Download: Estuary News, October 2013 PDF
While it’s hard to believe today, the San Francisco Estuary was one big dumping ground for cities and industry just decades ago. “The Bay was at its most contaminated from the 1950s to the early ’80s,” says Sam Luoma, a UC Davis ecologist who has spent half his life studying the Bay. “There was an oil spill a day and a fish kill a week.” Fish regularly went belly-up due to lack of oxygen, which in turn was caused by sewage-fed algal blooms. Adds Luoma, “Since then, we’ve fixed the most egregious problems, and the CCMP was part of all of us getting together to talk about it and to figure out the fixes.”
At the CCMP’s outset 20 years ago, the worst concerns included heavy metals and legacy contaminants such as mercury and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). A big part of addressing these and other problems was the Regional Monitoring Program (RMP), which for the first time gave us a comprehensive look at the health of the Bay (see insert). At least on the downstream end of the Estuary, the RMP shows where contaminants come from and how to reduce them, advancing CCMP goals of controlling pollution at the source, remediating pollution that can’t yet be controlled or is already in the water, protecting wildlife and people, and restoring wetlands. Solid information based on independent science helped industry and municipal water treatment systems clean up their acts.
But monitoring also revealed that a huge amount of water pollution came from runoff from urban areas during storms — a source that was not regulated when the CCMP began and required a whole new approach.
“Urban runoff doesn’t lend itself to end-of-the-pipe treatment,” says Tom Mumley of the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board, who implemented the Bay Area’s municipal stormwater regulations. Urban runoff comes from a daunting hodgepodge of sources, from streets to yards to roofs. And although they may be small individually, these sources can add up fast. For example, urban runoff is particularly high in PCBs and copper.
While there is no easy fix for the former, the San Francisco Estuary Partnership helped resolve the latter. “In the early days, copper in urban runoff was equal to or even greater than that from wastewater treatment plants,” Mumley says. But no one knew where all that copper was coming from. Then studies linked this heavy metal to brake pads, which was a big surprise. “We weren’t even thinking about brake pads back then,” he adds.
This discovery prompted manufacturers, regulators, and environmentalists to form the Brake Pad Partnership (BPP) in 1996. “This was facilitated by the Estuary Project, which had created a framework of positive relationships between industry and government,” says Kelly Moran, a chemist at TDC Environmental who helped found and implement the BPP. Fast forward to today, and the BPP’s success is evident. Under Senate Bill 346, brake pads sold in California must be down to 5 percent copper by 2021 and down to 0.5 percent by 2025. Even better, Moran expects that most brake pads will meet the final target much sooner.
Another early surprise was that the pesticides that replaced DDT were widespread in urban creeks and toxic to aquatic life. “Modern pesticides were not on our radar screen at the beginning of the CCMP,” Mumley says. To reduce pesticide runoff into streams, the regional water board brought pesticide users and manufacturers, municipalities, and regulators to the same table in the mid-1990s. In the 2000s, the Estuary Partnership facilitated the growth of this cooperative program, which was ultimately called the Urban Pesticide Pollution Prevention Project.
This effort led to new state regulations for pyrethroid pesticides, which are sprayed in a band around buildings. “We found that the band could be reduced from 7 feet to two inches and still control ants,” Moran says. “We’re expecting an 80 percent to 90 percent reduction of pyrethroids in streams.” In addition, the California Department of Pesticide Regulation is now reconfiguring their review process to avoid registering future pesticides that will pollute water.
A more recent concern is trash, which blows out of open dumpsters and builds up near fast food restaurants, transit centers and “anywhere there are large numbers of people in our throwaway society,” Mumley says. Besides being unsightly, trash — like urban runoff — is untreated and so is important to keep out of stormwater. Control options include working with businesses to limit trash generation in the first place, and intercepting trash before it washes down storm drains.
The Partnership is just wrapping up a 5-year demonstration project that entailed placing and assessing more than 4,000 trash capture devices in storm drains in 64 Bay Area municipalities. “This is full trash capture,” says Janet Cox, who directs the project. “The devices catch anything bigger than five millimeters.” Another facet of the project is a website where cities can upload information on how well the devices work. Next steps include extending this site into a statewide water quality portal showcasing trash hotspots and cleanup events.
