Bluestem Lake near Lincoln, Nebraska.

Bluestem Lake near Lincoln, Nebraska is five miles north of a coal-fired power plant. It is also one of 85 bodies of water in the state under a consumption advisory because of fish found to have elevated levels of mercury in their tissues. Half of the airborne mercury pollution in the US comes from coal-fired power plants. After years of study and debate, the EPA is planning to announce new limits on mercury from coal plants in November. Ken Winston of the Nebraska Sierra Club believes the agency is doing the right thing.

“When you burn coal, mercury goes up into the atmosphere,” Winston said. “It comes down in the form of rain. Fish eat it. People eat the fish. It can be very damaging and have long term negative impact on the development of children. So it’s something we need to get out of the environment as much as possible.”

The EPA says its proposed new mercury rules could reduce emissions across the country by 91%. Meanwhile, utilities are scrambling to meet other new federal regulations and industry groups are asking the government to slow down. The Nebraska Public Power District operates two coal plants. Under the proposed mercury rule Environmental Manager, Joe Citta, says the utility will need to install equipment that uses activated carbon in order to remove even more mercury than control systems already in place.

Sheldon Station coal fired power plant produces 140 pounds of mercury per year.

“The system is several million dollars,” Citta said. “But what really makes it expensive is the operating cost because activated carbon is rather pricey.”

NPPD will spend 35 million dollars to meet another new regulation reducing smog-forming pollutants that cross state lines. That rule, the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule (CSAPR), was announced in July and takes effect in January. Citta says it requires more cuts than many in the industry expected for pollutants like nitrogen oxides (NOx) and sulfur dioxide (SO2).

“This caught our state, many other states also,” Citta said. When the final rule came out they had reduced those by an additional 40%. Then with only 6 months to comply…We felt the proposed rule was manageable. We would have had to do some things. But they were certainly more achievable than this additional 40% reduction.”

Nebraska utilities feeling rushed by regulation are hoping to get some extra time. The Nebraska Attorney General’s office is working on a lawsuit against the interstate smog rule that a spokesperson says would protect utilities and consumers from costly federal overreach. A bill in the House of Representatives could slow things down by commissioning a study on the economic impact of the EPA’s emissions agenda. Steve Gates of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Energy says it is a reaction to a lot of regulation in a short period of time.

“In a state like Nebraska where 65% of our electricity comes from coal, something is going to happen and the guess is electricity prices go up immediately,” Gates said. “You know, there’s just a lot of economic implications that really should be looked at before we jump into something that no one knows the outcome economically.”

Nebraska rails are a major thoroughfare from Wyoming to power plants in the Midwest and southern Plains. Gates says the state’s economic ties to coal show the advantage of having easy access to inexpensive energy.

“We’re fortunate enough to be in the top ten lowest states for electricity in the country,” Gates said. “What we need to do is find a balance between reducing emissions the best we can while also keeping an eye on what we’re going to do to local economies if we enact something too quickly.”

The EPA claims that the mercury rule will have a positive economic impact in the end by providing health savings of up to $140 billion from reduced asthma, heart disease and other serious ailments. Gates says the EPA underestimates the cumulative impact of multiple rules all coming down at once, particularly in a bad economy. The Sierra Club’s Ken Winston believes power companies are capable of covering costs that they have not paid in the past.

“They can absorb the cost of making these changes much more easily than a person can,” Winston said. “An individual whose child doesn’t develop appropriately because they’ve had mercury poisoning, that’s a life that’s destroyed and we can’t tolerate that.”

Additional Links

• Nebraska Public Power District (NPPD)
• EPA mercury rule
• Nebraska Sierra Club
• Sierra Club – Beyond Coal
• Fish consumption advisories page
• Cross-State Air Pollution Rule (CSAPR)
• Houtson Chronicle – Texas sues EPA to block new pollution rule
• Nebraska AG lawsuit story
• Washington Post – White House threatens veto of House bill to delay EPA pollution rules
• The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE)

Climate change and invasive species threaten Lake Tahoe just as restoration funding dwindles. (Photo: Lauren Sommer)

Over the last 15 years, more than a billion dollars has been spent to protect Lake Tahoe's clear waters from runoff and erosion. Now, new threats to lake's clarity are emerging, just as restoration funding is drying up.

Researchers from UC Davis are hot on the trail of one of those threats. On a recent late summer morning, Katie Webb and a team from UC Davis's Tahoe Environmental Research Center went looking for it on a boat near South Lake Tahoe.

"So what we're looking for is a metal clam corral," Webb says, pulling on her scuba gear. The "clam corral" is a wire basket that holds clams living on the lake bottom. Webb swims down to it and attaches a rope, so the team can pull it on board.

The clams inside are Asian clams, an invasive species. They were not a welcome visitor when they were discovered in Lake Tahoe in 2002. Webb and her team are monitoring these corralled clams to see how fast the population is growing.

"So you can see this individual is number 11," she says, pointing to a tiny number super-glued on its shell. They use the numbers to track individuals over time. "We can see how much they've grown since we checked them in February and it should be a lot. They grow a lot in the summertime," Webb says.

"What they do is somewhat disturbing," says Geoff Schladow, director of the Tahoe Environmental Research Center. Asian clams filter massive amounts of lake water and that's where the problem starts.

"Of everything they filter, they consume about 10 percent of it and 90 percent they excrete. So their excretions are like these huge nutrient bombs," Schladow says.

