Tules on Twitchell Island in the Delta. (Photo: Josh Cassidy/KQED)

With thousands of acres of rich farmland, the Delta has a long agricultural legacy. But farming there can be a risky business. Dozens of farms have been flooded over the past half century as aging levees have collapsed.

That became a reality for farmer Rudy Mussi on the morning of June 3, 2004. It was clear, sunny day. "You never expect a flood in the summer months," says Mussi.

Mussi was growing corn and asparagus on lower Jones Tract, an island in the Delta, 10 miles west of Stockton. That morning, he got a phone call. Water was flooding onto his farmland.

"Your heart stops for a second or two and then realism sets in. And you just start moving your equipment and get it to high ground," says Mussi.

How did a flood happen a on a sunny day? It's because of a basic rule of physics. Mussi farmed on an island below sea level, like a lot of the islands in the Delta. The Delta used to be a huge swath of wetlands, where two major rivers met San Francisco Bay. Today, earthen levees hold that water back – most of the time.

"Once a break occurs, you know, there's no way you're gonna stop that, not with 10 feet of water on the other side," Mussi says. Draining the island and repairing the levees around Jones Tract cost about $90 million.

The levee break on Jones Tract in 2004. (Photo: CA Department of Water Resources)

It wasn't an isolated incident. Over the last century, more than 150 levees have failed in the Delta.

Delta Infrastructure at Risk

"This is how we get ourselves in kind of an arms race between the water and the land," says Jeff Mount, professor with the Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California-Davis.

Levee-building began in the 1850s, when settlers came to the Delta for the rich soil. More than a thousand miles of levees were built. "This network of levees through time had to get bigger and bigger for a very basic reason: the land has been steadily lowering," says Mount.

As farmers exposed the rich peat soil, it started decomposing. The land level dropped; "In some places they talked about four inches per year," says Mount. Today, it's less than an inch per year thanks to better farming practices.

Add up all those inches over the past century and some islands are now 30 feet below sea level. That puts a lot of stress on the levees. There are also other concerns: rising sea levels and extreme floods. "And then the big 800-pound gorilla in the room – we're due for a very large earthquake on the San Andreas system."

Add up all these risks and Mount says there's a two-thirds chance of a catastrophic levee failure in the next 50 years. That, of course, affects farmers and communities in the Delta, but it could also impact California's water supply.

"The raindrops that fall in Mount Shasta are consumed by people in San Diego. Water moves a great distance and this is one of the critical hubs in that system," says Mount.

Fixing the Delta's levees is estimated to cost billions. But on some islands, scientists are experimenting with a new fix.

Farming Carbon

Peat soil samples on Twitchell Island. (Photo: Josh Cassidy/KQED)

On a windy day on Twitchell Island in the Delta, ecologist Lisa Windham-Myers of the US Geological Survey pushes her way through a wetland filled with a tall, reed-like plant known as tule.

"The plant grows… some of these are 16 feet tall. They're just huge," she says. That growth is changing the ground we're standing on. Windham-Myers pulls out a sample of the dark peat soil.

The wetland produces soil at a rapid rate – four inches a year on average. That's huge, says USGS scientist Brian Bergamaschi, in a place where the land is sinking. "These islands are like bowls and the way we see projects like this is you want to fill up the middle of that bowl and help level out the whole island."

Planting wetlands like this one could raise the land level and water table on the inside of levees, relieving some of the pressure. But why would farmers want to replace cash crops with tule? Windham-Myers points to the soil.

"This is basically almost 100 percent carbon. These take up far more than a typical forest environment," she says. California is setting up a market for carbon, as part of the state's effort to cut global warming emissions. Early next year, companies that need to reduce their emissions could pay farmers to store carbon in wetlands like this.

USGS scientist Brian Bergamaschi talks with Delta farmer Al Medvitch. (Photo: Josh Cassidy/KQED)

Today, two farmers are here checking out the project: Steve Mello, a Delta farmer on Tyler Island and Al Medvitch, a farmer in the Montezuma Hills.

