San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
‘WHAT CAN BE DONE?’
ing safety principles. Tetra Tech has said Bowers’ claims are false.
Around the same time Bowers found the hot readings with his scanner, more than 300 soil samples from this part of the shipyard, and an area a bit farther west, were tested for radioactivity. Within the top layer of soil, cesium-137 contamination was “moderately extensive,” according to a Navy report, while radium-226 was “widespread.” One sample from next to 606 — south of the parking lot, where the Navy radiation labs used to be — showed an amount of radium-226 nearly three times higher than the cleanup goal. The Navy and the EPA declared in 2004 that areas near Building 606 were “radiologically impacted,” which meant contamination was likely and more investigation needed to be done.
The shipyard had always been a place of mysteries, but with these new findings, the uncertainties were multiplying.
Instead of slowing down, though, the city turned 606 into a destination, former officers said. A helipad was built next door, drawing new traffic to the shipyard, and the city added audiovisual features to a large classroom in 606, offering training courses to cops in the city and beyond. The moves opened the shipyard to more people at a time when the cleanup was about to enter its most intense phase.
“People were out cleaning with white suits and wearing masks, and we never had any of that,” said Madsen. “We just kept working out here. Working, running, training, showering, eating.”
By 2005, the Navy was worried about the safety of its shipyard tenants, moving to end their leases before contractors started digging up and testing every sewer and storm line for contamination.
“Our main concern was safety,” Doug Gilkey, the Navy’s base closure manager, said in an August 2005 Chronicle article. “These lines go under the roads. They go under buildings. When we start digging them up, we’re going to have trenches all over the base. Because of the safety, we needed to terminate those leases.”
But city officials, confronted again with the possible dangers of the shipyard — this time by its owner — still didn’t want to vacate Building 606.
The city asked to keep the lease. The Navy relented. The cops remained.
Conditions worsened, officers said. Eighteen-wheelers rattled the roads, carrying the concrete chunks of razed buildings and loads of contaminated soil and sand. To control the dust, contractors sprayed water on the same roads the cops were using, swamping their cars and motorcycles with mud.
“It was filthy,” said Sharon Ferrigno, who worked at Building 606 for four years as a lieutenant in the city’s Homeland Security Unit. “Our cars were just caked on with that junk.” The mud “was in places where we worked out, places where we ate, places where we changed,” said Madsen. “We were there on a daily basis, up to 16, 18 hours a day sometimes, unprotected.”
“They never covered those trucks,” Malliaras said. “When the wind would blow, and it blew a lot, it would just blow that dirt everywhere.”
Officers weren’t worried just about themselves; they felt guilty about taking pieces of the shipyard home to their families, their partners and kids, on their clothes and even in the fur of their K-9 dogs. “Some of these guys, not me, but they slept with their dogs,” said Gene Kalinin, 59, a retired K-9 officer. The dogs “weren’t pets, but they lived with these guys. Some brought them in their houses.”
Paul Swiatko was frustrated enough to write a memo to a captain in 2007. The Honda Unit officers, exposed on their dirt bikes, were getting swamped by “unhealthy dust” and “sloppy slick mud,” he wrote. The captain agreed that the situation was unacceptable, replying in a letter, “We should have been out of here well before this construction project ever began.” Swiatko said he never heard more after that.
The city did make a concession, acknowledging in a memo that there was “an inordinate amount of dust” and agreeing to pay $10,805.64 for 636 vouchers at the Tower Car Wash on Mission Street. Each employee at 606 got two free car washes per month.
The next year, 2009, most of the officers finally left the shipyard. The SFPD relocated the Tactical Division to a building in Potrero Hill, which was more central and allowed for quicker responses to emergencies.
But the city held onto the lease and has kept the crime lab in Building 606, along with 40 employees, even as the central question at 606 remains unanswered: What’s in the soil?
When the Tactical Division moved out in 2009, a comprehensive probe of the area had never been performed. In 2011 and 2012, a cleanup contractor finally tested a new set of soil samples — and partly because the contractor was Tetra Tech, the results produced more questions than answers.
Tetra Tech concluded that two areas south of the parking lot were clear of dangerous radioactivity. The company also checked the soil that had been excavated from beneath the building years earlier. Tetra Tech found elevated levels of cesium-137 in a few samples of that soil and disposed of it as “low-level radioactive waste.” But the Navy said last year that many of Tetra Tech’s measurements in this area can’t be trusted and need to be retaken.
As for the soil directly beneath 606 — soil that is still there — it was left alone. Authorities had said it needed to be checked for radioactivity. “The area beneath Building 606 will require a radiological survey, and remediation if necessary,” the Navy wrote in 2008. Based on available records, it doesn’t appear this survey has ever been performed.
Today, government agencies are wrestling with large questions about the future of the shipyard — questions about retesting, about politics, about restoring public trust. Meanwhile, the city officials in charge of 606 have been facing more mundane challenges, at an aging building they were asked to leave long ago.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, we have another sewer line leak,” a city engineer wrote on March 23, 2016.