UC Davis researcher Katie Webb holds an Asian clam from their population study. (Photo: Lauren Sommer)

With thousands of clams per square meter in some parts of the lake, their "nutrient bombs" help create algae blooms.

"So you have this bright green, stringy algae, sort of clinging to the bottom, a few tens of yards from the beach. People would be astounded to see this cause it looks like any place but Tahoe," he says.

In the face of this invasion, a team from UC Davis has been experimenting with rubber mats that suffocate Asian clams on the lake bottom. So far, the treatment looks promising.

Tahoe Basin Building Boom

Keeping the lake blue – and not green – has been a rallying cry for both environmental groups and Tahoe's tourism industry. Forty years ago, scientists could see 100 feet into the lake. Today, the clarity has decreased significantly to 64 feet.

"We're essentially like a bowl and what happens on the land affects the water," says Julie Regan of the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency. The agency oversees development on both the California and Nevada sides.

"What happened on the land in the 50s, 60s and 70s is that we had a lot of development – rampant overdevelopment," she says. Tahoe hosted 1960 Winter Olympics at Squaw Valley. Casinos went up. Building was booming. And soon, the region had a runoff problem.

"It's driveways. It's houses. What you cover on the land then interferes with the soils ability to filter runoff. That's what's causing clarity loss," says Regan.

Over the past 15 years, local agencies have tried to stop this decline with $1.5 billion of federal, state and local money. They've preserved open space and built projects to control erosion and filter runoff.

"In 2008 we got the news from the scientific community that we had stopped the slide and decline of lake clarity. That was great news," says Regan.

Scientists See Climate Change Impacts

In 2010, however, researchers at UC Davis found the second worst clarity level ever recorded. Geoff Schladow says runoff isn't the only culprit.

"What we've had just in the last few years is this explosion, this large increase in algae and they seem to be concentrated right near the surface," says Schladow.

These algae are invisible to the eye, but they're the right size to make the water look cloudier. Normally, they're competing with large algae near the surface. But Schladow says that's changing. Algae are heavier than water, so they gradually sink.

"The algae in the past tended to be mixed by the wind every few days. So if you're a large algae and you sank down 50 or 100 feet, you could be brought up again into the light by mixing."

Recently, the lake hasn't been mixing as much. The reason, Schladow thinks, is that the surface waters of the lake have gotten warmer with climate change. Warmer water is lighter than the cold, dense water at the bottom of the lake. So it's little bit like oil and water. The layers of the lake are more resistant to mixing.

"Now when we have less mixing, the large algae sink out. All we're left with are the small ones. And so their numbers are going up," says Schladow.

After decades of conservation work to reduce runoff, a lot of people are disappointed to see climate change posing a new threat to Lake Tahoe's clarity.

Schladow thinks it's not hopeless. "It's a call to redouble what we're doing, not to give up and walk away. It's now needed not just to restore clarity but to ward off what may be some pretty uncomfortable and disturbing features of climate change."

Restoration Funds Running Out

After an unprecedented influx of restoration funding, resources are now running low. Senator Dianne Feinstein introduced the Lake Tahoe Restoration Act of 2011 in Congress to authorize more, but has said she's not optimistic about getting it passed.

"We know the funding picture could potentially be bleak, so we're looking to any strategy that we can to keep this momentum going in terms of restoration," says Julie Regan of TRPA.

On top of that, Nevada is threatening to end its forty-year partnership with California by pulling out of the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, unless concessions are made about its voting power on new development. Regan says it's just one more challenge that will make the next few years a critical time for Lake Tahoe's future.

Surfers do more than surf. The Surfrider Foundation, originally formed to protect a surf beach and beach access, has developed into an international organization involved in multiple programs ranging from wildlife protection to ocean policy. As a surfer and a long term member of the foundation, I have been involved in countless beach clean-ups. We routinely walk the beaches pulling plastic bags, bottles and cigarette butts. Over the years, we have picked up tons of trash. Some of the beach clean-ups are organized, and sometimes I just pick up trash before or after surfing. This Saturday, September 17, Surfrider will join thousands of Californians for the California Coastal Cleanup Day.

As awareness increases, we are seeing fewer large pieces, but we still find countless cigarette butts, bottle caps and water bottles. We need to do more than just clean up, we need to stop it at the source. Our foundation has developed a plastics campaign called, "Rise Above Plastics." We must stop the plastics before it hits the beach. It is easily done. A metal water bottle, reusable shopping bag and an ash tray would significantly reduce plastics in the environment.

Here's the "Rise Above Plastics Pledge":

There is a section of the Pacific Ocean twice the size of the continental United States called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Within it, 100 million tons of plastic swirl in a vortex of currents. There is so much plastic in the water that it outnumbers zooplankton by six to one!

This plastic ends up in the stomachs of marine birds and animals. In fact, one million seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals die globally each year due to ingestion of or entanglement in plastics.

Plastic is forever, with virtually every piece of petroleum-based plastic ever made still in existence. That's why it's so critical to our oceans and beaches that we dramatically reduce our use of plastics, especially single-use plastics, starting today.

You can make a difference for our world's oceans, waves and beaches — pledge to rise above plastics today.

I commit to do my part to rise above plastics and protect the world's oceans, waves and beaches from plastic pollution. I will do this by:

- Using reusable bottles for my water and other drinks. By using just one reusable bottle, I will keep 167 single-use plastic bottles from entering the environment.