"The potential has been demonstrated well. You guys are standing in the middle of it. But in order to move from here to market, we need to develop a lot more techniques so people can come and verify that the carbon is stored," says Brian Bergamaschi, describing how wetland farming might work.

Both farmers seem open to the idea. But Mello says ultimately, it depends on the bottom line. "It would absolutely need to cash flow. While it could dovetail with levee stability, it would still need to generate enough to amortize your property value."

Still, Mello says assuming carbon prices are high enough, growing patches of wetlands could be a feasible way to improve the levees and to stay farming.

Photo of Ribbon Cutting by Christopher Lane

5/22/12 Update: I was just sent images from Christopher Lane, Assistant Director of Marketing at the Stanford Shopping Center, who helped produce this press event so I'm updating this blog with one of his images. (A link to all the images is given at the end of this blog.)

On the afternoon of Tuesday, May 15, 2012, I hitched a ride with my closest friend from San Francisco out to Palo Alto to attend the ribbon cutting for the first public fast charger in California for electric vehicles in Stanford Mall. This was definitely a green carpet event as it took place in the shopping mall’s garage within walking distance of the fast charger. Many people drove in zero emission cars to attend and the podium was lined on both sides with electric vehicles. Out of the many electric vehicles that were parked, most of them were Nissan Leafs, the same model we drove in from San Francisco. I counted 17 electric vehicles in all which I was told was a modest turnout at a EV event!

Now I’m not new to electric vehicles and the infrastructure. I tagged along with Obrie Hostetter, the Northern California EV Infrastructure Director at 350 Green, a developer of electric vehicle (EV) charging station networks. Her company, along with a partnership with the city of Palo Alto and John Ryan Company, Inc., was responsible for the permitting and construction necessary to place the Level 3 Fast Charger.

A level 2 charger will take about 7 hours to fully charge an EV battery; the Level 3 fast charger can charge the battery up to 80% in 30 minutes. Most EV owners do the majority of their charging at night at home and stay within a close proximity mitigating “range anxiety”. To give you an example: the ideal range of a Nissan Leaf for freeway driving is about 100 miles. With an infrastructure of fast chargers, that range can be increased without spending a lot of time to recharge the battery. This is just the first step in a fast charger infrastructure, as plans are in place to install 25 public fast chargers near retail locations by the fall of 2012.

EV drivers sign up for a payment card from 350Green to use the fast charger station. Use of the card and how to properly use the station was demonstrated after remarks from Palo Alto's Mayor Yiaway Yeh as well as the partners involved in making the public charging station possible. There were quite a few statistics that came out that were enlightening about this new technological movement: 1) There are over 3000 EVs in the Silicon Valley making Palo Alto a great corner stone for the EV infrastructure; the fast charger has already gotten quite a bit of use — since being turned on, it’s been used 3 to 4 times a day; 136 EV drivers have already signed up for the payment card to use at the station and the infrastructure to follow.

So what is the best ribbon to cut at such a green event? Applause went up when a gas hose was cut in front of the fast charger station and the Nissan Leaf it was charging with 100% renewable energy!

More photos of this event can be found here.

Mechanical engineer Jason Moore knows this all too well. To conduct an experiment on the mechanics of bicycle-riding, he even used a sewing machine.

Moore’s doctoral dissertation on the complex mechanisms by which a rider balances atop a bike required him to build a research bicycle at the University of California, Davis. We filmed Moore for our story about the science of riding a bicycle. In this slideshow you can explore some of the bike’s components and the work that went into creating them:

The view from inside the Oakland Fire Department's burn trailer during a rollover fire. Photograph courtesy of Kara Platoni.

Looking back, the only field trip that stands out from my grade school days was our trip to the San Francisco Exploratorium. What I remember best is the tactile dome. I entered into total darkness and spent the next hour feeling, crawling and sliding my way through a 3-D maze.

