Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
The hidden mound ignited a local firestorm, Goldbeck says. “Dumps
from all the big projects just kept piling up at Alcatraz, one on top of the
other, with no time for dispersion and lots of turbidity. So we had a dis-
posal capacity problem right when Oakland needed deepening for the
bigger ships, with fishermen getting upset about turbidity, and environ-
mentalists worried about toxics in the material getting back into the bay.”
John Beuttler of United Anglers commented at the time: “They were
dumping in the Bay every 30 minutes. Even charter fishing boats with the
most sophisticated electronic equipment couldn't find bait fish or Striped
Bass or halibut. . . . Party boat captains consistently reported [brown outs]
blanketing Central and San Pablo Bays . . . for days.”
A “mudlock” developed—no one could agree on the right place to put
the dredged material without hurting somebody or something. Various
management initiatives failed. The big carriers grew impatient with the
dredging impasse, dubbed the bay an “inefficient harbor,” and started
looking for deeper harbors to accommodate their maritime mammoths.
Eventually, however, warring mudslingers worked out a strategy that
continues to this day. Most of the dredged material is now dumped outside
the Golden Gate in deeper waters off the continental shelf, at much higher
transportation cost. Much of the rest of the material is being put to greener
use. These include caps for old landfills or brown fields, as well as new
material to raise the elevation of lands subsided behind dikes and restore
wetlands (see p. 252, “The Marin Shore”). And dredging can only occur
during specific windows of time when schools of herring and other sensi-
tive species are not around.
With the military retiring many of its shoreline berths and shipyards,
and less sediment coming into the bay from upstream, the need for dredg-
ing has diminished. At the same time, scientists project that the region's
wetlands will be needing more, rather than less, sediment to keep up with
future rising sea levels. Thus the practice of taking what remains of the
bay's sediment supply out to ocean dump sites may change (see p. 246,
“Key Ingredients: A Wetland Recipe” and p. 285, “Climate Change and the
Bay's Future”).
Barbara Salzman, a seasoned Marin Audubon Society activist with a gruff
Philadelphia accent, has been saving wetlands long enough to know just
about everyone who owns a scrap of marsh, hayfield, or open space along
her county's shore. Her stories evoke the first eras of the wetland crusades,
when most people still thought of baylands as swamps—better of drained
