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Today we present the first half of a two-part radio documentary from our friends at SF Public Press, “Exposed,” opening a window into the little-known history of the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard. The sprawling abandoned naval base, in San Francisco’s southeast waterfront Bayview neighborhood, is currently the site of the city’s largest real estate development project. The base played a key role in the Cold War nuclear era, when it housed a research institution known as the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, which studied the human health effects of radiation.
In part one, we trace the radioactive contamination found in the shipyard soil today back to its origins, with nuclear bomb testing in the Marshall Islands. We also hear from environmental justice advocates, including one who led a health biomonitoring survey revealing that nearby residents have toxic elements stored in body tissues that match the hazardous chemicals of concern identified at the shipyard.
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San Francisco Public Press Team Making Contact Team
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TRANSCRIPT
Salima Hamirani: Welcome to Making Contact, I’m Salima Hamirani and today we’re bringing you a two part radio documentary from San Francisco Public Press about radioactive contamination at the Hunter’s Point Naval Shipyard, which they produced in 2020. The shipyard was contaminated originally during the Cold War but remains toxic today and continues to affect the surrounding community. The two part documentary is called “Exposed: The Human Radiation Experiments at Hunters Point.” Here’s Part 1, and San Francisco Public Press reporter Rebecca Bowe.
Rebecca Bowe: In San Francisco’s Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood, many people have stories of fighting cancer and other diseases. Community advocates want answers. To what extent have these illnesses been caused by exposure to unusually high levels of environmental contamination? Contamination like toxic waste that lingers at the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, left over from the Cold War era.
Leaotis Martin: We didn’t know the shipyard y’know — we knew it was a Navy shipyard — but we didn’t know how contaminated it was. Ten, 11, 12 of our friends, we’d all get together, and we’d throw coats up over the barbed wire, and we’d hop over the fence, and we’d play in the shipyard. Mud, everything. We didn’t know it was nuclear.
Holly Barker: There’s very little discussion of these human radiation experiments. Its a conversation that happens very little at all in public
Rebecca Bowe: Military scientists carried out experiments at this naval base using radioactive material, to study the health effects of exposure to radiation. These days, neighborhood activists find they have to take the initiative themselves to get studies done on the possible lingering effects.
The Hunters Point Shipyard is a sprawling abandoned naval base along San Francisco’s southeastern waterfront. It’s a landmark in the Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood, defined by a giant crane rising up from an island of concrete. Massive dry docks sit empty. Water from the bay comes right up to old railroad tracks leading to empty buildings. In 1945, components of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima were loaded onto the USS Indianapolis at this very location. Today, the shipyard is the site of San Francisco’s largest residential development project. A small neighborhood of residents already lives in condos built here, and more buildings are on the way.
In June of 2020, Bayview health advocates told me they were worried about toxic dust. Soil excavation had started up recently on the shipyard while neighbors sheltered in place nearby.
Ahimsa Porter Sumchai: We’re in a community and in a ZIP code where the Department of Public Health has identified the second-highest case rate for COVID infections.
Rebecca Bowe: That’s Dr. Ahimsa Porter Sumchai, a community advocate and medical doctor who works to highlight health disparities in Bayview. For generations, people living here have reported health problems. And COVID-19, which can attack the respiratory system, hit the Bayview with particular force. So Dr. Sumchai was concerned that toxic pollution could go airborne, thanks to the nearby digging on the shipyard construction site.
Ahimsa Porter Sumchai: There’s no justification whatsoever for going forward on, you know, outdoor construction activity, especially in a region like this that is so isolated and is at the center of so many sensitive receptors in the community.
Rebecca Bowe: Sumchai spearheaded a community health biomonitoring survey and gathered urine samples from dozens of study participants.
Ahimsa Porter Sumchai: From the beginning we were seeing two elements surface in the screenings, almost universally. One of them is manganese. The other one is a rare element called vanadium. Both of them are chemicals of concern in the shipyard soil.
Rebecca Bowe: So far, it’s shown that some area residents have elevated levels of arsenic and rare radionuclides in their bodies. Radionuclides are atoms that emit radiation. And the ones found in the study have been found in the shipyard, too. On top of arsenic, manganese and vanadium, uranium and a rare radionuclide called gadolinium have also appeared in urine samples. As of 2020, the study had identified 16 people living in Bayview-Hunters Point who each had at least three of the elements in their bodies.
