1.
San Pablo Bay
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San Pablo Bay is a tidal estuary that forms the northern extension of San Francisco Bay in the East Bay and North Bay regions of the San Francisco Bay Area in northern California. San Pablo Bay was named after Rancho San Pablo, a Spanish land grant given to colonial Alta California settlers in 1815, the bay is approximately 10 mi across and has an area of approximately 90 sq mi. The bay is heavily silted from the contributions of the two rivers, which drain most of the Central Valley of California. All tributaries except for Sonoma Creek are commercially navigable and maintained by the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers, two peninsulas separate San Pablo Bay from San Francisco Bay. The eastern is in the City of Richmond and the western in the City of San Rafael, the bay is shared between Contra Costa county on the southern and eastern shore, and Solano, Sonoma and Marin counties on the northern and western shores. The county boundaries meet near the center of the bay, communities on the shores of San Pablo Bay include, Richmond, San Pablo, Pinole, Hercules, Rodeo in Contra Costa County, Vallejo in Solano County, along with Novato and San Rafael in Marin County. Because the Bay is close to major and local airports. Because of its size but shallow waters, San Pablo Bay frequently has difficult boating conditions. There are many undeveloped shore lands with salt marshes and mudflats, the Bay is a primary wintering stop for the canvasback duck population on the Pacific Flyway, as well as a migratory staging ground for numerous species of waterfowl. Much of the shore of the bay is protected as part of the San Pablo Bay National Wildlife Refuge. Endangered species that are found in the bay include the California brown pelican, California clapper rail and this is a popular destination for recreation fishing, with Saltwater species including, striped bass, surfperch, sturgeon, starry flounder, leopard shark, topsmelt, and anchovy. In the 1880s there was a village, where some 500 Chinese people lived. The location is now part of China Camp State Park, San Pablo Bay is the setting of alternative rock band Primuss four-part song series Fishermans Chronicles, and is also referenced in The Toys Go Winding Down and Harold of the Rocks. It is also mentioned in The Minus 5 song John Barleycorn Must Live, provides a brief history of the marshes of San Pablo Bay
2.
California
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California is the most populous state in the United States and the third most extensive by area. Located on the western coast of the U. S, California is bordered by the other U. S. states of Oregon, Nevada, and Arizona and shares an international border with the Mexican state of Baja California. Los Angeles is Californias most populous city, and the second largest after New York City. The Los Angeles Area and the San Francisco Bay Area are the nations second- and fifth-most populous urban regions, California also has the nations most populous county, Los Angeles County, and its largest county by area, San Bernardino County. The Central Valley, an agricultural area, dominates the states center. What is now California was first settled by various Native American tribes before being explored by a number of European expeditions during the 16th and 17th centuries, the Spanish Empire then claimed it as part of Alta California in their New Spain colony. The area became a part of Mexico in 1821 following its war for independence. The western portion of Alta California then was organized as the State of California, the California Gold Rush starting in 1848 led to dramatic social and demographic changes, with large-scale emigration from the east and abroad with an accompanying economic boom. If it were a country, California would be the 6th largest economy in the world, fifty-eight percent of the states economy is centered on finance, government, real estate services, technology, and professional, scientific and technical business services. Although it accounts for only 1.5 percent of the states economy, the story of Calafia is recorded in a 1510 work The Adventures of Esplandián, written as a sequel to Amadis de Gaula by Spanish adventure writer Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo. The kingdom of Queen Calafia, according to Montalvo, was said to be a land inhabited by griffins and other strange beasts. This conventional wisdom that California was an island, with maps drawn to reflect this belief, shortened forms of the states name include CA, Cal. Calif. and US-CA. Settled by successive waves of arrivals during the last 10,000 years, various estimates of the native population range from 100,000 to 300,000. The Indigenous peoples of California included more than 70 distinct groups of Native Americans, ranging from large, settled populations living on the coast to groups in the interior. California groups also were diverse in their organization with bands, tribes, villages. Trade, intermarriage and military alliances fostered many social and economic relationships among the diverse groups, the first European effort to explore the coast as far north as the Russian River was a Spanish sailing expedition, led by Portuguese captain Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, in 1542. Some 37 years later English explorer Francis Drake also explored and claimed a portion of the California coast in 1579. Spanish traders made unintended visits with the Manila galleons on their trips from the Philippines beginning in 1565
3.
