The infamous chapter of environmental history in the Bay Area is over because there is no fanfare and most people don’t know it. Or rather, it set sail.

The 873-foot military freighter Cape Mohican, which was involved in the largest oil spill in San Francisco Bay in the last half century, was towed from a long-standing port under the Port of Oakland and the Golden Gate Bridge. on Friday.

It had arrived in Mexico on Wednesday, tied to a tug with a steel rope the thickness of a beer bottle, and on August 1 it was moving at 7 miles an hour on its way to the Panama Canal and then to Beaumont, Texas. Long after that, it was dismantled and recycled at the Brownsville shipyard until the last day.

A huge 50-year-old ship, a gray barge stretching as long as the Trans-American Building was put into service in the Persian Gulf War.

However, his fame (or notoriety) came to fame on October 28, 1996 when a dry dock worker accidentally opened the ship’s valve near Pier 70 in San Francisco, south of what is now Giants Stadium. It occurred. He released water. Instead, 96,000 gallons of heavy black bunker oil were poured out. About 40,000 gallons of oil poured into San Francisco Bay.

Windy weather and early-season storms spread it quickly. The spill blackened for miles along the coasts of Alcatraz and Angel Island, drifted north to the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge and launched onto the beach at Point Reyes National Sea to Half Moon Bay.

“It was horrific to see the pollution,” said Mary Jane Shram, then a volunteer at Farallon Bay National Marine Reserve. “You are entering a beautiful looking beach area and there will be a pool of oil. Your shoes are ruined. There was hardly much under the sand. “

The oil spill was modest but devastating compared to the Exxon Valdez disaster of 1989, which dumped 11 million gallons of oil into the pristine Prince William Sound of Alaska. was.

Nearly 600 birds, including the little grebes, gulls, red-throated grebes and pelicans, were found dead and covered in oil. Thousands of coatings were applied but could not be captured or recovered.

A seagrass bed spilled in the bay, in which herring spawns annually. At least 12 seals were oiled. The oil has spread to marinas, piers and sea walls along the San Francisco waterfront. Overall, investigators reported that the 120-mile coastline was contaminated with oil spills and tar balls.

In October 1996, oil leaked from Cape Mohawk at Pier 70 in San Francisco. (California Department of Fish and Wildlife)

The spill was the largest in San Francisco Bay since 1988. At that time, 432,000 gallons of crude oil spilled from a broken storage tank at Shell’s Martinez Refinery into streams and swamps and into the bay. When the cargo ship Cosco Busan hit the Bay Bridge in the fog in 2007 and dumped 53,569 gallons of bunker fuel into its waters, it was eleven years before another major oil spill hit the bay.

“I rarely find anything so big and fast,” said Michael Roseau, an Auckland attorney who was general secretary of the San Francisco Baykeeper environmental group during the 1996 disaster.

The ship is now nearing the end of its lifespan.

Tech-wise, the US Maritime Bureau, a branch of the Department of Transportation that owns the ship, says its status has been downgraded. The Cape Mohawk was part of the National Defense Reserve Fleet for many years. This is a group of cargo ships that can be put into service during war. It is currently “owned”, a sort of waste from an old ship, sealed and repaired without a crew, often waiting to be recycled.

“It’s basically being scrapped. It’s too expensive to run, ”said Sal Mercogliano, marine historian and history professor at Campbell University in North Carolina.

Steam ships like Cape Mohawk have been replaced by diesel ships, he said. The ship was designed to carry barges that could carry ammunition and grenades. But the technology has been replaced by container ships, he said.

Some parliamentary leaders, including Congressman John Garamendi and D-Davis, are pushing the Pentagon to replace old cargo ships faster.

“There are concerns about how military equipment and supplies (beans, bullets, gasoline) can be delivered to the military in the event of a conflict,” said Mercogliano.

Marine Administration and San Francisco Dry Dock Inc after oil spill damage aggregated. The case was settled in 1998 for $ 8 million. Approximately $ 4.3 million was repaid to state and federal agencies for oil purification.

An additional $ 3.6 million was invested in an environmental remediation fund overseen by the National Park Service and other agencies.

Coast Guard members experienced an oil-absorbing boom in San Francisco Bay during the 1996 Cape Mohawk oil spill. (US Coast Guard)

Over the next decade, the money will be used from clearing debris and invading plants in San Francisco’s Crissy Field to restoring the Farallon Islands’ wolf, lizard and other bird nests, and building new stairs in the Bay Area. Paid for 12 major projects. A hiking trail for hikers on Angel Island.

The number of oil spills from California ships has declined in recent decades due to the double hull structure of oil tankers and the stringent legislation that requires crew training. But according to experts, there are always risks.

“People forget how awful it’s going to be,” said Ed Uber, a former director of Farallon Bay National Marine Reserve. “These big ships are controlled by humans. I was an officer on a merchant ship. I know that people make mistakes. “

OAKLAND, CA – JULY 9: Cape Mohican, which caused a major oil spill in San Francisco Bay in 1996, crossed the Bay Bridge as seen from the Port of Oakland in Oakland, California on Friday, July 9, 2021. She was towed away. (Reichves / Bay Area Newsgroup)

Ship involved in major oil spill leaves San Francisco Bay forever – Times-Herald source link

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State water pollution officials fined Sunnyvale $ 187,000 after the city’s sewage treatment plant spilled more than a quarter of a million gallons of partially treated wastewater into San Francisco Bay last summer.

