The particulate from diesel trucks, which contains a number of carcinogenic compounds, can also cause lung cancer.

Wondering how much soot is in your city's air right now? Find out through the Bay Area Air Quality Management District.

As I write this, it's rainy outside, which is a good thing from an air quality perspective. Rain keeps the dust, or particulate matter (that's "PM" in air quality jargon), glued to streets and cars, and out of the air. Here in San Francisco, our PM 2.5 value is seven — seven micrograms of soot for each cubic meter of air. That's pretty clean, so breathe deep.

Using the calendar on the left side of the page, check out the levels from January 8th — a day where the average PM 2.5 level was 52 — and you can see why the Bay Area Air Quality Management District declared January 8 a Spare the Air Day.

So what do these numbers mean?

PM 2.5 refers to the smallest soot particles that air officials measure – each particle is about 1/70th the width of a human hair. These particles are so small, they're invisible to the naked eye. They're small enough to travel deep into the delicate alveoli, or air sacs, in our lungs, where they can cause or exacerbate asthma and other breathing problems. From there, they can make their way into our bloodstream, leading to heart attacks and strokes. The particulate from diesel trucks, which contains a number of carcinogenic compounds, can also cause lung cancer. (Check out this excellent Q&A on the hazards of diesel soot.)

The black numbers describe the current level. Blue and red figures describe the change from that same hour, the day before.

When you look at the chart, check out the PM numbers for West Oakland, right next to the Port of Oakland. These are what air officials point to when asked to justify the new rules for Port truckers, which this story, and this one, describe. A few years ago, the BAAQMD conducted a detailed health assessment of West Oakland residents, finding cancer rates three times the Bay Area average. In this week's radio story, we also cite a 2008 Harvard study on lung cancer rates in truckers. Here's a story about the study, and the study itself.

Poke around the QUEST website a bit and you'll find an abundance of media on this subject. Start with Gabriela Quiros's terrific TV story, "Perilous Diesel." Gabi's also taken a closer look at some of the mysteries surrounding childhood asthma in another TV piece, "Asthma: What Brought on the Epidemic?"

Last but not least, here's a slide show of scenes from this week's radio QUEST story, featuring characters and scenes from several sides of the campaign to reduce diesel soot.

Listen to Truckers Clean Up Their Act radio report online.

Hundreds of plastic fragments taken from the Eastern Garbage Patch fill a Petri dish that is also crammed with insect-like water striders and blue copepods.

Be sure to check out Lindsey’s photos of the patch on the slideshow below.

Reporter Lindsey Hoshaw recently returned from a trip to the Pacific Garbage Patch.  She was the only journalist on a scientific expedition led by Charles Moore, who discovered the patch 12 years ago. QUEST reporter Amy Standen talked to Lindsey about her trip to the patch and what she found there.

Tell me a little bit about your trip to the Pacific Gyre. How long did it take, and what was life like onboard?

It took about a week to reach the patch after we set sail from Honolulu, Hawaii. There were four other crew members besides myself: first mate Jeffery Ernst, Algalita director of research Gwen  Lattin, University of North Carolina at Wilmington graduate student Bonnie Monteleone, scientist and director of UC Irvine’s Urban Water Resource Center Bill Cooper, and, of course, Captain Charles Moore, who discovered the patch.

The living conditions were tight. We each had our own bunk and there was one common living area where we’d eat meals, work on our laptops, read, and generally unwind at the end of the day. The meals that Captain Moore cooked were definitely the highlight. We ate fresh Mahi Mahi and had fresh fruit and vegetables throughout most of the trip until we started running low at the end.

Can you describe what the plastic patch looks like, as you approach it in the boat?  Is it something you can see from a distance?