These are just a few highlights of the CCMP’s many contributions to preventing or reducing pollution in the Estuary over the last 20 years. “Essentially all industrial and military sites around the Bay have been, or are, being cleaned up,” Mumley says. Most visible, perhaps, are the half dozen military bases which have been retired, purged of their poisons, and converted into shoreline parks, wetlands and developments.
Despite great strides in controlling what comes out of the pipe and through storm drains, the biggest, most unpredictable threat to Bay life continues to be oil spills. Most recently, the Cosco Busan ran into the Bay Bridge in 2007 and leaked 58,000 gallons of bunker fuel. The region is now better prepared to respond than it was 20 years ago, and shippers must follow more stringent containment efforts. But herring, waterfowl and other Bay life suffer every time it happens. Funds from oil spill settlements have sought to make amends, underwriting research on how oil affects herring eggs and duck feathers, and buying salt ponds for habitat restoration, among other good works.
Other smaller but important accomplishments in the last 20 years include enlisting the help of dentists in recycling mercury-tainted fillings, rather than flushing them down the drain. And dredging –which once raised a hue and cry about stirring up old contaminants buried in the bay mud– now has stricter protocols.
Upstream, many similar pollution prevention efforts have been underway in the more agricultural regions of the watershed. In the Brentwood Area of Contra Costa County, where large numbers of farmers flood their furrows to irrigate their canning tomatoes, corn, and other crops, the Natural Resources Conservation Service and the Contra Costa Resource Conservation District have had success showing them how much sediment and runoff comes from this practice. As a result of the outreach, more than 600 acres have been converted in recent years to drip irrigation. “It’s not so much that people aren’t willing to do it, it’s that they don’t realize it’s occurring or it’s a problem,” says the Service’s Alyson Aquino.
For all the successes in pollution prevention and control among CCMP partners, there is still a ways to go. “Some regulations and permits should be strengthened,” says Deb Self, who directs San Francisco Baykeeper, which champions water quality in the Bay. “What the Bay needs are regulations and permits with teeth, adequate monitoring to assess compliance, and aggressive enforcement of permit limits.”
The last two decades have yielded a cleaner, healthier Estuary but have also revealed pollution that is either intractable or comes from sources we hadn’t even considered such as air fresheners and birth control pills. “It’s a never-ending but evolving story,” Mumley says. “The challenges continue to grow.” Thanks partly to the CCMP, so do solutions.
Projects Implementing Pollution Goals 1993-2013: 91
NEXT ARTICLE: From Bay Mud to Building Material, From Lockdown to Smooth Sailing
By Ariel Rubissow Okamoto
Nothing could be stranger than sitting in the dark with thousands of suits and heels, watching a parade of promises to decarbonize from companies and countries large and small, reeling from the beauties of big screen rainforests and indigenous necklaces, and getting all choked up.
It was day two of the September 2018 Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco when I felt it.
At first I wondered if I was simply starstruck. Most of us labor away trying to fix one small corner of the planet or another without seeing the likes of Harrison Ford, Al Gore, Michael Bloomberg, Van Jones, Jerry Brown – or the ministers or mayors of dozens of cities and countries – in person, on stage and at times angry enough to spit. And between these luminaries a steady stream of CEOs, corporate sustainability officers, and pension fund managers promising percentages of renewables and profits in their portfolios dedicated to the climate cause by 2020-2050.
I tried to give every speaker my full attention: the young man of Vuntut Gwichin heritage from the edge of the Yukon’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge who pleaded with us not to enter his sacred lands with our drills and dependencies; all the women – swathed in bright patterns and head-scarfs – who kept punching their hearts. “My uncle in Uganda would take 129 years to emit the same amount of carbon as an American would in one year,” said Oxfam’s Winnie Byanyima.
“Our janitors are shutting off the lights you leave on,” said Aida Cardenas, speaking about the frontline workers she trains, mostly immigrants, who are excited to be part of climate change solutions in their new country.
The men on the stage, strutting about in feathers and pinstripes, spoke of hopes and dreams, money and power. “The notion that you can either do good or do well is a myth we have to collectively bust,” said New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy whose state is investing heavily in offshore wind farms.
“Climate change isn’t just about risks, it’s about opportunities,” said Blackrock sustainable investment manager Brian Deese.