That excursion was fairly tame compared to the exploits Kara Platoni, Eric Simons, and Casey Miner take on for their podcast series, The Field Trip, which broadcasts their science adventures out in the real world. For their first series that debuted last year, they explored fermentation by visiting the Cultured Pickle Shop, climbed into the Oakland Fire Department’s burn trailer for a kitchen fire simulation, interviewed a commercial salmon fisherman on his boat in the Berkeley Marina and followed a NASA crew at the bottom of a lakebed in Canada for their research study on Mars. To add a little more intellectual rigor to their adventures, they also interviewed an expert guest in their radio studio for each episode.

“We think our strong suit is going places, learning new things and being a proxy for the listener,” explained Kara Platoni. “We didn’t know of any other show where it was about going out and having a science adventure.”

As friends and UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism colleagues, the genuine personal chemistry of this trio is evident in their podcasts and blogs. They're definitely having fun on their adventures while taking advantage of the wealth of knowledge and opportunities offered by scientists in the Bay Area — and the listener is invited to tag along.

The studio interview segments are loosely scripted, but the field trips are taped live. The key to making this work is the trio’s insatiable curiosity for science. After lots of preparation, they just go out and ask the questions that interest them in a humorous and spontaneous way that engages their listeners.

When selecting topics for their episodes, they focus on stories that take science out of the laboratory. “Our ideal narrator for the field trip is someone whose life just embodies science everyday. It is part of their job, hobby and home,” explained Platoni, “so we can show people how science is something that happens in your everyday life, not just something that happens in school.” Casey Miner added, “And it should be fun, interesting, weird or gross.”

Their field trips will continue with a second series this spring and cover the diverse topics of coffee, taxidermy, telescopes and local inventors. One upcoming episode on telescopes will visit the Chabot Space & Science Center Observatory and feature a studio interview with UC Berkeley astronomer Geoff Marcy. Beginning today, a new episode will air weekly each Monday through June 4. You can listen to a preview of their new season here.

Free episodes are available on their website, iTunes, Public Radio Exchange and Sound Cloud. You can also follow them on Facebook and Twitter.

Water from the Delta has been fought over for more than a half century. Reporter Lauren Sommer sat down with Jason Peltier, the Deputy General Manager of Westlands Water District to discuss the future of the Delta and California’s water supply. The Westlands Water District is a 600,000 acre agricultural district on the west side of the San Joaquin valley. It’s part of the 3 million acres of farmland that’s served by water that’s moved from the Delta.

For another viewpoint, check out this Q&A with Barry Nelson of the Natural Resources Defense Council or see the rest of our series coverage.

Jason Peltier, Deputy General Manager of Westlands Water District

Where does the water for Westlands agriculture come from?

Through our history, California has accomplished great engineering feats with a system of dams and reservoirs. Those dams, like Shasta and Folsom, allow us to store water and move it through time. In other words, from wet season to dry season. And the aqueducts allow us to move the water from place to place.

How has the allocation of water changed over the years?

Over the last 20 years, our farmers have seen dramatic swings in their water supply, mostly on the downside. We’ve experienced 40%, 60%, up to 90% reductions in deliveries out of the Delta. In some cases there were dry years, but mostly it’s driven by environmental laws, the Endangered Species Act and the Central Valley Project Improvement Act. They’ve had a rough couple of decades dealing with uncertainty, unpredictability. You can’t get a loan to farm unless you can show the banker what water you have. And they don’t have a lot of confidence in going to their bankers.

Fifteen years ago, people were astonished by it. Now they are learning how to cope with it to some extent. The district has purchased 100,000 acres of farmland and taken it out of irrigated agriculture. Our farmers have shifted their crops to higher value, permanent crops, so they can afford to buy water on the market when the projects can’t deliver water. 80% of the district is on drip irrigation today. We’ve seen our water rates go up tremendously — our cheapest water is $100 an acre foot. Sometimes on the market, farmers are paying $400 an acre-foot.

Where do those fluctuations come from?

