AUDIO:

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KALT:

The Humboldt Bay area is experiencing the fastest rate of sea level rise on the west coast. That's because plate tectonics are causing the ground beneath us to sink at the same rate as sea level is rising, effectively doubling the relative rate of sea level rise. The loss of nature's resilience due to the building of levees, dikes, and other water diversions have left this area and the surrounding communities in a precarious position. Welcome to the EcoNews Report. I'm your host, Jen Kalt with Humboldt Waterkeeper.

As we continue our special series focused on sea level rise in the Humboldt Bay area, we're going to explore more of the issues that are particular to our region. To help us understand some of the challenges ahead for our communities, and how we might address them. We're exploring some of the communities that are most at risk along Humboldt Bay from sea level rise. An unseen danger in our midst is the pollution left behind from the region's industrial activities. Industrial development along Humboldt's coastlines has left some areas with a legacy of soil contamination. Rising sea levels and coastal erosion are expected to mobilize these toxic chemicals from abandoned industrial sites. This contamination has been detected in bay sediment. It's an ongoing concern. We need to take action to protect the health of the bay ecosystem and the communities that rely upon it. We're out here looking out over Humboldt Bay in Arcata at the Arcata Marsh and Wildlife Sanctuary.

And like most of the region, we're dealing with sea level rise here. It's happening here at a faster rate than anywhere else in California because the ground beneath the bay is sinking due to the tectonic activity. The earth is actually dropping at the same rate that sea level is rising. So we have approximately twice the the rate of sea level rise as the rest of the state. Along with sea level rise comes a lot of concerns not just for flooding and undermining foundations of houses and infrastructure, but also there are a lot of contaminated sites around Humboldt Bay. Many of them are old lumber mills that were put on top of wetlands. The wetlands were converted to solid land mostly by dumping a bunch of soil in them and filling them with rock and stuff. But the wetland soil and the channels that connect them to the bay are still there beneath those contaminated sites. It's a threat to the bay and to adjacent areas where people may be living or recreating or working. Some of these sites are already discharging contaminants into the bay or the tributaries now, but that's only going to get worse as sea level rises.

We've made a lot of progress over the years, largely because every project that gets done, if there isn't sampling, we raise the need for sampling to make sure that the problems aren't being exacerbated. We're going to explore some specific sites around the bay and meet some of the people living in these areas and working to address the contaminants that threaten the health of the region.

WILKINSON:

My name is Hilanea Wilkinson, born and raised here in Humboldt County. I am Wiyot from Table Bluff and Tuloa Island.

KALT:

The Wiyot people, who have been living around the bay since time immemorial, have witnessed changes to the bay ecosystem on a massive scale. And one of the very low-lying areas is Tuluwat, which is the biggest island in Humboldt Bay, or as the Wiyot tribe calls it.

WILKINSON:

We are at Woodley Island right now, which is the island right next to Tuluwat, which was where the Indian Island Massacre happened in 1860, during the World Renewal Ceremony for the Wiyots. And I am a descendant of one of the babies found on the island under his deceased mother. My grandmother taught me where to gather, what to gather, and how to give back to the land after you take. Say a prayer and leave some sweet root, which is our medicine. Maybe some wormwood. My father also raised and taught me how to get food for the family. Ever since I could walk, we would go out and go crabbing. We would also go out clamming out in the mud flats near Table Bluff. And I feel really grateful that I was able to do that with my grandma while she was still mobile, and that we could harvest clams and shellfish. Since the Wiyot tribe is such a coastal people, we heavily rely on the ocean, the bay, the rivers for our food source. Also cultural practices. Tuluwa Island, that was used as a dry dock boat yard.

KALT:

island became heavily contaminated from these industrial activities.

WILKINSON:

They would have all those chemicals up there. They built a seawall from marine batteries. I think it took five years at least to clean up, and then they had to cap the island and bring in new topsoil. Years after the cleanup, I still walk the shore and find oil cans, rusty old boat parts, and containers. And sometimes I even find washed up remains from the massacre. With the island being eroded, yep, still finding them. It's concerning with the island because there's so much history there that will be lost, has already been lost, but will be lost more with sea level rise. But it's been so disturbed already. I personally think we should just let it be at rest because it's been through so much.

