Diseaseville 

Back in January 2002, a sewer backed up, flooding much of the first story of their home in Mariner's Village. The couple called their insurance agent, who sent a cleaning contractor to take care of the mess. The contractor ripped up the wet carpet and set up air blowers throughout the house, a fairly common response to a flood. But the home that Tisdell and Green-Peace shared is not a common one.

Originally part of the Hunters Point Shipyard, what is now Mariner's Village once was a collection of buildings that the U.S. Navy used for office, housing, and other purposes, some of which are unclear today. In September 1980, at the direction of then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein, the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency took possession of the property and turned the former Navy buildings into town houses, which were sold to low-income residents through a federally subsidized program. Shaaron Green-Peace bought her home in 1998.

After the cracked sewer pipes that had caused the flooding were replaced, Tisdell and Green-Peace, still trying to dry their belongings, soon began smelling and tasting something oddly foul. "My tongue would just start swelling up and tingling," Green-Peace says. "There was like this burning inside my mouth."

A few months later, the couple's insurance company sent an investigator; eventually, the couple learned that the tile underneath the carpeting, likely part of the original Navy building, was laced with asbestos. In the floodwaters, asbestos loosened from the flooring as it disintegrated, and once the water was gone, the contractor blew the dried asbestos throughout the house. It became clear that the home was uninhabitable.

Tisdell and Green-Peace filed a lawsuit against their homeowners' association over the flood and subsequent damages and have been living in the parking lot since their insurance payments ran out last year. As their housing disaster continued, they learned another unsettling fact: Earlier this year, researchers found that a Navy radiation lab headquartered just down the hill at the shipyard once stored materials of an as-yet-unknown type in the area where Tisdell and Green-Peace now live.

Tisdell, a former Marine of significant size, is not a shy man. He sits on an advisory board that deals with issues regarding the ongoing environmental cleanup of the former Hunters Point Shipyard, which the Navy wants to turn over to local control. He has been known to take both the military and the city's Redevelopment Agency to task over environmental and health concerns. Clearly, his passion is born of a frustration fed, in part, by his living situation. "Why would the asthma rate be so great up here in Mariner's Village?" he asks rhetorically, standing in the parking lot above the shipyard. "A lot of people have skin problems up here that go away when you go somewhere else.

"They need to make the homeowners feel that this is a safe environment. That way, the only thing we have to worry about is the shipyard. We don't have to worry about where we stay."

In the 1940s, the Hunters Point Shipyard was a mainstay of the Navy's Pacific fleet and offered a steady supply of industrial jobs to blue-collar workers, many of them African-American; those jobs spawned an adjoining residential community. In 1974, the base closed, putting hundreds of people out of work, but the neighborhood of Hunters Point remained. For the past decade, the Navy has been engaged in a massive environmental cleanup of the former shipyard property, considered by many observers to be one of the most thoroughly contaminated sites in the country.

Mounting evidence strongly suggests that the shipyard's legacy of pollution spreads beyond its current boundaries. Many of the properties in the neighboring community of Hunters Point were originally part of the naval base. Those properties, long in private hands, have not been tested for pollution, even though they were once part of a shipyard so contaminated that it has been placed on the Environmental Protection Agency's National Priority List for environmental remediation.

Now, new research shows that the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, an applied nuclear research facility that handled, and more than occasionally mishandled, a wide variety of nuclear poisons, operated outside of the shipyard's present boundaries, in the area of what is now Mariner's Village. It is unclear precisely what NRDL operations were conducted there.

And because of complicated laws governing the environmental cleanup and transfer of military land and limited funding for environmental investigation, it may be years before the implicated Hunters Point properties can be reviewed for possible contamination.

In most cases, it is all but impossible to pinpoint a direct link between an environmental toxin and a particular illness. Because there has been no testing, it is impossible to say what, if any, pollutants exist on former shipyard land turned over to private use. There are a large number of pollution sources in southeast San Francisco, including an aging electric power plant.

But it seems highly likely that some environmental contaminant -- or set of contaminants -- is affecting the health of people who live in the Bayview and Hunters Point neighborhoods of San Francisco. Chronic asthma is rampant here. Lung cancer and heart disease, which can have environmental causes, are more prevalent in Bayview and Hunters Point than anywhere else in San Francisco. Less common diseases, like sarcoidosis, an illness that causes inflammation of the body's tissue, often in the lungs, also seem to show up more frequently among inhabitants of these neighborhoods. And one simple fact is known: Many of these residents live on what used to be Navy land that was not thoroughly screened for hazardous materials before it was moved to the private sector.