Part of these 20 years of water supply uncertainty has been driven primarily by environmental laws and restrictions. The restrictions that emanate out of the Endangered Species Act in the form of the biological opinions issued by the federal agencies have been kind of an added wrinkle of complexity for us. We can look at the results of reallocating water supply over the last two decades, and here in the last few years, you know, the fish have not done any better. We’ve seen 40 million acre-feet reallocated from human use to environmental use, and we haven’t seen the kind of response any of us would like to see. It’s very frustrating.

Something Westlands has sued over–

Well, yes, there’s been a lot of litigation and I’m sure there will be going forth because the stakes are so high. We’re quite happy to use the third branch of government to help to decide some of these huge differences we have with the administration. You know, we lose more than we win. But you know, it helps, even losing creates some certainty that, in the big picture, is of great value to us.

Now, there’s a new planning effort underway to create more certainty, right?

All the stakeholders kind of came together and said you know, what we’re living, this status quo is unacceptable for all of our interests. So we’ve got to try and find a new approach, a new way to address and resolve the conflicts between water project operations and our fisheries and our ecosystem. And that’s what gave rise to the Bay Delta Conservation Planning effort.

That plan, the Bay Delta Conservation Plan, calls for a large tunnel or canal to take water around the Delta, instead of through it.

It’s been recognized for decades that the location of the export pumps in the southern end of the Delta is a real problem for water quality issues, for vulnerability to earthquakes, for fish on some levels. So, we’re kind of trying to figure out how can we relocate those intakes up to the Sacramento River? We would be able to positively screen for fish, because we’d have a river flowing by. So there’s the alternative conveyance, probably cost $12 billion. And we think, you know, it is expensive. But it’s not because we have such a huge population base to spread our costs over. There’s a huge part of the economy of California that is at-risk today. And we shouldn’t accept that. We shouldn’t live with it.

The plan also calls for a lot of habitat restoration. Who should pay for that?

Our current planning target for recreation of intertidal habitat is about 60,000 acres. It’s to be determined how that’s going to be paid for. But in our minds, most of that is a public investment. That land was at one time fully in contact with water. With the Swamp and Overflow Act in the mid-1800s, islands were created, levees were built, and that water-land contact was lost. We can’t go back and find the people that built the levees in the 1800s, but we can recognize that there’s a broad public value for increasing intertidal habitat and trying to recreate some of the food conditions. Creating better habitat creates more food for the lower-end of the food chain, which then hopefully will work its way up to help the native fish.

Fish recovery is good for everybody, right?

The Delta is not dying – it’s a healthy and vibrant place. But there are those that think that the system is over-subscribed. We hear, “we don’t have enough water in California; we’ve got too many people, too many demands.” Some years, that’s the case. But there are also a lot of years when we have absolutely plenty of water in the system to meet the reasonable needs that are out there.

Plenty of water to meet the needs of both water users and the species?

All the beneficial uses. The average through the years is at about 80% of the water that flows into the Delta goes out to the ocean. And after a new conveyance is built, we’ll still be at about 80%. If somebody could tell me specifically where additional water is needed, when it’s needed and what good it’s going to do, we could have a conversation. As it is, it’s kind of a bumper sticker kind of a debate.

Right, fish vs. farms.

Farmers and fishermen have a heck of a lot more in common than they have dividing them. One of the saddest things for me right now is that we can’t work together more constructively: they want healthy fishery to sustain their fishing, and we want a healthy fishery to sustain our ability to export water. And we have an identity of interest. It’s just how we come at the problem.

When Spanish explorers first viewed the Delta from the top of Mt. Diablo in the late 1700’s, they thought they had discovered an inland sea. A vast low-lying, partly submerged marshland of wetland plants (tules) and winding tidal channels, the Delta teemed with birds and game animals, including elk, antelope, and grizzly bears. It’s only human inhabitants – small settlements of Miwok Indians – fished and hunted there during the drier months.

