QUEST Community Science Blog

Last week on QUEST, we took a look at the history of the San Francisco Bay’s most dangerous toxin: mercury. This week, now that the mercury is here in the bay, how is it affecting us? The obvious place to go was the Berkeley Marina, one of the bay’s most popular fishing spots. On the day I visited, halibut season had just begun and, even on a Monday morning, the pier was lined with anglers. Halibut contains high levels of mercury, just like other big SF Bay fish but – as you hear in the piece – you wouldn’t know it from talking to the fishermen out that day.

Of course mercury is a problem in many big fish we eat, not just the ones in the San Francisco Bay. Dr. Jane Hightower is one of the leading local doctors diagnosing various levels of mercury poisoning in her patients – many of whom, as she says, do their fishing at places like Whole Foods. We only had time to use a short piece of that interview in the actual story, but anyone who eats fish will want to hear more from Dr. Hightower. A longer version of that interview – including Dr. Hightower’s surprising views on kid staples like canned tuna fish – is right here.

You may listen to the “Mercury in the Bay - Part 2″ Radio report online, as well as find additional links and resources.

Amy Standen is a Reporter for QUEST and Radio News at KQED-FM.

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In honor of Earth Day, we wanted to take a big look at a chronic environmental issue in the Bay Area, tracing it from its origins to the contemporary strategies to solve it. Mercury was the obvious choice: It’s been flowing into the Bay since before California joined the union, and it continues to trickle in from not just the old culprits, like gold and mercury mines, but a modern crop of industries, like refineries and cement kilns. Even little things – like a broken mercury thermometer dumped into the sink – are part of the problem.

The key fact here is how incredibly potent mercury can be: Just one little globule from an old thermometer can poison all the fish in a 45-acre lake, making them unsafe for humans to eat. Mercury pollution is hardly unique to the Bay Area; what makes us interesting is that local officials are making real strides in trying to clean it up. Over the next 17 years or so, we’ll spend $2.6 billion dollars on the project. Even then, we won’t have a clean bay for 120 years.

For a lot of people, mercury pollution in the Bay is largely theoretical, since few stores sell fish caught in the Bay, and relatively few residents fish for their food. But some still do – including many recent immigrants from fishing-intensive cultures like Laos. We’ll look at how mercury affects the health of local fishermen next week.

This piece marks our first-ever audio slide show, and what a difference it makes! We also hope you’ll check out the mercury map above, where you can see how many pounds of mercury come from each of the Bay Area’s five refineries, plus other mercury sources and the bay’s popular fishing spots.

Watch the audio slide show of “Mercury in the Bay” online, as well as find additional links and resources.

Amy Standen is a Reporter for QUEST and Radio News at KQED-FM.

Thought California has consigned coal-burning to the scrap bin? Think again! California has 11 coal-fired power plants, all used to heat limestone into cement — making us one of the biggest cement-producing states in the country. In addition to cement, these kilns produce 95% of the state’s airborne mercury pollution and 2% of its greenhouse gas emissions. Mostly, they’ve slipped under the radar of regulators, but that is changing fast.

You may listen to the “Cement - A Dirty Business” Radio report online, as well as find additional links and resources. Also don’t miss our behind-the-scenes photos for this story.

Amy Standen is a Reporter for QUEST and Radio News at KQED-FM.

Polluting Makes Vatican List of Grave Social Sins

Over the course of a week of working with concrete,
this landscaping job produced only one bucket
of wastewater. Credit: Ann Hutcheson-WilcoxAs a lifelong Catholic and former Catholic priest, I often find myself wishing that the Church would stick to what it knows best: the Sacraments. I wish the Pope would declare a 10-year moratorium on anyone with any authority in the Church saying anything at all about sexuality.

But sometimes the Vatican gets it right.

Polluting is a now a recognized social sin, along with another act that tends to wreck havoc on the environment, that is, contributing to the growing social and economic divide between rich and poor. The rich contribute inordinately to pollution and the poor suffer inordinately from it.

The Church has installed photovoltaics (PV) on the roofs of some Vatican buildings, and has recognized the scientific consensus that humans contribute to global warming. One of my teachers in the Divinity program at Notre Dame, Fr. Tim O’Meara, said that the Church responds quite slowly to crisis and change. “It spends twenty-five years denying the problem, twenty-five years quietly addressing it, and twenty-five years claiming that this is the way we’ve always done things.” So by historical standards, the Church is moving with lightning speed.

One of my coworkers at Home Energy told me that she viewed the new sin as another tool in the environmental education toolbox. Through her experience as an environmental organizer, policy analyst, and fundraiser, she has learned that individuals are motivated to take action on behalf of the environment due to personal belief or their own unique life experience. While working with contractors on her own home, she has often found it challenging to explain to people in the trades why she feels that it is her responsibility to go beyond business as usual. Last week’s announcement that “la contaminación ahora es un pecado” (pollution is now a sin) came just at the right time. The contractors she was working with to rebuild a retaining wall made primarily of reused concrete and found objects figured out how to avoid dumping any wastewater into her gutter, which empties directly into the local creek, a home for native rainbow trout. If pollution were not yet a sin, they may not have been as willing to consider the alternatives. Over the course of a week of working with concrete, they produced only one bucket of wastewater.

The new sins do present a challenge to the imagination of poets like myself. In Dante’s Divine Comedy there is no place in hell for unrepentant polluters. Now that the Vatican has named pollution a serious social sin, we may have to invent a punishment, and a metaphorical place in hell for polluters. Let’s see-tyrants, assassins, and warmongers swim in a river of boiling blood, and the wrathful tear each other to pieces with their teeth-maybe polluters will have to tread water in that twice-Texas-sized trash dump floating in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch for all eternity, or at least until we decide how to clean it up.