ARC Ecology, a nonprofit San Francisco environmental group that has sued the Navy over other issues related to the Hunters Point Shipyard cleanup, plans to submit a petition to the Department of Defense, requesting a full testing for possible toxins on shipyard property now in private hands. The petition is the first step in a long legal process prescribed by federal law to get the military to examine and clean up its former properties.

"The thing for us is that you look at Mariner's Village and hear all these stories about people's health," ARC Director Saul Bloom says. "Now we know that it was a radiological business. We'd like to get to the bottom of what is contaminating the property, rather than just leaving well enough alone.

"We already have people dying out there."

In 1999, the Bayview Hunters Point Health and Environmental Assessment Task Force, composed of representatives of the San Francisco Department of Public Health, UCSF, and members of the community, performed the most comprehensive health survey of the area ever done. Among those surveyed, nearly one in five households reported having at least one resident with health problems believed to be attributable to pollution or environmental toxins. Health experts contacted by SF Weekly were unable to cite comparable studies for other urban areas.

But the Bayview­Hunters Point survey showed that 10 percent of residents -- or twice the national average of people in urban areas -- have asthma. Among children, researchers discovered, the numbers increase to 15 percent, meaning roughly one in every seven Hunters Point children is afflicted with asthma. Nationwide, that figure is closer to 9 percent, according to a 2001 survey by the national Centers for Disease Control.

But the researchers haven't determined the reasons for the elevated asthma rates.

"We didn't set out to answer the smoking-gun questions," says Kevin Grumbach, a University of California physician who led the survey. "My sense is that people want the smoking-causes-lung-cancer type of story -- the dioxin in the shipyard is giving me this, or pollution from the power plant is giving me that. And no one can say definitively not. But science hasn't proven these connections. It's just not so clear."

The survey included nearly 1,000 residents in some 250 randomly selected households of Bayview­Hunters Point. A majority of those surveyed, 69 percent, were African-American. Another 16 percent were Asian. Nearly half of the households surveyed reported incomes of between $15,000 to $50,000, and only 17 percent had annual incomes above $50,000.

The results found that Bayview­ Hunters Point residents had diabetes and high blood pressure in rates higher than the national average, though more closely in line with other African-American populations. Still, the survey found that half of all elderly residents in the area had high blood pressure. Given the neighborhood's proximity to hazardous-waste sites, the survey's authors noted that the high rates of disease, including asthma, were "of great concern."

In a 1997 study by Tomas Aragon, a physician and researcher in the San Francisco Department of Public Health's Office of Chronic Disease Epidemiology, Bayview­Hunters Point residents showed higher death rates associated with heart disease and lung cancer than did average San Franciscans. Heart disease, the study showed, is the leading cause of death among both male and female residents in Bayview­Hunters Point.

The high death and disease rates are not necessarily related to a lack of health care. In fact, the overwhelming majority of residents surveyed in 1999 (87 percent) reported having a regular source of health care.

Given Bayview­Hunters Point's health and pollution problems, it should come as small surprise that nearly half of the area's residents rated government efforts at environmental cleanup as "poor." And there is plenty to clean up in Hunters Point, among the most historically polluted neighborhoods in Northern California.

In addition to the shipyard -- itself a 500-acre Superfund site -- the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reports that 126 hazardous-waste handlers have operated in the area. For decades, a 70-year-old Pacific Gas & Electric power plant that looms over the shoreline along Evans Avenue sent nitrogen oxide and other pollutants into the air. Increased congestion from the 101 and 280 freeways has further polluted the community's air.

Now, a study of the nuclear history of the shipyard, done in connection with the cleanup of existing shipyard sites, has turned up documents that shed new light on the Hunters Point neighborhood. Research into the shipyard's radiation laboratory has shown that it had operations on properties that were transferred out of military control decades ago (see "Hot News," SF Weekly, March 19). Some community members argue that the new information makes it necessary for the military to conduct environmental testing on areas beyond the boundaries of its present cleanup.

The properties that are now Mariner's Village and the surrounding hillside were transferred to the private sector decades ago; neither federal nor state environmental regulators tested or cleared the area of contamination, because at the time of the transfer, such testing and clearing were not legally required, as they are now.

