One recent August morning, the sun was just rising when I was up and out the door of my apartment, heading to the Oakland estuary. Not everyone would be excited to get up at “oh-god-thirty” to tromp out to the bay’s shoreline and strap themselves to a wobbly paddleboard to hunt down piles of garbage. But as an environmental reporter and water nerd, I was pumped.
I’ve been out on the water before to check out garbage cleanup efforts by a large Army Corps of Engineers vessel, so I thought I knew what was ahead of me. But what I encountered that morning was something more extensive — a secret world of hazardous waste and marine debris lurking just out of view of everyday Oaklanders and eluding scattershot attempts at enforcement.
I arrived at the Jack London Aquatic Center, a public dock off the Embarcadero, to meet up with my guide for the day, Mary Spicer, the founder of I Heart Oakland-Alameda Estuary, a nonprofit group that has been targeting estuary debris for nearly a decade. Spicer, in a bright pink shirt and a broad straw hat, was chatting casually with an Oaklandside editor, Darwin BondGraham, who planned to join us in his kayak along with our photographer, Estefany Gonzalez. We were soon out on the water, our paddles slicing into its still surface.
The water was clear and calm, and the tide was low, so it didn’t take long to find what we were looking for: Just underneath the waters’ surface, the tops of battered boats were visible, decaying like sunken pirate ships. Trash was all around, drifting on the surface of the water, caught in hidden corners of the shoreline, or scattered across broad beaches that can only be reached by watercraft. Existing in tandem with all this debris were harbor seals, cranes, and sea snails, as well as boaters, rowers, and swimmers starting their morning recreational activities.
The blight, trash, and debris have long frustrated those who have dedicated their lives and livelihoods to these waters. Urban stormwater carries trash out to the San Francisco Bay from urban creeks and stormwater drains, dumping some 1.4 million gallons of trash into its waters each year, according to the San Francisco Estuary Partnership. During heavy storm years, additional pollutants can come from an overflow of untreated wastewater. The pollution got so bad a decade ago that the federal Environmental Protection Agency got involved. A 2014 consent decree still requires the city of Oakland to update its stormwater system to prevent it from overflowing into sewage systems — and carrying waste into the bay during storms.
Meanwhile, marine debris, whether from storms, abandoned vessels, or other sources, has continued to accumulate, attracting increased attention in recent years. In 2012, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration launched the Marine Debris Monitoring Program, which works nationally and globally to track debris across shorelines and issues grant funds to organizations trying to address the issue. The city of Oakland secured one of these multimillion-dollar grants in 2024 to help clean up the bay — a grant whose implementation has been slowed by bureaucratic delays.
Meaningful progress has also been stymied by thin enforcement and jurisdictional overlap that has left no single entity clearly in charge of the problem.
“Everyone says, ‘Not it’ and moves along,” Heather Krakora, executive director of the East Bay Rowing Club, told The Oaklandside. “Nobody wants to take responsibility.”
Abandoned and derelict vessels
Not long after we left the aquatic center’s dock, I found myself off balance on my paddleboard as I floated over the remains of a sunken boat. Spicer had warned me that I could easily topple, with the wreckage of so many boats hidden just under the surface. But I managed to stay upright, and the low tide made it easy to see thick algae growing on the submerged vessel; a few feet further and there was another, and beyond it, another, this one still partially afloat.
Soon, we paddled toward a group of dilapidated boats floating in a disjointed clump on the estuary; as we neared, we could see that many of them were tied together. Some of them appeared inhabited; some seemed abandoned. Most of the boats were in poor condition and in their current state, Spicer said, were likely to meet the same fate as the underwater wrecks we’d just passed.
When a boat is still floating, Spicer told me, it is relatively easy to tow it out of the water. But once it sinks, its removal is costly and potentially hazardous. Along with public safety and financial concerns, a boat’s sinking presents enormous environmental risks, potentially releasing oil, gas, and other contaminants into the water.
Krakora said she worries not only about the navigational challenges for rowers posed by these sunken vessels, but about the harm they present to the estuary’s waters. “It’s an environmental hazard on so many levels,” she said. “I would not want to get in the water around here if I had a choice.”
These waters have been a home for decades for those seeking a reprieve from the Bay Area’s steep cost of living. The most famous “Anchor Out” community is docked off of Sausalito, but many people also live aboard semi-derelict boats in Oakland’s waters.
Brock De Lappe, a former harbor master for marinas in Alameda and Oakland, said that when boats are left at marinas or docks — whether because someone couldn’t pay their fees or couldn’t afford to repair them — they are often auctioned off at a fraction of their value, sometimes for just a handful of dollars.