San Francisco Bay
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San Francisco Bay is a shallow estuary in the U. S. state of California. It is surrounded by a region known as the San Francisco Bay Area, dominated by the large cities San Francisco, Oakland. San Francisco Bay drains water from approximately 40 percent of California and it then connects to the Pacific Ocean via the Golden Gate strait. However, this group of interconnected bays is often called the San Francisco Bay. The bay was designated a Ramsar Wetland of International Importance on February 2,2013, the bay covers somewhere between 400 and 1,600 square miles, depending on which sub-bays, estuaries, wetlands, and so on are included in the measurement. The main part of the bay measures 3 to 12 miles wide east-to-west and it is the largest Pacific estuary in the Americas. Later, wetlands and inlets were filled in, reducing the Bays size since the mid-19th century by as much as one third. Recently, large areas of wetlands have been restored, further confusing the issue of the Bays size, despite its value as a waterway and harbor, many thousands of acres of marshy wetlands at the edges of the bay were, for many years, considered wasted space. As a result, soil excavated for building projects or dredged from channels was often dumped onto the wetlands, from the mid-19th century through the late 20th century, more than a third of the original bay was filled and often built on. The idea was, and remains, controversial, there are five large islands in San Francisco Bay. Alameda, the largest island, was created when a shipping lane was cut in 1901 and it is now predominantly a bedroom community. Angel Island was known as Ellis Island West because it served as the point for immigrants from East Asia. It is now a park accessible by ferry. Mountainous Yerba Buena Island is pierced by a tunnel linking the east and west spans of the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge, attached to the north is the artificial and flat Treasure Island, site of the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition. From the Second World War until the 1990s, both served as military bases and are now being redeveloped. Isolated in the center of the Bay is Alcatraz, the site of the federal penitentiary. The federal prison on Alcatraz Island no longer functions, but the complex is a popular tourist site, despite its name, Mare Island in the northern part of the bay is a peninsula rather than an island. During the last ice age, the now filled by the bay was a large linear valley with small hills
4.
East Bay Regional Park District
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The East Bay Regional Park District is a special district operating in Alameda County and Contra Costa County, California, within the East Bay area of the San Francisco Bay Area. It maintains and operates a system of parks which is the largest urban regional park district in the United States. The administrative office is located in Oakland, as of 2015, EBRPD spans 120,000 acres with 65 parks and over 1,200 miles of trails. Some of these parks are areas, others include a variety of visitor attractions. The trails are used for non-motorized transportation such as biking, hiking. Nearly 150 miles of paved trails through urban areas link the parks together, a destructive grass fire that broke out in Wildcat Canyon blew west into Berkeley on September 27,1923 and burned down 640 structures homes. The East Bay Water Company was harshly criticized for its failure to deliver water to successfully fight the fire. A state law was passed that enabled citizens of Alameda and Contra Costa Counties to create a district that could obtain water from the Mokelumne River. The East Bay Municipal District was formed and approved by the electorate, the EBRPD was founded in 1934, and acquired its first land two years later, when the East Bay Municipal Utility District sold 2,166 acres of its surplus land. The founders of the district included Robert Sibley, a hiking enthusiast, Hollis Thompson, then Berkeley City Manager, and Charles Lee Tilden, among others. William Penn Mott, Jr. served as director of the agency from 1962 to 1967, in June 2013, EBRPD purchased a 1,900 acres tract of land formerly known as Roddy Ranch in east Contra Costa County. The tract lies south of Antioch and west of Brentwood. The cost was reported as $14.24 million, funding will also be provided by California Wildlife Conservation Board and an unidentified private foundation. The acquisition does not include Roddy Ranch Golf Club or about 240 acres of privately owned land inside the project boundary, the East Contra Costa County Habitat Conservancy will install gates, fencing and signs around the tract in the coming year, while the sale is in escrow. The new area will likely be named Deer Valley Regional Park, in 2016, Vargas Plateau Regional Park in Fremont was the first park ever to have been shut down as the result of legal action in the more than 80-year history of EBRPD. During 2014, EBRPD cut park hours on a temporary and interim basis to reduce access to Mission Peak in Fremont. The parks administered by the EBRPD vary greatly in size and character, there are also bay shore parks such as the Point Pinole Regional Shoreline north of Richmond, the Coyote Hills Regional Park near Fremont, the Martin Luther King Jr. Regional Shoreline on San Leandro Bay, and the Oyster Bay Regional Shoreline south of the Oakland International Airport, the district also includes a former farm, a former coal mine, an extinct volcano, and one of the biggest dog-walking parks in the country. Redwood Regional Park contains the largest remaining stand of coast redwood in the East Bay
5.