So there is no proof that Mariner's Village is contaminated, or that cleanup at the shipyard has spread contamination, or that whatever contaminants do exist there have made residents sick. But anecdotally, neighbors made a connection with the shipyard long ago. "The more they disturbed the surroundings at the shipyard [over the years], seemed like everybody got sick with something up there," says longtime resident Laura Helm.

Old Navy Road ran along the side of the hill above the south end of the Hunters Point Shipyard; today, its only remnants are random squares of concrete hidden in grass and weeds. But in the decades following World War II, African-American men from the South and Midwest came to work at the shipyard, and they and their families lived on Old Navy Road, in what had been quarters for enlisted men that the San Francisco Housing Authority had turned into homes. Former residents remember that each rectangular building housed eight families on two floors.

The homes had spectacular bay views, and children played up and down the hill in front of them. That hill descended to a concrete bunker of a building that served, until 1969, as the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, the military's largest facility for applied nuclear research. Beyond that, residents remember, were animal pens where the Navy kept sheep and cows used in experiments. Early on, there was a tannery and slaughterhouses down the hill, just outside the shipyard gates. Some of the fathers gathered scraps of cowhide from the tannery and made knife sheaths or moccasins.

Jesse Mason's family lived on Old Navy Road when he came into the world in 1947. His father, Wilbur, was a laborer on the dry dock at Hunters Point Shipyard; he'd come from Louisiana with Jesse's mother, Bertha, for the promise of a good-paying job in the shipyard. Wilbur Mason died in a construction accident in 1971. Bertha Mason suffers from asthma and sarcoidosis. Decades ago, Jesse and his siblings moved their mother to South San Francisco, where they believe the air and weather are better. Two of Jesse's nephews, both of whom had lived on the hill, also have asthma; another died of bone cancer.

A man whose enthusiasm somehow makes him seem taller and younger than he is, the 56-year-old Mason attends community meetings without fail. Dressed in a worn leather bomber jacket, with missing fingers as proof of a career in construction work, Mason provides a running oral history of the Hunters Point neighborhood and its residents. It seems entirely possible that he knows everyone who has grown up here and every project ever started, stopped, abandoned, or completed.

Behind a desk awash in papers, Mason ticks off the dead and the afflicted in families other than his own. Stuck for an answer to a specific question, he punches numbers on a phone and consults his older sister, Dorothy, who fills in names of yet more former neighbors who've been stricken with serious illness. Sickness has become a significant part of the history of Hunters Point; it's embedded in the narrative of virtually any retelling of events. So many people are ill with so many dreadful diseases that, to some extent, widespread infirmity is considered ordinary.

Laura Helm, who is 54, grew up down the street from Jesse Mason and now lives on the other side of the hill. Her father and uncle worked in the shipyard; both died of cancer. Helm's daughter has lupus, an autoimmune disease that can be environmentally triggered and causes inflammation, pain, and tissue damage throughout the body. Her brother has asthma. Like Mason's mother, Helm suffers from sarcoidosis. So does one of her former neighbors. None of these afflictions was present in previous generations of her family, Helm says.

Helm's childhood neighbor is Janice McClough Chappell, whose family moved from Old Navy Road when she was 13 years old. She subsequently lived in other sections of Bayview­Hunters Point before moving to the East Bay.

Her late father, who had emphysema and other respiratory problems, worked in the shipyard. So did her uncle, who, before his death, suffered from asthma. Another brother recently died of respiratory illness.

"There were four children when we left [Old Navy Road]," the 53-year-old Chappell remembers. "We could stay out all day, but had to be in by dark. We used to play all down around there. There was still Navy right outside the gate. I can still remember talk back then about finding radioactive things around the area that kids weren't supposed to play with."

Federal law holds the government responsible for cleaning up hazardous waste on its property, regardless of how long ago the government polluted. But under the bureaucratic structure of the Department of Defense, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers manages the investigation and cleanup of former military bases, or, as they would be called in defense-speak, FUDS (Formerly Used Defense Sites). So although the Navy is cleaning up the former Hunters Point Shipyard, responsibility for surrounding property that had been part of the base, but was transferred to private hands before the shipyard cleanup began in 1994, falls to the Corps.

The last and largest building to serve as headquarters for the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, which handled a vast array of long-lived nuclear materials while experimenting with radiation in the early years of the Cold War, is located at the southwest border of the shipyard, on a FUDS. The building and surrounding land, just down the hill from Old Navy Road, are owned by an investment group. The building, now leased to a storage company, has been cleared of radiological contamination, but the surrounding property has never been investigated for radiological or other contamination.