Ahimsa Porter Sumchai: And we have two women who are neighbors. One of them underwent brain surgery in the front for removal of tumors, brain surgery in the back, posterior craniotomy for removal of brain tumors, excision of a breast cancer, and an ENT surgeon recently diagnosed her as having a tumor in her ear. Her neighbor underwent surgery for a brain tumor — a pituitary tumor. She also has two different tumors in her ears, and she had excision of a pulmonary nodule.
Rebecca Bowe: Were they tested as part of the study?
Ahimsa Porter Sumchai: Yes, and they have arsenic levels that are out of this world.
Rebecca Bowe: The survey findings don’t offer enough data to prove that toxic elements in the environment are directly linked to health problems. But they give key information that Sumchai says calls for more research. With further study, she says it may be possible to establish a connection between health problems residents have today and the lingering contamination from the shipyard’s nuclear history.
Ahimsa Porter Sumchai: And I really do believe that we have a radionuclide that likely speaks to the history of the shipyard and its nuclear history, specifically.
Rebecca Bowe: U.S. Navy records show that many radioactive hot spots have been detected throughout the shipyard. The Navy is responsible for toxic waste cleanup at the site. That work is ongoing. One group monitoring the cleanup is Bayview Hunters Point Community Advocates, a grassroots environmental justice organization. Michelle Pierce is the executive director. She’s part of a second generation of residents who draw a connection between the toxic contamination and the health impacts, and are pushing for a full cleanup.
Michelle Pierce: I got into environmental justice because my mom and some of her activist friends formed an environmental justice organization. My mother has a legal background, and I was studying biochem engineering. And she would give me paperwork that she would get from Navy engineers and laboratory scientists and say, “Michelle, can you interpret this?”
Rebecca Bowe: While Pierce and her mom focused on tackling environmental justice problems, she says that her community has always had a complex relationship with the shipyard. Some of the people living in the area today are descendants of Black World War II-era shipyard workers. Their families fled the segregated South to find work in the Bay Area.
Michelle Pierce: A lot of the people who were historically in Bayview-Hunters Point came out to San Francisco to work in that shipyard specifically. They offered really good, really well-paying, solid middle class jobs for people who would not traditionally have access to that kind of economic power.
Rebecca Bowe: But by the time she was coming of age in the neighborhood — in the 1980s — those shipyard jobs that had once attracted thousands of Black workers to San Francisco had vanished. The base was deactivated in 1974. That left an entire community facing a wave of unemployment. And it left behind about 450 acres of extremely contaminated waterfront property.
Michelle Pierce: There was a lot of stuff going on at that base until the Navy finally acknowledged that, oh yeah, by the way — probably that entire base is toxic.
Rebecca Bowe: By 1989, the shipyard had been designated as a Superfund site on the Environmental Protection Agency’s National Priorities List. That designation officially made it one of the most toxic places in the nation. It became a high priority for cleanup, especially as the ambitious and lucrative housing development plans came together. But the chain-link fences separating the shipyard from residential areas never stopped neighborhood kids from exploring.
Here’s Leaotis Martin, who moved to Bayview with his family in 1966, when he was 6 years old.
Leaotis Martin: We didn’t know the shipyard y’know — we knew it was a Navy shipyard — but we didn’t know how contaminated it was. Ten, 11, 12 of our friends, we’d all get together, and we’d throw coats over the barbed wire, and we’d hop over the fence, and we’d play in the shipyard. Mud, everything. We didn’t know it was nuclear. You know, some of my friends passed away from cancer. Our whole thing is that we want to be healthy as people in Nob Hill, y’know? And that’s why we fight this fight. And we actually fight this fight for these people to do their damn jobs because they get paid a lot of money y’know, to watch over health first, human lives first, but they’re not doing it.
Rebecca Bowe: Beyond that fence and the dirt Martin and his friends played in, there are rows of abandoned buildings and cavernous industrial spaces that go right up to the edge of the Bay. They’re made of deteriorating concrete, glass and steel. It looks like a strange, midcentury ghost town. Some of these structures, including one white, windowless building, once housed a Cold War institution called the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory. Here’s Pierce.
Michelle Pierce: So for the 20-something years that that lab was open, their entire focus was, “we’re going to find a way to clean this stuff up.” The main reason we know, now, that you can’t fix it, that you can’t clean it up, that this stuff persists forever, is because of the research that was developed at that lab, right?
