‘Toxic Land’: Protest Targets SF Housing Plans at Contaminated Hunters Point Naval Shipyard

At a community advisory meeting last week, the Navy revealed it discovered about 200 radiological items, including samples of uranium, and dozens of jars of other substances. The items were found in a 4,000-square-foot annex called Building 400A. Navy officials said in a statement that the items were “unrelated to project work being done at any time over the course of the cleanup.”

The materials were likely placed in the building by a former subcontractor, officials with the Navy said. They also said the subcontractor was not authorized to store the material on site and that there are “no public or contractor health and safety issues related to this incident.” The exact materials found were not disclosed.

Michael Pound, the Navy’s environmental coordinator for the area, said the Navy and its contractors will evaluate the materials, develop a plan to dispose of them and create a summary report. He adds that the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency are also developing evaluations.

“I’m not in a position to declare something illegal,” Pound said. “I can just say that they did not have authorization to have those materials in that building.”

Though he was invited, San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie didn’t turn up at the rally. Instead, the city sent Lila Hussain, senior project manager for the shipyard with the Office of Community Investment and Infrastructure, who said she came to “listen to all the voices” there and to work with agencies and the public. She said her department will review the reports on the contamination and share them with the community.

Arieann Harrison, executive director of the Marie Harrison Community Foundation, said she was skeptical of the Navy’s claim that a subcontractor brought in the material.

“I don’t believe that,” Harrison said. “We’ve been here before, and this is like history repeating itself. Because this fight has been going on generationally, we need to take another look and another approach at what’s actually been transpiring amongst long-term residents in District 10.”

Theo Ellington grew up in the area and is running for the District 10 supervisor’s seat. He said the community deserves transparency from the Navy and the city.

“We’ve lived with contamination, pollution, broken promises and unanswered questions,” Ellington said. “Every time we think we’re getting closer, we learn that there is still more work to do. And so today, we are demanding that our government do right by the people it serves.”

During the Cold War, the soil and groundwater of the 866-acre Hunters Point site — as well as surface water and sediment in the San Francisco Bay — were contaminated with radioactive chemicals, heavy metals and petroleum fuels from ships brought to the yard after atomic bomb tests. The base was declared one of the nation’s most contaminated sites in 1989.

Thursday’s announcement is just the latest in a decades-long effort to clean up the site. Last year, San Francisco officials and advocates raised alarms that the Navy had failed to alert the public to high levels of airborne radioactive material detected at the site almost a year earlier.

In 2023, the Navy unearthed two radioactive objects there. Early last year, the Navy, for the first time, acknowledged what Bay Area climate scientists and residents had asked the agency to investigate for years: In just over a decade, potentially toxic groundwater could surface there, partly due to human-caused climate change.

Back in 2022, the San Francisco Civil Grand Jury issued a report alerting the public that groundwater rise — a result of sea levels rising in response to global emissions melting ice caps and expanding oceans — could have significant effects on the site in the coming decades.

The latest findings raise fresh questions about the city’s plans to build thousands of homes amid an exceedingly complex and ongoing cleanup effort. When finished, the 693-acre Candlestick Point-Hunters Point Shipyard project — which the Superfund site is part of — could have more than 10,000 housing units.

The development would include two new waterfront neighborhoods with housing and retail, along with over 340 acres of parks and open space.

Harrison said building housing on top of any lingering radioactive contamination is unacceptable.

“This is not a call against development,” organizers wrote in a press release. “This is a call for truth. This is a call for science. This is a call for transparency. And above all, this is a call for environmental justice.”