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 located between Point San Pablo 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 o ...

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 fl ...

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 glacia ...

, and intertidal salt marsh owned by Chevron USA. The cove forms an important estuarine environmental resource for San Francisco Bay. 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 endangere ...

, Ridgway's rail,

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 and ...

, 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 A ...

.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 conditio ...

'' (NOAA), retrieved August 1, 2007 Other benthic 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. T ...

. Castro Cove is named after Don Víctor Castro.

Pollution

The cove is also a recreational, fishing, boating, and shellfishing area. The Richmond Rod & Gun Club Yacht Harbor is located on the western coast of the cove. The Chevron Richmond Refinery 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 o ...

, 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 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 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. ...

(PAHs) and mercury contamination.

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), t ...

(CEQA)-mandated mitigated negative declaration 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 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