The Bay’s unprecedented “red tide” algal bloom has almost completely gone away. SF Baykeeper continues to advise caution against contacting murky, discolored waters and encourages reports of these conditions to its Pollution Hotline.
The Richmond City Council just signed an agreement that will keep coal out of the city permanently—a move that Baykeeper has fought for long and hard. We worked with partners and local activists in Richmond to develop the original ban a few years ago, and then we provided expert legal advice after the fossil fuel industry took the city to court over the ban.
Baykeeper defends San Francisco Bay from the biggest threats and holds polluters accountable. For more than 30 years, using science, policy, and law, we’ve achieved 290 legal victories to stop pollution from industrial facilities, reduced sewage spills to the Bay by 75% from 10 cities, passed new state laws to keep fossil fuel pollution out of the Bay, and strengthened local regulation of toxic pollutants like mercury and selenium to protect the Bay’s wildlife and residents.
In celebration of our 35th year of defending San Francisco Bay, each month we’re sharing significant victories that we’ve won together and highlighting how they’re still making waves today.
In the early 2000s, a frustrated Richmond resident called Baykeeper’s pollution hotline. She reported that a city sewer main was spilling raw sewage into the street, nearby storm drains, and into her backyard. So, our field team investigated and our legal team researched—and the Sick of Sewage campaign was born.
"Thank you for suing us." The first time I heard those words from a defendant in a Baykeeper case many years ago, I was surprised and thought it was meant sarcastically. Then I heard it again a couple of years later from another defendant, and by the fifth or sixth time a defendant expressed their gratitude for our legal action, I began to realize that the Bay Area’s polluters are a little different.
