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"It's clear those contaminants will move to the bay because of the capping of the sewer pipe," Popkin said, explaining what he feels is the biggest environmental risk associated with the Giants' project. (Regional Water Quality Control Board staffers disagree.)
The next week, Popkin went to the board -- an agency with which he has regular contact -- and got a huge surprise.
He learned that the board's standards on all sorts of pollutants and procedures -- on the distance between sampling wells, and on the levels of contaminants allowed to remain in the soil and ground water, for example -- had changed. He was told the changes were all part of the regulatory agency's move to be more lenient with developers, so industrial sites would no longer lie fallow.
These were major regulatory changes that had occurred so quickly and quietly that Popkin, a veteran environmental consultant and hydrologist, had not known of them.
"I felt like Rip Van Winkle," said Popkin.
Nowhere in the three-volume, 1,614-page environmental impact report on the Giants stadium or the five-volume report by Geomatrix does the team or the consulting firm actually discuss the environmental impact of the project.
That is, those reports don't say word one about what the chemicals in the soil and water at the stadium site -- chemicals at levels that vastly exceed applicable state and federal standards -- can and possibly will do to the aquatic life in the area.
In fact, the EIR says very little about wildlife at all. The discussion of traffic around the new ballpark takes 609 pages of the environmental report. The description of wildlife takes two.
Most of the toxins found at the stadium sight are harmful to the reproductive capabilities of fish and birds. Many of the heavy metals and other pollutants found in the area can accumulate in animals as they travel higher up the food chain.
For example, mercury in the mud of the bay bottom can be ingested by a filter-feeding algae. This will be picked up by fish who feed on the algae and accumulate further in sea lions who feed on the fish. These toxics aren't excreted; so with each passing year, the levels grow higher and higher until, as has happened, entire populations in an area drop precipitously or simply disappear.
Perhaps the biggest oversight in assessing the potential for ecological harm was this: Geomatrix discussed the risks posed by individual chemicals it found in elevated levels. It took those individual chemicals and compared them to the nearest applicable standards and found them, individually, to be within a comfort range.
Greg Karras, the lead biologist for Communities for a Better Environment, says the real threat represented by the pollutants buried at the Giants ballpark lies in a combination of all of the chemicals there -- and those already found in the sediment in China Basin. That pollutants can have a cumulative impact is not a new or wacky theory; it is well-established science.
Geomatrix and the Giants didn't make any effort to calculate the cumulative effects of a possible release of the toxics contained in the soil and water beneath the new ballpark.
When asked why, the Giants consultant said, "Although the possibility exists that an additive effect could result from simultaneous exposure to multiple chemicals of potential ecological concern, current practice is to evaluate [toxic] risks individually using conservative water quality criteria comparisons in screening-level ecological risk evaluations."
In other words: They did not study such effects, because they didn't have to.
