Concern over dirt from S. F. shipyard
Pittsburg residents fear radioactive waste in dump
The Keller Canyon Landfill in the East Bay city of Pittsburg got more dirt from the botched Hunters Point Shipyard cleanup than any other dump site, a Navy official told The Chronicle.
The official, Scott Anderson, a deputy naval base closure manager, said that all of the substances brought to Keller Canyon were non-radiological and do not pose a threat to public health — with one exception from 2015 that he said was promptly corrected. He said the agency is working on an exact breakdown of what material from the San Francisco Superfund site went where. But he said Keller Canyon got the lion’s share of Hunters Point waste.
“To date we have not found any issues with the data or anything that left the base and came onto Keller Canyon,” he said, referring to reviews of records and statistical analyses. The Navy has not actually done tests at the landfill.
Residents who live around the dump, however, are not convinced. They crowded into a community meeting Thursday night in nearby Bay Point, where representatives from the
Navy, California Department of Public Health, Keller Canyon Landfill, Pittsburg and Contra Costa County tried to reassure them that they were in no danger.
“We want to be heard, not lectured to,” longtime Pittsburg resident Lisa Della Rocca said Friday. “Yesterday I felt like I was in kindergarten. We need transparency. We have every right to know what we’re breathing and what we’re up against.”
After The Chronicle in April reported that former Hunters Point workers saw soil with potentially dangerous levels of radiation leaving the shipyard bound for conventional landfills around the state — ones that aren’t equipped to handle the hazardous material — Rick King, the general manager of Keller Canyon, said he stopped accepting shipments from the San Francisco site.
He went through old truck manifests and found that his landfill had received between 220,000 and 225,000 tons of Hunters Point material from 2009 to 2017. Most of it was dirt, but there were some timber and asphalt pieces as well, he said.
Keller Canyon is run by Republic Services, a Fortune 500 company and the country’s second- largest hauler of nonhazardous waste. The landfill is allowed to receive up to 3,500 tons of trash per day.
King said Keller Canyon used the Hunters Point soil as a cover layer over garbage — meant to keep rodents and pests out and odors in. Subsequent layers of garbage and other material have been piled on top of that dirt.
Tetra Tech, the environmental engineering company responsible for ridding Hunters Point of toxic substances, said in a statement that it wasn’t responsible for transport or disposal of material to off- site landfills.
Two former Tetra Tech supervisors admitted last year they swapped potentially toxic soil samples for clean ones at the shipyard. Each was sentenced to eight months in prison.
The Navy contractor that transported material from Hunters Point to Keller Canyon was Gilbane from 2008 to 2011, and has been Arcadis since 2012, according to naval spokesman Bill Franklin.
Anderson said the cargo leaving Hunters Point had to pass through layers of oversight, including monitors that could have detected radiation. The shipyard whistle- blowers, however, said those scanners were reset to be less sensitive and that trucks left at night when they weren’t active.
Keller Canyon has its own detection system, too, King said. It was operating when all the Hunters Point shipments arrived and did not pick up radiation, he said.
But health officials at the Thursday forum acknowledged that radioactive material buried deep within a mass of dirt might not have been caught by the landfill’s sensors as trucks entered the facility. Then, atop a mountain of garbage in the windy delta city, strong gusts could have blown particles of the soil, meant as a protective layer, into surrounding neighborhoods, said Marilyn Underwood, the environmental health director of Contra Costa County.
“As it sits there now, it’s not a hazard to people nearby,” Underwood said. “There is an outstanding question of what happened before it was buried when it was being used as a soil cover.”
Another unresolved concern for landfill neighbors: Are nearby water systems safe?
John Fassell, chief of the inspection, compliance and enforcement program in the state public health agency, said the drinking water appears to have “natural background levels” of radiation, but that it’s “still being investigated.”
If there were a problem with the dirt transports from Hunters Point to Keller Canyon, it wouldn’t be the first time.
In June 2014, the shipyard sent 42 trucks carrying 987 tons of dirt to the dump, even though the material had higher levels of lead than what was acceptable for such a landfill, according to Anderson. The Navy caught the error a few days later, removed the material and did confirmation sampling at Keller Canyon, he said.
Then, in February 2015, nine trucks carrying 218 tons of asphalt from Hunters Point that hadn’t been properly screened for radiation got to the Keller Canyon dump. Fassell said the Navy found out about the lapse the same day, from a whistle- blower. The entire load had to be excavated and retested. It turned out six or seven handsize pieces had the radioactive isotope Cesium- 137 on them.
“We believe it was less than a day that it was there,” Fassell said.
Debbie Davis grew up in Hunters Point in the 1950s and now lives a block away from the Keller Canyon dump. She said her mother died of breast and ovarian cancer. Davis herself was recently diagnosed with thyroid cancer and had to undergo surgery for the gland to be removed.
“I thought the Navy was supposed to clean up all that stuff,” she said. “It messes with your health.”
Like other residents, Davis said her house gets the dust and odors from the landfill. Sometimes at night, she said, “You feel like the roof is going to blow off.”
There are 2,061 homes within a half- mile radius of Keller Canyon, according to Underwood.
One of those residents, Navy veteran Juanito Dumlao, 76, has taken to wearing a surgical mask when he goes out.
“I don’t know what I’m getting from the wind,” he said. “I have four children, nine grandchildren. What will be the future of these kids with this landfill here?”