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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.
