Tag: Navy

Jackie Williams, resident and garden keeper at Alice Griffith housing project, loves her job and loves where she lives, but she doesn’t believe that she will be able to keep these things when the developers come and tear down what she has called home for over 30 years.

At the Toxic Triangle hearing on June 12 at St. John's Baptist Church, residents discussed the many undiagnosed and unidentified health and skin problems that have resulted from the many pollution sources such as Chevron, the Navy’s Hunters Point Shipyard and the PG&E toxic site.

In December 2009, leading climatologist Dr. James Hansen cited new satellite data doubling or tripling previous sea level rise predictions. Climate change, he said, “is really a moral issue analogous to that faced by Lincoln with slavery,” an apt comparison considering the dangers for peoples of color in the Bayview Hunters Point neighborhood of San Francisco.

The San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC) predicts a 16-inch mid-century sea level rise, covering Bay Area coastal lands and eventually swamping downtown San Francisco up to Market Street. The primary global warming gas is carbon dioxide. Methane gas, heavily implicated in global warming, has been emitted for years from the Bayview Hunters Point Naval Shipyard. Sea level rise will release methane gas from wetlands and landfill, of which much of Hunters Point is composed.

“It is ‘normal,’ he said, for a child to have nosebleeds and asthma.”

The United States Navy has spent over $600 million trying to clean up the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard. Most of the money was wasted - more then $300 million by International Technologies - with little supervision by the United States Navy Base Closure Team in past years.

Lennar has used its multi-million dollar profits to buy off community groups, pay community residents as “consultants” and sell a set of wolf tickets that would have shamed even the wolf himself.

Newsom and his political allies are backing the Proposition G transfer of City property to a private developer in what is likely the worst public-private partnership the Newsom administration has dreamed up.

The 94124 zipcode ranks in the 80th percentile for particulates, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds. It ranks in the 90th percentile for sulfur dioxide.

Despite Lennar's promises to clean up toxics at this site, environmentalists point to the text of Propsition G, which states that “the final development plan for this Project Site may be materially different from the Project."

For over a year, Lennar polluted the Bayview with dangerous levels of asbestos particulate, churning poisonous dust clouds over community homes, schools and churches.

Prop G is not about development – it’s about land banking for the future. Lennar will sell off its affordable housing obligations to nonprofits, then hold out to maximize its return.

Short term exposures to particles can, within hours or days, aggravate lung disease, cause asthma attacks and acute bronchitis and increase susceptibility to respiratory infections.

Due to the toxicity of the land, Lennar is able to acquire land in poor areas, such as the Bayview, for next to nothing. Lennar then develops the area, building market value homes that current residents cannot afford, driving them out of their neighborhood.

“What Mayor Newsom, Lennar and its surrogates wanted me to do was leave the community exposed, and they hoped that this whole issue of their poisoning our babies and community would go with me.”

Efforts to “dirty transfer” uncleaned shipyard parcels as proposed in the conceptual plan and the June 2008 ballot measure represent a direct violation of a city ordinance.

Despite Lennar’s claims that grading was completed in September in 2007, community air monitors continue to document elevations in asbestos levels.

Now that we know how that negligence has endangered an upscale white neighborhood in Florida, will anyone in Hunters Point stand up in Lennar’s defense?

George D. Porter dedicated his career to the International Longshoremen’s Workers Union Local 34. He died in the care of his loving family on the morning of Feb. 19, 1992. His immediate cause of death was dehydration. His final cause of death was pulmonary asbestosis.

The resolution does not compel any action but calls upon the city to halt construction, order health assessments and communicate these reports to the district and the public.