Bradley Angel
I grew up in the 1960s. When I was a kid, I would turn on the TV and I would see the Vietnam War. It outraged me. I became more aware of other issues in my neighborhood. My mom, my best friend’s mom and two daughters, [and] my other best friend’s dad got cancer at the same time. Where I live, [there are] a lot of young moms who got cancer and died. Greenaction for Health Environment Justice was formed in late 1997 by people from urban rural and Indigenous communities on the frontlines of pollution and injustice around California and Arizona. The people who founded Greenaction come from communities that are affected. That’s a beautiful thing.
A lot of our leadership is sick. A number have died recently from cancer. It reminds us every day why the struggle continues.
What are the environmental issues at the Hunters Point Shipyard?
In the ‘50s when United States military was involved in atomic bomb tests in the Pacific, many of t h o s e ships came back to the Hunters Point Shipyard and were sandblasted. They were refurbished and the atomic bomb residue was dumped there. And the Navy conducted years of radiological testing.
The most contaminated parcel is what’s called parcel E2. That’s where the old landfill was. Parcel E2 is the hottest of the hotspots. We believe that nobody knows the extent of the contamination there.
The Lennar Corporation, one of the mega-developers, hooked up with the city and county of San Francisco and other politicians to do a development called the Shipyard. The idea is to build thousands and thousands of mostly upscale luxury homes. Some have been built already on parcels that have been deemed clean.
We’re not so sure about that. Maybe it is, maybe it’s not.
One of the main federal [nuclear remediation] contractors is Tetra Tech. Tetra Tech falsified hundreds of radioactive soil samples at the Hunters Point Shipyard. [In] 2016, the U.S. EPA and the State Department of Toxics [Dept of Toxic Substances and Control] announced an agreement with the Navy to put a halt on all further transfers of parcels to the city, to Lennar, because now they actually don’t know if what [the Navy] had said for years was true.
They continue to claim it’s safe. The government is pretending [to] See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil. When the government and the company says everything’s fine, we don’t believe that.
At an event that we had out at the shipyard, one of Lennar’s main spokespeople professed ignorance of the fire that burned underground for months. I don’t know which is worse: if he knew about it and wasn’t telling me, or if he was sincere and didn’t know about it.
Thank goodness that many organizations and residents, including community experts, have done research. Community knowledge has really been invaluable.
Greenaction and the Bayview Hunters Point Mothers and Fathers Committee, Bayview Community Advocates, Literacy for Environmental Justice, Dr. Tompkins and many others have joined together to oppose gentrification and call for better cleanup of the site.
The immediate demands are complete retesting of everything, with independent community oversight, because we don’t trust the government agencies as far as we can throw them.
You have a waterfront project on a Superfund site where they want to leave atomic bomb residue right by the waterfront threatened by sea level rise. It is a recipe for disaster. They plan on leaving large amounts of radioactive waste above health screening levels at the site, cover it with dirt, turn it into open space and build thousands of homes right around it.
We think that is unacceptable. Nobody should live there. In our opinion, they cannot properly clean it up. We don’t want to see the new residents poisoned, and we don’t want to see BayviewHunters Point gentrified.
Even if there wasn’t radioactive and toxic waste being left there the fact is that [if] you move thousands and thousands of upscale people into a low income people of color neighborhood, the whole neighborhood changes.
The people who are moving in are not from the community, and Third Street’s already starting to change. That trend will continue if Lennar and similar projects move forward. Gentrification has become a new threat. In so many ways gentrification and pollution is the double whammy.
New residents who have already moved into the Lennar Shipyard are now reaching out for information. A number of them said to us, “We weren’t told about all this. We were told everything’s fine.” They weren’t told about Tetra Tech falsifying hundreds of soil samples. They weren’t told about the radioactive and toxic waste that’s planned to be left at the site.
Now people are asking questions.
We want to see long term current and future residents protected.
What’s inspiring to us is that there’s been a lot of victories in Bayview-Hunters Point. The PG&E Hunters Point power plant is gone.
We now have a Hunters Point Environmental Justice Task Force that meets monthly where residents can go to an app on their smartphones and file pollution complaints and get results. So there’s been some progress, but the struggle continues.
Interview by Jin Zhu, Alexandra Lacey and Bean Crane
Edited by Bean Crane and Jin Zhu
Thread portrait by William Rhodes
