No Tight Connection At SFO

There has been a tremendous amount of discussion about the need for San Francisco International Airport to find mitigation sites if its proposal to landfill part of the Bay is accepted, acknowledges Travis. But he is quick to separate the review of SFO’s plans from the proposed land acquisition in the South Bay.

"The regulatory agencies and the environmental community have resisted any linking of the two," he said. "We don’t want to be in a position where the airport said, ‘if you approve this project, you’ll get this enormous amount of restoration funding.’ That would compromise the regulatory process, and would frankly be close to illegal."

"Is there a role for San Francisco Airport in this project?" he asks. "Yes – if their runway gets approved."

Restoration Will Be A Challenge

Securing the money to purchase the land and fund habitat restoration will be an enormous achievement. But the actual restoration – the engineering, the hydrology, the vegetation management – will also be a challenge. Guided by lessons learned through previous restoration efforts, scientists and wildlife experts are confident that they can begin the slow, steady process that will allow the Bay to rebuild its ancient landscape, gently washing sediment into thousands of acres of land that is currently diked and protected from the tides.

Drake said the Audubon Society sees the 19,000-acre acquisition as a critical piece of the effort to restore 100,000 acres of Bay Area tidal marsh, wetlands and riparian habitat – the Baylands. The figure comes from the 1999 Baylands Ecosystem Habitat Goals, a report by a committee of scientists and resource managers on restoration in the Bay. Drake adds that there would be plenty to accomplish beyond tackling the Baylands. "The first phase is restoring the 100,000 acres, but that’s just one piece of the puzzle," she said. "We need to develop a comprehensive ecological plan that would outline the restoration for the entire San Francisco Bay estuary."

Exciting Opportunities

"People are very concerned about the region in terms of transportation and housing infrastructure," noted Drake. "But the Bay is natural infrastructure, and we need to invest in that as well. A healthy Bay is critical to our economy and our quality of life."

After nearly three years of discussions that have brought dozens of federal, state and local agencies to the table with Cargill and an array of environmental organizations, dawn could be breaking for a new era in the Bay’s ecology. Many of the people close to the process credit the atmosphere of cooperation and mutual respect that has pervaded the discussions.

Cooperation is critical to success, points out Stark at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. "This is private land," he said. "People in a deal this big lose sight of that sometimes, but we’re operating under a willing seller policy. The landowner can sell private property when they choose, to whom they choose. Fish and Wildlife very rarely uses eminent domain as a vehicle. This is not like building a highway, where the road’s got to go through."

Travis adds that Cargill is often regarded with undue suspicion by people outside the discussions because it is a multi-national corporation with extensive land holdings. He reflects on his experience heading up the Shell Oil Spill Litigation Settlement Trustee Committee, which spearheaded the 1994 purchase of 10,000 acres of Cargill salt ponds near Napa. "Cargill is an interesting company in that some people just love to hate them," he said. "But they never, ever lied to me. And they’re proud of their record as an industrial operation that does a lot for the species.

"I think the important thing is that you have Cargill and the environmental community in the Bay Area saying the same thing: let’s consolidate the saltmaking on the east side of the Bay, let’s get public resources to buy the land, and let’s get this done."

Students of ecological history recognize that the Bay ecosystem has changed since settlers first began draining the wetlands and building towns that have since paved the region. Some species have disappeared, and new ones have made themselves at home. Recreating the past isn’t an issue, said Travis, but creating a future with vast open, wild places along the Bay shore is within reach.

"We are at the point where we can actually restore the health of the ecosystem," he said. "If we create the conditions, we won’t get the grizzly bear to come back, but we can create a vital, vibrant ecosystem."

The San Francisco Bay is an ideal area for salt making, thanks to the long, shallow topography of the Bay’s bottom along the edges, and our weather – just enough rain in the fall, winter and spring...dry summers...steady breezes and plenty of summer sunshine.

Bay water is San Francisco Bay water is only 71 percent as saline as sea water: it contains 2.5 percent sodium chloride, while ocean water salinity is 3.5 percent. That’s a key reason why it takes as long as five years for Bay water entering Cargill’s salt pond system to yield its sparkling salt.

Watermen manage the ponds, monitoring the salinity of each, and transferring brine to neighboring ponds as needed. The brine works its way through the pond system, getting closer to Cargill’s crystallizer beds and refinery in Newark as salinity increases. The color of the water changes, too, based on the natural organisms that thrive at various levels of salinity. As salinity increases, ponds will appear green, light green, pink, then red.

During the brine’s final summer, it is managed in the crystallizers – 1,000 acres of carefully graded salt beds. Watermen carefully adjust water levels in the crystallizers throughout the season to keep the salt dissolved in the brine until cool nights and stiff autumn breezes encourage large crystals to grow.

As salt crystals collect on the crystallizer beds in a layer 5 to 8 inches deep, the watermen drain off the brick-red bittern, the liquid byproduct of crystallization. Bittern, which contains additional sodium chloride and other natural salts from the Bay, is sold nationwide as a road de-icer and dust suppressant. Cargill is also developing processing technology for bittern to serve other markets and utilize all the products of solar salt production.

Once the crystals are exposed to the air, salt harvest begins, a desperate race against winter rains. The harvested salt is washed and piled on the massive stack that towers over the Newark shoreline, the process of solar salt production continues with every gust of wind and ray of sunshine that touches the salt ponds along the Bay’s edge.

The process is essentially the same as it was when John Johnson began commercial salt production in the Bay in 1854. Today, Cargill is implementing improvements that will allow it to harvest roughly the same amount of salt from fewer acres. Starting with saltier brine from just below the San Mateo Bridge, managing the brines more precisely throughout the evaporation process, improving salt recovery from bittern and utilizing its byproducts, and managing a "salt bank" will allow hundreds of South Bay workers to continue a historic and still-vital industry, while freeing up nearly 19,000 acres of wetlands for habitat restoration.