Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
PACIFIC STRIKE TEAM
In the 1970s, the U.S. Coast Guard's Pacific Strike Team set up shop on Marin
County's Novato shore. The job of this team, one of three special forces teams
in the nation created under the Clean Water Act of 1973, is to respond “any
time, any place, any hazard” to large-scale pollution incidents that occur any-
where between Montana and Asia, and in the Pacific Ocean or Antarctica (a
coverage area of 73 million square miles). From Marin, the team can deploy a
hazmat response trailer, a mobile incident command post, and a small flotilla
of skiffs and inflatable vessels, or call U.S. Coast Guard cutters in Alaska or
Guam into action.
plagued the cannery-lined Sacramento River around Stockton and areas
of the delta receiving sewage inputs. When the smell of decomposing algae
reached the nostrils of nearby residents, the public complained.
The bay was not the only convenient place to get rid of waste. Early
studies documented the pollution in San Pablo Bay's Castro Creek, and
later San Francisco's Islais Creek, around which clustered a variety of
heavy industries. Land along the bayshore also accumulated every kind of
refuse. The great shipyards at Richmond, Oakland, and Hunter's Point
piled up scrap metal, old fuel drums, and oily engine parts on their water-
fronts. They scraped chips of lead paint onto the ground and poured paint
thinner onto the tarmac. Military bases and munitions plants used the
convenient coves and corners of their shorelines as landfills and sewage
outfalls. Aerial photos of the era show a bright yellow-and-orange plume
oozing out into the bay from the slag heap of the Mountain Copper Com-
pany at the south end of the Benicia Bridge. According to John Hart, the
shoreline was a place for “anything that stank or was dangerous.”
By the early 1970s, the bay was absorbing 786 million gallons of waste-
water from municipalities and industries every day. A 1972 study noted 14
out of 16 shellfish beds exceeded bacterial standards. It was not safe to
swim or surf in the bay.
Down on the bottom of the bay, meanwhile, traces of all this human
activity were accumulating in the sediments. To read this record of con-
tamination, Sam Luoma sank steel pipes into the floors of San Pablo and
Richardson bays. The pipes captured five-foot-long cores of sediment lay-
ers laid down by erosion and deposition over the years. Within the older
layers, Luoma found signs of terrestrial soils from agricultural runoff and
erosion. Above these layers sat hydraulic mining debris with its signature
mercury content. In the more recent layers contaminant levels gradually
increased, because humans used more and more mechanical and chemical
tools between the 1930s and 1970s.