Richmond, California
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Richmond is a city in western Contra Costa County, California, United States. The city was incorporated on August 7,1905, under the McLaughlin Administration, Richmond was the largest city in the United States served by a Green Party mayor. As of the 2010 U. S. Census, the population is at 103,710. The largest, Richmond, Virginia, is the namesake of the California city, the Ohlone Indians were the first inhabitants of the Richmond area, settling an estimated 5,000 years ago. The name Richmond appears to predate actual incorporation by more than fifty years, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad had its terminus at Richmond. The first post office opened in 1900, Richmond was founded and incorporated in 1905, carved out of Rancho San Pablo, from which the nearby town of San Pablo inherited its name. Until the enactment of prohibition in 1919, the city had the largest winery in the world, in the 1920s the Ku Klux Klan was active in the city. In 1930 the Ford Motor Company opened a plant called Richmond Assembly Plant which moved to Milpitas in the 1960s. The old Ford plant has been a National Historic Place since 1988, the city was a small town at that time, until the onset of World War II which brought on a rush of migrants and a boom in the industrial sector. Standard Oil set up here in 1901, including a what is now the Chevron Richmond Refinery and tank farm. There is a pier into San Francisco Bay south of Point Molate for oil tankers, the western terminus of the Santa Fe Railroad was established in Richmond with ferry connections at Ferry Point in the Brickyard Cove area of Point Richmond to San Francisco. Many of these lived in specially constructed houses scattered throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, including Richmond, Berkeley. A specially built rail line, the Shipyard Railway, transported workers to the shipyards, kaisers Richmond shipyards built 747 Victory and Liberty ships for the war effort, more than any other site in the U. S. The city broke many records and even built one Liberty ship in a five days. On average the yards could build a ship in thirty days, the medical system established for the shipyard workers at the Richmond Field Hospital eventually became todays Kaiser Permanente HMO. It remained in operation until 1993 when it was replaced by the modern Richmond Medical Center hospital, Point Richmond was originally the commercial hub of the city, but a new downtown arose in the center of the city. It was populated by many department stores such as Kress, J. C. Penney, Sears, Macys, during the war the population increased dramatically and peaked at around 120,000 by the end of the war. Once the war ended the workers were no longer needed
6.
San Francisco
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San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the cultural, commercial, and financial center of Northern California. It is the birthplace of the United Nations, the California Gold Rush of 1849 brought rapid growth, making it the largest city on the West Coast at the time. San Francisco became a consolidated city-county in 1856, after three-quarters of the city was destroyed by the 1906 earthquake and fire, San Francisco was quickly rebuilt, hosting the Panama-Pacific International Exposition nine years later. In World War II, San Francisco was a port of embarkation for service members shipping out to the Pacific Theater. Politically, the city votes strongly along liberal Democratic Party lines, San Francisco is also the headquarters of five major banking institutions and various other companies such as Levi Strauss & Co. Dolby, Airbnb, Weebly, Pacific Gas and Electric Company, Yelp, Pinterest, Twitter, Uber, Lyft, Mozilla, Wikimedia Foundation, as of 2016, San Francisco is ranked high on world liveability rankings. The earliest archaeological evidence of habitation of the territory of the city of San Francisco dates to 3000 BC. Upon independence from Spain in 1821, the became part of Mexico. Under Mexican rule, the system gradually ended, and its lands became privatized. In 1835, Englishman William Richardson erected the first independent homestead, together with Alcalde Francisco de Haro, he laid out a street plan for the expanded settlement, and the town, named Yerba Buena, began to attract American settlers. Commodore John D. Sloat claimed California for the United States on July 7,1846, during the Mexican–American War, montgomery arrived to claim Yerba Buena two days later. Yerba Buena was renamed San Francisco on January 30 of the next year, despite its attractive location as a port and naval base, San Francisco was still a small settlement with inhospitable geography. The California Gold Rush brought a flood of treasure seekers, with their sourdough bread in tow, prospectors accumulated in San Francisco over rival Benicia, raising the population from 1,000 in 1848 to 25,000 by December 1849. The promise of fabulous riches was so strong that crews on arriving vessels deserted and rushed off to the gold fields, leaving behind a forest of masts in San Francisco harbor. Some of these approximately 500 abandoned ships were used at times as storeships, saloons and hotels, many were left to rot, by 1851 the harbor was extended out into the bay by wharves while buildings were erected on piles among the ships. By 1870 Yerba Buena Cove had been filled to create new land, buried ships are occasionally exposed when foundations are dug for new buildings. California was quickly granted statehood in 1850 and the U. S. military built Fort Point at the Golden Gate, silver discoveries, including the Comstock Lode in Nevada in 1859, further drove rapid population growth. With hordes of fortune seekers streaming through the city, lawlessness was common, and the Barbary Coast section of town gained notoriety as a haven for criminals, prostitution, entrepreneurs sought to capitalize on the wealth generated by the Gold Rush
7.