The spill occurred on July 29 when 36-inch welded steel pipeline broke, releasing 292,600 gallons – the equivalent of about 12 backyard swimming pools – of partially treated sewage that did not drain into canals into the bay near Moffett Field.

“These types of discharges pose a threat to the environment and human health,” said Thomas Mumley, vice chairman of the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board. “This enforcement measure is recognized by the wastewater treatment industry and will hopefully be a deterrent.”

The spill was one of the two largest illegal discharges from a Bay Area sewage treatment plant to San Francisco Bay in the past six years, Mumley said. It was dwarfed only by a 2.2 million gallon leak from the Sonoma Valley County Sanitation Agency facility on Jan. 11-12, 2019. This discharge of partially purified sewage, which resulted in a fine of $ 427,000, flowed into Sonoma Creek, which flows to San Pablo Bay.

The Sunnyvale case was settled on Monday.

Sunnyvale officials said the pipe that failed is 3 meters underground and was built in 1975. They said it had never failed before and should be replaced over the next few years as part of a massive $ 1 billion wastewater treatment modernization project, which was built in 1956 over a 20-year period. The plant supplies around 160,000 residents in Sunnyvale.

“That was something unexpected,” said Ramana Chinnakotla, Sunnyvale’s environmental manager. “But we know that our system ages. For this reason, the city council has committed to modernizing the facility. This pipe should be replaced. It’s unfortunate that it failed before we had a chance to replace it. “

Chinnakotla said no dead fish or other wildlife were seen in the water. The Bay Trail is nearby, but he said the area where the spill occurred – in a canal next to former Cargill Salt ponds now owned by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service – is not open to the public.

“This is a fish and wildlife channel,” he said. “It’s not really used for recreation. The probability that people would have come into contact with it is very low. “

Water tests conducted in the area after the spill found enterococcal bacteria 22 times higher than the state standard, along with elevated ammonia and pH levels, which can be harmful to fish and wildlife.

State regulations require that water pollution incidents be reported to the California Emergency Services Bureau and local health department within two hours. Workers at the Sunnyvale plant discovered the leak at 6:15 p.m. on July 29, but didn’t report it until 11 a.m. the next morning, state inspectors concluded. They also failed to properly put up signs warning of public health hazards, inspectors reported.

“Improperly treated wastewater does not belong in the bay,” said Sejal Choksi-Chugh, executive director of San Francisco Baykeeper, an environmental group. “And any amount is too much. But it is especially egregious if the spillage could have been prevented through routine surveillance and maintenance and neither the public nor the regulators were informed in a timely manner. Even partially purified wastewater contains bacteria, viruses and other harmful pathogens that can make people sick. “

The failed pipe connects the Sunnyvale wastewater treatment plant, located on the edge of the bay on Borregas Avenue between Moffett Field and Yahoo’s headquarters, to two oxidation basins that naturally treat wastewater before returning it to the for final disinfection Plant is pumping and filtering before clean water is piped into the bay. The next day, the pipe was taken out of service and two temporary above-ground pipes were installed in its place.

The city will be able to cover half the fine by completing a natural rainwater treatment project on Wolfe Road and Stewart Drive in Sunnyvale.

“The city doesn’t want such discharges to happen,” said Chinnakotla. “In this case, the wastewater was partially cleaned. There was no public health hazard. And we were able to correct it very quickly. “

The Sunnyvale Sewage Treatment Plant on Borregas Avenue spilled 292,600 gallons of partially purified wastewater into San Francisco Bay on July 29, 2020 when a pipe, shown with the red dot at the bottom of the image, broke, resulting in a penalty of 187,000 US dollars led state water regulators. (Photo: Google Maps)

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Clean-up operations are underway after 600 gallons of a petroleum-water mixture leaked into the waters of San Francisco Bay from a Chevron oil refinery in Richmond, California.

Tuesday afternoon was a shine watched in the water at Long Wharf, about a mile offshore from the Chevron Richmond Refinery near the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge.

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Authorities investigating the incident discovered that a pipeline near the wharf, which is used to carry a variety of oil and products that are returned to the refinery for reprocessing, was leaking about five gallons per minute until that Leak was stopped around 4:40 p.m.

The spill resulted in a Level 2 Incident Warning and a State of Health advisory constitute the Contra Costa Health Department for those who live in Richmond, North Richmond, and San Pablo. Officials advised people that the strong petroleum odor could cause irritation to their eyes, skin, nose or throat. Beaches in the area have also been closed. The notice was lifted later Tuesday evening after the spill was contained.

“It smelled like someone had spilled gasoline in front of my house, it smelled very, very bad all day,” said Margaret Berczynski, a resident of the area ABC 7.

“I’m really devastated. I can’t take my kids into the water, I can’t walk on water, I can’t enjoy it. I’m really scared, ”Berczynski told the news agency.

Chevron Richmond said it is working with federal, state and local authorities to clean up the mess. More than 2,000 feet of containment booms were installed around the leak, and oil skimmers were in the area to extract the petroleum from the water.

The impact on wildlife in the area is not currently clear, but the California Department of Fish and Wildlife says there have been no reports of oiled animals.

The spill is still being investigated.

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