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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.