- Using cloth bags for groceries and other purchases. For each reusable bag I use, I will save approximately 400 plastics from being used.

- Recycling the plastic bags and bottles I already have. For every thirteen plastic bags I don't use, I will save enough petroleum to drive a car one mile.

Work from the Algalita Marine Research Foundation indicates there is six times more plastic than phytoplankton (single-celled marine algae) per weight and fifty times more plastic than zooplankton (small crustaceans and larvae) in the North Pacific Gyre. Over half this plastic is plankton size: less than 60 mm or a quarter-inch in size. These tiny plants and animals are the base of the ocean food web, and animals consuming plankton from herring to whales are ingesting plastic.

Plastics are Forever

The plastic doesn’t go away, it just gets smaller. Approximately 70% of plastic sinks to the bottom where it sits like a time bomb waiting to be assimilated. The larger pieces float along until cast ashore or ingested by a marine animal. Plastics absorb organic pollutants like toxic sponges, concentrating the poisons and finding their way into the food chain from fish to humans. One study found fulmars, ocean-going birds that visit our waters, have over 30 pieces of plastic in their stomachs. A sea turtle found dead off Hawaii had over 1000 pieces of plastics in its intestines. Hundreds of thousands of seabirds, sea turtles and marine mammals die from plastic ingestion each year. Americans generate 10.5 million tons of plastic waste a year but recycle only 1 or 2% of it. An estimated 14 billion pounds of trash – most of it plastic – is dumped in the world's oceans every year. Plastic bags and other plastic garbage thrown into the ocean kill as many as 1 million sea creatures every year.

This problem occurs in every ocean in the world. We are killing our wildlife and poisoning ourselves through a preventable problem. For hundreds of miles of ocean, patches of plastic cross our bow. A sailboat is like a small planet: we have limited food and water and we generate waste. On past Sea Stewards expeditions, we are careful to keep all plastic aboard, and minimize plastic wrapping and bags in our provisioning. No plastic goes into the ocean on our watch.

Make a Change, Clean it Up

We can reduce our waste using less, bringing your own bag to the grocer and using a metal water bottle.
Join us and hundreds of thousands of Californians on September 17, California Coastal Clean Up Day. You can participate at one of the regular clean ups organized by your local Surfrider Foundation or start your own. Plastics reduction and marine debris clean up is part of Sea Stewards Healthy Oceans Initiative.

Watch Plastic in the Pacific to learn more about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Cinnabar from Lake County. Photo by Andrew Alden.

It's widely known that California has a mercury problem unlike other parts of the world. We don't produce it and we don't emit much any more, but a lot of old mercury is still lying around from the mining days. How did that happen?

In undisturbed nature, mercury is no more than a very local and very temporary problem. Mercury occurs mostly in sulfide compounds that are concentrated where ore-forming fluids invade metal-rich rocks. Cinnabar and metacinnabar are both mercury sulfide, HgS. Metacinnabar forms at higher temperatures.

Metacinnabar from the Mt. Diablo Mine. Photo by Andrew Alden.

The California Coast Range was a natural place for world-class mercury ore bodies to grow. First, the range has a large amount of metal-rich rocks in the form of serpentinite and its parent rock, peridotite, derived from ancient seafloor. Second, these rocks were cracked and tilted as the Coast Range was built. Third, volcanic activity worked over these rocks, adding heat and chemically active fluids. Thus the source rocks were repeatedly mobilized, attacked and disrupted, a natural refining sequence that at each step concentrated metals.

Serpentinite is a slippery rock that tends to attract faults, which in turn attract fluids. Hot deep fluids replaced the serpentinite with carbonate minerals like calcite, then again with silicate minerals like quartz. As veins of these minerals fan outward they carry mercury with them. Coast Range mercury was originally deposited at high temperatures deep underground, often associated with gold sitting a bit deeper. It remains for erosion to slowly uncover the ores. In coastal California, erosion is quite active as the Coast Range continues to rise.

Wide zones of silica-carbonate alteration dot our mountains and host hundreds of mercury occurrences. The great New Almaden Mine, south of San Jose, exploited a deposit of this type. It was the largest mercury producer in North America, spawning the gold mining industry that followed the placer gold rush of 1849. Cheap, efficient mercury amalgamation was the key to gold production, and New Almaden mercury made it feasible.

Yuba Gold Dredge 17, still working the Sierra gravels, uses mercury amalgamation to capture flour gold. Photo by Andrew Alden.

Volcanic heat also spawns hot-spring activity that can create mercury ore bodies, too. The McLaughlin Mine, north of Lake Berryessa, exploited a hot-spring type deposit yielding gold as well as mercury.

Today the mercury mines of the Bay Area are all closed and being remediated. The New Almaden property is now a county park and the McLaughlin Mine is being carefully restored to a working countryside. Fortunately, mercury can be well controlled if acid mine drainage can be prevented, because cinnabar is poorly soluble except in strongly acid waters. At Clear Lake, the large former Sulphur Bank Mine is slowly getting under control. The privately owned Mount Diablo Mine, where my metacinnabar specimen was collected, is not a threat to spill into local streams although money is needed to fix it for good.

