Hunters Point Shipyard a textbook case of environmental injustice
Residents deserve a voice, retesting — and the truth
It’s one thing to read about “environmental justice.” It’s another thing to see it play out before our very eyes. Case in point: the unfolding saga of the Hunters Point Shipyard cleanup, which could be one of the worst environmental injustices in California history.
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors began hearings this week to address this injustice, but discussion derailed almost immediately. As the board presses on, we remind the supervisors that the people of Bayview-Hunters Point deserve nothing less than:
1) Full criminal and civil accountability for the pollution control company executives who oversaw the botched cleanup.
2) Retesting of all parcels — including Parcel A, where 300 new homes are already built and occupied and 150 others are under construction — to assure residents they are not exposed to harmful radiation.
3) Clawing back pollution controller Tetra Tech’s profits and completely removing the company from this project and the Treasure Island cleanup project.
4) Reconstituting the citizens advisory board to oversee the shipyard cleanup.
5) Developing a robust environmental justice policy for San Francisco to ensure that communities of color are never targeted like this again.
First, let’s go over how we got here. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency defines environmental justice as “the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies.” The concept first emerged in the 1980s but has gained traction in California over the past decade.
In 2005, then-San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris started a (now-defunct) environmental justice unit that focused on hazardous-waste disposal and workplace safety. Other jurisdictions followed suit, and in 2012, the state attorney general’s office issued a memo stating that industrial projects should take account of the disproportionate impacts the project may have on low-income, minority communities.
Throughout the state, we’ve seen citizens mobilize to derail fracking projects near tribal lands, stop oil companies from trucking their noxious products through Latino neighborhoods along the Central Coast, and to shut down refineries in African American communities in Los Angeles.
These projects shared common traits:
⏩ An out-of-town corporation with few ties to the community targeted a low-income, minority community perceived as voiceless in the political process.
⏩ The corporation took steps to further silence dissidents and residents by eliminating avenues for public oversight and community participation. ⏩ Critical information about the proposed projects was deliberately withheld or falsified to hide the true public health risks and environmental cost to the community.
These concerns are now playing out right in our backyard with the Hunters Point Shipyard cleanup, a project the San Francisco Human Rights Commission redflagged as early as 2003.
But the injustice at the Hunters Point shipyard began generations ago. Because of racial segregation and evictions from other parts of San Francisco, many African Americans made Bayview Hunters Point their home in the years following World War II. The area still boasts the city’s largest African American population, and sadly, the highest percentage of people living below the federal poverty line.
The community has also been a location for industrial activity. From 1946 to 1969, the U.S. Navy used the Hunters Point shipyard to decontaminate ships and military equipment exposed to atomic bomb testing and to study the effects of radiation on animals and materials. The byproducts of these activities seeped into the soil, causing the EPA to declare the shipyard a Superfund site, that is, as land contaminated by wastes that pose a risk to human health or the environment and eligible for federal funding to clean it up.
Since 1994, the Navy has been preparing the site for a large mixed-use residential and commercial development with parks and open space. The project will bring 12,000 much-needed homes to San Francisco and reinvigorate an economically challenged neighborhood.
But things have not gone according to plan.
We now know that the workers for the engineering firm hired to oversee the cleanup, Tetra Tech, falsified data to hide the true toxicity of soil samples from the shipyard. A 2017 analysis by the Navy found that nearly half of the soil samples produced by Tetra Tech were deliberately falsified or manipulated. An EPA report revealed further fraud, calling into question 97 percent of the cleanup data. Tetra Tech pins the blame on “rogue” employees.
Two Tetra Tech employees already have pleaded guilty to fraud and been sentenced to federal prison. A $27 billion lawsuit was filed against the company recently for “blatant, conscious, callous disregard of Bayview-Hunters Point residents’ lives, born and unborn, for the next five generations.” So far, Tetra Tech has taken home more than $350 million for the cleanup.
It hardly seems a coincidence that this fraud took place in San Francisco’s poorest neighborhood. Or that it occurred in the years after the Navy abolished the federally required community oversight board that had raised early concerns about the cleanup. Can you imagine regulators eliminating a citizens advisory group for a major project in, say, the Marina or North Beach because the group raised concerns about environmental contamination and public health? We can’t either.
Nelson Mandela captured the essence of environmental justice when he said the true test of a nation is not how we treat the powerful, but how we treat the least among us. So far, we’re failing that test.