Castro Cove is a "portion of the

San Pablo Bay San Pablo Bay is a tidal estuary that forms the northern extension of 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 water c ...

" in

Richmond, California Richmond is a city in western Contra Costa County, California, United States. The city was incorporated on August 7, 1905, and has a city council.

located between

Point San Pablo Point San Pablo Harbor is a marina and small community at the far end of Point San Pablo in San Pablo Bay, within Richmond, in Contra Costa County, California. It is located at 1900 Stenmark Drive, Richmond CA 94801. Overview The community is ...

and the confluence of Wildcat Creek into Castro Creek.Monitoring Program Summary
, California Coastal Water Quality Monitoring Inventory, retrieved August 31, 2007

Overview

The

cove A cove is a small type of bay or coastal inlet. Coves usually have narrow, restricted entrances, are often circular or oval, and are often situated within a larger bay. Small, narrow, sheltered bays, inlets, creeks, or recesses in a coast are of ...

is made up of

mudflats Mudflats or mud flats, also known as tidal flats or, in Ireland, slob or slobs, are coastal wetlands that form in intertidal areas where sediments have been deposited by tides or rivers. A global analysis published in 2019 suggested that tidal f ...

bay mud Bay mud consists of thick deposits of soft, unconsolidated silty clay, which is saturated with water; these soil layers are situated at the bottom of certain estuaries, which are normally in temperate regions that have experienced cyclical glaci ...

, and

intertidal salt marsh A salt marsh or saltmarsh, also known as a coastal salt marsh or a tidal marsh, is a coastal ecosystem in the upper coastal intertidal zone between land and open saltwater or brackish water that is regularly flooded by the tides. It is dominat ...

owned by

Chevron USA Chevron Corporation is an American multinational energy corporation. The second-largest direct descendant of Standard Oil, and originally known as the Standard Oil Company of California (shortened to Socal or CalSo), it is headquartered in San ...

. The cove forms an important

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 environmen ...

environmental resource for

San Francisco Bay San Francisco Bay is a large tidal estuary in the United States, U.S. state of California, and gives its name to the San Francisco Bay Area. It is dominated by the big cities of San Francisco, San Jose, California, San Jose, and Oakland, Ca ...

. It is the home of many endangered species including the

Salt Marsh Harvest Mouse The salt marsh harvest mouse (''Reithrodontomys raviventris''), also known as the red-bellied harvest mouse, is an endangered rodent endemic to the San Francisco Bay Area salt marshes in California. The two distinct subspecies are both endanger ...

Ridgway's rail Ridgway's rail (''Rallus obsoletus'') is a near-threatened species of bird. It is found principally in California's San Francisco Bay to southern Baja California. A member of the rail family, Rallidae, it is a chicken-sized bird that rarely flie ...

steelhead Steelhead, or occasionally steelhead trout, is the common name of the anadromous form of the coastal rainbow trout or redband trout (O. m. gairdneri). Steelhead are native to cold-water tributaries of the Pacific basin in Northeast Asia an ...

, and

Olympia Oyster ''Ostrea lurida'', common name the Olympia oyster, after Olympia, Washington in the Puget Sound area, is a species of edible oyster, a marine bivalve mollusk in the family Ostreidae. This species occurs on the northern Pacific coast of North Am ...

.Castro Cove/Chevron Richmond, CA
, ''

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (abbreviated as NOAA ) is an United States scientific and regulatory agency within the United States Department of Commerce that forecasts weather, monitors oceanic and atmospheric conditi ...

'' (NOAA), retrieved August 1, 2007 Other

benthic The benthic zone is the ecological region at the lowest level of a body of water such as an ocean, lake, or stream, including the sediment surface and some sub-surface layers. The name comes from ancient Greek, βένθος (bénthos), meaning "t ...

invertebrates, mammals, fish, and birds also live in the habitat; all the animals may have been injured by contamination, whether endangered or of

least concern A least-concern species is a species that has been categorized by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as evaluated as not being a focus of species conservation because the specific species is still plentiful in the wild. Th ...