Earlier this year, Navy officials researching historical documents in conjunction with the shipyard cleanup discovered that the NRDL also used former shipyard buildings in the area around what is now the Mariner's Village town houses. The buildings -- located in an area now bounded by Donahue and Earl streets and LaSalle and Jerrold avenues -- were demolished in 1952. Navy officials say the buildings were occupied by the Material and Accounts Division of NRDL, which was in charge of administrative tasks rather than laboratory operations. But there is no way to know all of what happened more than 50 years ago at any given shipyard facility; other former NRDL sites discovered on the base have proven to be contaminated.

The path to an investigation of possible contamination at Mariner's Village is long, winding, and obstructed by miles of red tape.

Any property that the military used before 1988, and that has a connection to hazardous, toxic, or radioactive materials, is cataloged in the Army Corps of Engineers' FUDS inventory. Once the property is cataloged, the Corps prepares a cost estimate for an environmental investigation of the FUDS, and the investigation awaits federal funding. In this region alone, which covers Northern California, Utah, and Nevada, there are 435 FUDS sharing an annual environmental investigation budget of $20 million, says Jerry Vincent, who oversees FUDS property for the Army in this area.

"If I have funding, it takes three or four months [to investigate]," explains Vincent. "If not, it could be years."

San Francisco Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader in the House of Representatives, says she will support whatever funding the Department of Defense needs to clean up former shipyard property released to the private sector without proper screening. During the past four years, Pelosi, working with Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, has secured $225 million for cleaning and revitalizing the shipyard. "The possible presence of toxic materials is a matter of serious concern to me and to the residents of Bayview­Hunters Point," Pelosi says. "If there is contamination of these parcels, I will work in Congress to identify the appropriate federal agencies and funding to clean it up."

Residents and environmental activists familiar with the situation are appalled that the Department of Defense has not made it a priority to investigate possible pollution of a community it helped create.

ARC Ecology's Bloom notes that the military's role in the creation of Hunters Point as a residential neighborhood -- bringing African-Americans to the area to labor in the shipyard -- makes its failure to conduct a timely environmental investigation particularly egregious.

"The military created that community smack dab against the shipyard, so for any of the airborne and soil-borne pollutants, they [the residents] were on the front lines," Bloom says. "[Workers] brought home the contaminants on their shoes and in their clothes, so that their families are on the front lines too."

Essie Webb moved to Hunters Point in 1946. Her husband had already begun work as a welder at Hunters Point Shipyard by the time Webb arrived from Missouri with their 10-month-old son, Olin. Webb recalls going to the San Francisco Housing Authority office on Kiska Road and being settled into the buildings on Old Navy Road. She lived there with her family, which would grow to include five of her own and three adopted children, until 1973.

"To me, it was very nice," Webb recalls. "It was a very secure neighborhood, because you knew everyone who lived there. We all kind of looked after each other and each other's children. We would lock the door, and the key was put in the mailbox or under the doormat. It was that kind of neighborhood. You could trust each other."

In addition to raising eight children, Webb managed to participate in civic work through the public schools, the Redevelopment Agency, and the Housing Authority, where she sat on the Relocation Appeals Board hearing complaints of tenants who believed they'd been improperly evicted. At 85, she knows all about sickness in Hunters Point.

"I have grandchildren who have asthma," Webb says. "And I had asthma when I lived up on the hill."

Webb helped with the Bayview Hunters Point Health and Environmental Assessment Task Force's health survey. The results were no surprise to her. She lists off the names of relatives, friends, and neighbors who've had cancer and asthma and diabetes over the years, with little effort.

"Health problems have gotten a lot worse," Webb says. "Just about everybody I knew who lived up there had cancer or asthma. A lot of people still have cancer and asthma."

Webb would like to see environmental testing done, but she's not anticipating drastic change any time soon. The shipyard has been a part of this neighborhood for longer than she has. So has pollution, and so has disease. In fact, the shipyard's history is so intertwined with the community that what might be striking revelations about environmental contamination for another neighborhood are, in Hunters Point, unsurprising additions to a legacy of gradual poisoning.

"I know they [shipyard workers] had lots of dumping in the water and in the ground that polluted. Neighbors and friends told us about it. We just didn't think about it," Webb says. "People were more concerned about making a living."