Tag: Hunters Point Naval Shipyard

Like denying a paternity suit when the baby looks just like you – "Toxic Metals Found in Shipyard Neighbors".

Like a deep tissue abscess, landfill systems will not promote “healing” until they are excavated and removed. All Hunters Point residents and workers screened to date by HP Biomonitoring have chemicals detected in toxic concentrations.

A letter was sent to the team of UCSF-USB scientists reviewing retesting procedures for Hunters Point Shipyard Parcels A and G, via Ms. Laura Kurtzman, the designated contact person.

There has been no independent community-wide human biomonitoring program implemented in the United States designed to screen residents living adjacent to a federal Superfund site for toxic chemicals and radionuclides … until HP Biomonitoring! The new clinic, at 5021 Third St., next to the library, will be open soon.

Hunters Point residents suing Tetra Tech for the worst eco-fraud in US history demand that Gov. Newsom rescind the state’s contract with Tetra Tech for Butte County wildfire cleanup. This contract is an insult to residents who remain fearful for their very lives over the radiated Shipyard given the unusually high incidences of cancer, cancer deaths, respiratory diseases and other medical conditions among Hunters Point residents that scientists and doctors have indicated are caused by the Shipyard’s radiation and other toxic releases. A town hall meeting and a press conference are scheduled for MLK Day.

Bayview Hunters Point is the soul of San Francisco. It’s changing but its history and heroes can’t be erased and must be celebrated. They are the foundation and inspiration for the thriving community we will rebuild. In “Picture Bayview Hunters Point,” a labor of love, says director Joanna Haigood, Zaccho Dance Theatre, a BVHP-based cultural treasure, performs that history and presents those heroes unforgettably. Bring everyone, especially the children and young people, to this lavish but free performance – inside and outside the Opera House.

Thanking God for reparations, we heartily congratulate San Francisco Mayor London Breed, offering her our support and our love. Rejoice, Black San Francisco, in this historic victory! Let us work hard with London to rebuild the Black community and make it thrive again. Like it or not, we live in a chaotic world, but out of chaos come opportunities. Black talent, energy and ingenuity can make San Francisco the most exciting city in the world and restore its soul.

On behalf of thousands of victims including residents, deceased family members and unborn children, renowned civil rights attorney Charles Bonner filed a $27 billion lawsuit on May Day for damages arising from threats of cancer and other incurable illnesses relating to the documented fraud by U.S. Navy contractor Tetra Tech in assuring that the radiated land at the Hunters Point Shipyard had been cleaned. Learn more and JOIN THE LAWSUIT at the townhall meeting on Saturday, June 9, 1-3 p.m., at the Joseph Lee Rec Center, 1395 Mendell St. in Bayview Hunters Point.

Our story begins on any weekday morning in the mid 1940s, when thousands of men, migrants from the American South to “Frisco,” converged upon the gates of the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard on their way to work. To do their jobs building and repairing ships for the biggest employer in the San Francisco Bay Area during the war time economic boom. By 1908, the San Francisco Drydock, operating at the shipyard, had become “the world’s greatest shipping yard.”

Over $1 billion has been spent by the federal government since 2004 to clean up and remediate one of the most highly toxic and radioactive sites in the U.S., the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard in San Francisco. This Superfund site was home for decades, 1946-1969, to the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, and large Navy warships were towed there from the Pacific, where they had been placed close to nuclear tests.

Troubles afflicting the nearly 30-year radiation cleanup of San Francisco’s Hunters Point Shipyard are far worse than previously reported. Between 90 and 97 percent of the U.S. Navy soil samples re-examined by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency are “neither reliable nor defensible,” according to an EPA review released April 9 by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).

Breaking news reports in the mainstream media this week supplant the humble role the SF Bay View has played for over two decades in alerting the San Francisco community to the ongoing threats to health, safety and the environment stemming from the botched radiological remediation that continues at the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard. On Jan. 31, 2018, the US Navy has scheduled an Open House on Radiological Cleanup. Be there and be heard. It is time to take a stand against the final straw of criminal negligence, coverup and dangerous corruption that is driving the shipyard development like a diesel powered train on a track to nowhere!

For the last couple of years in San Francisco, the beginning of December has been marked by a bloody tradition: the murder of Black men by San Francisco police. On Dec. 1, just one day before we were set to gather around the family of Mario Woods to remember his life on the two-year anniversary of his killing, the SFPD shot and killed another of Bayview Hunters Point’s own sons, Keita O’Neil aka Icky. The result of letting Icky’s murder go without response is that another one of us gets killed. They didn’t kill Icky because he was a hustler. They killed Icky because in San Francisco our Black and Brown lives are considered expendable.

Seventy years! As I was sorting through papers, correspondence, news clippings and records, I realized that nuclear bomb and nuclear power development occurred within my lifetime. It was July 1945 when Trinity, the first atomic bomb, was detonated at the nuclear site in Alamogordo, New Mexico, followed the next month with a uranium bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and a hydrogen bomb on Nagasaki. At least 129,000 men, women and children were immediately killed.

The SF Bay View newspaper applauds the strength and integrity of state and federal regulators who have taken the ultimate stand in protecting the health and future of the Bayview Hunters Point community. In so doing you have joined the “Forest of Mighty Oaks” planted in Bayview Hunters Point who have stood in open defiance against the tyranny and onslaught of political corruption and for-profit development operating in San Francisco. But we hate to say we told you so ... for over 15 years!

In response to the escalating community outcry over the falsification of radioactive soil samples and concerns about reports of possible illegal dumping of radioactive soils by the U.S. Navy’s contractor Tetra Tech at the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard Superfund Site in Bayview Hunters Point, San Francisco, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, California Department of Toxic Substances Control and the U.S. Navy have agreed to put on hold any further transfers of Navy property at the Shipyard.

We read with amazement Matier and Ross’ announcement in the Sunday, May 15, Chronicle that San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee is “in talks with George Lucas” about “housing his collection of illustrative art and Hollywood memorabilia” on “a site already approved for redevelopment on Treasure Island.” The genius who conceived the “Star Wars” saga must not yet know that the place is thoroughly saturated with weapons grade chemicals and radioisotopes with half-lives of never, like plutonium and cesium 137, and that the Navy is not doing a bang-up job of digging the poisonous stuff out.

Although Bayview Hunters Point is one of the most beautiful Black communities in California, it is also one of the most toxic places in the country due to the radiation experiments that took place on the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard in the ‘40s and many other generators of deadly toxins, most of them government owned. Dr. Ray Tompkins, a historian and a scientific expert on the pollution in Bayview Hunters Point, gives an in-depth interview. Check him out in his own words.

Lennar’s track record in Bayview Hunters Point and on Yerba Buena Island clearly demonstrates a pattern of offering assurances they will provide poor, Black and Brown people affordable housing, then finding ways to renege on their promises and kicking them out. Join the protest by residents of Bayview Hunters Point, the Mission and Treasure Island at Lennar’s sales office at 645 Howard St., between Second and Third in downtown San Francisco on Thursday, Jan. 28, at noon, for a rally and a quick march to US EPA headquarters.

Among the crowd of 150 activists were four young people holding a sign that simply read, “Last 3 Percent.” The words refer not directly to police violence but to the broader problem of the mass exodus of African Americans from San Francisco. Thousands have left their city of birth not because of any personal preference but because of political decisions and economic policies, many set into motion several decades ago.