The Fort Bragg coastal headlands comprise 425 acres of the much-celebrated Mendocino Coast. If you walk the town’s coastal trail and look out to sea, you will see rocks and secluded coves, steep cliffs and flowery headlands, as well as whales, sea lions and pelicans galore, a place as spectacular as almost any on the California Coast. If you look toward town, you see chain-link fence and signs warning danger and contamination.
We have been told for decades not to worry about the contamination, yet the evidence contradicts this, above all the poison in the ponds left behind when old mill buildings were taken down, leaving behind acres of contaminated earth and, in these ponds, a deadly cocktail of PCBs and dioxins, lead, petroleum and other toxic byproducts.
The latest owner of the headlands is the California and Western Railroad — the Skunk Train, which clearly has development of the headlands in mind, though permitting requirements are presently the subject of litigation involving the railroad, the city of Fort Bragg and the California Coastal Commission.
What we see in Fort Bragg today is the remnant of more than a hundred years of timber milling, most of it done by the Union Lumber company. Union Lumber, whose owners, the Johnson family, had by 1885 built an empire in Mendocino County, including what became one of the largest timber mills in the world, with a railroad connecting the deforestation of the interior with the coastal mill. Thousands worked in this mill; their toil has been romanticized, but in fact work was seasonal, dangerous and often deadly.
By the mid-20th century, however, the forest increasingly depleted, the mill owners began to downsize operations until, in 1969, the Johnsons sold their empire (158,000 acres of redwood timberland and the Fort Bragg mill) to Boise Cascade. Four years later, Georgia-Pacific, the giant paper products subsidiary of Koch Industries, bought the mill and the headlands.
Whatever Georgia-Pacific had in mind, clean up was not part of it. So, when the mill was finally shut down in 2002, the town was left adjacent to an ecological nightmare. The final hand off was from Georgia-Pacific to the California and Western Railroad, an organization with limited resources.
In the years since Georgia-Pacific bought the mill, citizen scientists have sounded the alarm — again and again. There have been popular initiatives, even to this day, though thus far none sustainable. City Councils of various persuasions have come and gone, each kicking the can down the road, none with clear perspectives, nearly all with at least a foot in the “develop it” camp. It’s true, of course, that Fort Bragg, a poor town of 7,000-plus, has never had the funds to buy the property and clean it (an estimated $25 million for cleanup alone). Yet it’s also true it never tried to hold those who did accountable.
Is it too late for a solution that might benefit the citizens of Fort Bragg, while heading off a looming disaster? That is, sea level rise and the erosion over time of the headlands, or catastrophe, an earthquake or tsunami contaminating that part of the coast alleged to be toxic free and poisoning miles of shoreline, a deadly spill that would kill most everything in its path.
Georgia-Pacific should never have been allowed to sell without a proper clean up, and Georgia-Pacific and Koch Industries still have the money to do it. Moreover, if the town’s politicians have been compliant at best, complicit at worst, their word should not be the last word. The state of California has power and enormous resources, as does the Coastal Commission and a host of other agencies and our legislators, all pledged, they say, to a meaningful response to climate crisis. It’s never too late to do the right thing.
The challenge here is to get in step with so much of the rest of the world and think restoration, reforestation, rewilding, any or all of these, open land with recreation as a priority and education, a wildlife corridor, pristine coves and beaches, joining the immediate needs of the citizenry today with the fate of our earth.
Cal Winslow is director of the Mendocino Institute and a past fellow in Environmental History at UC Berkeley. His latest book is “Radical Seattle, the General Strike of 1919.” He lives in Caspar.
Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to delete inaccurate information about toxic cleanup on the headlands by the California and Western Railroad, which has never asserted that it isn’t obligated to cleanup the millsite and says it received a “no further action” notice from the state toxics department for nearly 90% of the site.
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