Carrie Austin

Carrie Austin

Cal/EPA SF Bay Water Board, Environmental Engineer

Lindsay Chen: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us; I’m Lindsey, a sophomore Public Policy Analysis major at Scripps College.

Hannah Sands: And I’m Hannah, a sophomore at Scripps majoring in environmental analysis.

LC: So today we’re interested in gathering stories from local leaders who have a lot of experience promoting sustainability, we’re hoping you could tell us a little bit about your background and what are some initiatives you’ve been involved in. We want to try to use your thoughts you leverage how to bring about change at local levels.

LC: We’d like to ask a little bit about your background, what you studied in school, how you started your career, and what your job is now.

Carrie Austin: I’m going to start with now, and then go backwards. The job I have now is I’m a civil servant, I work for the California Environmental Protection agency, and I work for a regional agency under that umbrella called the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board. California has delegated authority under the Federal Clean Water Act and one of the things that we do is we evaluate water quality and if it’s impaired by a pollutant like mercury we put it on a list of impaired waters and I have been working to write the regulations to fix those mercury impairments. For over a decade that has been my job, so I am a civil servant carrying out the federal clean water act to ensure fishable, swimmable, and drinkable waters. With the mercury problem the issue is fishable, the issue is that inorganic mercury is converted in low oxygen conditions by naturally occurring bacteria into a more toxic form; methyl mercury which then bio accumulates up the food web. When it gets up into the fish I tis a concern for the consumers, especially birds and humans, of those fish. That’s what I’ve been working on. How I got here, was I earned a B.S. in political economy of natural resources and then I earned an M.S. in environmental engineering. What I wanted to do in my career was either to invent new remediation technology or to write public policy. So the closest I’ve found is to writing these mercury related regulations. What got me started in this was love canal, which was a situation where solvent spills in the subsurface were poisoning residents and it was one of only two documented cancer clusters in the United states, very interested in that problem. I wanted to try to figure out how to solve toxic industrial pollution problems, and I am thrilled because I get to work on mercury, which comes from industry, be it mining, or burning of coal, or some other industrial processes that for the most part is how mercury is released to the environment.

LS: Thank you so much, you actually hit a lot of the points we were going to ask so if you could talk about some of the sources of the sediment pollutants that go into the bay area

CA: So the San Francisco bay area is here in the California Coast Ranges, which are one of the mercury belt that circles the globe. The Coast Ranges are very rich in mercury, and we have had two of the world’s top producing mercury mines. One of them is located in the hills above San Jose, new almaden. It’s the world’s 5^th largest producing mercury mine. Mercury was used for many different industrial processes, and one of them was gold mining in the Sierra Nevadas. So mercury came out of the hills above San Jose, and then those rivers flow into South San Francisco bay, so you get mercury pollution in the Bay from that mine. Then it was used up in the Sierras, and they drain due to westward drainages into the central valley which is 40% of California that drains into san Francisco bay and there were other mercury mines in the coast range that drain to the central valley, so those mercury mine sites are also mercury source. So one of the first major sources of mercury in sediments are those mines, both mercury and gold mines.

HS: So what are some of the tactics that your colleagues have found successful to implement to prevent this mercury contamination.

CA: We’re at the point where the worst of the pollution from the mines is behind us, and therefore we want to stop any further mercury coming down from the mines but we have this huge legacy in San Francisco bay and in other watersheds, which is really difficult to address. That’s why you want to start at the top of the watershed and you want to do mine remediation at the top of the watershed, so we call that “turning off the tap”. If you turn off the tap then you can start fixing the pipes downstream, in this case the creeks and the lakes. Eventually, the shores and the depths of the San Francisco Bay.

LC: When you’re implementing these regulatory policies what are some regulations you’ve worked through in the past and what are some hurdles that you’ve faced.