The patch is very difficult to describe because it’s not all stuck together. Imagine if you dumped a small wastebasket full of trash in an Olympic-size swimming pool. It wouldn’t all stay in one place and it might not all float. Most of the patch is made up of tiny plastic particles that are the size of grains of rice. It’s not something that you’d “see as you approach.” In a way, there’s no single feature to approach; the boundary of the garbage patch is hard to define because there is plastic throughout the Pacific. When you’re out on the bow sometimes you won’t see anything and other days you’ll see a rapid-fire succession of empty barrels, rope, buoys, plastic water bottles, and lots of unidentifiable plastic fragments. I’ve often been asked why you can’t see the patch from Google Earth and this is precisely why: The pieces are so tiny, water isn’t a fixed feature, and many of the fragments float beneath the surface.

Describe the moment you reached the gyre. What were your first impressions?

Actually reaching the gyre was a little anti-climactic because we collected trash throughout the journey — not just when were in the highest accumulation zone. It’s not like driving from one state to another where you’d see the road signs and vegetation change. My impression overall was surprisingly tempered. It was strange to see toothbrushes and water bottles and a toilet seat floating in the middle of the ocean. But if you think about how much plastic we produce each year, it completely makes sense. If the average American produces over four pounds of trash a day, how can we be surprised that it’s ending up in the ocean?

Is there any single type of plastic that seems most prominent? (E.g. plastic bags, or fishing nets?) How much of the plastic is still recognizable as a specific product?

The four most common items we saw were ropes, buoys, water bottles, and 55-gallon plastic barrels. Things like umbrella handles, toilet seats, toothbrushes, and light bulbs were much less common. There seem to be more identifiable objects if you’re measuring by weight but if you’re counting the number of plastic pieces then there are many more fragments than specific products.

How does it get there?

Scientists believe most of the plastic in the gyre is from the Pacific Rim, off the coasts of North America and Asia. Some is obviously from commercial fishing vessels; the rope, nets and buoys likely drifted away from fishing operations or may have been intentionally dumped. The question about plastic’s journey from a consumer to the patch is an interesting one. I would love to see a model of how this occurs or a report that charts the path of one piece of plastic from producer to consumer to the patch. Thus far I haven’t seen this and we can’t pick up a piece of plastic from the patch and say, “here’s how this got here.” That said, here’s a likely scenario: Someone on-the-go buys a water bottle and tosses it in the trash. The trashcan happens to be full and the water bottle falls onto the sidewalk. That night it rains and the water bottle goes into a storm drain that empties into the bay. From there it is slowly sucked out to sea and ends up in the North Pacific Gyre, which keeps everything swirling together in a giant whirlpool.

Are there any known human health effects from eating large ocean fish with high concentrations of plastic-derived toxins? And what kinds of toxins are we talking about?

Obviously there’s a precedent for this: We’ve been warned about the inherent dangers in eating tuna that contains mercury. If we are eating large ocean fish with high concentrations of plastic-derived toxins, they may be leaking into our tissues but most table fish (the fish we eat) don’t come from the garbage patch. More research needs to be done on this subject. The types of toxins we’re talking about are DDT and PCBs, among other things.

Having seen the patch in person, does it seem feasible that the Pacific gyre (or any of the others) could ever be cleaned up? Any idea what the leading strategies might be?

I am an eternal optimist, so while it would be extremely difficult to clean up, I still believe some sort of removal program may be possible. What may happen in 100 to 200 years is that we start to see this plastic as valuable once petroleum is no longer available. If rescuing the plastic becomes profitable then I could see people investing in large commercial vessels to try and clean it up. But right now I haven’t seem any clean-up endeavors that have convinced me they can remove an ocean’s worth of trash.

… Or, does the focus seem to be more on understanding the patches so that we don’t keep adding to them?

Of the four groups I know of who are studying the patch — the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, Scripps Institute of Oceanography, Project Kaisei and the GP2 Project — the first two are devoted to research and the latter are l ways to clean up the mess. There’s so much that needs to be understood in this arena, I think research is the way to go at this point.

