San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
WORKING IN A WASTELAND
Sent to a Superfund site, they were told they were safe. But the cops on the shipyard had good reason to doubt.
Fourteen years before the lump appeared on his neck, Nelson Lum’s San Francisco police unit was transferred to a new office in an unexpected location: the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard.
The shipyard is a federal Superfund waste site. By definition, it’s one of the most contaminated places in the country, tainted by radioactivity, heavy metals and other pollution. But in 1996, the toxic land offered what few places in San Francisco could: lots of space for a low price.
That year, the city decided to lease a large, empty building owned by the Navy for below-market rates. Known only as Building 606, it became the new headquarters for some specialized police units, including the SWAT team, the bomb squad, the Honda Unit, the K-9 Unit and the crime lab. Before long, more than 100 officers and civilians were clocking in at the shipyard every day.
It was safe, according to the city and the Navy. They told the people in Building 606 that any nearby contaminants were minimal, too scant to cause harm.
“The building is clean, absolutely, and the area around it is clean,” a Navy representative promised in a March 1997 news story.
But at times, the cops felt unsure. Lum took Police Academy recruits on training
around the shipyard, and more than once he was stunned when they passed Navy contractors outfitted in HazMat gear: goggles, respirators, disposable Tyvek uniforms.
“I’m in my shorts, and here are these guys walking around in space suits,” Lum recalled. “What’s wrong with this picture?”
Lum, 70, spent thousands of hours at the shipyard over eight years. He worked there every day for about a year, then returned regularly as a sergeant to lead SWAT exercises and academy trainings. He retired in 2005 and didn’t think much more about it.
In 2011, his wife noticed the lump on his neck. A biopsy confirmed it was malignant. Lum had thyroid cancer.
He asked his doctors if there might be a link to his time at the shipyard. They said they had no way of knowing.
Now cancer-free after two surgeries and two courses of radiation, Lum has been thinking about the shipyard again in recent months, alarmed by a scandal that has rocked the Navy’s billion-dollar effort to remove toxic material from the site.
The cleanup is a sprawling drama with a large cast. The Navy owns the land and hires contractors to test it and haul away contaminants. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and other regulators oversee the work. But somewhere along the line things went awry. Half a dozen former radiation workers have accused the main cleanup contractor, Tetra Tech, of violating safety standards to save money and make the site appear clean when it wasn’t. Two former Tetra Tech supervisors were sentenced to federal prison this year after admitting they falsified records and swapped soil samples. And the Navy and EPA say they have found wider patterns of likely fraud or manipulation in many radioactivity measurements across the site.
Tetra Tech has stood by its work and contested the whistle-blowers’ allegations, saying that “claims made against Tetra Tech EC by a handful of former subcontractors and employees are false.” Yet now the Navy is preparing to retest much of the shipyard.
“We pretty much believed that the city would not put us in danger,” Lum said. But lately, after hearing about problems with the cleanup, “I mean, it makes you wonder.”
Lum is among hundreds of cops and civilians who worked at 606 over the years, and one of many trying to figure out if they were put at risk. The city still leases the building; about 40 police employees work there today.
In early May, another retired SFPD officer contacted The Chronicle, asking whether reporters had heard of Building 606. Since then, Chronicle reporters have interviewed 30 former police officers who worked there and have examined hundreds of documents related to 606 and its surroundings, including leases, emails between public officials and decades-old Navy files.
Those records show the shipyard posed threats to city employees from the beginning. According to city and Navy reports, Building 606 ’s tap water and ventilation system were initially contaminated, and toxic gases were released near the building on multiple occasions. The Navy later discovered radioactive materials next door to Building 606 and in surrounding areas, raising the possibility of wider problems. But the Navy waited years to probe further — and when an investigation was finally performed, it was done by Tetra Tech, whose work is now in question.
Retired officers told The Chronicle that potential hazards weren’t clearly explained.
“We called it the Land of the Lost because they left us out there,” said Paul Swiatko, 68, a retired officer who was stationed at 606 with the Honda Unit, cops who rode dirt bikes. “We were kept in the dark.” The Navy and SFPD sent statements in response to questions for this story, emphasizing that the building is safe.
