Rivera Sanabria said the company did not have the capacity to complete the work. That happened because the authority was focused on “putting out a fire,” González said.

The CPI asked PRASA to identify the company hired during the operational emergency, but as of publication it had not provided the information.

“What happened is that this was done on an emergency basis, and the scope was very general: clean, identify intrusion areas and repair. At the time of that emergency there wasn’t much engineering, there wasn’t a very detailed scope,” González told the board.

The Infrastructure team’s decision was to repair the damaged pipe, but a couple of years later officials realized that part of it could not be repaired. The collapsed segment had to be completely rebuilt with new pipe.

Over the eight years the rehabilitation has taken, the agency held three bidding processes to find contractors capable of evaluating, designing and reconstructing the damaged structure in Arecibo’s Barrio Pueblo. All three times, the authority underestimated both the timeline and the cost of the work.

Rivera Sanabria, then the public corporation’s infrastructure director, repeatedly told the board that the priority was to get the pipe working “as soon as possible” to avoid public health risks and the costs of maintaining the bypass installed after the hurricane.

“Right now, if there’s any weather event — if a hurricane comes, if there’s flooding — the danger this creates is that the system is adjacent to the Río Grande de Arecibo, so an overflow will reach the body of water and could create a contamination event we don’t even want to think about,” Arecibo district Rep. Edgar Robles Rivera told the CPI.

“Right now, right in the middle of the restaurant district, that temporary equipment is there as if it were permanent, and what we want is for the Aqueduct and Sewer Authority to tell us how the system is operating, how the project is progressing, when it ends and when they’re going to remove that generator,” the lawmaker said.

This week, he filed House Resolution 668 to investigate the status of the bypass in La Puntilla.

The CPI requested data from the authority on the costs incurred to maintain the sanitary bypass, but it could not specify how much has been spent so far. After reviewing contracts and reports, the CPI estimated that maintaining it over eight years has cost more than $6 million. Although the authority initially handled maintenance directly, by mid-2020 responsibility for pumping, electricity and security had been transferred to Costa Mar Group, which in turn oversaw rehabilitation of the trunk line until February 2026.

The CPI contacted the company, but its representatives declined to comment on the project. According to records from Puerto Rico’s Department of State, Costa Mar Group was incorporated in October 2017, and the Arecibo project is one of seven it carries out for PRASA under contracts totaling $59 million. According to its website, the company grew out of a family business that began operating in 1997 under the name F Morales & Asociados, Inc. Its officers are Félix and Angelie Morales Roca.

After an access-to-information lawsuit, the agency confirmed to the CPI that the cost of repairing the trunk line has so far reached $19.3 million, even though the work is still not finished. The investment covered building and maintaining the bypass, inspecting the collapsed structure, cleaning it, and designing and rehabilitating it. It required two emergency declarations and two separate projects. For both, the agency contracted Costa Mar Group after holding public bids.

Funding came from Federal Emergency Management Agency recovery funds, the Aqueduct and Sewer Authority’s Capital Improvements Program, and the Clean Water State Revolving Fund Program administered by Puerto Rico’s Department of Natural and Environmental Resources with money from the Environmental Protection Agency.

“I think there was a problem here with a lack of sound professional judgment in the initial diagnosis by the Aqueduct and Sewer Authority, because you contract for a service based on what you think you know or understand is there. If that expert analysis is limited or incorrect, you’re going to hire incorrectly, and obviously the problem won’t be solved,” planner Félix Aponte Ortiz said of the case.

“After so many years and interventions, it was like trial and error. In such a delicate piece of infrastructure, there is no room for trial and error.”

Aponte Ortiz was elected consumer representative to PRASA’s board from 2014 to 2020, and he recalled urging the Infrastructure team in cases like this to avoid resorting to an Operational Emergency Declaration to repair failures without detailed evaluations that would allow officials to fully understand the problem.

“In general strategic terms, that trunk line — whichever one we build — is in the worst possible place, and we as a public corporation need to adopt a guiding vision of building ‘inland and high,’ because what nature is telling us is that what we have next to the coast comes with no guarantee of permanence. If we don’t recognize that reality that the climate crisis is telling us, then we’re making short-term investments, and this becomes an eight-year stopgap, but in a few years someone will be sitting at this table discussing the same situation,” Aponte Ortiz warned the board in December 2019, according to video of the meeting.

In a written statement to the CPI, the president of the College of Engineers and Surveyors of Puerto Rico said that “the reconstruction may be technically viable, but its sustainability will depend on whether it was designed with more severe scenarios in mind than those recorded historically. Ignoring that reality would increase the probability of future failures during extreme hydrometeorological events.”

The CPI asked PRASA what measures it took to adapt the rebuilt pipe to withstand conditions similar to those caused by Hurricane María, but as of publication it had not responded.

Rebuilt Where It Broke

Former Infrastructure Executive Director José Rivera Sanabria said rebuilding the pipe under the same conditions in which it stood before the hurricanes was a requirement imposed by the USACE. That, he said, was because the federal agency wanted to ensure the authority’s work would not conflict with its flood-control projects on the Río Grande de Arecibo. According to the authority, during permit negotiations the USACE considered two options: relocating the bridge and the sewer trunk line or adapting the existing pipeline.

Those negotiations with the federal agency to obtain permits were “quite extensive,” the engineer said. However, the USACE denied that it had conditioned the permit on merely rehabilitating the pipe, as Rivera Sanabria had repeatedly told the authority’s board.

“USACE did not condition the permits or require PRASA to do anything beyond what they requested in their application. Their permit request included rehabilitation of the sewer line to restore its functionality as a gravity sewer system and removal of the temporary bypass system. USACE did not approve or review the engineering design prepared by PRASA’s Architect‑Engineer,” a spokesperson for the USACE’s Caribbean District said in a written response.

Years after those negotiations, the USACE is still in the design stage of flood-management works on the Río Grande de Arecibo and still does not know whether the sewer network will be relocated, the federal agency told the CPI. The project received a $174.1 million federal allocation to address damage caused by hurricanes Harvey, Irma and María.

Although the initial expectation was to complete construction of levees and retaining walls on the river by 2027, the project remains in the design stage, and officials are still weighing whether to relocate the main sewer network “if the flood control project impacts the that sewer line,” according to the spokesperson.

The work is a continuation of a project launched by the USACE after Hurricane Georges struck Puerto Rico in September 1998. In March, Puerto Rico’s Senate approved Senate Resolution 388 to investigate the project’s progress and its “actual scope.”

Although the Municipality of Arecibo initially said it was available to speak with the CPI about the project, the interview never materialized.

This translation was generated with the assistance of AI and reviewed by our editorial team to ensure accuracy and clarity.