If you have been walking along Strawberry Creek on the UC Berkeley campus recently, you may have done a double-take: Much of the water is a bright green.
One reader, Linda Schacht Gage, was so taken aback by the color that she sent Berkeleyside the photo above, snapped on the north side of campus near University House. She asked us to investigate.
We turned to the person who knows Strawberry Creek the best (or at least has a public contact number) : Tim L. Pine, an environmental specialist at UC Berkeley’s Office of Environment, Health and Safety.
Pine said the green comes from a nontoxic dye that is used to check the quality of the pipes that feed into the creek.
“Utility plumbers are checking for cross-connections (where sanitary sewers may be attached to storm drains,” Pine wrote in an email. “These were fairly common way back in the early part of the 20th century and both the city and campus are very old.”