Instead of a fancy room with plush seats, a catered lunch, and speakers at a podium sharing their presentations on a big screen, attendees at the 27th Annual Meeting of the Regional Monitoring Program for Water Quality in San Francisco Bay (RMP) experienced the report-out entirely virtually on their own computer screens, thanks to the Covid pandemic. Nevertheless, and despite Zoom burnout, the October event was a success, with many attendees voicing a preference for the virtual format.
Hot science take homes from the presentations were plentiful. Several sessions covering both Atlantic and Pacific Coasts explored how scientists continue to focus on sediment movement through watersheds and estuaries, especially with its long-standing transport of hitch-hiking contaminants. In the Bay Area, the SF Regional Water Quality Control Board’s Xavier Fernandez also described sediment’s renascence as a precious commodity now, as sea levels steadily climb in the San Francisco Estuary. He shared a number of novel ideas for using all sources of sediment to build shoreline resiliency (see more sediment history in Slickens & Shoals, Estuary News, December 2020).
In another presentation, the University of Washington’s Ed Kolodziej unraveled a murder mystery involving coho salmon and road run-off—one of the favorite talks of the day. Turns out science sleuths detected a compound known as 6PPD-quinone—a chemical used in tires—as the culprit in the high death rates of spawning coho when they return to Puget Sound streams.
Another talk featured the San Francisco Estuary Institute’s Miguel Mendez who explored how the pandemic is changing the types of contaminants appearing in the Bay. Mendez introduced the audience to quaternary ammonium compounds, or QACs, present in the copious amounts of disinfectant products used as we all spray, squirt, and wipe our way through the pandemic. SFEI plans to use a 2017 study of QACs as a baseline for monitoring wastewater, stormwater, and sediment in 2020 and 2021.
Seven or more types of quaternary ammonium compounds (QACs) were found at 11 stations sampled throughout San Francisco Bay in 2017. Stations in orange (Grizzly Bay and Lower South Bay) had the highest sum of QACs of all stations. Scientists are now concerned QAC concentrations in the Bay will increase with the pandemic. Over half of the disinfectants on the EPA N-list effective against SARS-CoV-2 contain QACs.
The pandemic has also prompted researchers to look at wastewater as a means of tracking the spread of coronavirus in our communities. The online audience peaked at over 320 for the talk by Dr. Alexandria Boehm of Stanford on monitoring coronavirus in wastewater (see Covid Clues in Estuary News September 2020). Managers see this approach as a valuable complement to testing individual patients, capable of providing earlier detection of outbreaks and an integrated assessment of communities of people.
The 2020 Zoom event couldn’t have been more different from the RMP’s first meeting in December 1994, which was held at the Richmond Field Station, in a World War II vintage barracks-like building with wooden chairs and an overhead projector. At the time, the RMP—a collaboration of the Regional Board, the regulated discharger community, and the Aquatic Habitat Institute—was just getting underway. Contaminant monitoring in those days mostly involved characterizing water, sediment, and bivalves in the deep channel out in the middle of the Bay. Then came a big shift in scope.
“The Aquatic Habitat Institute just had five staff back then and they were really struggling,” says Bruce Thompson, the RMP’s first program manager (AHI later evolved into The Watershed Project and SFEI took up the RMP). “Then they were handed this huge project on a platter, with millions of dollars in funding.” The infusion replaced individual monitoring requirements by individual dischargers with a coordinated effort.
Over the first few annual meetings of the fledgling RMP that followed, there wasn’t any data yet to discuss. “It was more of a touchy-feely morale thing, and for planning,” says Thompson.
Rainer Hoenicke, who took over as RMP manager in 1999, still remembers those early meetings. “We tried to keep it economical and simple, we wanted to spend the money on science. We ordered sandwiches rather than having a catered lunch.”
Founders of the Regional Monitoring Program. Photo taken at the 10th RMP Annual Meeting in 2003. Photo: SFEI
In the 1990s, the focus was mainly on silver, copper, mercury and other heavy metals, as well as legacy contaminants like PCBs and DDT. Annual Meeting participants came to hear about the new data and results. “It wasn’t very interactive until they realized the data was actually useful and good,” says Hoenicke.
After reviewing progress over those first five years, the program shifted in focus from general surveillance and toxicity testing to answering management questions. “We moved into what are the sources of the stuff, where does it come from, and how do we clean it up, being much more question-specific,” says Hoenicke. “The resulting ‘co-production’ approach to science really premiered in the Bay Area then, when scientists sat down with managers through the RMP and asked them, ‘what do you need to know?’”