With respect to mines there’s a of of hurdles, one thing is that a lot of this dates from the gold rush and many mines, whether they’re gold or mercury mines, many of them are long abandoned, so there is the question of who is around who can legally be forced to pay for the clean up. So one of the huge questions we have, and this does not solely pertain to mercury and gold mines, and it doesn’t solely pertain to California or the Bay Area, this is a national problem, probably worldwide. We’ve done this huge resource extraction for generations and now we realize that we’ve polluted our own environment, and how do we get the money to pay for it? It’s extremely difficult if you don’t have a responsible party that a lawyer can help you force to pay for the clean up, if you cannot find that responsible party who has money its extremely difficult and it’s a huge scale problem. Another problem is all of the mercury that’s already widely dispersed in the environment, its going to be very slow to clean up even if we had all the money in the world, you cannot clean up every molecule of mercury, you would do a huge amount of destruction if you did that. So in some places you really want to wait for natural processes to take over. Some of the natural processes we think of them here as being the big storm events that come through and flush out creeks. In some cases they cause huge landslides and debris flow, and if that happens to be clean sediment from the hillside, it can be a real bonus to the creeks below because that clean sediment can then bury the old mercury contaminant sediment and it’s a natural process so the environment has evolved to deal with these large episodic storms. The plants do come in and re-seed the areas and regenerate over time. In the meantime, you look at those lakes and reservoirs, there are zones where the reservoirs get consumed from a very natural process and especially in lakes in California that has the Mediterranean climate, with really long, dry summers and then the very bottoms of the lakes and reservoirs gets depleted of oxygen. That’s where the naturally occurring bacteria converts the inorganic mercury into organic mercury. That’s how we get our problem so the other thing we’re doing is trying to push the envelope here to solve the methylation problem, so the conversion of inorganic mercury to methyl mercury it’s called methylation. The Santa Clara water district already has a number of pilot studies underway where they’re adding oxygen to some of their reservoirs to see if they can control that methylation process to the point where the fish would be safe to eat. So we’re not removing the mercury, but we’re controlling the water chemistry so to not make the mercury a worse problem.

HS: So going off of your earlier point of the issue when there is no one company that a lawyer can hold financially responsible for the pollution, was it difficult to get to the point where the government was able to take control of the water quality and was there resistance from the government because there wasn’t usually one company to hold responsible for the payments?

CA: So I only have experience with a few of these sites, and with respect to New Almaden, U.S. Fish and Wildlife service undertook a lawsuit called an NRDA, Natural Resources Damages Assessment. U.S. Fish and Wildlife service pursued the current property owners and the successor mining companies, so corporations get sold and bought; the newer versions are called the successor companies. So the parties came to a resolution, so the Santa Clara Parks and Recreation department had purchased nearly all of New Almaden. One of the successor companies had an attorney who insisted that this be a final settlement and the parties agreed to this as a final negotiation and there could be no subsequent financial recovery from the successor mining company. That was completed, and as a result county parks bore their part at New Almaden, they did about a $6 million clean up. Several other agencies have come in and identified other work including the Guadalupe River Watershed Mercury TMDL regulation. The county is held responsible for more work, but they cannot go back to hose successor mining corporations and recover anymore money, county parks which is in the business of providing recreational habitat is having to do remediation of an industrial site. So that’s one example. In other examples, we think that our agency is overseen by an appointed board, the board is appointed by the governor and approved by the legislature. We think they would never approve holding residential and other landowners responsible, or if the people own property that are downstream of the mine so that mining waste is on their property, and its not a commercial operation, we don’t see our board ever be willing to force those residents to clean up the mining waste on their property. SO that’s another challenge. And there are a number of mines like a huge number of mines in California where we have not been able to identify responsible parties are that precludes us from taking action. We don’t have superfund resources, and our agency does not undertake cleanup.

HS: So who then does undertake the cleanup, and does that play into the local governments role in the cases that you’ve worked on?

CA: So I need to speak to the projects that I’ve worked on, and the projects that I’ve worked on include the New Almaden Mine, and out in Marin county area the Gamanini Mercury Mine, which was a very special one time case where for the Gamanini Mercury Mine, USEPA Superfunds came in and did an emergency clean up action, but subsequently they have changed their rules and now they will only do clean up when it is presenting an immediate threat to human health. Mercury accumulation from consuming fish does not meet those criteria.

