One impact of the recent extraordinary storms across the state can be seen on the East Bay shoreline. Several readers have shared photographs of dense swaths of natural debris floating on the surface of the water and hugging the boats docked in the Berkeley Marina.
East Bay Regional Park District’s shoreline unit manager Kevin Takei said he has been aware of an increase in debris: “It looks like there are clumps of water hyacinth among the debris; that could have come from the Delta where there is an abundance of it,” he said. Takei added that he’s seen it reported that boats from the Army Corps of Engineers have been cleaning up floating debris.
Sediment has also turned some areas of the bay brown — a result of the two main rivers of the Central Valley, the Sacramento and the San Joaquin, flowing high and carrying with them high amounts of very fine clay particles, according to Jeffrey Mount, a senior fellow with the Public Policy Institute of California, as reported in the San Francisco Chronicle.
The US Coast Guard has stopped short of issuing a formal warning but is advising boaters to be cautious when navigating waters awash with debris.
