South Bay Campaign

Don't Frack the Pinnacles Rally - September 19, 2013 - Pinnacles National Park

Member Close-Up

Cynthia Denny — Exploring, Enjoying, Protecting Wetlands

by Cheryl Hylton

http://lomaprieta.sierraclub.org/loma-prietan/story/member-close/cynthia-denny-exploring-enjoying-protecting-wetlands/1011

Wetlands and Fracking

In a California parched by drought, 38 million people now compete for dwindling and increasingly valuable water resources with fisheries, hydroelectric power, recreation, tourism, watershed restoration, and farms that grow most of our nation’s produce. Because the massive water demands, and subsequent groundwater pollution, inherent to horizontal hydraulic fracturing (fracking) accelerate water shortages, state and local leaders should immediately demand a moratorium on fracking to preserve water and reduce wetland pollution.

Following meager rainfall in 2011 and 2012, 2013 was the driest year in California history. With minimal snow-pack, most of California experiencing severe to extreme drought, lakes and reservoirs lower than 40% of capacity, and soil moisture depleted, Governor Brown recently declared a state of emergency. He’s asked residents and businesses to reduce water consumption in preparation for imminent threats.

Fracking is controversial both for unsustainably high water consumption and for contaminating water with hazardous, cancer-causing, chemical lubricants. Water poisoned by fracking must be permanently removed from the hydrologic cycle to prevent serious public health risks (thereby worsening water shortages); and injured communities have no legal recourse because fracking exemptions in the 2005 Energy Policy Act protect fossil fuel companies that pollute local water from challenges under the Clean Water and Safe Drinking Water Acts.

In critically dry years, 66% of California’s water typically comes from groundwater; but 33% of the state’s groundwater is already polluted, and 50% of our lakes, wetlands, rivers and streams already exceed EPA water quality standards for toxic pollutants.

In January of this year Sierra Club California and a coalition of environmental groups called on the California Division of Oil, Gas & Geothermal Resources (DOGGR) to consider an alternative to continued well stimulation – including fracking – within the state. In addition they, asked DOGGR to consider a prohibition on well stimulation in or near sensitive areas including, among others, wetlands, stressed watersheds and aquifers, Native American cultural sites, air basins in non-attainment areas, urban areas, and terrestrial or marine habitat for threatened or endangered species.

Report to the CNRCC April 15, 2014

Redwood City “Saltworks” would divide

South Bay wetlands

Photo by

Micheal Endicott

The proposed “Saltworks” development in Redwood City would fragment the Peninsula’s bayfront open space, cutting off the restoration efforts at Bair Island from the rest of the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project.

The 1,433-acre property, east of Highway 101 and south of Seaport Boulevard, comprises former salt-crystallization ponds. Cargill Inc. and DMB Associates propose building here, over the next 25 years, 1,200 units of housing, a million square feet of commercial uses, a 63-acre sports park (i.e. sports fields), five schools, and a waste water-treatment center. Only 440 acres is planned for wetland restoration.

The development would have numerous intrinsic problems, including the danger of flooding if seawalls were to rupture from earthquakes, problems with the proposed water sources, potential maintenance problems when water levels rise as the climate warms, and increased congestion on already gridlocked Highway 101 and Woodside Road. The plan includes a “transit loop” linking the development to the Caltrain terminal and a proposed ferry terminal, but there are no guarantees that the terminal would be built or that the cash-strapped transit agencies would operate such lines.

More broadly, San Francisco Bay has already lost 90% of its wetlands. The former Cargill salt ponds are the last large privately held piece of restorable wetlands on the Bay. Restoration of the 1,433 acres of salt ponds into healthy wetlands would contribute more to our community and our ecosystem than would houses and pavement.

Studies from the 1980s and ’90s show tens of thousands of shorebirds using the Redwood City salt ponds. Last year Matt Leddy of the Friends of Redwood City photographed hundreds of shorebirds feeding and roosting on just one of the ponds slated for development. “On one weekend, he estimated 2,700 shorebirds including willets, black-necked stilts, marbled godwits, dowitchers, dunlins, avocets and sandpipers were all using the pond,” according to Save Wetlands (Winter 2010).

Redwood City itself is significantly below state averages for open space and recreation. The Trust for Public Lands reports that nationally cities average 17 acres of parkland per 1,000 people. Redwood City has 145 acres of parkland for 80,000 people. Just to meet the average, even without 30,000 new residents, Redwood City needs 1,215 more acres–the vast majority of the bayfront lands.

The initial study for the proposal claims that it includes 804 acres of open space. Of that area, however, only 255 acres would be an actual park, 63 acres would be sports fields, and 50 acres would be “multi-use perimeter open space”, which due to its narrow configuration isolated from other habitat would be of limited habitat value, particularly for such threatened and endangered species as the clapper rail, snowy plover, and salt-marsh harvest mouse. The remaining 440 acres would be the restored wetlands mentioned above, and we don’t know how they would be managed, although they might be incorporated into the Don Edwards National Wildlife Refuge. The Refuge would be the right manager–but it should be getting the entire site.

Saltworks calls its project the “50/50 Balanced Plan”–but there’s nothing balanced about building a development on two square miles of wetlands in a city that lacks parks and on a Bay that has lost most of its original wetlands.

Cynthia Denny, CNRCC Wetlands Committee

NOTE: See this article on the San Francisco Bay Siera Club website for the Yodler newsletter. A special thanks to editor Don Forman for reaching out for the story.

http://sfbaysc.org/wordpress/?p=100

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