California fish and game (20513749265)

September 1979 sewage spill in the San Francisco Bay Area
Title: California fish and game
Identifier: californiafishga66_4cali (find matches)
Year: [1] (s)
Authors: California. Dept. of Fish and Game; California. Fish and Game Commission; California. Division of Fish and Game
Subjects: Fisheries -- California; Game and game-birds -- California; Fishes -- California; Animal Population Groups; Pêches; Gibier; Poissons
Publisher: (San Francisco, etc. ) State of California, Resources Agency, Dept. of Fish and Game
Contributing Library: California Department of Fish and Game
Digitizing Sponsor: Internet Archive



Text Appearing Before Image:
238 CALIFORNIA FISH AND GAME NOTES HARBOR SEAL AND FISH POPULATIONS—BEFORE AND AFTER A SEWAGE SPILL IN SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO BAY A sewage spill occurred 4 through 29 September 1979, at the San Jose-Santa Clara Water Pollution Control Plant during which 4,000,000,000 gallons of par- tially treated sewage flowed into Artesian Slough (H. Singer, Senior W.R.C.E., California Regional Water Quality Control Board, pers. commun.). Initial reports by the media indicated massive wildlife die-offs in the Bay south of the Dumbar- ton Bridge. It does not appear that effluent reached Mowry Slough, which is a major harbor seal haul-out area in San Francisco Bay (Fancher 1979; Risebrough et al. 1979) about 8 miles from the spill's origin (Figure 1). Data on fish and seal numbers in the Mowry Slough area are available before, during, and after the spill as part of a year-long harbor seal study on the San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge. Although sample size is small, the results are of interest since the impact of the spill on south Bay macrofauna is still unknown.
Text Appearing After Image:
/ SCALE IN MILES FIGURE 1. Map of San Francisco Bay showing where the sewage spill originated and the Mowry Slough study site. Fish were sampled with a specially designed trap (Wild 1969) of 6-mm square mesh set at high tide to completely block a 5-m wide, 2-m deep tidal gut. Fish present in the gut were trapped as the water drained with the receding tide, a process taking approximately 4 hours. There were no major differences between sampling results 7 days prior to spillage onset, during the spill, and 5 days after the spill ceased (Table 1). The increased numbers of northern anchovy, Engrau-