Troubled Waters: Toxins Stir Up San Francisco Bay

Outraged by the dumping of sewage and diking of wetlands, naturalists and others rallied in the 1960s to “save San Francisco Bay”--and for many years, it seemed they had done just that.

Now folks aren’t so sure.

“Save the Bay” sentiments of two decades ago prompted several federal and state regulations that have ended the routine dumping of raw sewage into the bay and slowed the wholesale draining of wetlands.

But the movement did little to control the disposal of toxic chemical waste or restrict the diversion to Central and Southern California of increasing levels of fresh river water. That fresh water not only flushes pollutants out to sea, but also gives many fish species the means to eat and reproduce, biologists say.

Getting Sicker?

As a result, studies now indicate that San Francisco Bay--which scientists say is second only to Chesapeake Bay in size and importance among the nation’s inland estuaries--is still sick, and may be getting sicker.

“The bay has improved in one sense because in the past 20 years we have largely dealt with matters of oxygen depletion and fecal coliform bacteria caused by the dumping of raw organic matter,” said Frederic H. Nichols, one of four U.S. Geological Survey scientists to co-author a new comprehensive report on the history of human activity in the bay. It was published in Science magazine.

“What we’ve only recently begun to really focus on . . . are the trace toxic elements (in municipal, industrial and agricultural wastes). We know organisms in the estuary are contaminated to various degrees, so toxic chemicals are the issue now.”

“We have increased degradation and decreased (fresh water) flow,” said Jeannette A. Whipple, chief of physiological ecology investigations at the National Marine Fisheries Service laboratory in Tiburon. “When that has happened in other areas, you have run the risk of creating a dead sea.”

San Francisco Bay is far from dead, she said, but plainly it is in trouble. The precise nature and extent of that trouble is unclear because of a lack of research into the effects of pollution and other human activities on the bay.

“There is a lot of evidence that something is going on,” said Nichols. He cited as an example numerous tests confirming toxic chemical residue in fish. “We are contaminating them but we don’t know how we’re affecting them,” he said. “We don’t know why some (species) are able to cope while others are not.”

A 1983 study by Citizens for a Better Environment, a private advocacy group that focuses on toxic-waste and water-quality issues, concluded:

“Due to the chronic toxicity posed by persistent toxic substances in the bay environment, the threat of long-term ecological and human health effects does exist. (But) confounding variables and the slow, subtle nature of these effects makes documentation very difficult.”

A long menu of edible creatures harvested in the bay, including the native Dungeness crab, a tasty regional favorite once retailed in bulk on Fisherman’s Wharf for pennies apiece, are disappearing from the bay.

Ducks in the southern part of the bay, near San Jose, have been found with high levels of selenium, a mineral blamed for deformities in birds elsewhere.

Decline of Striped Bass

But perhaps the best-documented example of trouble in the bay is the decline of the striped bass. The trouble encountered by that hearty, silvery sports fish in particular, as documented in studies by the National Marine Fisheries Service and state Department of Fish and Game, has become something of a cause celebre in the Bay Area.

The federal fisheries service reported last year that bass in San Francisco Bay were in poorer health--smaller, less resistant to parasites, more tainted by chemicals and plagued with liver and reproductive disorders--than bass from Oregon’s pristine Coos River, Lake Mead in Nevada and the Hudson River in upstate New York.

At the same time, state Department of Fish and Game officials reported that their “Striped Bass Index,” a selective census that is used to measure the species’ number and fecundity, had sunk to a record low of 6.3. That is below the 9.0 rating achieved during the severe drought of the mid-1970s and far short of the state’s 79.0 target.

Conservationists, fishing enthusiasts and others believe the decline of the bass, a closely watched “indicator” fish, is an ominous sign.

Collapse of an Estuary

“This is scientifically acceptable evidence that the most important inland estuary on the west coasts of the North and South American continents is collapsing before our eyes,” said William T. Davoren, director of the Bay Institute, a private environmental research group.

Others have been somewhat more restrained in their assessments, but concern for the fish and the implications of its dilemma have renewed popular interest in the health of the bay. That interest extends to Washington and Sacramento.

Sens. Pete Wilson, a Republican, and Alan Cranston, a Democrat, have joined Reps. Sala Burton (D-San Francisco) and Norman Y. Mineta (D-San Jose) in proposing a Clean Water Act amendment authorizing the Environmental Protection Agency to conduct a four-year, $12-million study of the bay.

In Sacramento, Assemblyman Tom Bates (D-Oakland) has authored a bill that, among other things, would set water-quality standards for the bay. State Sen. Paul B. Carpenter (D-Cypress) has introduced another bill to protect the bay from pollution and excessive water diversion.

