Opinion: S.F. Bay can become a healthy body of water. But it’s going to take work
It was major news in August when a hazardous algae bloom turned San Francisco Bay water a murky brown color and killed a reported 10,000 yellowfin goby, hundreds of striped bass and white sturgeon, and a small number of endangered green sturgeon. That kind of attention may seem understandable today, but just a couple of generations ago, it’s likely barely anyone would have noticed. Why? Because fish die-offs used to be far more common. During the 1960s and early 1970s, huge fish die-offs were reported in San Francisco Bay almost every year, with over 100,000 fish dying in 1965 alone. Our bay had become a dumping ground for minimally treated sewage, industrial wastewater, polluted runoff and solid waste — unfit for aquatic life and unsafe for swimming.
-Written by Andrew Gunther and Alexis Strauss Hacker, members of the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board; and Jay Davis, a senior scientist at the San Francisco Estuary Institute.