KALT:

We take leave of Tuluwat for now and head south to King Salmon. In terms of sea level rise, it's one of the most vulnerable communities along the entire west coast. It already floods during storm surges and particularly high tides, especially when those are combined with a lot of rain.

ROHDE:

Soon after the whites entered the Bay in April 1850, they had burned a Wiyot village where King Salmon now is, and they had started building a town there that they called Humboldt City.

KALT:

Jerry Rohde is an author, historian, and ethnographer in Humboldt County.

ROHDE:

whites shot and killed two Indian boys who had shown them the village site. Humboldt City was supposed to be a major port and supply center to the inland gold mines, but it was poorly placed. There was marshland behind it, and the transportation route had to run around Booner Point and then go along the beach. Humboldt City was directly east of the mouth of the bay, but there were mud flats next to it and no real channel to get there. It was supposed to be a port, but it was hard for ships to land there. Humboldt City lasted only about a year. Over time, most of the town site washed away. About a hundred years after Humboldt City was abandoned, a dredge was brought in, a set of channels were cut, and the community of King Salmon was established.

KALT:

King Salmon, because of the way the town was built, it's the lowest-lying community in the Humboldt Bay Area. In the 1940s, a series of canals were dug out of the bay mud with a dredge, and it's therefore at the highest risk from rising sea level and experiences quite a bit of flooding. When there's a lot of rain, during high-tide events in particular, there's a lot of flooding here. But as sea level rises, this region has twice the rate of sea level rise or more of the rest of the state of California. So sea level rise is going to affect people here first in a lot of ways. It doesn't get a ton of attention because it's a very small community. It's unincorporated. There's not a lot of expensive, valuable real estate here. And so, you know, a lot of people are concerned that when it comes time to find government funding to help communities like this, that King Salmon and Fields Landing will be bypassed because there's not a lot of valuable real estate here. In a previous Sea Level Rise episode, we spoke with King Salmon resident Nate Faith. She shared her thoughts about the town's future with flooding from rising waters. And we also talked about another major concern, nuclear waste. So I, of course, have to ask you about the nuclear waste storage site, not wanting to induce more nightmares or anything. But it does seem to be, you know, it's just been an ever-present thing for this community since the mid-'60s. But it was, you know, shut down in, what, 78, I believe. But now there's the nuclear waste storage site, which PG&E says is safe for 50 years. And there's been new attention on the fact that the bluff has eroded quite a bit and that when the storage site was built, PG&E thought and scientists thought that the ground here was uplifting at the same rate as sea level was rising. And so that wasn't going to be an issue. And that was only in 2006. Now we know that is not the case. The ground is sinking at the same rate as sea level is rising. And so we have twice or more the rate of sea level rise than the rest of the state. So what are your thoughts about the way that's either being managed or what can be done in the long term?

FAITH:

I don't have enough information to know how it's being managed. I don't have a lot of confidence that anyone who's involved with it has an alternative plan to what has been already put in place, of leaving it in place and it's fine. Will we have this new information? I have yet to see how that's being addressed. I do know it's a big concern. I do know that I do feel a risk. I think neighbors do feel a risk. Now, when I bought the place, I can't speak for anyone else on this, but when I bought the place, I thought, surely that will be dealt with. So I was actually thinking that that shouldn't be something I would have to worry about. But I am worried. I had an engineer friend who we walked around to that bluff, and he said, well, I can tell you what's going to happen is it's going to get critical, and then something will happen. So I don't know whether that gives me confidence or worries me, because something happening could be the risk of something happening. It could be, oh, we've reached now the place where we can't let this erode anymore, or, oops, a very big unknown. I will say, honestly, I don't see enough evidence that there is enough proactive action taking place to feel that it's really being addressed.

KALT:

If you're just joining us, today's Econews Report is part of a special series on sea level rise. We're talking with King Salmon resident Nate Faith about the nearby nuclear waste storage site. I do know that after the 6.4 earthquake in December that we had that was in the middle of the night, pretty terrifying, a few people asked me if I knew what was being done to inspect it after the earthquake, and I asked PG&E and I never heard anything back. I probably asked the wrong people. I do know that there is going to be a tsunami evacuation drill in King Salmon. Have you been here for one of those, a tsunami evacuation drill?