For everyday citizens, our best bet is to do away with single-use disposable items like water bottles and take-out containers and plastic bags and coffee cups. I’ve started carrying around a mason jar, à la No Impact Man (http://noimpactman.typepad.com/), for coffee and restaurant leftovers. It’s just a matter of convincing ourselves that one hour of enjoyment with a disposable coffee cup is not worth a lifetime of plastic pollution.

Tune in April 20, 2010 for a new QUEST TV story, Sea of Plastic. You can also listen now QUEST Radio's story on the Pacific Garbage Patch online.

Funds for Lindsey's trip to the garbage patch were paid in part by Spot.us.

Mercury is a poisonous metallic element that is liquid at room temperature.

There's nothing like producing a controversial story on some favorite food group to have a profound effect on one's appetite. I gave up chicken after doing a story on factory farms (I already didn't eat beef or pork or I would have eliminated those as well.) Now, fish, too, has fallen from grace. Ignorance was bliss.

I've known for quite some time that some fish, especially tuna, were high in mercury. But discovering the extent of the problem, and that halibut and sea bass were also on the “do not eat too much of” list, was eye-opening for me. Now I count fish servings like some people count calories. Japanese cuisine, one of my favorites, has lost some of its glow, as well as its frequency in my dining-out plans.

Many of you have practical questions, as did I. How big a crimp does this have to put in my diet? How much is too much? How often is too often? Can I still enjoy that tuna sashimi and not worry about mercury overload?

Because there wasn't time in the QUEST TV segment on mercury in the bay to include information on safe fish eating practices, below are the guidelines, along with web links, to help you get plenty of Omega 3s and still keep your mercury levels low.

Here's what California's Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment says about eating fish from the San Francisco Bay and Delta Region.

• Women beyond childbearing age and men should eat no more than two meals per month of San Francisco Bay sport fish, including sturgeon and striped bass caught in the delta. (One meal for an adult is about eight ounces).
• Women beyond childbearing age and men should not eat any striped bass over 35 inches.
• Women of childbearing age, pregnant, nursing mothers, and children should not eat more than one meal of Bay fish per month. In addition, they should not eat any striped bass over 27 inches or any shark.
• This advisory does not apply to salmon, anchovies, herring, and smelt caught in the bay; other sport fish caught in the delta or ocean; or commercial fish.
• Richmond Harbor Channel area: In addition to the above advice, no one should eat any croakers, surfperches, bullheads, gobies or shellfish taken within the Richmond Harbor Channel area because of high levels of chemicals detected there.

Here’s a summary of the joint fish advisory published by the FDA and EPA for women who are pregnant, breastfeeding or may become pregnant and for children. This is a general advisory not exclusive to any water body.

• Do not eat Shark, Swordfish, King Mackerel, or Tilefish because they contain high levels of mercury.
• Eat up to 12 ounces (2 average meals) a week of a variety of fish and shellfish that are lower in mercury. Five of the most commonly eaten fish that are low in mercury are shrimp, canned light tuna, salmon, pollock, and catfish.
• Another commonly eaten fish, albacore ("white") tuna has more mercury than canned light tuna. So, when choosing your two meals of fish and shellfish, eat only up to 6 ounces (one average meal) of albacore tuna per week.
• Check local advisories about the safety of fish caught by family and friends in your local lakes, rivers, and coastal areas. If no advice is available, eat up to 6 ounces (one average meal) per week of fish you catch from local waters, but don't consume any other fish during that week.
• Follow these same recommendations when feeding fish and shellfish to your young child, but serve smaller portions.

Also, check for local advisories for each water body in California that has fish consumption guidelines. They vary by water body.

And lastly, here’s some practical advice from Dr. Jane Hightower, the medical doctor who we feature in the mercury story.