Worldwide, the overwhelmingly largest source of mercury pollution is from the burning of coal. A much smaller source is from oil and gas. Mercury appears to ride along with oil and gas as they trickle from their source rocks upward into the reservoirs we mine for energy. In oil, mercury lives in the tiny metal portion; in gas, mercury is a vapor. Levels in both are in the low parts-per-billion range, although California's oil tends to have relatively high levels. Mercury levels are highest in the dense fraction called petroleum coke, which is burned in place of coal. Even so, coal is far dirtier in terms of mercury, and the Bay Area is spared that insult.

More reading:

• Mercury Cycling and Bioaccumulation in Clear Lake, special issue of Ecological Applications
• Mercury Geoenvironmental Models by James Rytuba (US Geological Survey)

Trash in the Los Angeles River, en route to the ocean. Photo: kqedquest.

Plastic bottles, aluminum cans, plastic knives and forks, tangled fishing line, plastic bags, food wrappers, cigarette butts… all this and more will be collected from California’s beaches this coming Saturday, September 25, on Coastal Cleanup Day.  On last year’s Coastal Cleanup Day, volunteers collected over 1.4 million pounds of trash from California’s beaches and waterways. That is a mind-blowing amount of trash!

All this trash has a devastating effect on ocean life. Sea turtles eat plastic bags, mistaking them for jellyfish. Marine mammals get tangled in abandoned fishing nets. Sea birds are found with bellies full of colorful plastic shards. And, plastics can leach chemicals into ocean water. Bisphenol A, the chemical in hard plastic water bottles, has been found in seawater. Bisphenol A and other chemicals can mimic animals’ hormones and disturb their development. It can also bioaccumulate in fish and shellfish—and could potentially end up on our dinner plates.

The trash that washes up on our beaches is only a tiny fraction of the debris in the ocean. Check out QUEST’s TV Story, Plastic in the Pacific, to get a sense of the Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch. This collection of trash, caught in a gyre in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, is perhaps twice the size of Texas. It isn’t just floating plastic water bottles—it’s also a soup of tiny, confetti-like fragments of plastics that have started to break down, but will never completely disappear.

Coastal Cleanup Day is a great opportunity to clean up California’s coasts and prevent this trash from getting swept out to sea. It also sends a message: people care about minimizing the impact of trash on the environment. Last year, over 80,000 people volunteered on Coastal Cleanup Day. To find locations where you can volunteer this Saturday morning, look here.

Ultimately, we need to decrease the amount of trash we produce. In Germany, a policy was put in place in 1991 that made manufacturers and stores responsible for recycling all the packaging material for the products they make and sell. Customers unwrapped their purchases at the checkout stand and left all the wrappers at the store. (My dad tried this at home in Virginia—it didn’t go over so well.) This forced German manufacturers and retailers to create a recycling program to deal with all the trash, and provided a strong incentive to reduce the amount of packaging they used in the first place. A few California cities are off to a good start with localized bans on plastic bags. Let’s come up with other ways to ensure that in the coming years, volunteers on Coastal Cleanup Day will have less work to do!

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Bay Area smog, 1968

Reported for KQEDnews.org

For those too young to remember the Bay Area 40 years ago, it’s hard to imagine the mostly clear skies that Bay Area residents enjoy today filled with choking smog from factories, cars and garbage fires.

“Air pollution back in the ‘50s and ‘60s was considerably higher than it is today. What you had back then were very elevated levels of ozone, and of particulate matter from heavy industry and automobiles,” said Jack Broadbent, CEO of the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, in San Francisco. ”They used to contribute to levels on the order of three or four times what you see today.“

The Bay Area’s population has nearly doubled since then, to more than 7 million people. But the region’s air has become steadily cleaner. In 1969, there were 65 days when Bay Area air quality exceeded federal health standards. Under those same standards, last year, there wasn’t a single day over the limit.

The reason? The Clean Air Act.

One of the nation’s cornerstone environmental laws, the Clean Air Act turns 40 this week. Sort of.

Although Richard Nixon signed the law in December, 1970, the landmark legislation will be commemorated a bit early at an EPA conference Tuesday in Washington D.C. with a day of celebrations, speeches and public events around the country designed to highlight the public health and environmental benefits from the law.

California has been ahead of the rest of the country in reducing smog. Because of the state’s large population and hot weather, state lawmakers approved the first air pollution regulations in 1946. Since then, California was first to require smog checks for cars, first to ban leaded gasoline, first to require catalytic converters on cars.

“Much of what we’ve done here in the Bay Area is duplicated elsewhere,” said Broadbent. “You can go back east and find our rules just with a different title and different number.”

The Clean Air Act tied all the state rules together. It required the federal government for the first time to set standards for six major types of air pollution: soot, carbon monoxide, lead, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide and ground level ozone, a major source of smog.

Bay Area factory, 1962

The law ushered in a wave of state and federal standards, from scrubbers on smokestacks to the phase-out of leaded gasoline. Some of the results are dramatic. New cars sold today, with computerized emission systems and other high-tech devices, emit 99 percent less tailpipe pollution than cars sold in 1970.

But the job isn’t done, say health experts and air regulators.

Federal standards have become more stringent, resulting in 13 days last year when the Bay Area exceeded the new national standard for ground-level ozone.

Meanwhile, the pollution from trucks and other diesel-powered equipment, called particulate matter (PM), has until recently largely flown under the radar.

Tiny diesel soot particles are inhaled deep into the lungs and have been shown to cause life-shortening health problems ranging from respiratory illness to heart problems, asthma, and cancer. The California Air Resources Board estimates that diesel soot from ships, trains and trucks causes as many as 2,400 premature deaths statewide each year.