LC: So when discussing mercury, and the effects on fish and human health, how do you effectively get this knowledge out, is that something in your jurisdiction? Being able to inform the general public?

CA: That’s an interesting question, so California is really large, our bureaucracy within our government is large and its divided into areas of specialties. So I work for the water quality control board, but I don’t work for public health, and really the information about telling people which fish are good for them to eat, which are safer, which are not as safe, and which they really shouldn’t eat, that’s actually not the water quality boards responsibility. So within California EPA there is a public health and they have the office of environmental health hazard assessment, and that agency puts out very interesting and very reader friendly, or I should say fisher friendly, consumption advisories, so they tell you what fish to eat, and how much. They use a really great color scheme of different advisories, red means don’t eat these fish, yellow means you can eat a little bit, and they tell you exactly what your limit should be, and then green is you can eat quite a bit more of these fish. But still they tell you how to limit your consumption. I like the red, yellow, green signage for information output; I think it’s really clear and very graphic. The question is, how do you get the fish consumption advisory public, and posted at fishing sites and that’s where usually its actually the county environmental health department that has taken responsibility for that. I don’t know if they have any law or regulations that require the water distracts to post it, or if they just encourage them to, so you see some water districts are very proactive and they have the fish consumption advisory posted right there at the fishing pier. Have you seen any of them?

Hannah: I haven’t maybe that is because I am from the East Coast. Lindsey, have you seen them.

Elle: I think I have, I haven’t paid that close attention to bay area water unfortunately but could you describe a little bit more about it.

Carrie: If you have any other follow up, I’ll send you all a link to some of them so you can see. And the other thing is you have to get a fishing license in California and that’s from the California Department of fish and Wildlife. And they have fishing regulations which tell you what the limits are in any environment and they always remind you to look at that website. So it’s a public reminder.

Elle: I see, that makes sense. So I think you were talking about the county district and our local Marin district. Is there any fluidity between national government or is it county by county.

Carrie: Let’s see. The US EPA, so that would be national, have written a methylmercury standard and they have also written instructions for fish consumption. So here in California, we follow those guidance attachments but we as a California EPA have to abide by federal guidelines. And how that applies to county governance, if they want to follow it. If California has delegated authority for the Clean Water Act, which is one of the reasons why we follow federal guidance.

Hannah: So we already touched on it and if you don’t know any more about it we can either address it in a follow up email or not at all but we were just talking about county government following the policy. Do you know more about the next step for specifically for Walker Creek mercury, the site that you worked for? What the next step is after the policy has been implemented?

Carrie: Hmm, there is very little within Walker Creek where the local government can do more. Let me give you an example where local government can do something, how’s that?

Hannah: That’d be great.

Carrie: Okay we’ll go to the San Francisco Bay mercury and in that the county storm water agency is required to reduce that amount of mercury that is carried in stormwater drainsto San Francisco Bay. So the cities and counties have municipal regulations that they have to bring to action to reduce the amount of mercury getting into the bay. And also have to measure how much is getting in, those are requirements. So in this sense, I’m speaking as a regulatory agency, we make standards and issue permits for them to comply.

Elle: And if they don’t comply, what is the disciplinary action?

Carrie: We have enforcement authority and we use it.

Elle: Okay. Is there any advice or information you would give a person trying to be involved in this public policy work?

Carrie: We have a requirement for regulation that is very reflective of our democracy. So we have a whole public comment period. So we put our documents out and we circulate that information and we receive written comments that we respond to. We also take oral comments.

Hannah: The is a timeline and also status updates that are posted on the website for the public to find if they want more information.

Carrie: That’s true, in this internet age. All agencies have websites now and much information is available and we do regularly update it.

Elle: Could you speak a little bit about the funding and support for your subsequent policy for this mercury poisoning?