• “If you’re genetically susceptible, it’s really important to know that if you are an autoimmune-prone patient, Lupus, MS, thyroiditis, these kinds of things, then you should not consume mercury on a regular basis or at all. … And then the cardiac patients. You know, mercury can cause a reaction in vessels that leads to inflammation. So you want to have your Omega 3 fatty acids, which is anti-inflammatory. And not have mercury which is pro-inflammatory…. If you want to avoid significant mercury and you just don’t know what the mercury content is in the fish, a rule of thumb is to eat the small fish. Not a piece of the fish. If it comes in a steak, you want to know how big the fish was that the steak came from. You want the whole fish to fit on your plate. Don’t buy a bigger plate. Get a smaller fish. With the exception of salmon. Salmon can have elevated mercury, but very rarely.”

Good luck, good health, and and watch out for bones!




Watch the Mercury in San Francisco Bay television story online.





Tags: almaden, gold rush, mercury, mining, poison, pollution, total maximum daily load, toxic
]]> http://www.kqed.org/quest/blog/2009/10/06/producers-notes-mercury-in-san-francisco-bay/feed/ 3 37.8627 -122.318 http://www.kqed.org/quest/blog/2009/05/13/being-green-on-the-way-to-work/ http://www.kqed.org/quest/blog/2009/05/13/being-green-on-the-way-to-work/#comments Wed, 13 May 2009 17:47:22 +0000 Cat http://www.kqed.org/quest/blog/?p=2429 Bike to Work Day. ]]> Some happy bike commuters from the 2008 Bike to Work Day
Credit: Len Gilbert

On Thursday, May 14th, expect a jump in the number of bikes on the road in San Francisco. The reason for the inflation? Bike to Work Day. This will be the 15th Annual Bike to Work Day in San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area, and this year nine Bay Area counties will participate in the festivities. The event seeks to promote a healthy way of commuting by featuring commute convoys, energizer stations, prizes for costumes and decorated bikes and downtown bike valet parking. Many organizations like the California Academy of Sciences have put together bike-commute teams to support the event.

The Bay Area is not the only city promoting bicycle advocacy. The best known community bike program was started in the 1960s in Amsterdam. Known as a bicycle sharing system, bicycles were available on a large scale, allowing people to have ready access to these public bikes rather than owning personal ones. This allowed people to shift from transit to bicycle and back again. These programs have not only been successful in Europe but the United States as well.

One of the first community bicycle projects in the United States started in Portland, Oregon in 1994 by several civic and environmental activists. A number of bicycles were available on the streets for use. Since then many other communities have set up similar projects. One was set up at Burning Man in 2007, following the example of the Portland Yellow Bike program.

150,000 commuters are expected to forgo their car commute and bike into work on May 14th. Nationally, many more will commute by bike during the entire month of May to support National Bike Month.

There are some great perks to commuting by bike to work: Bikes are much cheaper than cars. Typically, a bike will cost around $700 per year; compare that to the cost of a car (which includes insurance, repairs and gas), around $8000 per year (according to the American Automobile Association). Not only is it cheaper, the carbon footprint of commuting by bike is drastically lower as well. A gallon of gas releases about 20 lbs of CO2 into the air; a bicycle creates no CO2 emissions. Bicycling is also a great way to stay healthy and active without having to make a trip to the gym.

All in all, Bike to Work Day is an individually and environmentally healthy way to get to and from work. For more information on Bike to Work Day, bike routes, and services offered for bicyclists visit http://btwd.bayareabikes.org/.





Tags: bicycle, bike, co2, commute, ecology, pollution
]]> http://www.kqed.org/quest/blog/2009/05/13/being-green-on-the-way-to-work/feed/ 0 37.769700 -122.466000 http://www.kqed.org/quest/blog/2008/12/05/reporters-notes-get-the-soot-out/ http://www.kqed.org/quest/blog/2008/12/05/reporters-notes-get-the-soot-out/#comments Sat, 06 Dec 2008 01:28:00 +0000 David Gorn http://www.kqed.org/quest/blog/?p=974
It's not just truckers that will have to spend a lot of money to retrofit their diesel engines. And quite a few trucks on California roads will actually be unaffected by a new California diesel regulation.