Rebecca Bowe: The Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory is an ethically questionable part of the shipyard’s history. In the late 1940s, shipyard workers had to sandblast and scrub radioactive Navy ships that had been hauled to San Francisco after being used in atomic bomb tests. That left toxic waste in the soil at Hunters Point and it left the workers scrubbing off the ships exposed to radiation.
They were closely monitored by medical scientists to find out how much radiation they were absorbing on a daily basis. Documenting their ongoing exposure was a way for military scientists to collect data to establish radiation health and safety standards.
A few years ago, my colleagues and I started diving into declassified government records produced by the lab. These documents are kept at the National Archives in San Bruno.
According to a 1946 memo, the lab planned to “conduct suitable experiments” to see if safety protocols for working on irradiated vessels should be adjusted.
It’s somewhat ironic that back then, the levels of radiation people were exposed to were closely monitored by scientists when in the present day, residents remain in the dark about their potential exposure to toxic materials. The big difference is that back then, the shipyard workers had scientific value to the Navy because lab scientists were able to extract data from them for all kinds of purposes. Unfortunately, the shipyard isn’t the only toxic hot spot in the Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood today.
Raymond Tompkins: I have family that lived out here. I lived out here for a brief moment. We bought property out here. I still have family living out here. I taught school out here.
Rebecca Bowe: Raymond Tompkins is a longtime community advocate, chemist and former member of the Hunters Point Shipyard Restoration Advisory Board. Years ago, I joined him on a drive through the neighborhood. He knows the location of every government agency air pollution monitor ever installed. They monitor dust, which could carry toxic chemicals.
Raymond Tompkins: To your left is Hunters Point, OK? To your right, you see 101? You see the traffic? And then that freeway there is 280. Now in between is 90% of all light industry in San Francisco. That stack right there, that smokestack, that’s the sewage plant. Look underneath the freeway where my finger is pointing, you can see the rusty metal and that’s the heavy recycling plant, OK. Look over there, you can see to your left, you see the piles of rock, that is where they have the cement factories. The dust just blows. Straight over there where you see the green glass, that’s the shipyard. All of this blows over there into that neighborhood.
Rebecca Bowe: For Tompkins, the legacy of toxic pollution at Hunters Point is inextricably linked with a long history of discrimination. But go back even farther in time, and you realize how the source of this contamination is linked with human rights abuses and environmental destruction halfway across the world.
Salima Hamirani: Just a quick break here to remind you that you’re listening to Making Contact. This week is part 1 of a two part documentary from San Francisco Public Press called Exposed: The Human Radiation Experiments at Hunters Point. You can find more information about the documentary on our website at focmedia.org. And now, back to the show.
Rebecca Bowe: Much of the nuclear waste in the soil in San Francisco actually originated in the Marshall Islands, where the U. S. military detonated 67 nuclear bombs between 1946 and 1958. The first Pacific nuclear test was Operation Crossroads, in July of 1946. The Navy exploded two atomic bombs, at Bikini Atoll, a remote lagoon in the Marshall Islands. But first, it forced 167 islanders to leave.
U.S. military official: Tell them please that the United States government now wants to turn this great destructive power into something for the benefit of mankind.
Rebecca Bowe: That’s a recording of U.S. military officials asking indigenous Marshall Islanders to leave Bikini Atoll and giving them virtually zero information about what was about to happen.
U.S. Military Official: Now they have heard of our plans for their evacuation. Will you ask King Juda to get up and tell us now what his people think and if they are willing to go.
Rebecca Bowe: According to anthropologist Holly Barker, who wrote about nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands, Juda replied that if the United States needed the islands and the lagoon, the Bikinians would lend it to them. At the time they viewed the U.S. as friends and allies. Half a century later, Anderson Jibas, the present-day mayor of Bikini and Kili, the island that Marshallese living on Bikini were relocated to, addressed members of Congress. Mayor Jibas said seven of his elder family members were from Bikini. They were made to leave to make way for nuclear explosions. Some of the bombs vaporized entire islands. This was at a 2018 committee hearing.
Mayor Anderson Jibas: Our ancestors moved from the beautiful isle at Bikini Atoll so that 23 thermonuclear bombs could be detonated, poisoning and vaporized three of our islands. That has been our experience. Bikini, too, must live with the consequences — removal and displacement. Nobody knows these consequences better than we do, certainly no agencies in Washington, D.C.
