The State - News from April 15, 1987

The public was warned to stay out of the water and avoid eating shellfish caught in the Bodega Bay area after a spill of 64,000 gallons of raw sewage. Bob Tancreto, district engineer for the state Water Quality Control Board, said the spill began Sunday afternoon and continued throughout the night because someone forgot to turn off a valve at the Bodega Bay sewage treatment plant. “If you had to spill something,” he said, “this would be the worst thing to spill.” After it left the plant, Tancreto said, the sewage flowed into a drainage ditch and “several dozen” feet to a salt marsh by the bay, and tidal action took an unknown amount into the bay.