At the end of Eight Mile Road in the Little Potato Slough of the San Joaquin Delta, a cluster of old ships, which stand tall on the horizon amid miles of crops, was topped Friday with a 10-story crane.

Contractors began the process of removing the 1940s military tugboat Mazapeta. The craft sank Sept. 4 with 1,600 gallons of diesel and engine oil onboard, which was soon contained by a rubberized floating boom.

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Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.