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Radioactive waste, toxic chemicals and plans for major development. The unsettling saga of the effort to clean up toxic former Navy sites around San Francisco Bay.
The state health department has crawled through an S.F. development with radiation scanners and says it found no hazards. But a review of its report on that effort shows the testing was superficial and did not address key questions about health and safety, prompting some experts to call the whole effort misleading.
The scan, which began in July and continued through December, was conducted in an area known as Parcel A, the only developed portion of the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, a Superfund site along the city’s southeast waterfront.
In 2004, the state and other agencies declared Parcel A free of radioactive hazards and removed it from the Superfund portion, a decision based largely on spotty paper records and conjecture instead of rigorous testing. Hundreds of people now live there. But after two employees of the Navy contractor Tetra Tech EC pleaded guilty to falsifying radioactivity test data in other parts of the shipyard and regulatory agencies raised additional questions about the company's work, worried homeowners demanded that their neighborhood be tested.
The state’s survey was supposed to provide some closure, and the city’s development agency welcomed the final report as good news. It said in a news release that the state had declared the housing area “free from any radiological health and safety hazards.”
Experts who spoke to The Chronicle, however, said the state’s scanning effort was far too limited to reach this conclusion.
The survey of the housing area was designed to pinpoint relatively large objects buried close to the surface that emit one type of radiation: gamma radiation. One such object, a radium-filled deck marker about the size of a silver dollar, was unearthed in September in an unoccupied area behind a fence.
But the survey did not account for other potentially dangerous forms of radioactivity, experts said. The state didn’t sample the soil on Parcel A, even though soil contamination is one of the main concerns driving the shipyard cleanup; when tainted soil is disturbed, radioactive particles can travel in dust and be ingested or inhaled, posing a cancer risk.
The survey also was unable to detect substances that emit alpha or beta radiation, including plutonium-239, which lasts tens of thousands of years, and strontium-90, which mimics calcium and lodges in bones. The only way to accurately measure alpha and beta particles is to analyze soil samples in a lab, something the state didn’t do.
“It is totally and completely wrong” for anyone to say the state report “means the area is free from any radiological hazards,” said Gaetano Taibi, a health physicist trained in the biological effects of radiation who used to work for the California Department of Public Health.
A Navy radiation expert with 40 years of experience also has called the survey incomplete.
“It’s not designed to be a thorough survey. It’s not designed to answer all questions,” Scott Hay, who has spent two years reviewing Tetra Tech’s radiation data as a Navy consultant, said during a community meeting at the shipyard on Jan. 28. “Is it a complete survey and would I recommend that you release the property based on that? No.”
The state and the Navy defended the Parcel A survey, arguing that it was adequate because the Navy never used Parcel A for industrial purposes and because much of the original soil was replaced during construction anyway.
Parcel A “is not contaminated with loose radioactive unsealed contaminants,” the California Department of Public Health, which conducted the survey, said in a statement. “The only logical contaminant scenario ... is from discrete sealed sources that somehow remained on the site.”
These are assumptions, however, not scientific conclusions based on test results. And they fit a larger pattern of unsupported claims and wishful thinking by government officials whose job is to watch the shipyard and keep people safe.
According to previous investigations by The Chronicle and other Bay Area media outlets, the agencies in charge of the shipyard — federal, state and local — have repeatedly tried to minimize problems with the cleanup and risks to the public over the past two decades. A city health official complained that investigating false soil samples was a waste of taxpayer money, blamed the media and withheld key documents from homeowners. The Navy failed to tell police employees stationed at the shipyard that their office was built atop a former “radioactive laundry” and was next door to a large, constantly agitated stockpile of radioactive dirt.
“They are twisting things in the absence of reliable measurements,” said Daniel Hirsch, former director of the Program on Environmental and Nuclear Policy at UC Santa Cruz and a persistent critic of the cleanup process. “Every claim for safety seems to be twisted and distorted.”
The central assumption behind the state’s recent scan of Parcel A is that soil contamination there isn’t “logical” — an assumption that’s been challenged by experts and a group of former cleanup workers turned whistle-blowers.
Last year, a group of academic researchers led by Hirsch used the Navy’s own records to show how radioactive substances could have traveled from the industrial parts of the shipyard to the current housing area, dispersed into the soil. Some former cleanup workers, meanwhile, have said they detected elevated levels of radioactivity in the sewer system beneath the housing area and in soil along its border.
