Emails Raise Questions About Chevron’s Bay Area Oil Spill Response
Aaron Cantu, Capital & Main
Capital & Main
This article was produced by the award-winning journalism nonprofit Capital & Main. It is co-published here with permission.
The morning after a quarter-inch hole in a pipeline owned by Chevron leaked petroleum fluids into the San Francisco Bay on February 9, Richmond Mayor Tom Butt struck an optimistic tone about the incident at the oil giant’s refinery.
“I think in the big picture it’s going to be OK,” Butt told one local press outlet.
On his blog several days later, Butt wrote the city had “dodged a bullet on what turned out to be a relatively small spill with no lingering effects.” In a city council meeting a week after the spill, he offered no thoughts when a counselor brought up the incident.
SF Baykeeper sues Biden administration to list local longfin smelt as endangered species
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Several longfin smelt collected Alviso Marsh in Lower South San Francisco Bay.The fish in these photos are all longfin smelt, photos taken in Dec. 2020. They were collected in Alviso Marsh in Lower South San Francisco Bay. Some were returned but some were kept for further evaluation. (They study their ear bones to get some data…). If you like you could add that longfin smelt are named their larger-than-average pectoral fin, the one behind their gills. Though to most of us the fin doesn’t look super long.James Ervin / UC Davis
Councilman, advocates call for change after latest Chevron refinery spill
By Dan McMenamin article
RICHMOND, Calif. - Richmond residents deserve more answers from Chevron and public agencies about an oil spill earlier this month and the community needs to discuss a future without the oil giant s refinery operating there, city officials and local advocates said Tuesday.
The Feb. 9 leak of several hundred gallons at the refinery s long wharf in Richmond caused a sheen of oil that spread from Point Molate to Brooks Island, according to a unified command for the spill that involved Chevron, according to the state Department of Fish and Wildlife s Office of Spill Prevention and Response, Contra Costa Health Services and the U.S. Coast Guard.
California Refinery’s Switch to Biofuels Not as Green As it Sounds Processing liquid fuels from commodities based on a monoculture agriculture model that is devastating the world s last intact forests requires close review.
A version of this op-ed appeared on the Biofuelwatch website. Gary Graham Hughes
February 9, 2021
The Carquinez Strait is a wonder of powerful tidewaters that connects the San Francisco Bay with the Sacramento-San Joaquín Delta. Every salmon born in the extensive Sacramento and Central Valley watersheds will make the journey through this bottleneck of coastline on their way to the Pacific Ocean. The shores of the strait, however, have been subject to intense industrial activity since colonization. In many ways Carquinez Strait is the geographical heart of the “refinery corridor” that stretches from the City of Richmond up along the north east shore of the Bay and through the strait ultimately to the last open waters of the delta in Beni