Salt Ponds of the San Francisco Bay | Hacker News Reader

Salt Ponds of the San Francisco Bay

atlasobscura.com

92 pointsarchgoon38 comments

I've taken a few pictures of these salt ponds before. They change colors quite frequently and form really cool and unique patters. Best view of them is up in the air in a helicopter or plane.

https://chrismccann.com/outside-facebook-hq - These are the salt ponds being reclaimed outside of the Facebook office.

https://chrismccann.com/palette - Here are the ones in Fremont, still being used for salt production.

I really enjoyed your portfolio.

Thanks! Appreciate the kind words :)

Back in the day I was an acoustic engineer and as part of an EIR (environment impact report) that is needed for the development of one of the salt marshes we had to go out on the salt pond levy's and setup sound level meters.

Two take aways from spending time out on the salt ponds.

1) They smell really really bad.

2) The soil is still very wet even in areas that look like solid ground. I nearly lost a shoe when my foot sank into this deep muck.

Moral of the story: better to view these ponds from afar.

Far enough? https://goo.gl/maps/GScUWhmvmrD2

> They smell really really bad.

I feel that's understating it. When I first moved to the bay area we drove by these multiple times. I assumed it HAD to be some sort of sewage treatment facility (after all where I used to live in Maryland had one near by and it smelled very similar).

They're really cool and interesting but yes I recommend viewing from afar or keeping the inside AC on when driving near it.

I've worked within spitting distance of these types of areas for 10 years now. I liked to joke that when I took the first job, they only hired during the winter, because if people knew what it smelled like in the summer, they'd never take the job.

Excellent sitrep

My father worked for Morton Salt in sales. I wrote term papers in school on the industry and thought I knew a lot about it but never knew about this at all.

FYI salt is mined under both Detroit and it's Canadian sister city of Windsor where Morton has their mine. My dad took many customers down in the mine. I always wanted to go but you had to be over sixteen.

Luck would have it shortly before my sixteenth birthday the companies insurer made them stop giving tours ;<).

http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/detroit-salt-mine

Stanford Crew rows out of a facility right next to[0] some of these salt ponds. When I rowed there - 20 years ago - there were also huge piles of salt right next door; I think it was/is a staging area for Cargill. These piles were big enough to have bulldozers driving around on them.

I think the facility may have moved a short distance since then; at the time there was also a truly enormous cylindrical "ship" docked right next door at a Lockheed Martin facility (since disappeared, it looks like). It looked like it could telescope to change its length; I don't know why.

They also used to whisper in crew recruits' ears that we would shortly be moving to row on Crystal Springs Reservoir[1], which would be a very different experience. That ... never happened =)

[0] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Stanford+Rowing+and+Sailin...

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Crystal+Springs+Reservoir/...

Your comment about the telescoping cylindrical ship intrigued me. I think it might have been the Hughes Mining Barge: http://aviationintel.com/update-hughes-mining-barge-hmb-1-su...

The barge is now in Alameda: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Bay+Ship+%26+Yacht+Co.,+29...

That's it!

We had been told it was used to nab the Soviet sub, but when I tried to verify that story when writing the above post I only saw pics of the Glomar Explorer, and figured we had been told a tall tale.

Glad to see some deeper research proved out the original story - thanks!

Many years ago I worked on the computer models used when developing the restoration plan. Happy to answers any questions.

Cool! What was the motivation for the restoration project? Like, were the salt ponds causing some sort of environmental damage, or was the smell hurting property values, or something else?

There's a big push to restore the wetlands to something approaching their pre-industrial state, which were salt marshes housing many species and benefiting the ecology of the area.

But did they not make money any more? Why did cargill care?

What made the Bay such an especially good place for getting salt?

It's sunny and doesn't rain much/at all for 8-9 months out of the year. And the tidal flats are protected because they are inside the bay.

As a middle class person without a property and kids just knowing we maintain salt ponds in an area where housing is in a world-record man-made critical shortage in a state where if fly over at night is mostly empty is beyond me. No houseboats (not many), no more foster city style land creation. Not much building up. Massive swaths of land that isnt a park, nor a preserve, nor "usable", but remains undeveloped. Poor public transit. I visit Japan quite often and wonder if San Fran had gotten firestormed into oblivion in 1945 we would be further along? Makes no sense to me to see Tokyo, starting from near nothing in 1945, holding 5 times as many people, having 525 subway stations, having so much more housing built up and infrastructure and a huge middle class (of course with demographics issues, but still) and to be here and watch basically the worst played game of Sim-City played out in real life. Billionaires club over here. I dont get why they like to live near muddy stinking salt mush while their baristas, kids teachers and man-servants need to rent tents in Gilroy to make it paycheck to paycheck.

The Hidden Ecologies blog collects kite aerial photography of the salt ponds. http://arch.ced.berkeley.edu/hiddenecologies/

More info about the project: http://arch.ced.berkeley.edu/hiddenecologies/?page_id=41

Very interesting to me because I grew up with these ponds and drive by some of them every workday. Sure would like more specifics: which ponds are being restored, which staying in production? Are some levies being removed, staying in place, being reconfigured? What's the schedule, year by year?

The west bay ones have mostly shut down. You can look at some drained ones by driving out Seaport Blvd, which is the bay end of Woodside Road. There are still some narrow gauge tracks and hopper cars lying around. The east bay ones south of the Dumbarton Bridge are still operating.

The process is simple. Seawater is let into a pond, and about half of it is allowed to evaporate. This doubles the salt concentration. That brine is moved to the next pond, which is half as big, and about half of the water is allowed to evaporate, which doubles the concentration again. The final pond is much smaller than the original, and there all the water in the now highly concentrated brine is allowed to evaporate, after which the salt is scraped up. The process takes huge land area and about five years, but little labor.

Different bacteria live at the different brine concentrations. That's why the colors vary.[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=14276449&goto=item%3Fi...

Isn't the Facebook HQ (former Sun Microsystems campus) located right next to the salt ponds?

Yes they are

> While the salt ponds and their beautiful showing may not be there forever, the project is on a 30-year plan, so there’s still some time to enjoy this fading ghost of San Francisco’s industrial history.

Does this mean the smell will go away in 30 years from now?

Wetlands don't smell great either.

Yeah, I figure the smell is the exposed contaminants of the Bay itself. Everywhere on the Bay where you have mud banks they smell terrible at low tide.

Mud doesn't have to be contaminated to smell bad, it just kinda does naturally.

Most of this is decomposing plant material that naturally collects near shorelines. Wetlands, marshes, and swamps regularly smell bad, even in completely pristine undeveloped landscapes.

"Pristine tidal wetland" means "mud flat".

Here is what it could look like when/if they do restore this area as marais salant: https://goo.gl/maps/d5ATzvYyxs22

You'll get a good glimpse taking the Capitol Corridor east from San Jose.

Or the ACE.

You'll also see what's left of the drawbridge ghost town if you're quick:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drawbridge,_California

Alviso is a very unique area as well:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alviso,_San_Jose,_California

> their ever-changing pigments always stand out from the sky, and have served as a visual marker for astronauts

Can someone verify it is possible to spot these ponds from a usual orbit?

"Salt Ponds of San Francisco Bay"

Thanks! I miscopied that. :)

I always wondered about those bright colored regular shapes when I landed at SFO. Glad I finally know what they are.

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