Tag: Carol Harvey

This segment of the saga on Treasure Island highlights a ‘walk past Arsenic Park’ through the Navy’s toxic dump.

Samuel-Ace Ieremia Johnson’s journey home is carried in celebration of the love he had for life.

Rest in Power 10-year-old Sammy Johnson, precious human being.

Sam Johnson is fighting for his young life and with hope laced with anguish, friends are asking for prayers and community offerings to help Sam’s family and save this precious human life.

The lines are drawn – Captialism’s Profits over People, or, Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win, all Power to the People

These crushing personal accounts of lives living, lived and lost on Treasure Island, are a clear indictment against the white supremacist, racist, capitalist, profits-over-people developers, the U.S. Navy and government entities, which intentionally continue to withhold information and refute any danger and harm to residents suffering and dying from extreme toxic conditions of their harmful living space.

When we least expect it, trouble comes. “I came in contact with a door handle, now I got COVID-19. It’s bad enough my immune system is compromised. I have emphysema and I might not make it out of this.”

The Treasure Island neighborhood’s history spans back 81 years. In 1939, San Francisco built this 404-acre artificial landform for the Golden Gate International Exhibition. In 1941, the Navy took it for a military base, and in 1999-2000, when it was decommissioned, San Franciscans – mostly people of color at risk of homelessness – moved in.

Twenty years before COVID-19, poor and people of color, some with disabilities, and low- and middle-income market rate renters were subjected to the island’s high winds carrying toxins creating a respiratory disease cluster.

“I’m angry about that because I would never have moved to Treasure Island if they had told me there was radiation (there). I didn’t know what was happening to me until I got these tumors (one) on my shoulder and one on my side.”

On Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2020, a press conference was held in front of San Francisco Superior Court, at 400 McAllister, at which San Francisco Attorney Stanley Goff and lead plaintiffs and former Treasure Island residents Andre Patterson and Felita Sample publicly announced a “class action lawsuit and complaint for damages,” arising from public and private exposure to toxins on Treasure Island.

The Navy’s announcement of an estimated 163+ radioactive waste excavations, 41 neighborhood chemical removals, and a large clump of elevated radioactivity from under an occupied home raises doubts that Treasure Island can ever be completely cleaned.

Judge James Donato: “It just doesn’t make any sense to me, that a guy rolls out of bed and says, ‘Hey, today is the day I’m going to swap out the test samples.’”

You’ve been an especially effective, strong, patient and articulate voice confronting forces that do not respect human rights or human life. You’ve told these opportunists firmly and politely that every human being on earth has the right to live and raise their children and see their grandchildren thrive in pollution-free places and to breathe clean air without toxins.

Twenty years ago, the city of San Francisco moved thousands of its homeless and low-income residents into former military housing on Treasure Island, a small artificial land mass whose 55 years as a Navy base left it covered in toxic radiation. Today, construction on the island has it on track to becoming a bustling, upscale extension of the city. The problem is, some of those residents from 20 years ago are still there. So are thousands of others who have moved in since. So is the radiation.

On Tuesday, Nov. 27, 2018, the second San Francisco Board of Supervisors audit hearing will be held on racial discrimination in City jobs. The public is urged to attend the press conference on the City Hall steps at 12:30 and the hearing in the Board Chambers beginning at 3 p.m. The first hearing on Sept. 19, 2018, brought literally hundreds of workers to the Supervisors’ Chambers and the overflow room. Dozens testified that they had faced numerous instances of racist discrimination and retaliation and even physical assaults by city managers.

As a shockwave of disclosures expands the Hunters Point scandal, more startling historical and scientific facts were revealed by Daniel Hirsch, former University of California Santa Cruz Program on Environmental and Nuclear Policy director on Thursday, Oct. 18, 2018. A clutch of powerful federal, state and local politicians has been involved for decades in the remediation and redevelopment of Superfund sites Hunters Point and Treasure Island. 

At the March 2018 Treasure Island Restoration Advisory Board meeting, remediation project manager Dave Clark “recollected” that, between 2006 and 2016, the Navy unearthed 1,280 radiological objects, one for every two residents. By contrast, on Sept. 13, San Francisco Chronicle reporters announced the “startling” discovery at Hunters Point of a single “radium deck marker about the size of a silver dollar” near condos on 75-acre Parcel A, which was transferred to the city in 2004 – startling because “contamination ... was cleaned up years ago.”

I was born on July 11, 1954. My brother Charles was born on July 17. We’re cancers. We’re tough. He’s older than I am. He’s an Irish twin. We’re the same age for six days. I was born in a Kansas City hospital – County Hospital Number Two – a segregated hospital. Hospital Number One was for white people. Hospital Two was for Black people. Kansas was a border state. They didn’t have slaves, but they didn’t like Black people.

At 11:00 a.m. Monday, April 16, 2018, community organizer Steve Zeltzer introduced former Treasure Island residents Andre Patterson and Felita Sample, who had been invited to speak at this press conference where whistle-blowers exposed the malfeasance of remediation contractor Tetra Tech on Hunters Point and Treasure Island. “I want to introduce two people today who’ve been personally affected by the corruption and the coverup at Treasure Island."