Jim Gunshinan is Managing Editor of Home Energy Magazine. He holds an M.S. in Bioengineering from Pennsylvania State University, State College, Pennsylvania, and a Master of Divinity (MDiv) degree from University of Notre Dame.

Image source: Michael PatrickMany Bay Area cities are trying to clean up their acts by putting in place new green initiatives. But from San Jose to Berkeley, some city leaders are finding out it’s not always so easy to turn over a new leaf. QUEST looks at the challenges municipalities face with budget constraints, legal restrictions and reluctance, on the part of some residents, to change. Marjorie Sun reports.


You may listen to the “It’s Not Easy Going Green” Radio report online, as well as find additional links and resources.

Andrea Kissack is Senior Editor for QUEST at KQED Public Radio.

photo courtesy of the San Francisco Public Utilities CommissionWe’d had “aging infrastructure” on our story lists for some time when we first heard about the sewage spills in Mill Valley. When news came in that not just one, but two sewage spills had poured five million gallons of partially treated wastewater into Richardson Bay, we decided to move that story to the top of the list.

Those spills got a lot of coverage, including by KQED, so our question was a little broader. Were those spills an anomaly? (Answer: No, they were big, but not unusual.) And how does this happen in as eco-conscious a place as the Bay Area? What would it take to stop it?

The two Mill Valley spills seem to have resulted from a few different problems: overwhelmed capacity, failed alarms, operator error, and probably other factors, too. But the underlying cause is the same, and it’s true of many sewage systems in the Bay Area: These systems — the pipes, the digesters, the pumps – are reaching the end of their useful lives. (Some of the older clay pipes were built in the 1850s!) Few cities are jumping to do the necessary upgrades, and who can blame them? What’s less sexy than an expensive, disruptive construction project that takes place mostly underground, out of sight?

Still, as we say in the piece, we’ve done it before. Those who lived in the Bay Area before the 1970s may remember the stench of raw sewage drifting up through the car window as they crossed the Bay. Thanks to the Clean Water Act of 1972, the Bay is vastly cleaner than it used to be and there are far less spills.

So what will it take to get cities to pony up the cash this time around? Baykeeper is taking the issue to the courts – you can read more about their Sick of Sewage campaign here: http://www.baykeeper.org/

You may listen to the “Sewage Happens” Radio report online, as well as find additional links and resources.

Amy Standen is a Reporter for QUEST and Radio News at KQED-FM.

It has been nine days since a Chinese freighter hit the Bay Bridge spilling 58-thousand gallons of bunker fuel into the Bay. After a massive effort only 25 percent of the oil has been cleaned up. And experts say they may not be able to recover much more. As clean-up crews in hazmat suits scour the beaches, scientists say they’ll be dealing with the aftermath of last week’s oil spill for months, maybe even years. Why is it so hard to clean up oil? And what will happen to the thousands of gallons of spilled oil that can’t be recovered?

You may listen to the “Cleaning Up Oil in the Bay” radio report online, as well as find additional links and resources.

Amy Standen is a Reporter for QUEST and Radio News at KQED-FM.

latitude: 37.7631, longitude: -122.4093

Oil boom at Crab Cove. Credit: gwenOil Spill update: get KQED’s news reports, interviews, analysis and photos as well as links to more coverage, photos from the community, and ways to help in the cleanup efforts. Includes coverage by QUEST radio reporter Amy Standen, and QUEST Managing Editor Paul Rogers.

Go to: KQED | News: SF Bay Oil Spill

See and contribute photos to KQED Public Radio’s: SF Bay Oil Spill photo pool.

Craig Rosa is an Interactive Producer for QUEST at KQED.

latitude: 37.7631, longitude: -122.4093

Oil booms at Crissy Field. Credit: fredsharplesJust two days before a container ship hit the Bay Bridge, spilling 58,000 gallons of oil into the waters of San Francisco Bay, QUEST web producer Craig Rosa and I were at Crissy Field beach. We were photographing pelicans and recording dogs playing in the sand for an upcoming Exploration. When I went to the beach Thursday morning, there was a big lump in my throat as I watched those same pelicans skim the water that wasn’t the same as it had been the morning before.

It seems that the fate of birds in these situations provokes an especially emotional response in most people. Maybe it’s their visibility, maybe it’s the metaphor of losing flight, but there’s something about an oil-covered bird that makes plain the most tragic consequences of human interactions with nature.

Standing at the beach (which I visit frequently because it’s across from my office) made me realize how much there is to understand about the Bay’s inner workings. Knowing that there was much less oil on Crissy Field than at Rodeo Beach made me consider how the Bay’s currents flow than I had before. The booms floating in the water prompted questions about whether marine microorganisms are filtered out along with the oil, what role such critters play, and how they’re faring in an oily environment. Watching ducks splash about in the marsh, I wondered about the less-visible fates of the plants and fish below the surface. No doubt the oil spill’s effects are beyond birds and oily blobs on the beach, hidden to those of us unfamiliar with the Bay’s ecosystems and mechanics.

While Craig and I meandered the dunes with Park Service staff days before, we learned that Crissy Field is an ever-changing environment, always in flux, sometimes through forces of nature and sometime at the hands of humans. Remembering this was heartening. Crissy Field has gone from natural shoreline to air strip and back to shoreline again, and has recovered from past oil spills much larger than this one. Nature (with a little help from concerned citizens) has amazing repair mechanisms, and has allowed Crissy Field to survive many assaults during its history. Despite its current scars, it will survive this as well.

Robin Marks is a journalist and science writer who current serves as a Multimedia Projects Developer for the Exploratorium in San Francisco, CA.

latitude: 37.8058, longitude: -122.4530