In fact, a recent Air District study concluded that exposure to particulate matter of 2.5 microns in width and smaller (PM 2.5) is by far the leading public health risk from air pollution in the Bay Area, accounting for more than 90 percent of premature mortality related to air pollution.

“We have done a great job of reducing smog levels here in the Bay Area. But there are these communities in and around the Bay Area that still of course, we believe, experience elevated levels of toxic air contaminants,” said Broadbent.

The Air District has identified several “hot spots” or communities at much higher risk of exposure to dangerous levels of diesel particulate and other types of air pollution including Richmond, the West Oakland/ Berkeley corridor and Bayview Hunter’s Point.

The Port of Oakland, a major source of particulate matter pollution in West Oakland

Local, state and federal rules have begun to address particulate pollution. In 2006, the EPA mandated the use of ultra-low sulfur diesel fuel. California has also required that all ships within 24 miles of California ports to burn low-sulfur fuel.

“Increasingly we recognize the health impacts of ozone and of particulate matter,” said Dr. Tom Dailey, chief of pulmonary medicine at Santa Clara Kaiser Permanente Medical Center. “That’s why the diesel engine regulations have been so important. None of us can escape the air that we breathe and the idea of getting these pollutants out of our air has been shown to decrease the incidence of heart attacks, stroke, and asthma exacerbations.”

But Denny Larson of the environmental justice organization, Global Community Monitor, says that while these regulations are a move in the right direction, thousands of toxic air contaminants remain unmonitored and under-regulated in the Bay Area.

“Toxic, cancer-causing volatile organic compounds such as benzene and hydrogen sulfide are extremely dangerous to public health and quite present in the Bay Area particularly around oil refineries and other fossil fuel industries,” Larson said. “Right now, we don’t have federal standards like we do for those smog-forming pollutants for those. And there aren’t a lot of requirements to monitor for them either.”

“We have made significant progress in the 40 years of the Clean Air Act,” he added. “But that’s been limited to a very narrow spectrum of air pollutants and has left out almost entirely the air quality concerns and health of millions of Americans who live near industrial facilities.”

The latest frontier in air regulation is in greenhouse gases.

Both the state Air Resources Board and the Bay Area air district are in the process of writing new regulations to control and reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.

“We’ve got a fairly aggressive program,” said Broadbent. “We’ve been looking at cities and counties putting grants out to inventory greenhouse gas emissions as well as to put in strategies that are energy conservation type measures. And we were one of the first in the state, possibly the nation, to put a greenhouse gas fee on businesses emitting greenhouse gases.”

Because transportation is still California's largest source of carbon dioxide, with passenger vehicles and light duty trucks creating more than 30 percent of total climate change emissions, state lawmakers in 2002 passed a new law requiring all new cars sold in California to reduce greenhouse emissions 30 percent by 2016.

And nationally, the EPA plans to significantly expand the scope of the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from factories, power plants and other industrial source starting next year.

But the new approach is controversial. Some business groups have argued that clean air laws already are costly for industry, and that a new layer of climate change regulation, particularly in a bad economy, will cost jobs. Proposition 23, on California’s November ballot, would suspend AB 32, the state’s landmark greenhouse gas law, until unemployment falls to 5.5 percent for a year.

“I’m glad we’re celebrating this but in some ways, it’s bittersweet,” said Dailey.  "We still have a long way to go.”

MORE VIDEO & AUDIO:

Watch QUEST TV's Earth Day Special:  Where We've Been, Where We're Headed

Listen to QUEST Radio's Earth Day Radio Special: The History of Environmental Justice

Watch QUEST TV's Perilous Diesel

Listen to QUEST Radio's Truckers Clean Up Their Act

Watch QUEST TV's Asthma: What Brought on the Epidemic?

LISTEN TO KQED NEWS INTERVIEW WITH REPORTER AMY MILLER

Marking a Milestone for Clean Air in the Bay Area and Beyond

Federal officials today are marking a milestone in the fight to clean up the nation's environment. Forty years ago, Congress passed the Clean Air Act. The law aimed to tackle the impact of air pollution from cars, industry, and other sources by setting the first nationwide limits on pollutants. Since then, levels of toxic pollutants like lead, ozone and carbon monoxide have dropped dramatically. But the victory hasn't been complete. Particulate pollution from diesel fuel still represents a widespread health risk and battles are still ahead as regulators take on the task of cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Host Kelly Wilkinson talks about the impact of the Clean Air Act and the pollution challenges ahead with Amy Miller, reporter and producer for KQED's Quest science and environment program.

Related articles by Zemanta

• "EPA Adopts Strong Protections Against Air Pollution from Cement Kilns" and related posts (climateofourfuture.org)
• Like a Good Neighbor, the Clean Air Act is There (treehugger.com)
• Big Birthdays for Clean Air Act and OPEC (dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Clean Air Act Turns 40 (green.blogs.nytimes.com)

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Removal of culverts at 12th Street will increase tidal flow into Lake Merritt (credit: Amy Miller)

Reported for KQEDnews.org

Excavators rumbled and dust filled the air in downtown Oakland this week as the demolition of a 12-lane stretch of roadway running along the south end of Lake Merritt got underway.

