Floodwaters reached the Elkhorn Slough. What chemicals did they carry with them?

When the Pajaro River levee breached shortly after midnight March 11, floodwaters made their way south down Salinas Road, and later that Saturday morning, reached the Elkhorn Slough, a national estuarine research reserve.

On their way, the waters inundated Tri-County Landscape Supply, and just before 3pm on Sunday, March 12, Elkhorn resident Rebecca Dmytryk filed a hazardous materials spill report with the state Office of Emergency Services, stating there was a sheen of “unknown black petroleum product” about 200-by-45 feet in size that appeared to be coming from a shed at Tri-County.

Tri-County manager Juan Ramirez confirms it was the source – a tank holding 60 gallons of waste oil, which is “all gone,” he says. He adds everything was up to code, but it got submerged by the flood.

Dmytryk, along with her husband Duane Titus, runs nonprofit Wildlife Emergency Services, a wild animal rescue company. Titus says they’ve done a number of rescues over the years for animals impacted by oil spills, and he says that for birds, even a dime-size blot of oil on their plume can be a death sentence. Oil latches onto vegetation, he says, so he’s unsure if any of the oil reached the slough.

Mark Silberstein, executive director of nonprofit Elkhorn Slough Foundation, says this is a reprisal of the Pajaro floods of 1995, when floodwaters reached the slough on the same path. Some of the sediment the waters then deposited in the slough contained DDT – a pesticide banned in 1972 due to its toxicity and thinning of bird eggshells – and they decimated a fledgling colony of Caspian terns, which Silberstein says have not returned. He says ESF scientists will be watching in the coming months for broken egg shells and deformed embryos – signs of DDT poisoning.

Dave Feliz, the reserve manager, says scientists will be closely monitoring any new sediment deposited from the flood. “Even decades after [DDT] was used, it persists in the soils,” he says.