Today the Delta, dotted with levees and constructed islands, bears little resemblance to its native state; much has been reclaimed for agricultural use. But it wasn’t until the mid-Nineteenth Century, just over 150 years ago, that its momentous physical transformation began. It’s been a Herculean effort to meet the steep demands of California’s increasingly crowded and insatiably thirsty population, nearly two-thirds of who rely on the Delta as a primary water source. A stark symbol of our quest to bend nature to our will, the Delta also remains the epicenter of an epic drama of seemingly insurmountable political battles and power struggles, pitting north against south; farmer against environmentalist.

So how did it get like this?

Take a quick paddle through the key events in the slideshow above.

Water from the Delta has been fought over for more than a half century. Reporter Lauren Sommer sat down with Barry Nelson, the Senior Policy Analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council to discuss the future of the Delta and California’s water supply.

For another viewpoint, check out this Q&A with Jason Peltier of the Westlands Water District or see the rest of our series coverage.

Barry Nelson, Senior Policy Analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council.

When were the first signs that the Delta ecosystem was in trouble?

Since the 1960s, we’ve seen a steadily growing trend of diversions from the Delta. If you look at long-term averages, you filter out the impacts of droughts and wet years, we’ve taken more and more and more water from the Delta pretty steadily for the last 50 years, and that really hit a crisis point in the ‘90s. That’s the point at which we started seeing the winter-run salmon and the Delta smelt being protected under the state and federal Endangered Species Act.

And ten years ago, things really changed dramatically. Starting in 2000, suddenly we started taking a lot more water out of the Delta for a lot of reasons. It was an enormous increase, about a 20% increase on average. And the ecosystem crashed. It was called the “pelagic organism decline.” But what it meant was pretty simple: that everything swimming in the Delta was in deep trouble.

So now we’ve got half a dozen species in deep trouble in the estuary and a fishing industry that’s honestly fighting for survival.

What caused their decline?

A lot of work has been done looking at this catastrophic, across-the-board, collapse of the Bay Delta ecosystem. And the bottom line was recognition that, while there are lots of stressors, there are pollution problems in the ecosystem. We do have invasive species like clams that have come from overseas. But the core problem is the amount of water we pump out of that system.

There was a huge fight in the courts over this issue. And ultimately, the courts and then the agencies imposed a new set of rules that really have returned us to the level of pumping we saw for about 30 years prior to the 2000’s.

And what were those rules on pumping?

The Delta’s a complicated ecosystem. As water flows through it, it flows through it in a complicated pattern. Fish have evolved to survive with that pattern; water coming through at certain times of year, and flowing through those Delta channels into the Bay.

Basically, the federal rules control two things: the amount of water that flows all the way through the ecosystem into the Bay in order to maintain a healthy ecosystem and the extent to which some of the channels within the Delta flow backwards.

The pumps in the south Delta are so powerful that they literally reverse the direction of flow in these Delta channels. And if you’re a young migrating salmon swimming downstream towards the ocean as Mother Nature programmed you, when the Delta channels are flowing the wrong direction, it’s very easy for those fish to follow that water and get sucked right into the pumps. And that’s why those pumps have killed in the last decade or so not a million fish, not tens of millions of fish, but over a hundred million young fish killed just at the pumps.

So if you could design your ideal plan for the Delta, what would that look like?

First, we know we need to see some real habitat restoration in the Delta. We’ve converted almost every scrap of habitat in the Delta to farmland, and in order to restore a healthy Delta, we need to return some of that to habitat. And actually I think that’s something where there’s a fair amount of agreement. How you do that is not trivial, but I think there’s a fair amount of agreement around that. And given the challenge of maintaining all of the existing levees in perpetuity, the question is: are we going to do it in a planned and thoughtful way?

Second, we really don’t have a choice but to maintain a lot of our Delta levees for a couple of decades. It’s going to take a long time to make major changes in the Delta. And there is so much infrastructure, the Delta communities, Delta farming, and water supply that depend on Delta levees today.

