Clean Water Action

California

Accomplishments

Mercury Victory

Clean Water Action is celebrating a major victory! On Wednesday, Sept. 7th, the State Water Quality Control Board took a major step toward cleaning up San Francisco Bay and protecting local communities by rejecting a proposed plan that in its original form would allow the Bay's mercury levels to remain toxic for 120 years.

CWA has worked hard over the last 2 years to ensure that the approved plan includes strategies to actually clean up the mercury and protect our communities in the interim. Recently, we submitted a letter, signed by 2400 residents throughout the Bay Area, calling for specific improvements to the plan, including:

• Strategies to reduce the danger to impacted communities that depend on Bay fish for basic sustenance,
• Addressing the ongoing hazard of the hundreds of abandoned mines that continue to leach mercury into the Bay,
• Requiring all wastewater treatment facilities meet the highest reductions possible of mercury in their discharges into the Bay, and
• Ongoing monitoring of discharges for the presence of methylmercury (the most toxic form to humans and wildlife).

The resolution adopted by the State Board sends the plan back to the Regional Board who proposed it originally and calls for these and other key improvements to ensure that we clean up the Bay in as timely a fashion as possible. We applaud the State Board for their action and see this as a major victory for the environment and for impacted communities throughout the area. Thank you to all who signed our letter. We'll keep you posted as this issue develops further.