Clean Water Program

Just in time for California Coastal Cleanup Day, an insert in today’s East Bay Express provides readers with ways to help protect San Francisco Bay. The East Bay Municipal Utility District invites Bay residents to volunteer for creek and Bay cleanups on Saturday, and take everyday steps for the health of the environment, like fixing leaky pipes and flushing only the 3 P’s – not wipes or medications.

Guadalupe River is contaminated with mercury mining wastes from runoff associated with the historic New Almaden Mining District in the upper watershed that produced 40 million kilograms during its working life (1850-1975) and with PCB and other urban pollutants from a long history of urbanization and industrial land uses.

SFEI has been monitoring pollutant concentrations in the Guadalupe River during winter storms since October 2002. The result is one of the world’s most extensive data sets on mercury, PCBs, and other pollutant concentrations and loads in an urban river.  In a recent manuscript, SFEI staff used the dataset to answer three major questions.

SFEI and several agency partners recently completed a multi-year, EPA funded project called Flood Control 2.0. The goal of the project was to develop information that is useful for integrating habitat restoration into flood management at the Bay edge. Project outputs are now available at floodcontrol.sfei.org.