But the demise of the 2,000-foot long section of 12th Street, dubbed the “world’s shortest freeway” by locals, is more than just a road project. It’s part of the most visible and expensive phase of a multimillion-dollar rebirth of Lake Merritt, an Oakland landmark that gained renown as North America’s first wildlife refuge in 1870, yet which has been plagued for decades by environmental, architectural and public access problems.

For as long as most Oakland residents can remember, the water in the 140-acre lake has been stagnant and polluted. Many of the surrounding historic buildings and structures have been in a state of disrepair. And narrow trails around the lake have been pitted with potholes.

In November 2002, more than 80 percent of Oakland voters approved Measure DD, a $198 million dollar bond measure to fund water quality and parks projects throughout the city. Of that, $115 million was allocated for Lake Merritt.

“Our number one goal is to improve water quality and improve habitat in the lake,” said Joel Peter, the city of Oakland’s Measure DD program manager.

Measure DD Program Manager, Joel Peter (credit: Amy Miller)

“The number two goal is to re-establish connections at the lake. In addition to reconnecting the lake and the bay hydrologically, we’re also trying to reconnect people with nature — because people don’t even realize that the lake’s part of the bay.”

Peter’s task is to oversee more than 50 projects described in the bond. They include restoring creeks and wetlands, improving water quality in Lake Merritt, widening pedestrian and cycling paths and building better roadways to calm traffic around the lake. The project is scheduled to be completed in 2015.

The work on 12th Street is the most extensive piece of the restoration. Crews are reconfiguring the 12-lane road to a six-lane boulevard, lined with trees, a bicycle lane and footpath, all adjacent to a new 4-acre park.

And where an earth-fill dam under the street now restricts the flow of water by forcing it through narrow culverts, a bridge will extend instead, allowing the bay’s tides to flow in and out more freely through a wider channel.

All of this, combined with the other improvements to the area, makes the Measure DD effort what Peter calls “the most wide-ranging and complex series of projects ever undertaken by the City of Oakland.”

Not Really a Lake

Although commonly thought of as a freshwater, man-made lake, Lake Merritt is actually a tidal lagoon that formed after the last ice age where several creeks within the surrounding 4,650-acre watershed empty into San Francisco Bay. The “lake” is connected to San Francisco Bay by a half-mile-long channel, which allows its salty water to rise and fall along with the bay’s tides.

Peter said lack of public awareness about what Lake Merritt really is contributes to the misconception that the lake is actually dirtier than it really is.

“People expect a pristine, clear, Sierra-type lake,” he said. “It’s actually a tidal slough. And if they knew it was salt water and what they are smelling in many cases is just natural things you find around San Francisco Bay in terms of algae growth and mud flats and that sort of thing, actually the water quality in the lake is not terrible before we started this project. But I think that is the perception.”

The heady odor is exactly what Dr. Samuel Merritt smelled in 1854 when the successful San Francisco physician purchased 23 acres around the shoreline of the tidal slough that would later bear his name. Merritt, who became the mayor of Oakland in 1867, was also a shrewd businessman who realized the value of his real estate holdings would increase if the pungent marsh became a recreational lake. So, in 1869, he used his own money to build a dam across the mouth of the slough near where 12th Street is today so that the water level in the lake could be controlled.

The Lake Merritt Channel in 1908 at low tide (credit: Oakland Public Library)

The presence of more than a hundred different species of birds including ducks, geese, pelicans, egrets, herons and cormorants also proved to be a great draw for hunters. To alleviate the dangerous gunfire so close to town, in 1870, Merritt was able to persuade the state legislature to designate Lake Merritt as the first state wildlife refuge in North America.

Over the next century, the lake was dredged. Its surrounding marshlands were filled. And the city of Oakland rose up around its 3-mile perimeter. Bit by bit, the channel that connects the lake to San Francisco Bay, which had been up to a quarter mile wide in some places, was filled in.

Today, the channel is an average 110 feet wide — even narrower where it crosses under 10th and 12th Streets. The steady narrowing has restricted the flow of water in and out of Lake Merritt, which has meant less mixing of the water, and less tidal flushing of the lake, which impacts the health of fish and other aquatic organisms.

The Lake Merritt Channel today at high tide (credit: Amy Miller)

But the encroachment of automobiles may have done the most harm.

“The roadways kept getting pushed wider and wider,” said Peter, “and the lake itself and the park around it was less emphasized. And maintenance has fallen off due to budget issues. It became a bit shabby around the edges. People called it ‘the jewel of Oakland’ but felt it had lost its polish.”

Citizens Unite

By 2001, the problems had reached a breaking point. City leaders commissioned a study called the Lake Merritt Master Plan to look at possible solutions. But the plan excluded the problematic south end of the lake.

This exclusion was likely because at the same time, with the backing of then-mayor Jerry Brown, the Oakland Diocese began a campaign to purchase land in front of the historic Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center at the south end of the lake to build a massive cathedral.

With a group of citizens, graphic designer and longtime Oakland resident Naomi Schiff began to organize against more private development on the lake. “Some of us didn’t feel that it was a good idea for Lake Merritt to become a reflecting pond for a church. Any church,” Schiff said.

Schiff, along with a number of architects, community and historical groups, landscape architects and urban planners, founded the Coalition of Advocates for Lake Merritt (CALM). In the process of worrying about the cathedral, the group’s members made sure to be at the table for Lake Merritt Master Plan meetings. They’d done so much research and made so much noise that ultimately, the city asked them to submit a plan of their own for the south end of the lake.