“Based on a review of all available site related information, the Navy remains confident that Building 606 is safe for occupancy,” wrote Derek Robinson, the Navy’s environmental coordinator for the shipyard. A police spokesman said “concerns and potential issues” about 606 over the last two decades have been documented by commanders and “promptly addressed.” He said the San Francisco Department of Public Health “has consistently assured SFPD that Building 606 is safe for the men and women who work there.”
The health department is the lead city agency monitoring the shipyard cleanup. In response to questions about Building 606, a spokeswoman wrote, “It is very important that the past and current occupants of Building 606 know that they were and are safe, and that there is no evidence of exposure to health hazards related to the Shipyard cleanup in that building. Because there is no exposure, there is no risk.”
An EPA spokeswoman said in an email that the lease restricted cops to safe areas, and added that the building was designed to protect workers from any contaminants that might lay beneath. “EPA believes the workers in Building 606 are protected from potential radiological and volatile organic compound contamination,” she said.
This, in essence, has been the official story for decades, told in certainties and absolutes. The shipyard has been portrayed as a known quantity and its cleanup as a tidy process, controlled by restrictions noted on paper, fences in the field, and oversight by multiple regulators.
The reality is more complex, as the saga of Building 606 demonstrates. It goes beyond cops and dirt, helping explain why San Francisco’s most important redevelopment project since the 1906 earthquake has consumed a quarter century and a billion dollars and still isn’t done. Records show that officials shortened environmental reviews as part of a scramble to open the shipyard to commerce. The Navy distorted the history and potential risks of the Building 606 site. And the city signed on. The ones with the least power, and least information, were the hundreds of people who worked there. And for them, the shipyard was a place of chaos, danger and mystery.
Fallout
On July 25, 1946, off Bikini Atoll, a set of small islands in the Pacific Ocean, the U.S. military performed one of the most dramatic atomic tests of the 20th century, known as Shot Baker. A large bomb was detonated underwater. The ocean heaved. In “a giant and unprecedented spectacle,” as one military account later described it, a million tons of water spurted up in a great white column a mile high, spreading into an incandescent dome of toxic moisture.
At the dawn of the Cold War, the military wanted to know how ships and people would be damaged by the deadly and long-lasting radioactive poisons spread by nuclear explosions. So they brought nearly 100 “target” ships to Bikini, some loaded with live pigs and sheep, and set off two atomic bombs at close range, the second of which was Baker. The results startled U.S. officials. They had expected some contamination but not the near-total poisoning they observed among the assembled cruisers, battleships and aircraft carriers. Shot Baker soaked the ships, turning them into “radioactive stoves” that “would have burned all living things aboard with inruns visible and painless but deadly radiation,” officials wrote in a secret cable to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington.
The Navy tried to decontaminate the ships at Bikini, sending in crews of sailors to scrub the decks with soap and brushes. It didn’t work. Their clothes became radioactive. The pigs started to keel over and die.
The military ordered the “most heavily contaminated ships” to proceed to Hunters Point, where a group of Navy scientists and civilians had been studying radiation. The U.S. government hoped these experts might know how to handle the radioactive death armada it had created.
Eighteen target ships and 61 support ships made the voyage to San Francisco. When they arrived, the scientists examined them, dragging the nuclear fallout into the shipyard. First known as the RADLAB, then the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, or NRDL, the Navy’s research group was centered in the southern end of the shipyard. The 500-acre shipyard is shaped a bit like a human left hand. The original NRDL buildings stood in the depression of the palm — the same area where, decades later, hundreds of elite San Francisco police officers would be stationed.
Among these buildings were “hot” chemistry and biology labs, kennels for animals given lethal doses of radiation, and storage vaults for radioactive elements used in the experiments. The Navy also stashed drums of radioactive waste in temporary shacks in the area.
In the decades to come, one of the buildings in particular would shape the police presence at the shipyard: Building 503, originally a kitchen and mess hall. After the A-bomb tests, Navy leaders realized that a special facility was needed to wash the contaminated clothing of sailors at Hunters Point. An “urgent” request for funds was made, and a laundry was installed inside 503 — a “Radioactive Laundry.”
The 1940s and ’50s were a more lenient era, safetywise. Navy records describe the shipyard’s first radiological safety section as a “small band” of junior officers with equipment consisting “of one coffee pot and six Geiger counters, only two of which worked.” To illuminate