Navy finds radiological material in ‘unauthorized’ storage in SF

Community groups near Hunters Point issued a “call to action” Friday after the U.S. Navy disclosed “radiological material” was found in a cabinet at the former naval shipyard back in April.

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In a statement released in May, Navy officials said a contractor discovered “radiological material in a cabinet in a secure building” at the infamous Superfund site. They described the material as being found in “unauthorized” storage.

“The material was believed to be placed in the building by a former subcontractor at the site, and may have violated Radiological Material License requirements,” Navy officials said of the finding on April 8. They clarified the suspected subcontractor “was not authorized” to store the material in the building they were occupying at the time. Additionally they said “there are no public or contractor health and safety issues related to this incident” and the material was “unrelated to project work being done at any time over the course of cleanup operations.”

The Navy did not disclose what material the contractor found in the cabinet.

The Hunters Point shipyard has been shut down since 1991, with the Navy in charge of cleaning up the area, and its work overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency and California state regulatory agencies. For decades, the area was used as a ship repair yard and also as the site of the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory from 1946 to 1969. 

The area is now an EPA-designated Superfund site that encompasses nearly 900 acres after NRDL activities “contaminated soil, dust, sediments, surface water and groundwater” with multiple pollutants including heavy metals, pesticides, petroleum fuels and radionuclides. 

After demolishing and cleaning the site, the Navy is expected to turn over the land to San Francisco. Currently only one parcel, Parcel A, has been declared safe to be developed. That parcel was turned over to the city for development in 2004 and is the site of some newly built housing developments.

While the Navy pointed to a subcontractor as the reason the unauthorized material was just sitting in a cabinet, local community groups say they are fed up with the contentious cleanup and are planning a rally at City Hall on June 24.

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On Friday, the Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice group and Marie Harrison Community Foundation issued a call for action, announcing a rally and demanding community members have more say in the cleanup.

“We don’t trust them as far as we can throw them,” Bradley Angel, executive director of Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice, told SFGATE of the Navy. He highlighted past issues including a radioactive object found in 2018 in an area previously declared clean, and the 2017 guilty pleas by two subcontractors who admitted to falsifying reports. 

Last year, officials from the San Francisco Department of Public Health sent a sharply worded letter to the Navy after officials neglected for months to tell city leaders about airborne samples that showed high levels of plutonium. This year, the EPA those samples were actually caused by laboratory error. 

But Angel said he no longer trusts what federal and local officials say about the location. In the call to action, the two community groups made multiple demands, including reparations for people who had health issues related to the site, funds for community-led testing, and long-term studies of health impacts.

“We don’t trust the data,” Angel said.