. Castro Cove is named after

Don Víctor Castro Don, don or DON and variants may refer to: Places *County Donegal, Ireland, Chapman code DON *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 vil ...

Pollution

The cove is also a recreational, fishing, boating, and shellfishing area. The

Richmond Rod & Gun Club Yacht Harbor Richmond most often refers to: * Richmond, Virginia, the capital of Virginia, United States * Richmond, London, a part of London * Richmond, North Yorkshire, a town in England * Richmond, British Columbia, a city in Canada * Richmond, California, ...

is located on the western coast of the cove. The

Chevron Richmond Refinery The Chevron Richmond Refinery is a petroleum refinery in Richmond, California, on San Francisco Bay.

located at the south end of the inlet dumps 5.6 million gallons daily of treated industrial use waters into the

Cove A cove is a small type of bay or coastal inlet. Coves usually have narrow, restricted entrances, are often circular or oval, and are often situated within a larger bay. Small, narrow, sheltered bays, inlets, creeks, or recesses in a coast are of ...

, Castro Creek and

. From 1902 until 1987 the refinery released various contaminants in its wastewater and other run-off, which severely contaminated the Bay mud of the cove. In 1998 the

California Regional Water Quality Control Board The California State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB) is one of six branches of the California Environmental Protection Agency. History This regulatory program has had the status of an official government department since the 1950s. The St ...

began to plan cleanup of the site and pressured Chevron. The water board used the authority of the

Bay Protection and Toxic Clean-up Program A bay is a recessed, coastal body of water that directly connects to a larger main body of water, such as an ocean, a lake, or another bay. A large bay is usually called a gulf, sea, sound, or bight. A cove is a small, circular bay with a nar ...

to require Chevron to produce a sediment characterization work plan in 1998. Years of discharge or polluted water left the cove with high levels of

polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons A polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) is a class of organic compounds that is composed of multiple aromatic rings. The simplest representative is naphthalene, having two aromatic rings and the three-ring compounds anthracene and phenanthrene. P ...

(PAHs) and

mercury contamination Mercury is a chemical element with the symbol Hg and atomic number 80. It is also known as quicksilver and was formerly named hydrargyrum ( ) from the Greek words, ''hydor'' (water) and ''argyros'' (silver). A heavy, silvery d-block element, me ...

Cleanup

Between 1999 and 2001 benthic toxicity tests found PAHs and mercury levels at up to 507 mg/kg and 13 mg/kg respectively at this site and a portion was designated as an area of concern (AOC). The most contaminated, AOC is adjacent to the former wastewater outfall which has been relocated into

. A

California Environmental Quality Act The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) is a California statute passed in 1970 and signed in to law by then-Governor Ronald Reagan, shortly after the United States federal government passed the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), ...

(CEQA)-mandated

mitigated negative declaration Mitigation is the reduction of something harmful or the reduction of its harmful effects. It may refer to measures taken to reduce the harmful effects of hazards that remain ''in potentia'', or to manage harmful incidents that have already occur ...

was completed and a corrective action plan was designed. The plan which includes a natural resource damage assessment will cordon off the AOC with steel sheet piling and have the contaminated muds and sediment dredged and pumped into a disused treatment pond. In that treatment pond the toxic waste will be dried and then neutralized with a stabilizing agent like

fly ash Fly ash, flue ash, coal ash, or pulverised fuel ash (in the UK) plurale tantum: coal combustion residuals (CCRs)is a coal combustion product that is composed of the particulates (fine particles of burned fuel) that are driven out of coal-fired ...

or cement. The inactive pond will then be regraded and capped with vegetation. The remediation project is scheduled for the summer of 2007.

References

{{coord, 37.956, -122.401, display=title Bodies of water of Richmond, California Bays of California Bays of Contra Costa County, California San Francisco Bay Geography of Richmond, California Coves of the United States Wetlands of the San Francisco Bay Area