Caririe: Hmm, so how do I say this nicely? We are a regulatory agency so the metaphor here is the California department of education set the speed limits on freeways. It’s the local police and the highway patrol who enforce these limits, it is very costly to people if they disobey the speed limits. So we right a regulation and we need to have continued funding for our agency for our staff to enforce the regulation. So the first thing is, our agency has three structures and that’s part of the way we cover staff costs. And so for all of the entities we issue permits to, they have to pay annual fees. So we have some fee structures that way but we also have other money that come in including from the US EPA that comes in as well. So the first thing is that the enforcement agency itself has to be funded and we have these requirements that people manage their activity in a way where they don’t discharge pollutants. Obviously there is some cost there. We do have some grant programs, most of it is money from the US EPA then we can then issue as grants. But by in large it falls on the shoulders on whoever is polluting wastewaters, it literally falls on their shoulders to cover the cost of implementing the program.

Elle: Okay, I see. So it’s allocated through different ways.

Carrie: I’m sorry?

Elle: The funding, giving the enforcers the money and the regulatory unit.

Carrie: I’m sorry I’m not following.

Elle: It’s okay, we can move on.

Hannah: Do you see yourself continuing in mercury policies? Or do you have an interest in working with other pollutants? Or water allocation policies?

Carrie: For my personal career, I am very much involved with solving the problem of industrial pollution and mercury is a big interest of mine but I would at all mind working with other pollutants. I had a brigade of hazardous waste engineering under my belt before I came into the public sector so I worked on various different types of sites including solvant intruding in groundwater. I happen to have clearly developed a very deep interest in mercury because I feel like the defiance is very involving and the engineering is just beginning. And I’m an engineer. Engineers apply the science to solve problems and so it’s so fascinating. And I actually attend the International Conference of Mercury as a Global Pollutant so ICGMP and I arrange of sessions that talk literally have people come and speak at this conference about what they are actively doing for the mercury pollution problem, not nearly the science. When you go to these international technical conferences you can discuss the science, few people in the world moved into remediation and engineering and that’s what I’m trying to push. That’s one of my areas of professional interest. I am pleased to say that this June I will again be hosting a session on that at this international conference so that’s way above and beyond here in California. We rarely, rarely get funding to attend a conference of the states and certainly not internationally.

Elle: At these international conferences like globally, how are others handling mercury bioaccumulation?

Carrie: We try to reduce emissions of mercury to the atmosphere like the Minamata Treaty we signed recently but did you notice it was not funded?

Elle: Oh, that’s unfortunate.

Carrie: Yes, I feel like the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouses gases that really set a bad trend for the international agreements and that they aren’t being funded. Some governments have set aside funding for Minamata but I don’t think it’s anywhere near the level that that treaty needs. Are you aware of the Minamata Treaty?

Elle: I am not aware of that treaty.

Carrie: You can go ahead and search on the internet up the UN environmental program Minamata Treaty, very exciting. Wonderful mercury treaty but like I said, it needs funding.

Hannah: I’m looking at it now and it’s funny because it is a legally binding instrument and there is legally binding for the funding.

Carrie: Right.

Hannah: Cool, there is a lot of interesting information on that treaty that we can look into. Is there one specific approach that you’re looking to be able to learn about at the international conference or is there something specific you want to share with other people at the conference?

Carrie: I’m very interested in learning what people are doing to control the methylation process in their aquatic environment because people in most wildlife have exposure to mercury because it is converted into methylmercury and gets into fish. Certainly there is a concern with artisanal gold that is using mercury and some people are getting direct exposure but for the vast majority of the world’s population, it is consuming fish that’s the factor. So I’m very interested in learning how to control methylation in the aquatic environment and that’s true for not only freshwaters and lakes and rivers but also in estuaries in San Francisco Bay. So, I don’t know what I’ll learn.

Elle: Right.

Hannah: It would be great to hear from other international policy makers on how they are approaching the issue because we all know that every issue inherently needs to be addressed locally in addition it would be interesting to hear how other countries, what we can take from them and apply and how we can address the issues here.

Elle: We talked a little bit about locally verses internationally, do you see a difference between public and private sectors? And if there are different approaches there.