Third, from our perspective, the challenge we face in terms of exporting water from the Delta is first figuring out how much water we can safely pump from the Delta. And then designing a facility around that.

You’re talking about the “peripheral canal,” right? A canal or tunnel that would take water around the Delta?

Well, there are two conflicting visions for a facility in the Delta. One is the old plan. Fifty years ago, the state of California was planning to build a peripheral canal around the Delta, an enormous facility that would allow those pumps in the south Delta to take water from the north Delta and pump it around the Delta rather than through Delta channels. And that was really a simple proposal to simply take more water from the ecosystem. We know now that that, the amount of water that that would have taken would have been devastating to the ecosystem.

That’s the old version of the canal. But there’s a new version out there. And that is a proposal to deal with earthquake risks in the Delta. It’s to deal with the fact that there really are earthquake risks in the Delta that represent significant threats to water supply. And a facility could provide a lifeline in case the Delta was to temporarily fail. What we’re struggling with right now is that we have competing interests in California advancing two different visions for what the problem is in the Delta.

With such a long history of disagreement, what are the chances of agreeing on a plan?

There’s a reason that the discussion on the Delta is so politically heated that people don’t usually talk about. And that is California is out of rivers. If you look around the state of California at the Colorado River and the Klamath River and the Trinity River, the Owens River, the San Joaquin, on and on, we’ve really started to hit real hard physical limits in the amount of water we can take out of all of those rivers.

Ten years ago we weren’t paying enough attention to sea level rise impacts. We weren’t really thinking about earthquake risks in, in the Delta. So there really is a sense that we need to figure this problem out this time.

That’s what makes the Delta debate so compelling. The Delta is an incredibly important ecosystem. It’s an incredibly important place for a quarter million people who live there. And it’s a tremendously important water supply for the state of California. There are a lot of reasons why our planning efforts today could fail, but it’s so important to the future of the state. It’s so important to the health of the Bay and the Bay Area, it’s so important to the future of the salmon industry, to the residents of the Delta. We can’t let that effort fail.

If you’re like most Californians, you’ve probably never heard of the Delta or why it’s important to the state’s economy and wildlife. In three minutes, we’ll explain how the Delta is a key part of California’s water supply and why it’s been the focus of a decades-long water battle.

Image credit: Flickr/great_sea

Dogs’ amazing sense of smell can help police officers find lost people, illegal drugs or smuggled food. Scientists use trained sniffer dogs to track pythons in the Everglades or find whales by smelling their floating poop. And some dogs can smell cancer too.

Scientists are working to build devices that can detect odors as sensitively as a dog’s nose. Now researchers in South Korea have built a sensor that works like a dog’s nose, without using canine sniffing cells. The new device combines a simplified version of the cells in dog’s nose with tiny transistors similar to those in our computers. It senses hexanal, a chemical commonly released by rotting food.

When a dog takes a whiff of something (possibly stinky to us!), chemical vapors bind to matching proteins on the surface of different cells in its nose. Binding of the aroma molecule sends a cascade of charged ions coursing through the cell. Those ions create an electric field that travels through the cell. This chemical and electrical wave travels along connected cells and neurons until it reaches the dog’s brain as a nerve impulse, signaling that the animal encountered that particular smell.

Tai Hyun Park and Seunghun Hong, of Seoul National University, with their colleagues, recreated a simplified version of the detecting cells in a dog’s nose using tiny bubbles made from cell membrane. The scientists engineered human kidney cells to produce the canine receptor protein for hexanal, a chemical released by rotting food.

These cells naturally contain a handful of accessory proteins that generate the ion cascade once the smell molecule binds to its receptor. The researchers shook the engineered cells and tiny bits of membrane pinched off into tiny bubbles that contained the dog receptor protein and the accessory proteins (see left side of the picture below).

