Waiting for the Big One

Contaminants



13
Mar

Waiting for the Big One

If and when El Niño decides to dump a big storm on the Bay Area — even at 2:00 am on a Saturday night — SFEI’s Lester McKee and Alicia Gilbreath and their team are ready to pull on their parkas and dash out to take water samples.“With plenty of data for normal years, it was important to get data from a more extreme year,” says Phil Trowbridge...
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16
Dec

Unhealthy Fiber in Bay Diet

Millions of tiny pieces of plastic, each less than five millimeters wide, are flowing into San Francisco Bay each day. This minute debris—known as microplastic—is a growing environmental concern for water bodies worldwide as it evades filtration and mimics food consumed by wildlife. A recent study...
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16
Dec

The Most Under-Regulated Facility

The Kaiser Permanente Cement Plant (named after nearby Permanente Creek) produced six million barrels of cement to build Shasta Dam, and countless roads, buildings, and bridges. Now known as Lehigh Southwest Cement Company, the quarry and plant still supplies 50% of the Bay Area’s Portland cement, and recently earned some intense scrutiny from local regulators.
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13
Sep

Tracking Tiny Toxins

San Francisco Bay and the region’s other water bodies have an unfortunate legacy of human pollution. But we’re not the only culprits: beyond the mercury and PCBs, the Bay contains toxins produced by phytoplankton—photosynthesizing microorganisms classified as blue-green algae (also known as cyanobacteria), dinoflagellates, and diatoms. Under conditions still not well understood, these tiny organisms secrete chemicals that can enter aquatic food webs and impact human health. Funded by the San Francisco Estuary Institute’s Regional Monitoring Program for Water Quality and the San Francisco Bay Nutrient Management Strategy, researchers are surveying the Bay for microcystin, from the freshwater cyanobacterium Microcystis, and domoic acid, from the marine diatom Pseudo-nitzschia, and trying to account for their presence in the Bay.
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05
Jun

Beyond the Blubber

When John Kucklick talks about interrogation techniques, his subjects aren’t tight-lipped terrorists, they’re bits of blubber. Harbor seal fat is a well-known repository of legacy contaminants from the Bay like PCBs, flame retardants and DDT, but the Regional Monitoring Program for Water Quality in San Francisco Bay (RMP) wanted to know what they might be missing. In 2010, they asked Kucklick, a scientist with access to a national database of 330,000 chemicals and some pretty cutting edge software, to check their blubber for unknowns.
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26
Mar

Copper Effects on Salmon Influenced by Salinity

A decade of research by David Baldwin of NOAA’s North
west Fisheries Science Center 
and other biologists has shown
 that very 
low levels of dissolved copper interfere with a salmon’s ability to detect smells. This can 
be a matter of life or death: 
salmon rely on their olfac
tory sense to avoid predators...
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16
Dec

Beyond the Bag Ban

The other day I found myself turning out the closets for one last plastic bag. But a year into San Francisco’s bag ban, there just aren’t that many plastic shopping bags around our house anymore. All told, 60 percent of municipalities in the four most urbanized Bay Area counties have banned them. It’s all part of a substantial endeavor by regional regulators and 76 local municipalities to stop litter, PCBs and mercury from getting into our creeks and Bay via stormwater runoff.
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03
Sep

Small Fish Test Helps Target PCB Clean Up

Jay Davis didn’t expect much from a pilot test for PCBs in silversides and topsmelt that live on the edges of the San Francisco Bay. The monitoring program he heads only ran the test on these small fish, which rarely grow more than 3-4 inches long, because it was simple to piggyback on an existing study of mercury in the same fish samples. “I thought it wouldn’t really be a big deal,” says Davis, who is lead scientist for the Bay Regional Monitoring Program (RMP). PCBs, a toxicant linked to cancer, accumulate in fat as bigger creatures eat littler ones, so Davis assumed concentrations would be lower in small fish than in larger sport fish. The pilot study revealed the...
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19
Jun

Shifts in Selenium Spikes

USGS scientists headed up river this June to see whether two Asian clams had also headed upstream with the drought. When there’s less fresh water flowing out to sea, salty ocean water intrudes inland, and changes the distribution of these pesky invertebrates. Potamocorbula like it saltier than Corbicula, and usually hang out in the Suisun Bay region. But scientists suspect drought conditions may have changed all that, and with it, how and when the contaminant selenium gets cycled through the estuarine food web via the clams.
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19
Jun

Freeing Fish While Locking Up Mercury

Restoration planners were worried that connecting a former salt evaporation pond with the Bay could introduce long-dormant mercury to the wider ecosystem, and initial studies of levels in water bird eggs and fish reinforced that concern. A set of adjustable gates between the pond and the river allows seasonal closure of the pond and the ability to control the flow. But that raised a new question: would the river’s steelhead run get sidetracked...
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03
Mar

Bay Primed for Pea Soup?

Nutrients could be the next big problem for San Francisco Bay — or make that in the Bay, because they’re already here at levels high enough to have caused trouble elsewhere. But despite its excess nitrogen and phosphorus, the Bay has been free of harmful algal blooms and oxygen-depleted dead zones for decades. Indeed, we’ve been so sure of this immunity to nutrients that most wastewater treatment plants don’t even have to remove them before discharging into the Bay. Recent chinks in the Bay’s resistance to nutrients are now alerting us, however, to get ready in case there’s worse to come.
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03
Mar

Keeping the Salt Field at Bay

As the dry, warm days went on and on and on this winter, two guys intimate with California’s Sacramento San Joaquin River delta shifted gears. One reassigned staff from flood to drought response, and the other lay awake at night imagining barriers across various slough openings. By early February, some Sierra reservoirs were so low, and so close to “dead pool” level, that the water projects stopped pumping and delivering. Farmers had to retrench, communities realized they might only have enough drinking water for the next six weeks, and any salmon that succeeded in spawning upstream had no water to carry them down. Things got scary. The water projects asked state regulators to let them off the hook in meeting...
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