Live-aboard docking fees in Oakland’s ports are around $300 to $400 a month, depending on the location. So some who buy those boats end up anchoring illegally in the bay’s waters, without the funds to maintain their vessels. Because these boats are typically rundown, a large number end up sinking, adding to the bay’s junk.
“In the wintertime, when there’s storms, these boats break loose, and they drift up on shore, they crash into other boats,” De Lappe said. “This kind of stuff has been going on for not weeks, not months, but years.”
In recent years, Richardson Bay, the Oakland Port’s neighbor across the water, has been cracking down on these informal communities, working to find residents alternate housing and removing vessels to comply with a settlement with the San Francisco Bay Conservation & Development Commission. No such strategy is present in Oakland.
De Lappe noted that it is illegal in Oakland for a boat to be anchored in the estuary for over 12 consecutive hours, but the Oakland Police Department’s marine patrol unit, which is funded through a Port of Oakland program, amounts to one officer, Officer Kaleo Albino, who can’t single-handedly solve the proliferation of vessels.
Paul Chambers, an OPD spokesperson, confirmed that the police department’s Marine Unit has jurisdiction over Bay Area waterways and said that the estuary and surrounding areas are monitored by Albino and other patrol officers, in collaboration with the US Coast Guard and Alameda Police Patrol. Chambers said that roughly 20 calls come in each month for “estuary-related issues.”
Many of those who spend their time at the estuary — boaters, rowers, and others — have been asking for additional enforcement help, but de Lappe said their requests have gone largely unanswered.
“It’s an area that is really blatantly ignored by the city,” Krakora, the rowing club director, said.
Where trash goes to die
Paddling on from the sunken boats, we disembarked on a piece of land that Spicer described as a trash hot spot. As I stepped off my board onto the mucky shoreline, I saw trash scattered and partially buried throughout the area. An abandoned refrigerator lay on its side without a door. A lawnmower stood upright as if waiting for a field grass to grow. A seemingly infinite number of chip bags were strewn about the area, often caught on chunks of washed up vessels, used needles, or crushed cans. A bright yellow trash bag labeled “Don’t Trash California” was ripped open, with garbage spilling out.
As part of Spicer’s clean up work, she brings volunteers out to these hard-to-reach shores, where they’ve removed tons of trash over the years. Before they arrive, Spicer does a sweep to assess the situation. Then on a cleanup day, any hazardous materials, items such as aerosols, corrosive chemicals, or remnants of dock pilings soaked in creosote — an oily, hazardous chemical used to preserve wood — are handled by specialized corrosive crews.
The trash comes from all fronts, Spicer said. It is dumped over the sides of boats or left by people hanging out onshore. But a lot of it, she said, comes from storm drains. Trash collects on Oakland streets and then the rains come, washing it into drains that sometimes overflow into the bay. This urban runoff can be toxic to people, and can be deadly to wildlife. According to San Francisco Bay Keeper, a watchdog organization that monitors pollution in the bay, runoff from cities can be deadly to fish and birds who may confuse plastic for food, become tangled in garbage, or get exposed to toxins. “Pesticides, fertilizers, and other pollutants like heavy metals, oil, and grease” show up in the bay, the organization has found, and are “known to have a harmful effect on fish and wildlife, hindering their growth, brain health, and reproductive development.”
“If you stand over a storm drain during an intense storm, you will just see pounds and pounds of debris and garbage washing directly into the Oakland estuary,” Spicer said of the storm outlets near the bay. “If you paddle directly after a storm, the amount of chip bags and plastic floating in the Oakland estuary is really disconcerting.”
As we neared the end of our August paddle, we stepped onto another small beach — another trash hotspot, Spicer said — located just past the Fifth Avenue Marina. Spicer said she had seen birds nesting on a hill here that had been spared the worst of the trash. As we approached a nearby pond, the water was mottled with little black dots. Spicer was ecstatic. What had first appeared to be nothing more than pebbles turned out to be a vast collection of sea snails — creatures whose presence, for her, represented something important about the estuary.
“What so many people who don’t live near a body of water, or near the Oakland estuary, may not realize is how alive the water is,” she said. “Our shorelines are teaming with life. If we would give it a chance.”
Spicer said that, for her, seeing wildlife struggle to find healthy space on the shoreline is painful. But while others may see the water as a lost cause, Spicer sees it as too vital to give up on. She noted that the water around us not only serves the natural world, but the human world as well.
“We need to almost see ourselves as part of nature,” she said, “instead of something that’s far away from it.”
The city of Oakland received a $3 million NOAA grant last year to collaborate with I Heart Oakland-Alameda Estuary and other local organizations to create a preventative abandoned and derelict vessel program and to address marine debris and trash. Spicer showed me three garbage “hot spots” on our trip to the estuary, but Spicer said she has identified a total of 10 areas along the estuary that are in dire need of attention; she said they will be a focus of the grant-funded cleanup.
