SFEI has been asked to characterize selenium in six wastewater treatment effluent. Facilities will be sampled four times in 2011; twice in the wet season and twice in the dry season.
The San Francisco Bay Long-Term Management Strategy (LTMS) is a collaborative partnership with the purpose to conduct dredging activities in an economically prudent and environmentally sound manner.
The San Francisco Bay Fish Project is a two-year project to reduce exposure to harmful chemicals from eating San Francisco Bay fish. This Project is part of the Regional Water Quality Control Board’s strategies to reduce the levels of PCB and mercury in the Bay (these strategies are called Total Maximum Daily Loads, or TMDLs). The Project is intended to improve communication to the public about how to reduce their exposure to PCBs and mercury from consuming San Francisco Bay fish while the Water Board works to reduce the levels of PCBs and mercury in those fish.
The TRC was updated on the RMP Master Planning effort, and discussed developments in the Nutrients strategy, RMP modeling efforts, sportfish monitoring and water quality report card.
Copper has been a priority concern due to its acute toxicity to aquatic life. As a result of a significant body of work demonstrating that much of the copper in the Bay is not bioavailable and the on-going observations of concentrations below water quality objectives, the Bay was delisted for copper. Site-specific objectives (SSO) for copper were developed in 2007 that establish criteria for various segments within the Bay. The site-specific objective specifically called for further study on the potential toxicity of copper to the olfactory system of salmonids.
There is an urgent need for estimates of stormwater loads by watershed and by region. The recently adopted Municipal Regional Permit (MRP) specifically requires generations of additional information on the loads of sediment and contaminants. In addition, the Mercury and PCB TMDLs require reductions in watershed loads by 50 and 90 percent, respectively. Understanding the loads from representative watersheds is critical for addressing these information needs and achieving these load reductions.
More than 100,000 chemicals have been registered or approved for commercial use in the US. For many of these chemicals, major information gaps limit evaluations of their potential risks, and environmental monitoring of these chemicals has not been required by regulatory agencies. Nevertheless, researchers and government agencies have begun to collect occurrence, fate, and toxicity data for a number of these chemicals.
