On Oct. 4, 2025 community leaders and organizations gathered to host the city’s second annual climate resilience fair. The event buzzed as attendees walked from booth to booth, discussing current climate and community health threats, solutions and successes. Just a half mile away, a former hazardous waste processing facility, The BayRow Holding LLC site, colloquially known as “Romic,” sat vacant.
Sites like Romic and East Palo Alto’s shoreline now face a new climate threat — groundwater rise. As the sea level rises due to climate change, groundwater near the SanFrancisco Bay rises with it, potentially releasing contaminants from toxic sites. Research shows that groundwater rise threatens over 5,000 contaminated sites in the Bay Area.While community groups are fighting back, mapping sites, exploring legal pathways and organizing opposition, recourse against contaminated sites like Romic is difficult to slow.
Some sites may belong to defunct companies, others including Romic, face pressure from developers.
Listen above to hear how scientific experts and the East Palo Alto community is responding to this growing threat.
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Claire Barber holds a BA in Environmental Studies with minors in journalism and film from Colorado College, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa. While at Colorado College, Claire co-founded the CC Outdoor Journal (an equity-focused outdoor student publication) and began her outdoor and environmental reporting career. She has since interned for several publications, including SKI Magazine, and has produced several short documentaries. Her work has appeared in Field & Stream, Outside, Powder Magazine, Trails Magazine, Business Insider, and more. Claire’s journalism is colored by experiences working and playing in the outdoor and environmental world (she once ate a slimy grub for some free pizza and fell off of a mountain in the Pyrenees). Claire’s particular interest lies in how environmental storytelling can be made more effective and accessible. Claire has researched how local news might fail to communicate disaster information, such as wildfire alerts, to key and often overlooked stakeholders. Since 2023, Claire also has worked as a communications fellow at an ecosystem defense non-profit. There she has similarly seen how the media often struggle to effectively communicate environmental information to important constituents. While at Stanford, Claire hopes to explore how environmental reporting can be made more accessible through multimedia and data journalism.
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