Jason Fagone and Cynthia Dizikes Sep. 13, 2018 Updated: Sep. 14, 2018 9:39 a.m. San Francisco Chronicle
Approximate location of the deck marker located just outside the submarine barracks where the workers who cleaned the radiation on ships sent to Hunters Point Shipyard after the nuclear tests in the pacific were cleaned. Ironically the builder ( Lennar) of the New Construction had their onsite headquarters in one of these barracks where the nuclear radiation contaminated workers ate their lunch. I wonder if their workers knew they were headquartered on one of the most nuclear contaminated buildings on the site? Generally they were designed to be a buffer zone between the contaminated portions of the base where workers would shower and change clothes after they spent the day sandblasting the radiation off of the ships. Eventually the Navy gave up on the ships that were the target of the nuclear blasts and sank them off the coast of most of the ports on the west coast of the US.
The USS Indianapolis that was cleaned at Hunters Point and then sunk at what is now the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. The Navy stuffed the ship with thousands of barrels of nuclear waste when they sent it to the bottom of the Bay and they also dumped the barrels off the Farallon Islands where unfortunately they are only a few hundred feet in depth well within the range of fishing vessels for the Bay Area.
The Article:
“A highly radioactive object has been discovered at the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard next to a housing area that has been declared safe and free of radioactive contamination for more than a decade, The Chronicle has learned. The finding is the latest problem at San Francisco’s most ambitious redevelopment project in a century — an effort to transform a 500-acre Superfund waste site into a bustling waterfront neighborhood of 12,000 homes.”
“The housing area is known as Parcel A. The California Department of Public Health is scanning it for radioactivity after revelations that employees of the Navy’s main cleanup contractor, Tetra Tech, faked radiation measurements in other parts of the shipyard. Parcel A residents and city officials demanded a test after whistle-blowers and media reports raised the possibility that some of those problems may have extended to Parcel A, where 300 housing units have been completed and an additional 150 are under construction.But the discovery of a radium device is startling because the city and multiple government agencies have said for years that any contamination on Parcel A was cleaned up long ago. The Navy transferred the 75-acre parcel to the city in 2004. The land is now owned by home builder and developer Lennar Corp. Public officials have repeatedly assured residents that no harmful radioactivity exists near their homes and they have nothing to worry about.”
Disaster Area 