Albany Hill
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Albany Hill is a prominent hill along the east shore of San Francisco Bay in the city of Albany, California. Geologically, the hill is predominantly Jurassic sandstone, carried to the edge of North America on the Pacific Plate. Albany Hill is part of a range of hills uplifted long before todays Berkeley Hills and these hills include Fleming Point and Point Isabel, Brooks Island, the Potrero San Pablo, and the hills across San Pablo Strait. Albany Hills indigenous Ohlone name is unknown, the name was changed to Albany Hill shortly after the city incorporated as Ocean View changed its name to Albany. The adjacent city of El Cerrito was named after the hills original Spanish name, the north side of Albany Hill was long used by Native Americans, as evidenced by large mortar stones and remnants of a shell midden. Oaks on the side, the willow grove where tributary Middle Creek joins Cerrito Creek, salt and fresh wetlands to the north. Beginning in the late 19th century, Judson Powder Works manufactured dynamite at the northwest foot of the hill, the company had been forced to move from San Francisco and then nearby Fleming Point in Berkeley because of continuing accidental explosions. The eucaluptus trees now on the hill were planted by the manufacturers to catch debris. The stop on the railroad tracks just to the west was called Nobel Station. In 1905, an accidental explosion of nitroglycerin killed 23 workers. The explosion carved a massive crater in the flank of the hill. After this incident, dynamite making was forced north to less-settled areas, making an eventual last stand at Pt. Pinole, now a regional park. As a large space, the only nearby high elevation next to the Bay. Perhaps as a result, the hill harbors unusually large numbers of native wildflowers, the oak forest on the cool north face remains much as it was pre-European-settlement. The non-native eucalyptus trees on the summit attract migrating and wintering monarch butterflies, hawks, owls, wild turkeys, and deer are among the animal inhabitants, herons, kingfishers, and egrets fish the creek. The hill provides a view of Albany, Berkeley — notably, UC Berkeleys Sather Tower —, from the other, it looks out onto the Bay, with San Francisco in the distance. Looking south from the hill, the high-rises in downtown Oakland, from earliest European settlement, residents have enjoyed open space on the hill, sledding on dry grass and swinging from rope swings. Protest by local residents defeated most of these, eventually the city retained an environmental consultant to prepare an Environmental Impact Report on alternative development schemes and development densities
8.
Dynamite
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Dynamite is an explosive made of nitroglycerin, sorbents and stabilizers. It was invented by the Swedish chemist and engineer Alfred Nobel in Geesthacht and it rapidly gained wide-scale use as a safer alternative to gun powder and nitroglycerin. Dynamite was invented by Alfred Nobel and was the first safely manageable explosive stronger than black powder, Nobel obtained patents for his invention in England on 7 May 1867, in Sweden on 19 October 1867. After its introduction, dynamite rapidly gained wide-scale use as an alternative to black powder. Nobel tightly controlled the patents, and unlicensed duplicating companies were shut down. However, a few American businessmen got around the patent by using a different formula. Nobel originally sold dynamite as Nobels Blasting Powder but decided to change the name to dynamite, from the Ancient Greek word δύναμις dýnamis, an industrialist, engineer, and inventor, Alfred Nobels father, Immanuel Nobel, built bridges and buildings in Stockholm. His construction work inspired him to new methods of blasting rock. Immanuels work with later on inspired Alfred to make explosives safer. Today dynamite is used in the mining, quarrying, construction. Dynamite is still the product of choice for trenching applications, Dynamite is occasionally used as an initiator or booster for AN and ANFO explosive charges. Nitroglycerin by itself is a strong explosive, but is extremely shock-sensitive, and degrades over time to even more unstable forms. Dynamite combines nitroglycerin with absorbents and stabilizers, rendering it safe to use, the original composition of dynamite consisted of three parts Explosive Oil, one part diatomaceous earth as the absorbent, and a small admixture of sodium carbonate antacid as the stabilizer. Diatomaceous earth is not usually used today as an absorbent medium and it has replaced by cheaper media like sawdust, wood pulp, flour. Other stabilizers like calcium carbonate or zinc oxide can be used in the place of sodium carbonate, sodium nitrate is added to the medium as an oxidizer that improves the dynamites brisance. Dynamite is usually sold in the form of cardboard cylinders about 20 cm long and about 3.2 cm in diameter, a stick of dynamite thus produced contains roughly 1 MJ of energy. Other sizes also exist, rated by either portion or by weight, Dynamite is usually rated by weight strength, usually from 20% to 60%. For example, 40% dynamite is composed of 40% nitroglycerin and 60% dope, the maximum shelf life of nitroglycerin-based dynamite is recommended as one year from the date of manufacture under good storage conditions
