By Lisa Owens Viani

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.

Last September, stakeholders in the Regional Monitoring Program decided they would be remiss if they did not try to measure some high priority pollutants during an El Niño year. “With plenty of data for normal years, it was important to get data from a more extreme year,” says Phil Trowbridge, the RMP manager, adding that months of planning enabled them to focus on three things — mercury, PCBs and sediment — in three places — under the Golden Gate Bridge and the South Bay’s Dumbarton Bridge and at the mouth of the Guadalupe River.

Read More

Waiting for the Big One

By Lisa Owens Viani

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.

Last September, stakeholders in the Regional Monitoring Program decided they would be remiss if they did not try to measure some high priority pollutants during an El Niño year. “With plenty of data for normal years, it was important to get data from a more extreme year,” says Phil Trowbridge, the RMP manager, adding that months of planning enabled them to focus on three things — mercury, PCBs and sediment — in three places — under the Golden Gate Bridge and the South Bay’s Dumbarton Bridge and at the mouth of the Guadalupe River.

Read More

Related Content

About the author

Lisa Owens Viani is a freelance writer and editor specializing in environmental, science, land use, and design topics. She writes for several national magazines including Landscape Architecture Magazine, ICON and Architecture, and has written for Estuary for many years. She is the co-founder of the nonprofit Raptors Are The Solution, www.raptorsarethesolution.org, which educates people about the role of birds of prey in the ecosystem and how rodenticides in the food web are affecting them.

Related Posts

Restoration Reflections: A Hundred Ways to Cherish the Estuary

Restoration is a powerful concept. Physically it entails putting something back, making it right again; emotionally it requires hope for the future, a sense of something worth doing.  In the Estuary, restoration is no longer about recreating some pristine ecosystem that once was. The vast marshes that carpeted the Delta...

VA Agreement Highlights Habitat Questions

Restoring marsh and wetland habitat can have significant benefits for dozens of species throughout the Bay and Delta—that’s beyond dispute. But when it comes to saving the Estuary’s most imperiled fish, how much habitat improvements can help in the absence of dramatically increased freshwater flows is a question that has...
Ducks. Photo: Rick Lewis

Delta Restoration Baseline Revealed

When the Delta Stewardship Council amended its Delta Plan and established a goal of restoring 60,000 to 80,000 acres of wetland above a 2007 baseline by 2050, it raised some fundamental questions: How much of that goal has already been met, and where? A recent study, presented at the Delta...