The California Air Resources Board is expected to vote on a new diesel-emissions regulation when the board meets on December 11 and 12 in Sacramento. As Dan Sperling, head of the Institute for Transportation Studies at UC Davis, explains in this clip, diesel trucks haven't been regulated the same way cars have been.

It would require all trucks on California roads to meet the lower 2010 emissions standards. The cost to retrofit a diesel truck could run anywhere from $10,000 to $25,000 per truck. There are roughly a million diesel trucks driving through the state – but not all of them are going to get the retrofit.

About half of the trucks traveling through California are from out of state. And almost all of those are long-distance freight trucks, which drive so many miles that they only last about three years – so most of the out-of-state trucks will meet 2010 standards in time.

That leaves about half-a-million California trucks, and of those, only about 200,000 are estimated to need retrofitting. From the truckers' point of view, that's still a tough haul in today's economy. Here's Bob Ramorino, President of Road Star Trucking in Hayward and head of the California Trucking Association, discussing how the new regulations could affect his business.

Overall, the expected cost is about $5.5 billion. About $1 billion of bond money will be available to make that transition easier for truckers.

And not just for truckers. Diesel buses will need to meet the requirement, as well. And blood centers are concerned about retrofitting their bloodmobiles.

If retrofitting really old diesel trucks doesn't quite make financial sense – that is, if the cost of retrofitting isn't worth the mileage left in some old diesel trucks — some truckers have the choice of junking those trucks and springing for new ones. But for bloodmobiles, with their specialized and complicated and expensive layouts, buying new could be financially crippling.

There's one more number to compare to all the others. According to the Air Resources Board, California loses about $40 billion a year due to lost job time and illnesses attributable to diesel exhaust. In the clip above, Dr. Tom Dailey, chief of pulmonary medicine at Kaiser Permanente, Santa Clara talks about some of those health dangers.

Listen to the Get the Soot Out radio report online.


Tags: air pollution, asthma, diesel, Environment, Health, kqedquest, pollution, Radio, transportation, trucks
]]> http://www.kqed.org/quest/blog/2008/12/05/reporters-notes-get-the-soot-out/feed/ 1 37.619011 -122.051944 http://www.kqed.org/quest/blog/2008/09/19/reporters-notes-fast-trains/ http://www.kqed.org/quest/blog/2008/09/19/reporters-notes-fast-trains/#comments Sat, 20 Sep 2008 00:10:20 +0000 David Gorn http://www.kqed.org/quest/blog/?p=836 Credit: California High Speed Rail AuthorityThe devil's in the details, so the details aren't entirely in the proposition. There are still many open questions about Prop. 1A on the November ballot, the proposal to bring high speed rail to California – and that makes sense, since there are a billion details, many of them contentious, in any $9.95 billion initiative and $45 billion project.

One of those outstanding questions is: Where will the train go?

In the Bay Area, that has been a huge issue. There are two proposed routes (check out an interactive map here) — one through the East Bay and the Altamont Corridor toward Sacramento, and the "preferred alternative," which runs down the Peninsula, through San Jose, Gilroy and the Pacheco Pass, and then loops back around to Sacramento.

Some rail advocates filed a lawsuit, pushing the state to do more study, particularly environmental study. The Pacheco Pass route cuts through some pristine landscape, and that worries environmentalists. And the Altamont route runs through some of the heaviest traffic corridors in the Bay Area, so a high speed train could relieve some of the East Bay's congestion. In addition, the Peninsula communities of Menlo Park and Atherton joined the lawsuit, because they're concerned about the potential of massive above-the-street construction there.

The Rail Authority says it's working with communities to answer their concerns. For instance, it's possible that some of the high speed rail stations could go below ground on the Peninsula — and that they hope to build BOTH routes eventually. Right now, they say, the Pacheco Pass route is preferred, but they point out that it's a long way till the tracks go down and the train starts running, and there will be a lot to work out over the next decade.