Diagram of new sensor. On right: The bubble contains dog smell receptor protein (labeled olfactory) and accessory proteins that allow calcium ions to flow inside when the receptor protein binds hexanal. The bubble sits atop a web of carbon nanotubes. Left: Calcium ions flow into the bubble when the receptor protein binds the target, hexanal. Image credit: Seunghun Hong, Seoul National University in Korea

Then the scientists placed these bubbles atop a web of conducting carbon nanotubes, hollow cylinders made from carbon sheets. When the receptor protein in the bubble captures hexanal, the other proteins begin the chemical cascade that ends with calcium ions flowing into the bubble (right side of the picture above).

The new sensor does not detect the electric field created by those ions, as a dog’s brain eventually would. It measures how that electric field influences current flowing through a nanotube transistor.

In the transistor, carbon nanotubes stretch between two electrodes and current flows freely through the nanotubes. The positive electric field created by the ions inside the bubble repels the positive charges zipping through the carbon nanotubes. Without free flowing positive charges, the nanotube cannot easily conduct electric current. So when hexanal binds to the bubble, calcium ions rush inside and the sensor reports a decreased electric current (Analyst, DOI: 10.1039/c2an16274a). The more hexanal, the lower the reported current.

The sensor could detect the 6-carbon hexanal chain even when it was mixed with similar chemicals 5-, 7- and 8-carbons long. It even signaled when covered with diluted spoiled milk.

Hong says that these sensors could be used to evaluate the quality of wine, coffee and perfume by standardizing and quantifying their smells. Dogs have 220 million different smell receptors (pdf). But there’s no need to make one sensor for each smell receptor in a dog’s nose, Hong says. Perhaps scientists would need 10 to 20 different sensors that correspond to the characteristic odors of the wine or coffee, he says.

It was on November 18, 1936, that the two sections of the main span were joined in the middle. From the holdings of the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District, Used with Permission, www.goldengate.org

Fred Brusati. Photograph courtesy of Labor Archives and Research Center, SFSU.

When it opened in 1937, the Golden Gate Bridge was the longest suspension bridge ever built, constructed in one of the world’s most challenging settings. For the men who poured the concrete, and drove in each steel rivet, it was a life changing experience.

In many ways, Fred Brusati was typical of the kinds of men who worked building the Bridge. His parents had emigrated from Milano, Italy to Montana, where Fred’s father worked as a copper miner. After Fred was born in 1911, his parents moved to San Rafael.

Fred spent a year in high school, then went looking for work.

“One day I heard they were going to start the Golden Gate Bridge,” he told interviewer Harvey Schwartz in 1987, as part of an oral history project conducted by Labor Archives and Research Center at San Francisco State University.

“And I says well, I’ll try it. I never been up 746 feet but I’ll try it anyhow.”

Tough work, in tough times

Photograph courtesy of Labor Archives and Research Center, SFSU.

It was the middle of the Great Depression. Mary Currie, a spokeswoman for the Golden Gate Bridge District, says getting a job on the Golden Gate Bridge was like winning the lottery.

“The men would line up and wait for a chance to get a job, literally hoping someone would hurt themselves so they’d be the one to get the job.”

Slim Lambert, a cowboy from Washington state, was hired as a roustabout. He helped build a temporary railway to carry equipment across the bridge span, making about 10 dollars a day.

“Things were a lot different in those days,” he told Schwartz.

“You hardly ever slowed down to a trot. If you went to the restroom and stayed more than 30 seconds, the boss would come see what was wrong with you. Lots of men were fired right on the spot, if the boss thought they were malingering a little bit. There was men waiting right there for a job.”

Construction challenges

The Marin tower of the Golden Gate Bridge under construction in 1933. From the holdings of the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District, Used with Permission, www.goldengate.org

Construction of the Golden Gate Bridge marked the first time anyone had built a suspension bridge support with a tower in the open ocean. The conditions, above and below the water, were harsh.

Divers faced powerful currents as they helped anchor the massive concrete bridge support onto the ocean floor.

And up on the towers, workers stuffed newspapers in their jackets to keep warm.

Martin Adams, born in Arkansas in 1912, called the bridge “the coldest place I’ve ever worked.”

