Thursday November 12, 2026
Hoodline —
More than three decades after regulators first flagged chemical contamination in San Francisco Bay fish, new testing shows the problem hasn’t gone away. Shiner surfperch collected near Hunters Point Naval Shipyard carried PCB concentrations more than 10 times the state’s threshold for unsafe consumption, according to researchers who presented findings at a recent regional water-quality meeting in Berkeley.
The results come from the ninth round of testing since 1994, when the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board first documented the problem in a pilot study, according to the San Francisco Estuary Institute. Jennifer Sun presented the 2024 testing results at the Regional Monitoring Program’s annual water-quality meeting in Berkeley, where an institute chart put the state’s no-eating PCB threshold at roughly 120 parts per billion. Shiner surfperch caught beside Hunters Point, a federal Superfund toxic cleanup site, contained roughly 1,500 to 1,800 parts per billion of PCBs, while an institute presentation described the concentrations there as extremely high. By comparison, surfperch from eight other Bay locations contained about 400 parts per billion or less, and the Bay-wide average for the species came in around 200 parts per billion.