“And so we did,” said Schiff. “And even though we didn’t have any money or source of funding, we cobbled together a proposal which was to narrow 12th Street to six lanes and put in a park.”

CALM member James Vann was one of the architects who worked on the proposal. “CALM felt that that end of the lake could become a destination if we figured out how to address circulation problems and created areas where people could congregate,” said Vann.

After dozens of brainstorming and outreach meetings, CALM came up with a proposal which had the community’s endorsement. “We also put pressure on the city because this was public land and it could not just be given away for private use. There had to be an open and competitive process,” said Vann.

Their proposal was approved.

“Sometimes you feel like you’re David and Goliath and you’re going to lose but somehow, we didn’t lose,” Schiff said. “Ultimately, it was a good thing that the cathedral people came up with this crazy idea because it galvanized all this creative thinking. And it worked”.

The Kaiser Convention Center and 12th Street demolition at Lake Merritt (credit: Amy Miller)

Frustrated by years of meetings and plans designed to address the problems at Lake Merritt with few results, Oakland City councilman Danny Wan and his successor, councilwoman Pat Kernighan and others got behind the citizen’s group proposal.

They all convinced Oakland to put a $198 million bond measure on the ballot.

Work Begins, Then Stops

After Measure DD passed in 2002, it took the city two years to complete the designs and coordinate logistics. Actual restoration work on Lake Merritt finally started in 2004.

One of the first jobs was to address the lake’s water quality, which “is better now than it has been, especially if you go way back to 120 years ago when the raw sewage came in,” said Richard Bailey, executive director of the Lake Merritt Institute, a non-profit organization contracted by the city to remove floating trash from the lake several times a week.

But the lake is listed as “impaired” under the federal Clean Water Act for trash and low oxygen levels, Bailey said.

“We also have high bacteria levels but we’re not listed for that,” added Bailey.

There are 62 storm drain outfalls that flow directly into Lake Merritt.

“The biggest problem with the lake is not litter, it’s not oxygen, its ignorance,” Bailey said. “People don’t realize that storm drains go directly to public water.”

Bailey and his group of volunteers remove between 1,000 and 5,000 pounds of trash from the lake per month, depending on the season.

Richard Bailey of the Lake Merritt Institute removes all kinds of trash from the lake (credit: Josh Cassidy)

To address the trash problem in the lake, Measure DD has funded the construction of four trash collection units on large storm drain lines to intercept and capture floatable debris and sediment before it gets to the lake.

In another project to improve the lake’s water quality, the Lake Merritt Institute installed three aeration fountains and Measure DD funds repaired one existing fountain around the lake to help reduce the stagnant water in some places. But each of the fountains only treats one acre of water. Lake Merritt covers 140 acres.

Planners are hopeful that the lack of dissolved oxygen in the lake will be alleviated after the completion of another key feature of the project: $27 million to improve the Lake Merritt Channel. Construction will involve removal of the culverts at 12th and 10th Streets that have restricted access for people and water between the lake and the channel for more than 100 years.

“The volume of water exchanged at every tide will be double what it is now,” Peter said. “We’re also creating a new tidal marsh by taking out some of the filled land and grading it very carefully down to the sea level and putting in tidal marsh plants to reestablish some of that original habitat.”

New pedestrian and bike trails will be built to pass beneath a new bridge on 10th Street to connect the 12th Street area with the Channel Park to the west. Funds will also go toward improving Channel Park, which teems with birds and fish yet, is virtually unused because of lack of access from Lake Merritt.

Work on the Lake Merritt channel improvements is scheduled to start early next year.

After getting off to what was perceived by many as a slow start, most of the restoration work around the lake has been moving along as scheduled. But in 2006, parts of the project hit a temporary road block when a group of residents called, “Friends of the Lake,” filed a lawsuit to prevent the city from cutting down dozens of trees around the lake to accommodate the new construction.

In late 2007, after an environmental review determined that the trees could be removed without negatively impacting the ecosystem, the lawsuit was dismissed and work resumed.

Budget issues were also responsible for some delays. At a cost of nearly $54 million, the 12th Street project is by far the most expensive part of the plan. When it was originally bid out in 2005, the construction industry in the Bay Area was booming. The city only received one bid, said Peter, and it was significantly over budget. They had to find another way to raise more money.

It took a couple of years for Peter to make up a funding shortfall with matching grants from agencies such as the Federal Highway Bridge Program and the California Coastal Conservancy. During that time, the recession was hitting and construction bids became much more competitive. Peter had his choice of seven bids, all well within the original budget for the project.

“We had the incredible fortune that Measure DD passed when people were really flush and now we’re spending it when construction costs are low,” said Schiff.

The 12th Street project broke ground on May 6, 2010. It will transform south end of the lake by reconfiguring what was a dangerous and inaccessible 12-lane expressway at the edge of a lake into a 6-lane, tree-lined boulevard with signalized intersections and crosswalks.

The redesign will also create new parkland at the edge of the lake and remove unsafe and unsightly tunnels which have been locked and gated by the city since the early 1990’s.

The work on 12th Street will also establish direct pedestrian, bicycle and boat access from Lake Merritt to Channel Park — setting the stage for what will one day be a direct route from the lake all the way out to the bay.

