Environment
The bushes rustle as Herb Warren emerges toting a trash picker and plastic bucket. The 65-year-old retiree ambles through the plants, snatching up the pieces of littered plastic, food wrappers and bottles along the stretch of Baxter Creek running through Booker T. Anderson Park.
More than 800 volunteers, many of them teenagers, broke coastal cleanup records in Shimada Park Saturday.
Near the corner of Cutting Boulevard and 23rd Street, between an asphalt parking lot and a concrete sidewalk, surrounded by weeds and yellowed grass, is a dead tree.
The East Bay Regional Park District is looking for $5.2 million to fund a first-of-its-kind interpretive center at Point Pinole, which would help tell the environmental and cultural history of the area through educational programs for school children and the public.
Hundreds of volunteers will collect thousands of pounds of trash Saturday at Shimada Friendship Park as part of an annual statewide effort to clean coastlines and educate the public about healthy watersheds. Unlike other ocean contaminants, “Trash is a pollutant you can see, so it’s less abstract,” said Juliana Gonzalez, the Healthy Watersheds Program manager for The Watershed Project, which co-sponsors the event with Supervisor John Gioia and the City of Richmond from 9 a.m.-noon on Saturday. At noon, volunteers…
Chevron failed to check pipes despite internal policies. The U.S. Chemical Safety Board has found that sections of pipe that were measured following the August 6 fire at Chevron’s Richmond refinery had thinned in thickness by 80 percent. Chevron would have had to replace those sections to comply with its own standards, but the company did not inspect these sections in November 2011, despite internal policies to check all segments, CSB’s Don Holstrom said Tuesday night at the City Council…
A dozen Richmond residents, most donning shirts that read ‘Clean Air for All,’ rode a bus to the Bay Area Air Quality Management District office this morning to hear from the various agencies investigating the Aug. 6 Chevron refinery fire. Spectators filled the chairs and lined the wall of the quiet, wood-paneled room as each organization — including representatives from BAAQMD, the Environmental Protection Agency, Contra Costa Health Services, the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, and California Air Resources Board —…
Almost a year after the City Council approved a separation agreement with Veolia Water, the city is still searching for an alternative wastewater treatment method.
As hikers crunch down the gravel pathway of the Wildcat Marsh Trail, 89 solar panels tower over a grid of wastewater treatment ponds. But over the other shoulder, coastal birds soar above the wide-open tidal marsh and pickleweed. The Wildcat Marsh Trail takes it all in in a gauntlet of manmade-meets-nature-made. Across the marsh, a factory’s steam billows at the base of the mountains. The trail feeds into the Landfill Loop trail, where trucks buzz around on Garbage Mountain pulverizing…