While the grant came in 2024, Jean Walsh, a city spokesperson, said there were some delays in getting the project underway, but the city is now in the final stages.
“There have been delays in obtaining needed Environmental Compliance Process approvals,” Walsh wrote by email, “and work within the Estuary waterways permit application processes and Partner organizational status application and approvals have also provided some delay.”
She said the city will still try to complete the work by the end of 2027, as originally planned, but may have to seek an extension. Chambers, the police spokesperson, said the OPD is planning to support cleanup efforts as part of the grant project. The grant does not allocate money for additional police enforcement.
“We are hoping to conduct a large-scale cleanup operation by the end of the year,” he wrote in an email to The Oaklandside.
A jurisdictional tangle
Out on the water in August, and as I heard from people who use and care deeply for the estuary, one thing became clear: the estuary is a jurisdictional tangle. Where a boat sinks or washes to shore shapes who is in charge of the problem. And that confusion can be a source of intense frustration for those trying to move bay cleanup forward.
As I paddled through the waters, I couldn’t help but think about all the entities that touched just these troubled waters. When I stepped onto my paddleboard, I pushed off from a publicly owned dock into Oakland waters. The abandoned boats had sunk under a road controlled by Caltrans. But if one was leaking chemicals or disrupting navigation, I learned, it would become the problem of the US Coast Guard — while also subject to enforcement and oversight by The San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission.
The various storm drains Spicer spoke to me about are owned and monitored by a variety of entities, including the city of Oakland, Alameda County, and private companies. Their discharge is likewise monitored by a variety of entities, starting with the federal Environmental Protection Agency, the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board, and the State Water Resources Control Board. The wastewater that can sometimes end up in the bay during heavy rain years, on the other hand, is the jurisdiction of EBMUD, the East Bay Municipal Utility District.
The Port of Oakland, which loomed just north of us, owns large swaths of the bay’s shoreline, adding another jurisdiction into the mix. At the end of our trip, we could spot Brooklyn Basin, the new development owned by Signature Development Group — just one of several private companies that touch the waters edge.
All these different entities entwine over and under and on top of each other, mixed up as messily as the trash strewn about the shore.
The San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, called BCDC, is responsible for protecting and enhancing the San Francisco Bay. It monitors the bay’s waters and the shoreline up to 100 feet past the median high tide. Anyone building along the shoreline needs a permit from BCDC, but those permits become outdated or their requirements change over time, which can lead to inconsistencies. In 2020, BCDC issued Oakland a cease-and-desist order in part over environmental issues related to encampments and abandoned vessels at Union Point Park and in the adjoining estuary. More recent complaints surrounding other locations around the estuary, including at Jack London Aquatic Center, have led the commission to reevaluate its approach.
“Our newly integrated enforcement and compliance team has been meeting monthly with the City of Oakland to discuss these issues, BCDC staff has conducted a comprehensive walkthrough of the park, and we are in the midst of a detailed review of the Cease and Desist Order,” Larry Goldzband, executive director of the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, said in a recent report. BDCD will evaluate Oakland’s compliance with the order, the report says, but the first step in the process is to get the commission and the city of Oakland on the same page about how to resolve their approach to encampments, abandoned vessels, and the accumulation of debris going forward.
The city of Oakland and Alameda County each have stormwater permits from the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board that require these entities to manage the infiltration of stormwater into sewage systems to prevent untreated sewage ending up in the bay — and to limit the amount of trash that ends up in the bay.
As for the abandoned vessels, if an unregistered boat sinks or washes to shore, dealing with it typically becomes the responsibility of the city where it lands — but who’s responsible sometimes gets a bit fuzzy.
The Coast Guard is perhaps the most resourced of these competing oversight entities, but the agency told me its officers will usually intervene only when a wreck impacts navigation.
“For the removal of abandoned boats from the water, unless they are a hazard to navigation, the Coast Guard only has the authority to remove oil and hazardous materials from vessels,” Lauren Giancola, a spokesperson for the Coast Guard Southwest District said by email.
Giancola said the Coast Guard’s San Francisco sector responds to more “search and rescue” calls — which include reports of abandoned or sinking vessels — than any other Coast Guard sector, averaging around 1,000 a year. But few lead to prosecutions; she said only three incidents have been prosecuted so far this year related to the Oakland estuary.
Wash, the city spokesperson, said as part of the NOAA grant, the city is planning to remove 16 sunken vessels, but has yet to identify a partner to handle the removal.
Spicer hopes the $3 million federal grant will help unify the various public and private entities, the vibrant community of rowers, swimmers, fishers, and boaters we saw on the estuary in August, in a mission to clean up the estuary.
“The goal is to unite,” she said, “and to find a long-term way to address these issues.”