FAITH:

drill. I've done my own sort of, I threw on my go bag and ran down there and ran up to the hill and timed myself. I think I've done some personal things to see and of course any scenario, if it's a tsunami, any scenario does not have a good outcome for me. But at least in king tide season and heavy rains or what not, I have some possibility of actually making it up to the hill if I need to. I'm glad that there are conversations. I woke up actually with that earthquake. I honestly woke up in the middle of the night shaking thinking, oh I wonder, I wonder if that plant, if this is it for that nuclear plant. I wonder if we're gonna have the waste now. I wonder what's gonna happen now. And I haven't heard anything since then. So earthquakes definitely get me thinking that way. I do hope that they're monitoring it because nobody wants to have an incident or a big leakage or anything like that. So it's a little disconcerting to see that something about, at least inspections and what not, hasn't, we haven't heard news about that since the earthquake. It would be nice to know more.

KALT:

It would be nice. I know they guard it heavily from, you know, terrorist attacks, but I'm not entirely sure that's the biggest threat to that facility. And it's costing a lot of money to do that, but they haven't been super forthcoming about what they do to monitor the waste and stuff. But you knew about it when you bought your house, and do you think other people who are buying homes here know about that site?

FAITH:

Probably not to the degree I'd looked into it. I'm sure people ask. I mean, my realtor was very open and said, this is a decommissioned nuclear site and there is storage. So he was very open with me. I don't know if it's something that every realtor does, but I'm not sure that everyone understands the full risk. It might be because we don't see it from here. You know, people are very immediate. And when you're in your home, you're not looking at it. It's easy to forget that it's there. But I do know that there's a concern. We're all worried about it getting into our drinking water, that kind of thing, that that's a concern for people. From the comments I have heard, it's definitely, definitely a concern.

KALT:

Well, and the thing is that, you know, since since this plant was built, and maybe even before, but this is one of the first commercial nuclear power plants built in the United States. And at that time, and ever since the government, federal government has been promising to build a repository for all the waste somewhere so it can be sent, quote unquote, away, which I don't think is ever going to happen. I have

FAITH:

also come to that conclusion, and that did keep a lot of us going, I think, for a long time. But now that reality's sinking in, we have gotten little tidbits of news saying, oh no, it's not going anywhere, it's staying here. I haven't spoken to anybody who has bought since that kind of news started coming out that they're not gonna take that waste away. So I don't know how people feel about that. It doesn't comfort me, but that's where I think we want more news about what are they doing to bolster that storage site then. What are they doing to take care of that erosion?

KALT:

Well, what I know is pretty limited, but I know that after there's a really big storm and a lot of waves pound on the riprap at the base of that bluff, that PG&E goes out and checks on it and they may, you know, dump more rock or, you know, something there. But a lot of people say that that bluff is where a lot of the wave energy got focused after the jetties were built. And then after the bluff eroded like 1,400 feet laterally in something like 60 years, they put the riprap at the base there and that then reflected the wave energy to the other side of the bay where there's a bunch of erosion. And it just kind of bounces around the bay like, you know, hitting balls on a pool table. And then what happens is people where the new erosion is happening say, oh, we got to throw a bunch of rock on this. And, you know, then it just continues to push that storm energy somewhere else, the wave energy somewhere else and cause more and more erosion, you know, until we start to have a more holistic management plan for the bay, you know, having all this erosion and continuing to just put in armored shorelines. And it's all done on emergency permits because it's like, oh, it's an emergency. It's eroding the road by the boat ramp or whatever. Until we have a holistic plan for the whole bay rather than that type of approach, more and more is not going to help with the sea level rise problem. From the little town of King Salmon, we are now going to move to the north end of Humboldt Bay at the shores of Arcata. So we're here at the Arcata Martian Wildlife Sanctuary, which has its own crazy industrial past. A lot of the area was used for harvesting native plants and hunting back before white people came here. The whole region was, we had ancestral territory and the bay was much bigger until European American colonists came here and started to massively transform the environment. And that included blocking off wetlands from the tides, you know, filling in all kinds of slough channels. The slough channels were used by Wiyot people as transportation corridors. They would boat up and down these to get around. But then the conversion to all the industry, well, first it was gold and there was a big wharf built here at the Arcata Marsh to bring in supplies for the gold miners and the timber industry took over after that. And that's where a lot of the contamination originated. So there were over 100 lumber mills around Humboldt Bay at one time. And in the 1940s, they began to use a lot of chemicals, a lot of really toxic chemicals. And one of them was a wood preservative called pentachlorophenol that contained dioxins. And it was banned for use on lumber in the 1980s because of the dioxin content of that chemical. Dioxins are some of the most toxic, long-lasting chemicals ever manufactured. And a lot of these sites still to this day harbor high levels of dioxins and these magnify up the food chain. So they get into the fish and other aquatic life, shellfish and whatnot. And any animals or people who eat fish and shellfish continue to concentrate those dioxins. The old maps show a prairie here and it would have been filled with tons of culturally important plants. Adam Canter, who is a botanist and works for the Wiyot tribe, knows a lot about the culturally important plants that were here at one time. Arcata Prairie was a big prairie that went all the way from here up to the high school, I think.