Lake Merritt’s Road Diet

Many of the Measure DD projects already have been completed. A major part of the renovation involved reducing 4-lane roadways around the lake to two lanes, putting the lake’s major thoroughfares on what is in essence a “road diet” by reducing the number of traffic lanes in order to improve traffic flow. The concept is counterintuitive, planners say, but after running computer simulations of all the traffic around the lake, they figured out how to make it work with better-designed systems.

Two of the affected roadways are Lakeshore Avenue along the southwest side and Lakeside Drive on the southeast. Lakeshore was once a high-speed commute route. By November 2009, it had been reduced to two lanes and bicycle lanes were added in each direction. Better pedestrian crossings, and a 2-way left turn lane in the middle keeps the traffic flowing.

Lakeshore Avenue after going on a "road diet"; Bioswale within the median island (credit: Josh Cassidy)

Many of the historic buildings and structures around the lake already have received major upgrades with Measure DD funds. The Municipal Boathouse was completely renovated to LEED Gold certification, a top green building standard. It now houses the Lake Chalet restaurant on the top floor and public boating facilities on the bottom level.

Similarly, crews rebuilt the East 18th Street Pier and renovated the Pergola and Colonnade, a scenic row of roofed columns built in 1913 that mark the end of the eastern arm of the lake.

Lake Merritt’s beloved Children’s Fairyland received $3.1 million to build a new Children’s Theater and an addition to the Puppet Theater, which holds the distinction of being the oldest professional puppet theater in the United States.

And at several points around the lake, storm drain outlets were redirected so that water from the paved surfaces runs through a bioswale: a gently sloping trough of tall grasses, filtering the runoff through their root structures and a special permeable soil before it goes into the lake. Trails and bike paths also have been widened and repaved with long-lasting, sustainable materials.

Pride But Concern About Upkeep

On a recent sunny August afternoon, Melissa McDonald and Serena Speth, both from Oakland, were sitting on the lake’s edge with their toddlers.

“It’s fantastic, I love it!” McDonald said. “The pathways and the landscaping are so much better and it’s cleaned up a lot. It’s easier to convince people who don’t live in Oakland to come to the lake now.”

Retired Oakland natives Joseph Hardy and Anthony Lefall walk around the lake every day together from 8AM to noon.

“Everybody’s talking about it and it’s all positive from the citizens that frequent the lake, the taxpayers,” said Lefall.

Oakland natives Joseph Hardy (left) and Anthony Lefall walk around Lake Merritt every morning (credit: Amy Miller)

But both said they are concerned about what might happen in the years ahead.

“After they do all this remodeling, it’s the upkeep,” said Hardy. “These potholes, the birds using the bathroom all over the grass where you can’t lay and enjoy it. This graffiti, if you look all these containers all over the place. Why can’t they have someone maintain it? Maintenance, that’s what we’re concerned about. Maintenance.”

Naomi Schiff echoes their concerns. As part of the Measure DD Community Coalition, CALM’s next task is to try to find the funding to ensure that Lake Merritt continues to thrive and shine.

“I see that as the big challenge,” she said. “And the drawback is that we’re going to have to find money and there is never any government money for non-capital improvements.”

Overall, Measure DD will be a big win for Lake Merritt and the passionate residents who call it their own. Architect James Vann said he is looking forward to Lake Merritt finally living up to its potential.
“With the expanded new pedestrian facilities, family facilities that are coming online that it will become truly the gem of Oakland, Oakland’s jewel and we’ll see many more uses than are there today. That’s my hope.”

View Lake Merritt in a larger map
Google Map produced by Josh Cassidy

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Life was easier back before I produced this piece. Now everywhere I look and everything I touch seems to be made of plastic.

I don’t know why I didn’t think about plastic before I produced this story about plastic from around the world that’s gathering and collecting in the Pacific Ocean. But now, everywhere I look and everything I touch seems to be made of plastic: this keyboard, pen, desk, the monitor in front of me, my water bottle, the phone to the left of me, the stacks of video tapes in plastic containers to the right, even the plastic office chair holding me up. But I’m not just struck by the fact that everything’s made of petroleum products. I’m stunned by the fact that I knew all the time that I was surrounded by plastic, but I’d found ways to ignore it, accept it and live with it.

Life was easier back before I did this piece. I didn’t think of albatross stomachs when I saw cigarette lighters for sale. I didn’t have to worry what to do with the plastic lid on the recycled paper cup after I drank my fair trade organic coffee. I didn’t get strange looks from the corner sandwich shop lady until I recently removed a lunch from the plastic bag she provided. I had to explain to her why I didn’t want the plastic bag she so carefully and skillfully packed with my chicken salad sandwich, cheddar cheese chips and juice (in an actual glass bottle).

I told her how plastic doesn’t go away for centuries, how it breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces, even nano-sized particles. I went on about how it could get into the food chain. She didn’t have an answer when I asked her if she knew what we’re doing to the ocean and the planet and our children. Plastic was the enemy and it was everywhere!

I knew I was getting carried away. But then I started thinking maybe I should get carried away. Maybe we all should get carried away, you know, talk about it, get informed about it, get angry about it, write our senators and members of Congress. But being a TV producer who’s always faced with making difficult cuts in the edit room, I knew when less was more. So I chilled out, gave her what I owed for the food and time and left a hefty tip, and started to leave. Her smile made me pause. She thanked me for telling her all about plastic. She said she’d speak to the owner about replacing the plastic bags.

Watch the Plastic in the Pacific television story online.

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