State-Federal Study

Already under way is a joint state-federal study analyzing fresh water flows in the bay. Eventually, the study may help state officials decide how much water can safely be diverted south. It is complicated work; the study began in 1980 and will continue at least through 1990, according to Perry L. Herrgesell, a fisheries biologist with the Department of Fish and Game.

The interagency program is looking at such things as where fresh water and salt water mix in the bay. The location determines the growth of plankton, microscopic plants and animals on which fish feed; thus the flow regulates the number of fish that survive.

They also study such things as the amount of nutrients carried into the bay by different flow rates and how varying flows push or pull various species of immature fish to those particular parts of the bay that give them the right amounts of food, salinity and other factors in their survival.

Three Different Bays

The body commonly referred to as San Francisco Bay is actually three separate bays: San Francisco Bay proper to the south, San Pablo Bay immediately north and Suisun Bay to the northeast. Farther east lies the vast Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

The bay washes over a lot of property--about 450 square miles, not counting wetlands--and its size is easily matched by its importance.

Runoff from 40% of California--the entire fertile Central Valley--wanders through the delta and then the bay on its way to the ocean. At least 10 rivers directly or indirectly empty into the bay, and fully half the migratory birds on the Pacific flyway spend the winter there, Geological Survey researchers report.

Commercially, the bay is one of the busiest ship channels on the globe. It allows passage not only to the busy ports of Oakland and San Francisco, but also to ports in Sacramento and Stockton, and several large oil terminals.

Radical changes in the bay can be traced to the arrival of people in large numbers during the mid-19th-Century Gold Rush, the Geological Survey report stated. Miners dumped 40 inches of silt in the bay in their search for gold, while merchants scuttled ships and dumped trash and sand into coastal waters to create another valuable commodity--real estate. Meanwhile, farmers began diking and draining large parcels of wetlands to create vast new fields of nutrient-packed soil.

Marshland Reclaimed

The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that 830 square miles of marshland has been reclaimed from the bay and delta since 1850, penned behind a latticework of levees or buried under mountains of fill. It amounts to more land than has been recovered by all the dikes in Holland.

Nonetheless, there is still pressure to fill in more of the bay’s wetlands and marshes. The Army Corps of Engineers estimates that more than a third of the remaining 19,000 acres of wetlands is marked for reclamation. Developers have proposed filling in bits of the bay for new projects, ranging from industrial parks and airports to shopping malls and homes--even garbage dumps and a race track.

Further, pumps have siphoned more than 60% of the bay’s normal fresh water flow to slake the thirst of Southern Californians and irrigate Central Valley farms, the Geological Survey report noted. Diversions are expected to rise above 70% by the end of the century.

These diversions, which are strong enough to reverse the flow of rivers and streams, hamper the dilution of toxins dumped into the bay, Geological Survey researchers concluded. Diversion pumps also contribute to the decline of fish species by sucking up spawning bass, salmon and sturgeon and their eggs, Nichols said.

Sewage Discharge

Compounding the problem are municipal sewage facilities and industry, which together are estimated by Citizens for a Better Environment to discharge about 6,000 tons of pollutants to the bay each year. Included are more than 370 tons of toxic heavy metals, which persist in the bay and accumulate in the flesh of fish, scientists said.

Still, the extent--and the consequence--of all those changes is difficult to assess with precision because efforts to study the bay have been under-funded and uncoordinated, scientists add.

Whipple said she believes “it’s a mistake to look for one single reason” for the decline of bay fish stocks. “All these things (pollution, diversions, overfishing, natural parasites) are working together,” she said.

Whipple, Nichols and other scientists hope Congress funds the proposed new EPA study, which they believe could bridge the knowledge gaps hampering a full understanding of the bay.

Until now, environmentalists have contended that federal policy makers have not only ignored the bay, but they have actually hurt pollution-control efforts by exempting agricultural drainage water from EPA jurisdiction.

Pollution Source

The waste is suspected as a major source of pollution. Drainage water from the San Joaquin Valley, for example, flows into the bay, but the EPA is not authorized to regulate it.

Not all news is bad, however. Testing by the state’s Regional Water Quality Control Board shows a renewed clarity in bay waters, and, for the first time in half a century, clams along the San Mateo waterfront south of San Francisco have been approved for human consumption.

In addition, government authorities have begun moving against big industrial polluters, particularly oil refineries along San Pablo and Suisun bays. Since January, for example, authorities have exacted $500,000 in civil penalties from one oil refinery, ordered a second to install $40-million pollution-control equipment, and asked that criminal charges be filed against a third for falsifying test results and bypassing pollution-control equipment for 2,363 days since 1977.