“You put all the clothes on you had and worked, worked hard, or you’d freeze.”

Cold was the least of their concerns. Bridge spokeswoman Mary Currie says workers on the bridge didn’t just fear death. They expected it.

Workers on the main cable of the Golden Gate Bridge. From the holdings of the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District, Used with Permission, www.goldengate.org

“At the time, the industry standard was that for every million dollars spent, there would be a loss of life,” says Currie.

The bridge was estimated to cost $35 million. But structural engineer Joseph Strauss, who headed the project, was determined to keep workers safe. Hard hats were required. And Strauss insisted on one feature that Mary Currie says was at the time completely novel: A safety net.

“It was a $130,000 expense at the time, which was considered an exorbitant expense. But he really fought for it and was able to get the board of directors to permit it.”

Over four years of construction, the safety net saved the lives of 19 men. They called themselves the “Halfway to Hell Club.”

For nearly four years, the Golden Gate Bridge project seemed charmed with an almost perfect safety record. And then, one day, everything changed.

For the roadway construction, Strauss insisted on the addition of the $130,000 safety net. From the holdings of the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District, Used with Permission, www.goldengate.org

The collapse

The task that day, on February 17th, 1937 was to remove a wooden scaffold that had been built underneath the bridge platform. To reach it, workers had hung a temporary catwalk. Each time they stripped off a section of wood, workers would move the catwalk another few feet.

“And as they started to move it,” recalled Martin Adams, who was standing nearby, “that’s when it went down. 9:20 in the morning, it went down.”

The catwalk hadn’t been attached properly. It broke off and plunged into the ocean, dragging the safety net with it.

Dummatzen's family after their son's death. Photograph courtesy of Labor Archives and Research Center, SFSU

Fred Brusati was working nearby when he heard someone shout that the catwalk had fallen. He rushed over to the side and saw a man clinging to a piece of steel. Brusati and a few others threw the man a rope, and hauled him up to safety.

“The man had a pipe in his mouth,” recalled Brusati. “He didn’t drop the pipe or nothing. He just started to walk toward San Francisco and I never did see him back there again.”

The real tragedy was below. Twelve men had fallen 220 feet into the water. One of them was Slim Lambert.

“People ask me what went through your mind? The only thing that went through my mind was survival. I knew that to have a prayer, I had to hit the water feet first.”

But when Lambert hit the water, his legs tangled in the safety net.

“That’s the only time I panicked during that whole thing,” said Lambert. “I was caught in the net and the net was headed for the bottom.”

Fred Dummatzen. Photograph courtesy of Labor Archives and Research Center, SFSU.

Lambert plunged so deep that when he surfaced he was bleeding from his ears. Bridge debris was everywhere.

“I got a couple of planks together for my self first, and then I saw Fred thrashing about. So I got him.”

Fred Dummatzen was 24 years old. Lambert pulled him up onto the planks and waited.

“I heard this power boat coming in. Put put put.”

It was a crab fisherman, coming in from sea. Lambert says there was so much junk in the water, he worried the driver would pass right by.

“He took another look around and his eye hit me. What I relief. I figured, by gosh, we’re gonna make it.”

Dummatzen died on the crab boat. But Lambert and another man, 51-year old carpenter named Oscar Osberg, survived the fall. Today, there’s a plaque on the south western side of the bridge at the entrance to the west sidewalk dedicated to the ten men who died that day.

Mary Currie says the workers she’s talked to don’t really remember the cold, or the danger. They felt lucky to be there.

At a time when the rest of the country was struggling to get by, six Bay Area counties agreed to spend what seemed like a fortune on a suspension bridge longer than any the world had ever seen.

“It was the people who had to rise up and see this as a symbol of hope, imagination, stick-to-itiveness,” says Currie. “They saw this bridge as something that would change their lives.”

And that, she says, was a pretty gutsy thing to have done.

The Golden Gate Bridge turns 75 on May 27th.