In parallel, the dischargers paying for the program began to participate more, realizing regulators were making much-needed, more site-specific refinements to water quality objectives and plans based on the new RMP data, says Hoenicke. “There was more ownership of the problems and solutions in the whole community, rather than just allowing the Regional Board to tell them what to do.”
Data generated by the RMP supported the passage of several critical pieces of legislation and Executive Orders. “As a result, concentrations of some phased-out products actually went down, reducing the environmental risks to wildlife and people,” says Hoenicke. One RMP staffer even went on to become the Director of the CA Department of Toxic Substances Control, where she spearheaded a green chemistry initiative. “This was a huge breakthrough in how industry and stewards of the public trust changed the paradigm behind the production of synthetic compounds for industrial and household uses,” according to Hoenicke.
In recent years, the program has moved away from monitoring legacy pollutants to focus more on nutrients, sediment and emerging contaminants, according to RMP Steering Committee Chair Tom Mumley.
Meanwhile the Annual Meeting also moved to more sophisticated venues and presentations—migrating to the Lawrence Hall of Science, the Oakland Museum, and finally the cushy David Brower Center in Berkeley in 2012. Remote access to the meeting via the internet has also grown over the last few years, laying the groundwork for this year’s Covid-mandated virtual meeting.
“I think they did a great job of pulling the whole program together,” says RMP science advisor Maggie Dutch of the Washington State Department of Ecology. “The one thing I missed was the face-to-face conversations that you have afterwards, which are always really valuable.”
Our magazine’s media motto for many years has been “Where there’s an estuary, there’s a crowd.” The San Francisco Estuary is a place where people, wildlife, and commerce congregate, and where watersheds, rivers and the ocean meet and mix, creating a place of unusual diversity. In choosing to tell the...
Ever since the state and federal water projects were built in the 1930s and 1940s, California has captured snowmelt in foothill reservoirs, and moved the fresh water from dam releases and river outflows to parched parts of the state via aqueducts hundreds of miles long. A convoluted system of ancient...
Though the Clean Water Act did an amazing job of reducing wastewater and stormwater pollution of the San Francisco Estuary, some contaminants remain thorny problems. Legacy pollutants like mercury washed into the watershed from upstream gold mining, PCBs from old industrial sites, and selenium from agricultural drainage in the San...
Hothouse Earth
By Ariel Rubissow Okamoto
Photo by Megan Nguyen
Nothing could be stranger than sitting in the dark with thousands of suits and heels, watching a parade of promises to decarbonize from companies and countries large and small, reeling from the beauties of big screen rainforests and indigenous necklaces, and getting all choked up.
It was day two of the September 2018 Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco when I felt it.
At first I wondered if I was simply starstruck. Most of us labor away trying to fix one small corner of the planet or another without seeing the likes of Harrison Ford, Al Gore, Michael Bloomberg, Van Jones, Jerry Brown – or the ministers or mayors of dozens of cities and countries – in person, on stage and at times angry enough to spit. And between these luminaries a steady stream of CEOs, corporate sustainability officers, and pension fund managers promising percentages of renewables and profits in their portfolios dedicated to the climate cause by 2020-2050.
I tried to give every speaker my full attention: the young man of Vuntut Gwichin heritage from the edge of the Yukon’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge who pleaded with us not to enter his sacred lands with our drills and dependencies; all the women – swathed in bright patterns and head-scarfs – who kept punching their hearts. “My uncle in Uganda would take 129 years to emit the same amount of carbon as an American would in one year,” said Oxfam’s Winnie Byanyima.
“Our janitors are shutting off the lights you leave on,” said Aida Cardenas, speaking about the frontline workers she trains, mostly immigrants, who are excited to be part of climate change solutions in their new country.
The men on the stage, strutting about in feathers and pinstripes, spoke of hopes and dreams, money and power. “The notion that you can either do good or do well is a myth we have to collectively bust,” said New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy whose state is investing heavily in offshore wind farms.
“Climate change isn’t just about risks, it’s about opportunities,” said Blackrock sustainable investment manager Brian Deese.
But it wasn’t all these fine speeches that started the butterflies. Halfway through the second day of testimonials, it was a slight white-haired woman wrapped in an azure pashmina that pricked my tears. One minute she was on the silver screen with Alec Baldwin and the next she taking a seat on stage. She talked about trees. How trees can solve 30% of our carbon reduction problem. How we have to stop whacking them back in the Amazon and start planting them everywhere else. I couldn’t help thinking of Dr. Seuss and his truffala trees. Jane Goodall, over 80, is as fierce as my Lorax. Or my daughter’s Avatar.
