Supes push for redo of botched test in Hunters Point cleanup scandal

San Francisco supervisors Monday pressed the Navy to retest the entire Hunters Point Shipyard, including a portion already dotted with new condos, during the first public hearing into the widening scandal of the botched $1 billion cleanup at the Superfund site.

For weeks, the supervisors had eagerly awaited an opportunity to question Tetra Tech, the environmental engineering company responsible for ridding the site of nuclear residue and other toxic materials. Two Tetra Tech employees have pleaded guilty of cheating when testing soil at the site.

They got that chance Monday during a hearing called by Supervisor Malia Cohen. But the company’s testimony was cut short after just a few minutes when supervisors expressed disappointment and anger that Tetra Tech had sent a recently hired lawyer to respond to questions, rather than a technical expert with firsthand knowledge of the cleanup.

Cohen, who represents the district where the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard is located, blasted Tetra Tech for sending Preston Hopson, who joined Tetra Tech as general counsel in January.

“There are constituents in here who know more about what has been going on in the neighborhood than you, sir,” Cohen said. “I find it insulting that you are the only person from Tetra Tech who is here.”

After that, Hopson walked out of the chambers, along with the company’s publicist.

Sam Singer, a local spokesman hired by Tetra Tech, said it was Cohen, not Tetra Tech, who was at fault for the abbreviated exchange. He said Hopson could have answered the questions “if given the opportunity.”

“Supervisor Cohen invited Tetra Tech to make a presentation to the city so it and the public could learn firsthand about the issues of concern,” he said. “But she refused to allow Tetra Tech to speak and give a presentation.”

Singer said that his client had been prepared to show that “cleanup work at Hunters Point Naval Shipyard meets the standards set by the U.S. Navy” and that any cheating in the work was the fault of a couple of “rogue employees.”

The brief appearance of Tetra Tech’s attorney was just one highlight of a four-hour hearing, during which city officials repeatedly demanded that the Navy and the federal Environmental Protection Agency retest the entire shipyard, including Parcel A, that part of the property where developer FivePoint has built 300 homes and has another 150 under construction.

Officials from the Navy, the EPA and the San Francisco Department of Public Health each said they were committed to retesting the property and making sure it is safe before any more of it is transferred to the city for redevelopment. But none of them were willing to say when and how that might happen. And none specifically promised that Parcel A would be retested.

Laura Duchnak, director of the Navy’s Base Realignment and Closure Program, contended that Parcel A is safe.

“I would live there, and I would have my family live there,” she said.

She said Tetra Tech worked on only one building on Parcel A, Building 322, which she said

was scanned for radioactivity and then removed from the site in 2004. But whistle-blowers have questioned that information and say that high levels of radioactive materials were found a few feet outside the edge of Parcel A.

Members of the Board of Supervisors were not convinced by the assurances.

“It’s not enough to say that it’s safe and you would live there. Quite frankly, you don’t live there,” Supervisor Sandra Lee Fewer told Duchnak. “Parcel A needs to be retested so people can sleep at night.”

Enrique Manzanilla, director of the Superfund Division for the EPA’s Western division, said devising a plan on how and when to approach the retesting is more complicated than it might seem.

“We are aware of the deep concern that you and the community have about the health of the current and future residents,” he said. “I understand this community has had a cloud hanging over its head for far too long.”

The shipyard was home to the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory from 1946 to 1969, when tests were conducted to determine the effects of radiation on living organisms, and ships contaminated by atomic bomb explosions were drydocked at Hunters Point. Most operations ceased at the shipyard in 1974, and it was named redundant as part of the Base Realignment and Closure effort in 1991.

Supervisor Jane Kim said she said “dismayed and disgusted”

by the allegations of cheating and expressed disappointment that the city’s Department of Public Health has not played a stronger role in making sure the cleanup was done properly. Kim’s district includes Treasure Island, a former naval facility where Tetra Tech also was contracted to do cleanup work.

“We need our local agency to be our advocate, not the advocate of the federal contractor,” she said.

The hearing featured longtime Bayview neighborhood activist Marie Harrison, who has been pushing to have the property cleaned up since the mid-1970s. She spoke of elevated cancer rates in the Bayview, and said eight people on her block have been diagnosed with cancer.

“For years, I have heard very real fears from the community and very little appropriate response from the Navy or other federal agencies,” Cohen said. “Public trust has been completely eroded by this terribly opaque process.”

Steve Castleman, who heads up the Environmental Law and Justice Clinic at Golden Gate University’s law school, called regulators to task for their failed oversight.

“But for those whistle-blowers, the Navy and the EPA would have approved additional transfer of parcels at Hunters Point that were still contaminated.”

Amy Brownell of the San Francisco Department of Public Health, who has worked on the shipyard cleanup for 25 years, said, “We still believe the parcel (A) is safe for residents, workers and tenants.

“There has never been a case when we thought public health and safety was at risk,” she said. “The fraudulent behavior is an outrage, but we don’t believe that public health and safety is at risk.”

This month, the U.S. attorney’s office unsealed documents showing that two former Tetra Tech supervisors involved in the cleanup of radioactive contaminants at the old shipyard had pleaded guilty to falsifying soil samples. Each man, 48-year old Justin Hubbard and 65-year-old Stephen Rolph, received eight months in prison.

In his plea agreement, Hubbard admitted substituting 5-gallon buckets of clean soil for potentially contaminated dirt at the shipyard site.

Also on Monday, Mayor Mark Farrell and House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco both called for the retesting of Parcel A. In a letter, Farrell asked the U.S. Navy and the EPA to “undertake re-evaluation of the occupied portion of the shipyard to assure us that they pose no health threat to the people living and working there.”

“If the Navy and the U.S. EPA do not believe that a re-evaluation is needed we are requesting a detailed explanation as to why no further evaluation is needed in light of Tetra Tech’s allegations,” the mayor wrote.