The Farallon Islands sit just 27 miles west of the Golden Gate, but they seem a world apart from the high-rises and trolley cars that have come to define San Francisco. The seven main islands jut up from a jagged eight-mile underwater ridge and are anything but inviting. With constantly rough seas and tumultuous weather the Islands have been nicknamed the "Devil's Teeth" by sailors. Not to mention the fact that the Farallones are the western most tip of the Red Triangle, a swath of ocean that has had the highest amount of Great White shark attacks in the world. A single day in October of 2006 the scientific group called Tagging of Pelagic Predators (TOPP) photographed no less than 40 different white sharks around Southeast Farallon.
But despite these harshest of conditions the Islands haven't managed to escape the imperial contado of San Francisco. In 1853 a lighthouse was constructed on Southeast Farallon, the largest and only inhabitable island, in order to facilitate easy access to and from the San Francisco Bay for the thousands that poured in each year in search of gold. The islands, though they didn't contain gold, were home to thousands of small seabirds called Murres. The bird's eggs were pilfered by San Franciscans and brought back to the city to sell, a dozen could bring a dollar to the egg-picker and during the peak months of May and June the Islands yielded 500,000 eggs a month. However, once the lighthouse keepers, realizing that there was money to be made, started to collect eggs themselves, a full-on egg war commenced. Men were killed (only two) and the bird population was decimated. Finally in 1881 the government claimed sole ownership of the island and declared egg collecting illegal.
The egg-collecting combined with the threat of oil spills from San Francisco's shipping lanes spurred President Theodore Roosevelt to sign Executive Order No. 1043 in 1909, creating the Farallon Reservation which protected the northern islands in the chain.
But all was not said and done for the Farallones and the exploitation practiced by San Francisco. From 1946 to 1970 the waters around the Farallones were used as a dumping site for radioactive waste. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that around 47,500 containers, each one a steel drum holding 55 gallons of nuclear waste, were dumped near the Farallones. It is amazing that the White Sharks and the five species of pinnipeds, some 10,000 individuals, have survived this environmental destruction. The primary military agency which used the dumping site was the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory in San Francisco.
Scientists from PRBO Conservation Science, a Petaluma, CA based organization (Petaluma is a city that is itself nestled comfortably in the San Francisco contado, being just a short trip up the 101) have been on the island every day since 1968. In 1969 all the islands became protected when they became a National Wildlife refuge. In 1970 the United States terminated all radioactive waste dumping.
For more information check out Thayer Walker's article in The Surfer's Journal "Over the Deep: Mind-Surfing and Research at the Farallones"
or
http://www.lighthousefriends.com/light.asp?ID=100
or
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farallon_Islands
