Two years ago, the Bay Area’s 40 publicly owned wastewater treatment agencies got some hard news. They had 10 years to upgrade their facilities to reduce pollutants entering the bay by 40%, at an estimated cost of $11 billion.

At a Thursday meeting of the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board, a pathway was initiated for certain projects to get a deadline extension if they qualify and are moving as quickly as possible.

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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.