Rebecca Bowe: But as he told the committee chair, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, at the hearing, the Department of Energy had found it was still too dangerous to return. And sea level rise from climate change is quickly threatening the island they were relocated to.
Mayor Anderson Jibas: Madam chair, we cannot go back to Bikini because it’s filled with radiation — cesium-137, strontium-190 — we cannot live there, according to studies of DOE who stay there. But we cannot live on Kili Island. It’s only three-fourths of a mile wide and long. We consider it a prison. There is not enough resources.
Rebecca Bowe: Back in 1946, after the evacuation of Bikini Atoll, the Navy assembled more than 100 target ships in the lagoon. Then it set off two plutonium bombs, each with a force equivalent to the bomb dropped on Nagasaki the year before. The Navy’s tests also affected its own personnel. Observation ships were sent in to witness the test detonations. Those ships had sailors on them.
Arthur Fortun: Everybody was told to get out on the flight deck and stand at attention. And face the blast.
Archival Video: Five, four, three, two, one, fire.
Rebecca Bowe: An airplane dropped the first nuke. Radio operator Arthur Fortun described the next blast — this one from the waters below. The blast sent a 90-foot wave into the air. It rained down onto the ships and coated everything in a mix of fission byproducts.
Arthur Fortun: There was a big, big splash, a spray, I guess you could call it. Instant fog. I think they should’ve told us what was going to happen. It was just going on a test, that’s all we knew. But we didn’t know we were going to be in it.
Rebecca Bowe: Fortun, who told his story 40 years later to researcher Sandra Marlow, was one of thousands of Army and Navy veterans exposed to radiation during the atomic testing era. At the time of Operation Crossroads, atomic energy was a new phenomenon. After the tests, the Navy suddenly had a radioactive fleet on its hands. And it wasn’t prepared to clean it up.
Daniel Hirsch: So what did the Navy do? This is why you’re here. They decided to bring 79 of those contaminated ships to Hunter’s Point. And they tried over a period of years to decontaminate these ships.
Rebecca Bowe: That’s Daniel Hirsch, president of Committee to Bridge the Gap, an environmental watchdog organization. In a presentation to shipyard residents in November of 2018, he explained how the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory had tried to bring the ships to San Francisco to decontaminate them.
Daniel Hirsch: And they brought back to Hunters Point vast quantities of nuclear weapons debris for analysis, filled with plutonium, uranium, fission products and activation products. They also then had licenses for vast amounts of radioactive materials of their own.
Rebecca Bowe: Winds carried the sandblast throughout the shipyard and radioactive fuel from the irradiated ships was burned in power plants on-site. Hirsch said the radiation lab participated in nearly every Pacific nuclear test conducted in the 1950s.
Daniel Hirsch: Now you all know the fundamentals of radiation. You cannot neutralize radioactivity by physical means. All you can do is move it. So decontamination of these ships meant getting the radioactivity off the ships onto Hunters Point.
Rebecca Bowe: Throughout the Cold War decontamination efforts, the U.S. government denied that the contaminated ships posed any danger. It even made propaganda films in response to fears about the dangers of radiation. Here’s audio from one, about the USS Independence, one of the contaminated ships brought to San Francisco after the tests.
Propaganda Clip: The Independence got the attention of heavy thinkers everywhere. “Really, Claire, I just can’t imagine why they brought that boat back. From what I’ve heard, it’s very dangerous.” “Indeed, it is. It’s contaminated.” “And I read that that contamination simply never dies away.”
Rebecca Bowe: In keeping with the sexist attitude of the times, at this point, the two women are shown almost causing a car crash.
Propaganda Clip: “Really, it’s a menace to public health and safety.” The charges brought against the Independence were like false death reports — exaggerated. A quick postmortem on the Bikini tests shows why. The target vessels were old, obsolete. They had been earmarked as expendable. Some were eliminated by the tests. Others were sunk later because of the structural damage they had sustained. Instead of being sent to the bottom at Bikini, the “Mighty I” was given a stay of execution and taken back to the States. She served not only for radioactive study but helped explode the myth that contamination is an everlasting hazard.
Rebecca Bowe: In 1951, the Navy intentionally sunk the Independence near the Farallon Islands, about 25 miles west of San Francisco. But before this happened, the ship was loaded up with radioactive waste not just from Hunters Point but also from other Bay Area research labs. The radioactive ship remains at the bottom of the ocean to this day.
