Castro Creek is a creek in
Richmond, California
Richmond is a city in western Contra Costa County, California, United States. The city was municipal corporation, incorporated on August 3, 1905, and has a Richmond, California, City Council, city council. , in the western part of the city adjacent to the Chevron Oil Refinery.
Wildcat Creek drains into it directly and though other
Wildcat Marsh Wildcat Marsh is the wetlands delta formed by the mouth of Wildcat Creek at its confluence with Castro Creek in Richmond, California. tributaries into
Castro Cove of
San Pablo Bay
San Pablo Bay is a tidal estuary that forms the northern extension of the San Francisco Bay in the East Bay and North Bay regions of the San Francisco Bay Area in northern California.
Most of the Bay is shallow; however, there is a deep wate ...
. The creek drains from the
drainage basin
A drainage basin is an area of land in which all flowing surface water converges to a single point, such as a river mouth, or flows into another body of water, such as a lake or ocean. A basin is separated from adjacent basins by a perimeter, ...
of the surrounding area and was once part of the channel that separated the island of Point Richmond with the mainland.
[Map](_blank)
TopoQuest, retrieved July 6, 2008
Name
The stream is waterway is named after
Don Víctor Castro
Don, don or DON and variants may refer to:
Places
*Don (river), a river in European Russia
*Don River (disambiguation), several other rivers with the name
* Don, Benin, a town in Benin
* Don, Dang, a village and hill station in Dang district, Gu ...
the owner of the area when it was
Rancho San Pablo
Rancho San Pablo was a land grant in present-day Contra Costa County, California given in 1823 by Governor Luís Antonio Argüello to Francisco María Castro (1775–1831), a former soldier at the San Francisco Presidio and one-time ''alcalde' ...
.
Description
The
Chevron Richmond Refinery dumps wastewater into the creek routinely 500 yards north of the confluence with Wildcat Creek and also in a drainage.
[Monitoring Program Summary](_blank)
, California Coastal Water Quality Monitoring Inventory, retrieved August 31, 2007 Other waste may only be dumped into the creek through a drainage ditch on Castro Street during high intensity rainfall.
Castro Creek is a fishing, shell-fishing, and recreation area.
Its
estuarine
An estuary is a partially enclosed coastal body of brackish water with one or more rivers or streams flowing into it, and with a free connection to the open sea. Estuaries form a transition zone between river environments and maritime environm ...
habitat is essential habitat for several endangered species.
The creek is also a fish spawning and migration center.
The refinery creates per day of byproduct refinery process water, cooling water, storm water and other wastewater which it discharges into Castro Creek,
Castro Cove,
Wildcat Marsh Wildcat Marsh is the wetlands delta formed by the mouth of Wildcat Creek at its confluence with Castro Creek in Richmond, California. , and
San Pablo Bay
San Pablo Bay is a tidal estuary that forms the northern extension of the San Francisco Bay in the East Bay and North Bay regions of the San Francisco Bay Area in northern California.
Most of the Bay is shallow; however, there is a deep wate ...
.
Castro Cove has become very polluted from 85 years of unbridled discharge of waste waters with
PAHs and
mercury from the Chevron Oil Refinery and is scheduled to begin cleanup efforts in summer 2007.
[Castro Cove/Chevron Richmond, CA](_blank)
, ''National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA ) is an American scientific and regulatory agency charged with Weather forecasting, forecasting weather, monitoring oceanic and atmospheric conditions, Hydrography, charting the seas, ...
'' (NOAA), retrieved August 1, 2007
See also
*
Castro Cove
*
Cerrito Creek
Cerrito Creek is one of the principal watercourses running out of the Berkeley Hills into San Francisco Bay in northern California. It is significant for its use as a boundary demarcation historically, as well as presently. In the early 19th c ...
- marked the southern border of Castro's ranch
*
List of watercourses in the San Francisco Bay Area
These watercourses (rivers, creeks, sloughs, etc.) in the San Francisco Bay Area are grouped according to the bodies of water they flow into. Tributaries are listed under the watercourses they feed, sorted by the elevation of the confluence so th ...
Notes
{{San Francisco Bay watershed
Bodies of water of Richmond, California
Rivers of Contra Costa County, California
Rivers of Northern California
Tributaries of San Pablo Bay