The next phase of the cleanup of contamination at the Balloon Track in Eureka is approaching.The former railyard beside Humboldt Bay, which hosts toxin-laden soil and other materials from its time storing fuel and hosting a freight yard for repairing and refueling locomotives, has sat vacant for years. But in 2024, the first phase of a cleanup began with debris removed and defunct train cars booted from where they sat for decades.Now the second phase is being pursued, which involves removal and testing of dirt in drainage ditches for hazardous materials, according to Eureka planning documents.A city staff report on this cleanup notes that six inches on ditch bottoms and banks will be removed, with samples collected and exposed areas stabilized and planted with native plants. This soil will be tested for contaminants.This will impact about 12,000 square feet of wetlands in total, with work occurring during dry weather when water is absent from ditches.According to materials submitted to the city by the engineering firm coordinating the cleanup, NorthPoint Consulting Group, “the majority of the Stage 1 work has been completed,” — which ranges from demolition of slabs, debris sorting, concrete crushing, hazardous material disposal, and removal of metal contaminated soils. According to a staff report, approximately 355 tons of historic bunker sand, about 56 tons of contaminated soil and about 109 tons of solid waste were removed.Removal of rail cars at the property, which involved scrapping engines and moving others off-site, began in 2024. The site is a former tidal marshland filled in the early 1900s and was used as a freight yard for decades.The Union Pacific Railroad Company found everything from Bunker C oil, diesel, gasoline, motor oil, polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons, arsenic, copper, lead, zinc and chlorinated volatile organic compounds in their various investigations into the materials at the site. Environmentally persistent dioxins have also been identified in testing.“It should have been done years ago, but it’s good that the cleanup is finally going to be done the right way. It will involve shallow excavation followed by more sampling to determine whether more excavation needs to be done,” said Jen Kalt, director of Humboldt Waterkeeper in an email.The environmental organization previously collected soil samples in 2007 finding environmental toxins, and filed lawsuits against the city regarding a planned “Marina Center” previously envisioned at the site.“Humboldt Waterkeeper will continue to follow the remediation plans to make sure the bay and Clark Slough are not further impacted by dioxins and other contaminants when the site is eventually developed,” said Kalt.Keep Reading
Did you know that a large percentage of oysters that are consumed on the entire West Coast has lived in Humboldt County at some point in its life?As an employee of the North Coast Growers’ Association, I have visited my fair share of farms; I’ve seen everything from cows getting milked by robots to an Albert Etter apple orchard, filled with trees of unique varieties that aren’t available anywhere else in the world. However, despite living in Eureka, I had never seen an oyster farm until earlier this month.I was lucky enough to get to tour Hog Island Oyster Company’s facility on the Samoa peninsula, and was blown away with how little I knew about farming oysters in Humboldt Bay, so I want to share some tidbits of that information with you.Apparently, oysters love Humboldt Bay. If happy cows come from California, happy oysters definitely come from Humboldt Bay. One reason is the expansive mud flats that get exposed during low tide help warm the water up, which in turns helps to produce more plankton for oysters to eat. Another reason is that the water that enters Humboldt Bay only stays in the Bay for a couple of days before getting pulled out to the ocean. This process keeps the water quality very high. If you compare this to other bays like San Diego Bay, water can stay in the bay for up to several months so it quickly circulates any disease that could affect the oyster population.The ideal growing conditions for oysters is what led Hog Island Oyster Co. to move their main breeding facility to Humboldt. “How do you breed an oyster?” I’m glad you asked!Read More
When I was a kid, my babysitter was a witch. She was a typical pointy-hatted, spell-casting witch. But she was also a marine biology major at Humboldt State University, so she’d take me on her broom to the beach after school to look for washed-up stuff.One day she said, “Look, my lovely, the beach is covered in Satan’s testicles!”Thousands of marble-sized clear blobs were washing in. She said, “Sorry, they are actually called ‘comb jellies.’ See, I used to date a guy named Satan, so I knew I couldn’t trust him. I cast a spell so that if he ever cheated on me, his testicles would turn into exploding glass marbles engineered to shred his scrotum. Um, this species of comb jelly looks like our common Pacific sea gooseberry (Pleurobrachia bachei).”Keep Reading
A mechanical failure during last week’s emergency repair work to a damaged Humboldt Bay Municipal Water District (HBMWD) transmission pipeline caused chlorinated water to spill into Janes Creek, resulting in the death of more than 250 fish, including trout, sculpin and Coho salmon, according to district staff.Contractors for the HBMWD had almost finished repairing a major water transmission line last Tuesday evening when the spill occurred, according to General Manager Michiko Mares. She explained that a temporary pipeline had been installed to drain chlorinated water from the pipe as part of the disinfection process that’s performed prior to bringing the transmission pipeline back into service. The temporary line ruptured, causing roughly 13,500 gallons of chlorinated water to flow into Janes Creek over a 15-minute period, Mares said.District employees promptly notified the appropriate regulatory agencies, Mares said, including the California Office of Emergency Services, the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board and the Humboldt County Division of Environmental Health, which serves as our region’s Certified Unified Program Agency (CUPA).Keep Reading
One morning a week, Stefan Kiesbye makes the drive from his home in Santa Rosa to one of the beaches around Bodega Bay, to pick up trash.After dropping his wife at an airport shuttle early Sunday morning, Kiesbye headed out to Doran Regional Park in Bodega Bay. Arriving an hour before sunrise, he was greeted by a chorus of sea lions barking from the end of the jetty.At the westernmost tip of the beach, some 50 feet above the waterline, he spied a large creature out of the corner of his eye. In recent years, Kiesbye has encountered several deceased sea lions at Doran. But this was a different animal: a stranded fish, oval in shape, roughly six feet long and three feet across.Kiesbye, a novelist and English professor at Sonoma State University, wasn’t sure what he was seeing. This strange fish, its small mouth far out of proportion with the rest of its body, had neither a tail, so far as he could tell, nor “back fin.”He was looking at the body of a hoodwinker sunfish, or Mola tecta – derived from the Latin word tectus, meaning hidden – a species whose very existence has only been known since 2017. That’s when it was first described by a group of researchers led by Dr. Marianne Nyegaard of New Zealand.Keep Reading