When testing other parts of the shipyard, the Navy is supposed to use a more rigorous approach than the one the state applied to Parcel A. The Navy agrees to “cleanup levels” — amounts of radioactive substances that wouldn’t pose an unacceptable health risk to anyone living there. Then it takes soil samples, tests them, and compares the results to the cleanup levels.
At the housing area on Parcel A, though, the state used radiation scanners that were held above the ground by workers or towed from tractors, taking thousands of individual radiation measurements in specific locations.
Instead of checking the measurements against objective cleanup levels, the state checked them against each other, investigating further only if one area was much more radioactive than the others.
By way of analogy, if a government beef inspector applied the same method, she would check thousands of steaks for disease-causing bacteria and throw out only the handful of steaks with the highest bacteria counts, even if a lower amount of bacteria would still make someone sick.
“Literally, they don’t even have a claim of what is clean,” said Hirsch. “All they did is they wandered around Parcel A and looked for spots that were a lot hotter than other parts.”
The state responded that the parcel is composed of “dozens of different types of materials” both natural and man-made — rocks, wood chips, asphalt, concrete — making their approach valid and necessary. The state also said that prior to the construction of new homes, much of the topsoil on Parcel A was replaced with new fill known to be clean.
A close examination of the report shows that multiple locations in the housing area registered above-average levels of radium-226 and cesium-137, two potentially dangerous radioactive substances. The state says these spots were double-checked using a more sensitive scanner and only naturally occurring radiation was found.
But there’s no way to be sure of that conclusion without taking soil samples and testing them in a lab, said Don Wadsworth, a health physicist and ex-president of New World Environmental, a former radiation-control subcontractor at the shipyard. Wadsworth is one of seven people who worked on the cleanup and have since filed federal whistle-blower lawsuits against Tetra Tech. New World Environmental is also named as the defendant in one of those lawsuits.
“If someone came back to me with the readings that the state got, I would tell them to go back there and take soil samples. I’d want to know what was there,” said Wadsworth. He called the report “eye candy for the uninformed.”
There are still a few loose ends in the Parcel A survey that will be tied up soon, the state says in its report. In addition to the deck marker that was found, the state noticed a second “anomaly” in November — an unusual but “barely detectable” radiation reading that was taken months earlier on a hillside. The anomaly could not be detected during a later search, possibly due to damp conditions caused by rain. Workers plan to return to the spot and investigate further.
Responding to concerns from residents, the state is also offering to test dust inside their homes. The indoor testing, which will be performed between Feb. 27 and March 2 for those who request it, will look for alpha and beta particles in dust wipes from window sills, “to assess whether residents are being exposed to radiation that might have blown into the residences,” the state said.
The state health department may not have the final word on the housing area’s safety. Several city officials said recently they want more scrutiny of the tests. Mayor London Breed, City Attorney Dennis Herrera and Shamann Walton, the supervisor whose district includes the shipyard, have asked two local universities to examine the testing process at Parcel A and a second parcel nearby. Details of the review have not been released.
“We are in discussions with UCSF and UC Berkeley about the timing and details of this review,” said the mayor’s spokesman, Jeff Cretan. “As they are the trusted experts in the field, we are looking to them to design and implement procedures and protocols of a review that will meet the needs of the community.”
Homebuilding giant Lennar Corp., the city’s partner in developing Parcel A, referred detailed questions about the state’s scan to public officials, saying in a statement: “No radiological health and safety hazards to the residents of Parcel A were observed.”
About 20 homeowners have filed lawsuits against Lennar and Tetra Tech, alleging that the companies withheld facts about contamination at the shipyard. Lennar and Tetra Tech have said the suits are baseless.
One of the plaintiffs, Salustiano Ribeiro, a laboratory scientist who moved to the shipyard in 2017, said he didn’t think the state performed enough testing.
“It’s like they’re not listening to us,” he said. “They should have done soil sampling all over [the parcel]. To make sure that they can find alpha and beta. If it’s clean, then I could be OK. But I don’t know if it’s truly clean.”
Editor's note: This article has been modified since its original publication to make clear that two employees of Tetra Tech EC pleaded guilty to falsifying data about radiation hazards at the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, and that various regulatory agencies overseeing the Hunters Point cleanup, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Navy and state health authorities, have called Tetra Tech EC's test results for much of the site into question.
Jason Fagone and Cynthia Dizikes are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: jason.fagone@sfchronicle.com, cdizikes@sfchronicle.com
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