The Santa Clara County District Attorney’s office announced
today that it has settled a civil lawsuit against Gilroy’s famous
garlic grower.
The Santa Clara County District Attorney’s office announced today that it has settled a civil lawsuit against Gilroy’s famous garlic grower.
It has been more than a year since a toxic stew of garlic-tainted water at Christopher Ranch spilled into the Uvas Creek and killed hundreds of fish, including nine endangered steelhead salmon. The company will pay $25,000 in civil penalties and an additional $35,000 for damage to wildlife and costs to agencies that investigated the spill, according to a press release from the DA’s office.
This comes after the company has already spent more than $250,000 to install a back-up wastewater pump system and provide a detailed blueprint of the ranch’s underground pipes. The latter required Bill Christopher to hire a company to send aquatic cameras throughout his aging system.
The February 2007 spill happened when an unidentified party released the contents of a 50-gallon subterranean storm water tank into Uvas Creek. A culvert connects the tank with the creek, but storm water is never released into the waterway since it contains garlic and other vegetables that fall from delivery trucks. Instead, storm water from the tank flows to holding ponds for controlled rotting and is then spread safely into the ground as irrigation water.
Christopher has also sought to prevent future spills by cutting the chain connecting the tank’s release valve with the above-ground hand crank. He has also locked the crank and added it to a checklist of equipment inspected twice a day. The garlic grower had been cited in 2001 for leaving the culvert open, and the company did not inspect the drainage system regularly during the six months leading up to the spill, according to the press release.
Environmental officials told investigators that decomposing garlic created a harmful solution that killed not only fish, but algae, crayfish and virtually all other aquatic life along an eighth-of-a-mile stretch of the creek. The creek meanders through the city before winding through the fields of garlic and other row crops at Christopher Ranch, just north of state Route 25.
