Tag: Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory

DDDDC ingredients for Hunters Point Bayview horror story mystery cake: Navy paid Tetra Tech subsidiary hundreds of millions of dollars for botched cleanup – busted for fraudulent radiation testing – scapegoat the fraud on “rogue employees” – another subsidiary of Tetra Tech previously accused of similar shenanigans at the Industrial Excess Landfill in Ohio – “We now know what they [the EPA] did to us and how they did it.” Bake at 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit for at least one decade.

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.

Liberation News spoke with Bradley Angel, the executive director of Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice, about the news that a U.S. Navy-sponsored review of the radioactive cleanup at the former shipyard in San Francisco’s Bayview Hunters Point revealed massive fraud by federal contractor Tetra Tech. According to the review, nearly half of the data produced by Tetra Tech has been manipulated, falsified or is otherwise suspect.

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!

State and federal regulators asked the Navy to stop transferring land from the Hunters Point Shipyard to San Francisco’s control while investigators look into reports that contractor Tetra Tech misrepresented its work cleaning up the toxic Superfund site. In a Sept. 13 letter to Navy official Lawrence Lansdale, the Environmental Protection Agency’s Angeles Herrera and the California Department of Toxic Substances Control’s Janet Naito requested confirmation that the Navy will not propose any land transfers for the time being.

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.

While sorting through papers, correspondence, news clippings, records etc., I realized that nuclear bomb and nuclear power development has occurred within my lifetime. It was July 16, 1945, when Trinity, the first atomic bomb, was detonated at Alamogordo nuclear site in New Mexico, followed by the uranium bomb dropped on Hiroshima and the hydrogen bomb on Nagasaki in August.

A cleanup worker at the decommissioned Hunters Point Naval Shipyard in southeast San Francisco is facing a rare life threatening cancer he believes is caused by his exposure to known toxins at the federal Superfund site. Diagnosed with a Peripheral T Cell Lymphoma, an aggressive high grade lymphoid malignancy with a five year survival rate of 32 percent, the worker has retained the high powered New York law firm Weitz & Luxenberg.

On Nov. 13 the San Francisco Chronicle ran a lead story written by the S.F.-based Center for Investigative Reporting. The story was about the radioactive contamination of Treasure Island, a former U.S. Navy base in the middle of the Bay. This story is important in and of itself but also because it once again unearths the region’s role in the birth of the atomic age and also highlights the radioactive legacy that continues to haunt us.

The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) requires state and local agencies to analyze and publicly disclose the environmental impacts of proposed projects and to adopt all feasible measures to mitigate those impacts. Appeal under CEQA is one of the most important tools that neighborhood groups and individuals may use to influence changes in their neighborhoods.

Contrary to Mayor Ed Lee’s claim in a press release issued yesterday by the Mayor’s Office, the Superior Court issued an important victory for Bayview environmental health advocates by blocking the proposed early transfer of the toxic parcels of the Hunters Point Superfund site.

In a victory for Bayview Hunters Point community and environmental justice groups, a Superior Court judge ruled today that the City of San Francisco’s redevelopment plan for the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard failed to properly evaluate the environmental and health risks by allowing the Navy to transfer ownership of the contaminated Superfund site before the cleanup of the area was complete.

The fight by the people of San Francisco to hold the San Francisco Department of Public Health and mega-developer Lennar accountable for clean air and the health of Hunters Point residents endured another round Thursday, June 23, at City Hall. The verdict? Jury still out.

The Board of Supervisors will hold a public hearing Thursday, June 23, at 1 p.m. in City Hall, Room 263, on the efforts by the Department of Public Health and the Lennar Corp. to conceal information about adverse health impacts of Lennar's work at the Hunters Point Shipyard. Pack the hearing!

At the close of 2008 and throughout 2009, Americans watched our federal government reward the reckless multinational financial sector with trillions of dollars for causing the worst hardship since the Great Depression. San Franciscans and Californians joined in the agony but few understood that both San Francisco and California have come up with their own bailout for one of the major players in the meltdown, the South Florida based Lennar Corp.