WITH DNC IN MIND, CITY BANS CARRYING URINE, FECES: Poop and pee fueled the huge algae bloom in San Francisco Bay. Fixing the problem could cost $14 billion.
After an unprecedented harmful algae bloom first turned San Francisco Bay a murky brown color and then littered its shores with dead fish, many people assumed it was yet another climate disaster to add to the list, along with extreme drought, wildfires and heat waves.
While scientists suspect climate change played a role in triggering the bloom, what fueled it is not a mystery. Algae blooms need food to grow, and this one had plenty: nutrients originating in wastewater that the region’s 37 sewage plants pump into the bay.
In other words —we wouldn’t have this problem without the poop and pee of the Bay Area’s 8 million residents.
“For those of you who aren’t aware, when you flush the toilet every day, you’re flushing nutrients down,” said Eileen White, executive officer of San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board, at a press conference last week. The waste arrives at the sewage plant and is treated, she explained, but those nutrients — mostly nitrogen and phosphorous — remain in the water that is discharged into the bay.
There has been no evidence of a raw sewage leak; rather it’s the regular amount of those nutrients that have long made the bay primed for a harmful algal bloom like this one, which started in late July in Alameda and has recently flared up as far as Sausalito, Vallejo and Fremont.
Nutrients “may not have triggered this specific event,” said David Senn, senior scientist at SF Bay Nutrient Management Strategy of the San Francisco Estuary Institute, a group formed to study the issue 10 years ago. “But they contributed to its size, the amount of the organism and how long it lasted.”
More details here, if the above article is paywalled: Toxic algae bloom kills off fish around San Francisco Bay.
Rotting carcasses of striped bass, bat rays and other fish have been washing up on the shores of the San Francisco Bay Area in recent days, after a toxic algae bloom spread across the area.
The toxic bloom began in July and has stretched as far north as San Pablo Bay, roughly 20 miles (32 km) north of San Francisco, to as far south as the coastlines of San Mateo County, said environmental advocacy organization San Francisco Baykeeper.
It identified the culprit behind the murky brown waters as a species of algae called Heterosigma akashiwo.
“This bloom’s been going on for over a month and it’s covering San Francisco Bay, so the scope and the duration of this bloom is unprecedented,” Jon Rosenfield, a Baykeeper senior scientist, told Reuters.
The fish aren’t the only animals being impacted by, err, material that can be found on the streets of San Francisco: Do dogs in San Francisco get stoned from eating human poop?
Thanks to its population of NIMBYs (Never in My Back Yard) and/or BANANAs (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything), Silicon Valley is 21st century computer technology running on infrastructure that hasn’t been updated since the 1960s heyday of Pat Brown, Jerry’s dad.
(Updated and bumped; classical reference in headline.)