Bay Still in Danger : Wildlife and Water Quality Threatened

The saga of San Diego Bay is one of masterful manipulation.

When the people wanted a sewer, they turned the bay into one. When they wanted a playground, they cleaned the bay up.

When the Navy wanted bigger ships, it gouged out the bay’s bottom. When it wanted more planes, it replaced the water with land.

Today, San Diego Bay is said to be among the cleanest metropolitan-area bays in the world--just a quarter of a century after it was a metropolitan-area cesspool off limits to people as well as fish.

It is also a pared-down version of its former self--sliced, diced and remodeled to fit the needs of the U.S. Navy and the desires of developers trying to burn their brand into one of the country’s fastest-growing areas. Nearly a third of the bay has been filled in.

The bay is in good health, many regulatory officials say, comparing it to more active commercial ports like Los Angeles and Long Beach. But some warn of ominous signs of damage that cannot be reversed.

High levels of copper and cancer-causing polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) have turned up in parts of the bay, and development has cut shoreline wildlife habitat by 90%. Three native bird species are now endangered--a consequence, some say, of the manhandling of the bay.

“What I see is that the agencies and developers are moving toward total manipulation of systems,” said Joy Zedler, a biology professor at San Diego State University. “My worst fears are that we’ll have no natural heritage to fall back on, and we’ll only have guesswork as to what a naturally functioning coastal wetland ought to be like.”

This week, the state expects to release the results of studies that have found alarming amounts of copper, silver, zinc and PCBs, and have focused the attention of the state Department of Fish and Game on San Diego Bay.

State investigators don’t know the origins of most of the pollutants, which county officials say pose no immediate threat to human health. But they said they discovered it now simply because they started looking. The more they look, the more they may find.

“Municipal waste discharges are aesthetically unpleasing. They’ve got lots of turbidity and they smell funny,” said Dr. Michael Martin of DFG. “On the other hand, these persistent contaminants, you can’t see them. They have a long residual time, and once they’re discharged, it’s very difficult to get them back.”

San Diego Bay curls around North Island and along the western edge of San Diego, a crescent of water framed by Point Loma, Chula Vista and Imperial Beach to the southeast, and the long sliver of the Silver Strand and Coronado to the west.

At 18 square miles, it is Southern California’s largest natural bay (though less than one-twentieth the size of San Francisco Bay). It houses one quarter of the U.S. Navy’s active fleet, a commercial fishing fleet, recreational marinas and houseboat anchorages.

It contains wetlands and salt ponds essential to the life of many species of fish and birds, buried in its southern quarter. They provide the microscopic plant and animal life eaten by larger fish, and rare breeding and nesting sites for migratory and native birds.

“There’s no place else on earth that has the type of coastal habitats that we do,” said Zedler, referring to the bay and other areas of Southern California. “They’re unique. Once they’re gone, there’s no replacing them.”

The bay was once a very different place than it is today: It was open to the Pacific, and Coronado Island and North Island were actually islands. But the ocean gradually molded the Silver Strand into a narrow barrier.

Then man went to work.

First came channel dredging to exploit the harbor for commerce, followed by filling to expand the land area. One shoal covered with dredge “spoils” turned into Shelter Island. One hundred forty-two acres of mud flats became Lindbergh Field.

World War II brought rampant remodeling. When the Navy needed room for taxiing seaplanes, it dredged the mid bay. North Island bulged and grew symmetrical. The shoreline lost its serrated look to geometric lines. The bay steadily shrank.

Later, private development gnawed at the shoreline. Beds of eel grass gave way to marinas and piers. Over time, the surrounding cities co-opted the bay into a common sewer.

During the 1950s, San Diego Bay swallowed 55.6 million gallons of sewage a day, most of it raw or barely treated. A “sludge bed” 9,000 yards long and 3 feet deep lurked on the bottom like the Loch Ness monster. By 1963, it had grown to more than 7 feet thick.

Fish disappeared and swimming was banned in most of the bay. The military cut back aquatic training. The water turned red, green and brown. County health chief J.B. Askew called it “beet juice and borscht.”

“San Diego Bay was pretty much a cesspool,” said Tomas E. Firle, environmental management coordinator for the San Diego Unified Port District. “It literally stank.”

The bay was saved by the metropolitan sewage system, which in August, 1963, began routing domestic sewage to Point Loma to be treated, then dumped into the Pacific. Industries joined the system later, and federal environmental regulation imposed a permit system on industrial discharges.

The Pacific’s loss was the bay’s gain: Water quality improved almost immediately. Researchers say fish and wildlife returned, algae disappeared, and the water grew clearer. Even the mighty sludge bed eroded.

These days, beach closings are relatively rare. Bacteria measurements tend to fall well below state limits, county officials say. The county’s environmental-health chief says he swims in the bay. He says swallowing the water in most places wouldn’t faze him.