CANTER:

It must've just been magnificent. It was known for its species of Angelica and cow parsnip and logusticum and mixed in with herbs like yarrow and knick-knick even. And it's kind of cool. You can go up on I Street in Arcata and there's some legacy old growth pepperwood trees which a lot of folks don't think being that coastal. But I think those are actually kind of remnants of the Arcata Prairie ecotone. There was this kind of pepperwood edge in Savannah that was probably super diverse before you hit the redwoods. So it would've been very rich landscape.

KALT:

Imagine how incredible it must have been. A coastal prairie with views of the bay, elk grazing on lush grass, vast connected braiding slough channels where the freshwater parts of the streams mixed with the tidewaters of Humboldt Bay. What about burning on the prairies?

CANTER:

It was very frequent. We know that we used fire to manage the prairies.

KALT:

California's lands from marsh to forest to prairie evolved with fire and depend on periodic burning to remain productive wildlife habitat and areas for harvest and cultivation.

CANTER:

Hazelnuts were burned and huckleberries were burned, you know, sometimes on a three-year rotation. It was a constant sort of battle to keep the forest from encroaching onto the prairies. And you know, not just to benefit plants, fire was used to benefit wildlife, you know, megafauna like elk.

KALT:

year. So it's hard to believe this looking out across this slough channel. It's meandering through a salt marsh and there's lots of willows and bird habitat over there but this was a lumber mill and it was a big lumber mill. It encompassed the whole side of South I Street all the way to Samoa Boulevard. There were mills lining Butcher Slough which is Jolly Giant Creek. The tidally influenced parts of the channels are called sloughs even though they're connected to the Freshwater Creek. So Janes Creek becomes McDaniel Slough. Jolly Giant Creek becomes Butcher Slough. Butcher Slough was channelized in a long straight ditch when the mills were all here. At any given time there were several mills. The Arcata Marsh Interpretive Center was built at a site that was a mill and you know you see the pilings in the slough channel from the old mill site and in the 1980s around the time that the wood preservative with the dioxins was banned for use in lumber mills the city of Arcata not realizing that there was probably a lot of contamination here. That's when they decided to restore the slough channel and so they dug the slough channel right through the old mill site. And they didn't know that you know the chemicals were so toxic. People did not know back then you know people said better living through chemistry and all that insanity you know. So we're talking about an era where people were just starting to realize that maybe if you use chemicals that kill things like mosquitoes and fungus that they maybe kill other things too. You know 70s 1970s and early 80s. So green lumber you know the logs were cut into lumber and it would be either dipped or sprayed with the chemicals and then sorted and so it got everywhere. It just got all over the place. There were also some conical burners here on the property. This pollution left behind by the lumber mills is one of the top priorities that Humboldt Waterkeeper has been working on over the years. This is Helena Wilkinson again.

WILKINSON:

Especially with sea level rise and the coastal inundation, I hope that we can really bring to light the issues that we are having with our environment, the risks that are becoming more and more apparent.

KALT:

The good news is that people have begun to address the contamination around Humboldt Bay. Recent grants have been awarded to clean up these sites before the groundwater and sea level rises and mobilizes these contaminants into the bay. For more information on sea level rise in Humboldt Bay, check out the Humboldt Sea Level Rise Institute website, humboldtslri.org. Many thanks to community members Helena Wilkinson, Jerry Rohde, Nate Faith, and Adam Cantor.

OUTRO:

This has been another episode of the EcoNews Report. Join us again at this time on this channel next week for more environmental news from the north coast of California. This episode was produced by Jesse Eden with funding provided by the California Coastal Commission Whale Tail Grant Program. Thanks for joining us.