But it wasn’t all these fine speeches that started the butterflies. Halfway through the second day of testimonials, it was a slight white-haired woman wrapped in an azure pashmina that pricked my tears. One minute she was on the silver screen with Alec Baldwin and the next she taking a seat on stage. She talked about trees. How trees can solve 30% of our carbon reduction problem. How we have to stop whacking them back in the Amazon and start planting them everywhere else. I couldn’t help thinking of Dr. Seuss and his truffala trees. Jane Goodall, over 80, is as fierce as my Lorax. Or my daughter’s Avatar.
Analyzing my take home feeling from the event I realized it wasn’t the usual fear – killer storms, tidal waves, no food for my kids to eat on a half-baked planet – nor a newfound sense of hope – I’ve always thought nature will get along just fine without us. What I felt was relief. People were actually doing something. Doing a lot. And there was so much more we could do.
As we all pumped fists in the dark, as the presentations went on and on and on because so many people and businesses and countries wanted to STEP UP, I realized how swayed I had let myself be by the doomsday news mill.
“We must be like the river, “ said a boy from Bangladesh named Risalat Khan, who had noticed our Sierra watersheds from the plane. “We must cut through the mountain of obstacles. Let’s be the river!”
Or as Harrison Ford less poetically put it: “Let’s turn off our phones and roll up our sleeves and kick this monster’s ass.”
by Isaac Pearlman
Since California’s last state-led climate change assessment in 2012, the Golden State has experienced a litany of natural disasters. This includes four years of severe drought from 2012 to 2016, an almost non-existent Sierra Nevada snowpack in 2014-2015 costing $2.1 billion in economic losses, widespread Bay Area flooding from winter 2017 storms, and extremely large and damaging wildfires culminating with this year’s Mendocino Complex fire achieving the dubious distinction of the largest in state history. California’s most recent climate assessment, released August 27th, predicts that for the state and the Bay Area, we can expect even more in the future.
The California state government first began assessing climate impacts formally in 2006, due to an executive order by Governor Schwarzenegger. California’s latest iteration and its fourth overall, includes a dizzying array of 44 technical reports; three topical studies on climate justice, tribal and indigenous communities, and the coast and ocean; as well as nine region-specific analyses.
The results are alarming for our state’s future: an estimated four to five feet of sea level rise and loss of one to two-thirds of Southern California beaches by 2100, a 50 percent increase in wildfires over 25,000 acres, stronger and longer heat waves, and infrastructure like airports, wastewater treatment plants, rail and roadways increasingly likely to suffer flooding.
For the first time, California’s latest assessment dives into climate consequences on a regional level. Academics representing nine California regions spearheaded research and summarized the best available science on the variable heat, rain, flooding and extreme event consequences for their areas. For example, the highest local rate of sea level rise in the state is at the rapidly subsiding Humboldt Bay. In San Diego county, the most biodiverse in all of California, preserving its many fragile and endangered species is an urgent priority. Francesca Hopkins from UC Riverside found that the highest rate of childhood asthma in the state isn’t an urban smog-filled city but in the Imperial Valley, where toxic dust from Salton Sea disaster chokes communities – and will only become worse as higher temperatures and less water due to climate change dry and brittle the area.
According to the Bay Area Regional Report, since 1950 the Bay Area has already increased in temperature by 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit and local sea level is eight inches higher than it was one hundred years ago. Future climate will render the Bay Area less suitable for our evergreen redwood and fir forests, and more favorable for tolerant chaparral shrub land. The region’s seven million people and $750 billion economy (almost one-third of California’s total) is predicted to be increasingly beset by more “boom and bust” irregular wet and very dry years, punctuated by increasingly intense and damaging storms.
Unsurprisingly, according to the report the Bay Area’s intensifying housing and equity problems have a multiplier affect with climate change. As Bay Area housing spreads further north, south, and inland the result is higher transportation and energy needs for those with the fewest resources available to afford them; and acute disparity in climate vulnerability across Bay Area communities and populations.
“All Californians will likely endure more illness and be at greater risk of early death because of climate change,” bluntly states the statewide summary brochure for California’s climate assessment. “[However] vulnerable populations that already experience the greatest adverse health impacts will be disproportionately affected.”
“We’re much better at being reactive to a disaster than planning ahead,” said UC Berkeley professor and contributing author David Ackerly at a California Adaptation Forum panel in Sacramento on August 27th. “And it is vulnerable communities that suffer from those disasters. How much human suffering has to happen before it triggers the next round of activity?”
The assessment’s data is publicly available online at “Cal-adapt,” where Californians can explore projected impacts for their neighborhoods, towns, and regions.