Carrie: Yes, my first degree is political economy of natural resources and one of the things you study is political economy is what are the incentive structures. And the incentive structures in the private sectors is profit. Public relations and safety play a role but they tend to be not nearly as important as profit. The private industries will fight us, they will fight regulations, they’ll fight permit requirements to make them clean things up. Some public agencies are responsible for reservoirs, they own public land. They are named the responsible party and they’re main issue is that they don’t have money for it. I think that with respect to mercury it’s perceived as not being controllable and theyre just downstream victims or legacy victims of something that someone else did. There is a sector of people within the agency who feel that the agency should not be held responsible. That there is another sector of the agency that feel that the agency should do what it can to create a safe, recreating environment. I see that in the public agency and most of all in the public agency what we hear is, we don’t have any funding to address this problem so for example, New Almaden owned by Santa Clara county parks and rec, this is an agency whose mission is to provide open space and recreation not to industrial waste site clean ups. So every dollar they spend on industrial waste site cleanup is a dollar they can’t spend towards their mission. And it hurts them. It’s not their primary mission. They’re not an environmental agency. So those are some of the things I see in the differences between the private and the public sector.

Hannah: What do you think the role is for the private sector in keeping in the collaboration with the public sector in order to remediate the issue? Where do you think the private sector can be effective keeping in mind that they’re main goal is to make a profit?

Carrie: The main part of the private sector these days is going to be currently operating industry and with respect to currently operating industry, environmentally regulation has come down the pike in reducing mercury in any of their raw ingredients. Phenomenal effects. Huge. So we use to have switches on automobiles, y’know when people would go up and lean on a car and the car’s alarm would go off. That use to be a mercury switch and now it is an electronic switch so there isn’t mercury in the car. There were a lot of industrial processes that used low level switches in any kind of a chemical plant or any kind of a chemical treatment. And a lot of those switches were mercury switches and now they are changed out for another type of system without using mercury. With respect to light bulbs, with respect to cell phones. They’re using less and less mercury. With respect to emissions to cement plants. So just using the limestone to make Portland cement, a lot of the limestone has a trace amount of mercury and is heated to form Portland cement and it releases that mercury to the atmosphere and now those plants are required to put blockers on so that was a regulation from the federal government and the great thing about a nationwide rule. This is actually a really good example of private pressures verses public sector awareness. Portland cement plants are located very far apart and there are very few of them in the country and often times many one plant has a monopoly in the local area. All of the cement is from, all of the cement from the San Francisco Bay Area is from only one or two local cement mills, there’s one in Cupertino and there is one in the hills above Santa Cruz. There may be a couple more but it’s not a very abundant supplier situation. If any of it is coming from far away, you know that cement is very heavy so it’s going to have very high transport costs. So these are single, y’know, sparse very large industries hard for just California. It’s hard for a city to regulate the mercury from other places that happens to be in their city, let alone the county, let alone the state. There is some transport of cement and there have been closure of cement mills. It’s not like there is zero competition but when the federal government comes through and puts the regulation on which is effective for every cement mill in the United States, it levels the playing field. It just makes it easier the local Bay Area management district doesn’t have to do a different regulation from the Southern Coastal Air Quality district and the state of California doesn’t have to do a regulation and you have different business cost compared to other states. You have the federal government implementing uniform emission standards across the United States. It’s super helpful. Does that make sense?

Elle: Yes, that definitely makes sense.

Carrie: Okay, so we need to wrap up. We’re kind of running late here.

Elle: Yes, I was just about to wrap up with a final follow up question. Is there anything else you’d like to say about your work?

Carrie: Y’know I just want to put in a plug for civil servants. I love working in this agency, we have some of the smartest and most dedicated professionals here. It‘s truly impressive. And I just want to emphasize the service side of it. We come here and have a very satisfying professional job but our aim to provide service to our constituents. And it is a super rewarding job. So that’s my plug.

Elle: It definitely sounds like you are very passion driven and this is very impressive, all the stuff that you are working with.

Carrie: Well good, well thank you very much and if y’all shoot me a follow up email, I can send you a link to the fish consumption advisories.

Elle: Oh great, well thank you so much.

Hannah: Thank you and we will definitely send a transcript and run it by you for approval.

Carrie: Thank you.

Elle: And Carrie, have a great thanksgiving break.

Carrie: You too, Bye!

Elle and Hannah: Bye!