The sewage system at 606 had broken down, resulting in periodic floods of liquid waste that threatened to shut down the crime lab. The emergency spawned emails between the city and Navy. “These issues at Bldg 606 are getting to be numerous and ridiculous,” one Navy staffer complained. Another Navy official pointed out that the city really should have left 606 a decade earlier.
“If you recall at that time, the Navy wanted to cease all leasing,” the Navy official wrote.
To fix the problem, an underground sewer vault was needed, and a pit had to be dug to hold the vault. But because this was Building 606, the question arose: Did the excavated soil need to be scanned for radioactivity? The Navy and city said no, as long as the pit was at least 5 feet away from an area that the Navy will eventually be retesting.
“Scanning it will involve extra contracts & will take extra time & money & will delay the project,” the health department’s point person on the shipyard, Amy Brownell, emailed a Navy official in November. “And since it can be avoided, let’s take the easy path.”
People still in the building remain nervous about radiation, according to recent emails provided by the health and police departments. On May 7, a crime lab staffer emailed the current city hygienist at 606, saying that employees were concerned about radiation in and around the building and asking if the hygienist could perform a radiation test. The hygienist didn’t think so: “We have some old Geiger counters that have not been calibrated for a few years,” he replied. “Beyond that we do not have radiation detection equipment.”
That same week, something happened at 606 that echoed the warnings of communication problems from two decades prior: “One of our employees was stopped and tested for radiation while walking in an area surrounding the building today,” a crime lab employee emailed the hygienist. Apparently the employee had unknowingly entered a restricted area the Navy had designated for retesting. The hygienist fired off an email to his bosses, asking for information: “Can you please look into this as soon as possible and let me know what is occurring out there.”
There’s a guy in Idaho who keeps track of dead and dying San Francisco cops, a retired SFPD officer named René LaPrevotte. When a police officer dies, he sends an email blast to about a thousand people, paying tribute. “We call him the Grim Reaper,” said Katherine Portoni, a former SFPD dispatcher. “Actually, he’s awesome.”
Portoni’s husband, John, was the subject of a LaPrevotte email. John worked at Building 606 with the Tactical Division. Portoni used to visit him for lunch. “I was like, ‘Wow, what are they doing out here?’ ” she recalled. “It was just a dingy place.” John was diagnosed with glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer, in 2011 and died 13 months later.
Lately, LaPrevotte has used his email list to connect cops who worked at Building 606, and Madsen and others are doing the same, trying to assemble a picture of their health as a group and to better understand the risks they faced. There are officers who have already survived cancer or blood diseases: Nelson Lum; Sharon Ferrigno, who was diagnosed with melanoma in 2009 and had it surgically removed; Philip Brown, a former dirt-bike cop, who suffers from an autoimmune disease that destroys red blood cells.
They don’t know if the shipyard is to blame. No scientific study of 606 workers has been done, and there is no evidence suggesting cancer rates among this group are higher than normal.
“We realize that it would be tough to prove,” Madsen said. “The nature of the job is we’re out in the middle of a lot of things. And so we’d always tell each other, ‘Well, what if we came down with something? How are we going to prove that we got it from here?’ And guys would just throw up their hands.”
On a weekday in May, six of the former shipyard officers who spoke to The Chronicle returned to Hunters Point to have a photo taken.
It was a gray, chilly day. They met at the main gate of the shipyard, where the master developer has already built 300 homes, and colorful banners line construction fences: “A proud heritage, a new beginning.” The back gate offers easier access to 606, so the officers carpooled there, cresting over the hill and descending into the shipyard. A guard waved them through the gate.
The city’s current plan is to use 606 for two more years. A new home is being built for the SFPD crime lab and Traffic Division, and when it is complete, in 2020, the Police Department will vacate 606. For now, the lease is active, and the SFPD pays $12,325 per month in rent.
Most of the retired cops hadn’t been back to the shipyard in years, and some hadn’t seen each other for a while. Standing in front of 606, telling stories, joking around a bit, they started to open up. Behind them, people inside the building could be seen going about their workday.
“I’m worried now,” said Mel Bautista, a retired Honda Unit officer who spent 12 years at the shipyard. “I want to live for a while.”
Across the street to the west, crows circled above a tall pile of dirt next to an empty building. “I’m concerned,” Swiatko said, before a gust of wind rippled his jacket. He laughed and shrugged. “But what can be done?”
Former dirt-bike cop Richard Tong, 66, clasped his hands behind his back.
“I think that the city could be a lot more honest with us,” he said in a careful, quiet voice. “If there is contamination out here, let us know about it. Get us out of here, OK? ... I always thought the city took care of their people who took care of their people. We’re taking care of the people out in the public. Why aren’t they taking care of us?”
Aside from the new houses back at the main gate, little about the shipyard seemed to have changed, the cops said. The dirt and empty buildings, the fields, 606 itself.
After the picture-taking was done, the former cops got into their cars and drove away, passing a sign on the shipyard’s back gate: “The Navy is no longer inspecting or maintaining this property at the levels of an operational naval base. Safety hazards may be present.”
A reunion