Listen to the Fast Trains radio report online.


Tags: election, Engineering, Environment, high speed rail, kqedquest, pollution, public transit, Radio, train, transportation
]]> http://www.kqed.org/quest/blog/2008/09/19/reporters-notes-fast-trains/feed/ 2 37.7898 -122.398 http://www.kqed.org/quest/blog/2008/08/22/reporters-notes-sea-of-plastic/ http://www.kqed.org/quest/blog/2008/08/22/reporters-notes-sea-of-plastic/#comments Sat, 23 Aug 2008 00:13:55 +0000 David Gorn http://www.kqed.org/quest/blog/?p=794

It's hard to imagine the scope and breadth of the Great Garbage Patch that lies in the North Pacific Gyre in the Pacific Ocean between the West Coast and Hawaii. It's estimated to be about double the size of Texas. Most people think of it as an island of trash, but that's not accurate. It's floating debris – about 80 percent of it plastic, according to Charles Moore of Algalita Marine Research Foundation – that is caught between ocean currents. And that debris is getting thicker and thicker in the water.

The current flows eastward at the bottom (southern end) of the Gyre, and westward along the top (northern edge) of the Gyre. And another current runs northward right along the West Coast. In the center of all of those currents is the Gyre, and that's where all the debris drifts. It's like the center of a hot tub where bubbles tend to form. Because of all of the garbage in the Gyre, Moore says it’s "like a toilet bowl that never flushes."

So it's not a matter of this giant area getting any bigger. The concern is that the area will become much denser with plastic, given the increasing amount of plastic and other detritus going into our ocean. Plastic doesn't biodegrade, but it does degrade into smaller pieces, and those pieces are making the water in the Gyre a lot thicker and soupier. Right now, Moore says, there are places in the Gyre where plastic bits outnumber plankton 6 to 1.

There are five Gyres in oceans around the world, and data is just starting to be collected on how much trash and plastic are in all of them. Moore pegs the estimated amount of plastic in the North Pacific Gyre at 3 million tons.

What can be done about it? Biologists and environmentalists all have similar suggestions. Make less trash. Bring your own cup to the coffee shop. Use paper to-go containers at restaurants. Bring your own reusable bags to the grocery store. Recycle plastic containers. Try not to use single-use plastic water bottles. And volunteer for a beach cleanup, since the trash washing up on the beaches is pretty constant.

Listen to the Sea of Plastic radio report online, and find additional resources and links.


Tags: birds, Environment, kqedquest, North Pacific Gyre, ocean, plastic, pollution, Radio
]]> http://www.kqed.org/quest/blog/2008/08/22/reporters-notes-sea-of-plastic/feed/ 8 36.7948 -121.785 http://www.kqed.org/quest/blog/2008/08/12/producer39s-notes58-ghost-fleet/ http://www.kqed.org/quest/blog/2008/08/12/producer39s-notes58-ghost-fleet/#comments Tue, 12 Aug 2008 19:57:43 +0000 Amy Miller http://www.kqed.org/quest/blog/?p=762


UPDATE on 10/23/09: From the San Francisco Chronicle – "Two World War II cargo ships moored among Benicia's fabled "ghost fleet" since the late 1940s will be towed out of Suisun Bay next month, scrubbed clean in dry dock and ultimately sent to Texas to be broken up and sold for scrap".

Read more about the clean-up effort in the Chronicle here.


On the surface of the story, the Ghost Fleet of Suisun Bay (commonly called the "Mothball Fleet" but most accurately referred to as the Suisun Bay National Defense Reserve Fleet) is leaking toxic waste in the form of peeling ship paint containing nasty heavy metals into an already stressed bay ecosystem. Bad guys: Mothball Fleet. Good guys: Enviros who are suing. Simple, right?