So far, the cleanup project has taken almost 30 years and cost more than a billion dollars. The Navy is responsible for remediating the polluted land to make it safe to build housing. And according to the Navy today, the Hunters Point Shipyard is safe for people who live and work there.
Rebecca Bowe: But in 2014, it had come out that government contractors had faked soil samples at the shipyard. Tetra Tech EC, a U.S. Navy contractor, provided fake soil samples from an area where Tetra Tech was tasked with remediating radioactive contamination. Anthony Smith spent years as a field technician with the crews at the center of the scandal. He later came forward as a whistleblower, charging that Tetra Tech had altered data under pressure to get the job done.
Anthony Smith: And so about every building you see on this base — not all of them, but a bunch of them that we surveyed and cheated at in changing the data, ’cause an instrument takes a reading every six seconds. So you’re talking about in a day’s time, you’re talking about thousands and thousands of counts of data that they was changing, to lower them down to where they’d pass, you know? Anything over background, at a time and a half, is considered elevated, so you lowered the number down to fit the background. So if it read 15,000, which is elevated, you’d drop the number down to 7,000 or 8,000. That’s how you cheated with the numbers.
Rebecca Bowe: The Tetra Tech scandal has eroded trust in the Navy, prompted lawsuits and caused delays. What’s more, some advocates have pointed out that the majority of the base was never even tested at all. And this has only inflamed tensions with neighbors who don’t trust the Navy or the housing developer. You could hear those tensions surfacing at this community meeting in 2017.
Marie Harrison: Now, these poor folks are standing here, being forced to tell you all another lie. I think you need to know what a lie sounds like. When they tell you that this stuff is safe, and that there is no problems with the soil samples, and that the Navy says this, this is a lie.
Rebecca Bowe: That’s Marie Harrison, an environment justice advocate from San Francisco’s Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood. Harrison passed away in 2019, and her memorial service at a Bayview church highlighted her role in trying to address environmental contamination that created health hazards in her community. In that tape she was speaking at a meeting hosted by the U.S. Navy about the ongoing cleanup of toxic contamination in the soil at the Hunters Point Shipyard. The meeting got chaotic as community members pressed the Navy for answers.
Meeting Participant: You don’t live here, you don’t live here and experience this cancer and stuff that’s going around, and our families dying. We, as residents, are stepping up right now, face to face, to let you know: Stop lying to us. Because we’re the ones dying. You guys don’t live here. We do. A nd our families live here.
Rebecca Bowe: Still the Navy has maintained that despite all this, the Hunters Point Shipyard should be considered safe. Here’s Navy representative Derek Robinson.
Rebecca Bowe (questioning Robinson): So they’re being exposed to just the general background level?
Derek Robinson: General background level, same as any other location in San Francisco, practically.
Rebecca Bowe: But maybe elevated slightly.
Derek Robinson: I would actually say that the work that we’ve done has lowered it overall. You know, the things I know people are concerned about is their own health, and their family, and my job, really, is to make sure this property is safe before we get rid of it. And the gold standard is, would I allow my family to come here. The people that I’m most protective of in the world. And the answer is absolutely yes. It absolutely is.
Rebecca Bowe: What it comes down to is the actual risk people might face — a risk that took on a completely new meaning in the context of the coronavirus pandemic — which long-term residents have faced for generations. Community advocates are pushing for a more thorough cleanup of the Superfund site. The current plan involves installing layers of landfill, concrete and fabric barriers on top of toxic soil to keep the hazard contained. For Michelle Pierce, the second-generation advocate for a proper cleanup in Hunters Point, news of the Tetra Tech fraud was no surprise. Mistrust of the Navy is already the default.
Michelle Pierce: We’re the residents. We live here. We live here over multiple generations, right? So, we’ve been doing this since forever. The nature of the military is that people come and go. The traditional thing has been, oh, these are low-education, low-skills people, so they don’t know what they’re talking about, they’re just paranoid, you know they saw something, they misinterpreted it, they don’t know. And that’s what keeps happening. These are people that have been in this movement for some of them for 40 years now, right? They know what’s going on.
Salima Hamirani: That was part 1 of Exposed: The Human Radiation Experiments at Hunters Point from our friends at San Francisco public press. Part 2 is next week, so please tune in to find out why the Navy conducted human radiation experiments in the first place. And that does it for today’s show. If you’d like more information, please visit us online at focmedia.org. I’m Salima Hamirani. Thanks for listening to Making Contact.