But regulatory officials still speak, euphemistically, of “stresses” and “insults.”

High levels of zinc and silver have turned up in state tests, in addition to the unhealthy levels of PCBs and copper. Those metals can be highly toxic to young fish and invertebrates, and state investigators say they have no idea where they came from.

About a dozen bay-front industries have state permits regulating their discharges, most of which are believed to be innocuous, like brine from the South Bay salt flats and cooling water from San Diego Gas & Electric’s South Bay plant.

But inspections are relatively cursory and few and far between, even for shipyards and other firms that handle paints and chemicals that they are prohibited from dumping into the bay. Officials think the high levels of copper came from a transport firm that violated its permit.

Meanwhile, there is little enforcement of bans against sewage from pleasure boats, and violations are difficult to prove. Holding tank pump-out facilities break down periodically and municipal sewer lines overflow, loosing sewage that makes its way into the bay.

In 1977, the Navy acknowledged that 440,000 gallons of sewage were dumped into the bay daily from aircraft carriers and other warships. But Cmdr. Tom Jurkowsky, a Pacific fleet spokesman, said ships now are equipped so that no sewage has gone into the bay for at least a year.

Diving off the 24th Street Terminal in National City for sediment samples, water-quality biologist Pete Michaels finds the muck so deep he can bury his arm up to the armpit. The bottom feels soft, “like a feather bed. That’s how we know we’re there.”

Down there, it’s too dark to read the gauges on underwater diving tanks, said Michael, who works for the Regional Water Quality Control Board. Divers hold onto each other to remember which way is up, and take their sediment samples by feel.

But out in the northern reaches, where the channel is deep, strong tides flush and scour the bay twice a day. There, divers find smooth sand along the bottom. Visibility can reach a dozen feet.

The effects of industrial and recreational growth on the fish are unclear.

Richard D. Ford, director of the Center for Marine Studies at San Diego State, found through extensive studies between 1968 and 1975 that a wide variety of fish were returning to the bay. Attempts to count species have produced numbers ranging from 30 to 90.

But Don Konishi looks at it from another perspective--that of a man who has fished the bay since the 1930s. He moved as a child with his family from La Mesa to a house behind the canneries--with an outhouse on stilts that emptied straight into the bay.

Konishi worked for years on tuna seiners, before business declined and he became a longshoreman. Now retired, he stands on the riprap along Harbor Island most mornings at dawn, fishing and talking with other fishermen.

They remember bat rays, flounder, giant schools of sea trout, and ubiquitous sardines and anchovies. They recall the clams that crowded the mud flats that were replaced by Lindbergh Field, and a bay that seemed so wide you could barely see across it.

“It’s getting cleaner. Twenty years ago, you look in here, you’d see all this garbage floating by,” John Castagnola mused, early one morning last week. But as for the fishing, he insisted, “It was better. I guess the fish ate sewage.”

Lois Ewen, a Coronado councilwoman, remembers the marlin that rode the wake of the San Diego-Coronado ferry. When the bay became polluted, they disappeared. When the bay was cleaned up, they never came back.

The toll on the bird population is better-documented, though regulatory officials say they have insufficient money for studies. Without inventories, they have difficulty showing the steady, incremental impact of development.

Three bird species living on San Diego Bay are on state and federal endangered species lists, primarily because of the loss of habitat. Biologist Zedler calls that “a symptom. I think it tells us that the whole ecosystem is changing in irreversible ways.”

Increased boat traffic recently halved the number of ducks wintering on the bay, said Elizabeth Copper, a San Diego biologist. Martin Kenney of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said the endangered California least tern is in especially bad shape: Eggs have been intentionally smashed and run over by recreational vehicles.

Today the last saltwater marsh on the bay is part of a controversial Chula Vista project. The planned hotel, marina, industrial and residential complex would not touch the wetlands. But two roads would cut through to reach a hotel on Gunpowder Point.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which regulates development along waterways, now asks developers to make up for wetlands that they damage. But space is running out. Copper says the Chula Vista project will invade habitat set aside after an earlier development.

Other efforts to create habitat include a small wildlife sanctuary and an island built out of dredge spoils in South Bay. While the island created a new marsh, it took away some shallow bay. “It was bay habitat,” said Zedler. “Now it’s 50 acres of intertidal wetland.”

Glen Lukos, chief of the south coast section of the Corps of Engineers, said most of his office’s applications for waterfront construction seem to come from San Diego County. He could not remember denying a single permit in his three years in the office.

“The pressure is tremendous to develop things,” said Kenney. “There’s too much money to be made.”

But more marinas mean more invasion of eel-grass beds, he said. More boats mean more disturbing of water fowl and shore birds, more spilling of oil and gas. More hotels may mean more dredging and filling, losing shallow-water habitat and disturbing the life on the bay floor.

“They’re always coming to us with some type of proposals,” Kenney said. “Nobody wants to leave the bay alone.”