But when we began digging into the story, we found the origins of the problem and current impasse to be a bit more convoluted. I'll attempt to quickly summarize: The fleet has been there since the 1940's. It wasn't until 2006 that it came to light that the exterior paint is peeling from the ships and falling into the bay. Many tons of toxic heavy metals have already fallen into Suisun Bay and there's a lot more to be had. Oddly enough, the story was initially triggered by a study that was commissioned by the federal body who oversees the fleet, the Department of Transportation's Maritime Administration, or MARAD for short. So the Contra Costa Times got a hold of a draft of that report and now, the ships are at the center of a different kind of battle long after they've been decommissioned.

Environmental groups (NRDC, Arc Ecology and San Francisco Bay Keeper), community leaders and water regulators justifiably want MARAD to either remove or better maintain the ships so that they are not polluting these waters that serve as both fishing and nursery grounds for several fragile or threatened species. That includes humans who are often out there catching fish for dinner. Historically, MARAD has been regularly removing and dismantling the ships but like most federal bodies whose charter was drafted during WWII, alacrity is not at the top of their mission statement.



View Suisun Bay's Mothball Fleet in a larger map

The real issue now seems to be that MARAD has had to completely stop removing ships because they can't clean their hulls of potentially hazardous invasive biological species (to comply with the U.S. Coast Guard's National Aquatic Invasive Species Act of 2003) without scraping more paint into the bay. So, until someone develops a system to clean the hulls that doesn't scrape more paint into the water, the San Francisco Regional Water Quality Control Board says that MARAD can't remove the ships.

The one possible solution that everyone pretty much agrees upon is to dismantle the ships locally so that they don’t have to be cleaned of invasive species. There are currently no ship dismantlers operating on the West Coast but there's a company called Allied Defense Recycling located on Vallejo's Mare Island Naval Shipyard that's chomping at the bit to tear those ships apart. But they've also run into red tape. And while they await permits and approvals from multiple parties, the ships continue to rot and pollute.

It's always easier to write a story with clear heroes and villains. But to me, it does seem that MARAD, environmental groups and water regulators all agree that we have a problem that must be addressed. So, what now? I guess we wait. Perhaps this lawsuit will kick start some aspect of the clean-up process but in the meantime, frustration mounts for all parties involved and many pointing index fingers are suffering from overuse.

Watch the "Ghost Fleet" TV Story online, as well as find additional links and resources. Also, check out the online photo set of the ships and behind the scenes images.


Tags: Bay Keeper, bay pollution, heavy metals, kqedquest, MARAD, Mothball Fleet, NRDC, pollution, san francisco bay, scamping, ship recycling, ships, Suisun Bay, toxics, TV, water, World War II
]]> http://www.kqed.org/quest/blog/2008/08/12/producer39s-notes58-ghost-fleet/feed/ 1 38.077398 -122.097694 http://www.kqed.org/quest/blog/2008/04/25/mercury-in-the-bay-part-2/ http://www.kqed.org/quest/blog/2008/04/25/mercury-in-the-bay-part-2/#comments Sat, 26 Apr 2008 00:51:41 +0000 Amy Standen http://www.kqed.org/quest/blog/2008/04/25/mercury-in-the-bay-part-2/ 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.




Tags: Environment, fish, Health, KQED, kqedquest, mercury, pollution, Radio
]]> http://www.kqed.org/quest/blog/2008/04/25/mercury-in-the-bay-part-2/feed/ 3 37.8614 -122.322 http://www.kqed.org/quest/blog/2008/04/18/reporters-notes-mercury-in-the-bay-part-1/ http://www.kqed.org/quest/blog/2008/04/18/reporters-notes-mercury-in-the-bay-part-1/#comments Sat, 19 Apr 2008 02:29:06 +0000 Amy Standen http://www.kqed.org/quest/blog/2008/04/18/reporters-notes-mercury-in-the-bay-part-1/

View Larger Map

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.




Tags: almaden, cinnibar, gold, gold rush, KQED, kqedquest, mercury, mine, mining, pollution, quicksilver, Radio, water, watershed
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