On January 6, 2015, a crowd of more than 100 people gathered to celebrate and witness the breaching of a levee that since the 1800s has held back tidal water from the 1200 acre Cullinan Ranch property, located along the fringe of San Pablo Bay in California (part of the San Francisco Bay Estuary).

It has been five years to the month since the lodging a consent decree settling a natural resource damages case against Chevron USA for their contamination of Castro Cove adjacent to their Richmond refinery in California.

In the late 2000s while OR&R’s Assessment and Restoration Division was assessing the injuries from years of PAH and mercury contamination in Castro Cove, planning was well underway for the restoration of Cullinan Ranch, a former oat and hay farm in Solano County. Plans to turn the site into a massive residential and commercial development had been halted in the 1980s and soon after, the federal government had purchased the property and appended it to the San Pablo Bay National Wildlife Refuge. It has taken more than two additional decades to design and accumulate sufficient funds to complete the restoration of the site.

The trustees selected Cullinan, along with Breuner Marsh several miles to the south, as two key wetlands restoration projects to serve as compensation for decades of aquatic injuries from PAHs and mercury contamination in Castro Cove. Funding from the damage assessment were coupled with other funding provided by NOAA under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and Community-Based Restoration program to provide the major impetus that got the long delayed project underway. So when the speeches were done and the excavator finally scooped away the narrow band of mud separating Cullinan Ranch from the brackish tidal waters of Dutchman Slough, another milestone was recorded in the continuing efforts to restore tens of thousands of diked former wetlands around San Francisco Bay.

For further information, contact Greg.Baker@noaa.gov.

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