Analyzing my take home feeling from the event I realized it wasn’t the usual fear – killer storms, tidal waves, no food for my kids to eat on a half-baked planet – nor a newfound sense of hope – I’ve always thought nature will get along just fine without us. What I felt was relief. People were actually doing something. Doing a lot. And there was so much more we could do.
As we all pumped fists in the dark, as the presentations went on and on and on because so many people and businesses and countries wanted to STEP UP, I realized how swayed I had let myself be by the doomsday news mill.
“We must be like the river, “ said a boy from Bangladesh named Risalat Khan, who had noticed our Sierra watersheds from the plane. “We must cut through the mountain of obstacles. Let’s be the river!”
Or as Harrison Ford less poetically put it: “Let’s turn off our phones and roll up our sleeves and kick this monster’s ass.”
4th California Climate Change Assessment Blues
by Isaac Pearlman
Since California’s last state-led climate change assessment in 2012, the Golden State has experienced a litany of natural disasters. This includes four years of severe drought from 2012 to 2016, an almost non-existent Sierra Nevada snowpack in 2014-2015 costing $2.1 billion in economic losses, widespread Bay Area flooding from winter 2017 storms, and extremely large and damaging wildfires culminating with this year’s Mendocino Complex fire achieving the dubious distinction of the largest in state history. California’s most recent climate assessment, released August 27th, predicts that for the state and the Bay Area, we can expect even more in the future.
The California state government first began assessing climate impacts formally in 2006, due to an executive order by Governor Schwarzenegger. California’s latest iteration and its fourth overall, includes a dizzying array of 44 technical reports; three topical studies on climate justice, tribal and indigenous communities, and the coast and ocean; as well as nine region-specific analyses.
The results are alarming for our state’s future: an estimated four to five feet of sea level rise and loss of one to two-thirds of Southern California beaches by 2100, a 50 percent increase in wildfires over 25,000 acres, stronger and longer heat waves, and infrastructure like airports, wastewater treatment plants, rail and roadways increasingly likely to suffer flooding.
For the first time, California’s latest assessment dives into climate consequences on a regional level. Academics representing nine California regions spearheaded research and summarized the best available science on the variable heat, rain, flooding and extreme event consequences for their areas. For example, the highest local rate of sea level rise in the state is at the rapidly subsiding Humboldt Bay. In San Diego county, the most biodiverse in all of California, preserving its many fragile and endangered species is an urgent priority. Francesca Hopkins from UC Riverside found that the highest rate of childhood asthma in the state isn’t an urban smog-filled city but in the Imperial Valley, where toxic dust from Salton Sea disaster chokes communities – and will only become worse as higher temperatures and less water due to climate change dry and brittle the area.
According to the Bay Area Regional Report, since 1950 the Bay Area has already increased in temperature by 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit and local sea level is eight inches higher than it was one hundred years ago. Future climate will render the Bay Area less suitable for our evergreen redwood and fir forests, and more favorable for tolerant chaparral shrub land. The region’s seven million people and $750 billion economy (almost one-third of California’s total) is predicted to be increasingly beset by more “boom and bust” irregular wet and very dry years, punctuated by increasingly intense and damaging storms.
Unsurprisingly, according to the report the Bay Area’s intensifying housing and equity problems have a multiplier affect with climate change. As Bay Area housing spreads further north, south, and inland the result is higher transportation and energy needs for those with the fewest resources available to afford them; and acute disparity in climate vulnerability across Bay Area communities and populations.
“All Californians will likely endure more illness and be at greater risk of early death because of climate change,” bluntly states the statewide summary brochure for California’s climate assessment. “[However] vulnerable populations that already experience the greatest adverse health impacts will be disproportionately affected.”
“We’re much better at being reactive to a disaster than planning ahead,” said UC Berkeley professor and contributing author David Ackerly at a California Adaptation Forum panel in Sacramento on August 27th. “And it is vulnerable communities that suffer from those disasters. How much human suffering has to happen before it triggers the next round of activity?”
The assessment’s data is publicly available online at “Cal-adapt,” where Californians can explore projected impacts for their neighborhoods, towns, and regions.
The results are alarming for our state’s future: an estimated four to five feet of sea level rise and loss of one to two-thirds of Southern California beaches by 2100, a 50 percent increase in wildfires over 25,000 acres, stronger and longer heat waves, and infrastructure like airports, wastewater treatment plants, rail and roadways increasingly likely to suffer flooding.