City of San Francisco Officials, City Staff, Politicians and their families, why do you think your are immune to radiation? It is not just for poor people, it is an equal opportunity killer and you were exposed.
Lennar builders couldn’t have picked a worse site to locate their site office at Hunters point Shipyard, the Submarine Barracks, the decontamination chamber for the dock workers who sandblasted the radioactive ships from the Atomic Bomb tests in the Pacific.
If you worked for Lennar, or if you were a city official, or staff for the politicians, or a politician, and their families who did photo ops on the shipyard, you will need to watch out for cancer for the rest of your lives. That means telling your doctor that you were needlessly exposed to the products of an Atomic Bomb:
EPA Facts about Plutonium
EPA Facts About Strontium 90
EPA Facts about Cesium 137
EPA Facts about Cobalt 60
The procedure was simple, you walked in one side, changed out of your street clothes and into work clothes. Early on they had the same laundry but they soon realized that washing radioactive clothing only just contaminated the existing laundry of the shipyard so they had to build one exclusively for the radioactive laundry of work clothes.
Here is a video by the Navy on decontamination note this is a training film. https://youtu.be/vKkjPvAgVPg
It was at the San Francisco Navy Shipyard that engineers from the Navy, the Medical Corps located at 50 Fell Street in San Francisco. BuMed trained Graduates of the Naval Academy to use RADIAC devices to measure radiation, professors from UC Berkeley and Stanford University and Radiologists figured out how to clean up a ship contaminated by an Atomic Bomb. This had not been done before, so their techniques were particularly hazardous, and everything was learned by trial and error and hence most of the people who took the most risks were dead by 1957.
San Francisco was the headquarters and they sent out orders to other Navy bases that received ships from Operations Crossroads the Bikini Island blasts of 1946. They include:
In San Francisco this included
Hunters Point Shipyard the submarine Barracks were used for decontamination and the Navy used them again in the Korean War to train Navy Divers so the Navy at the time had little regard for safety, it was not until people started to die in large numbers that the standards for safe radiation were established and instituted but the navy’s safe levels of radiation were always higher than the Atomic Energy commission. They could not admit they were wrong!
Treasure Island where the Independence was scraped clean and thus exposed the entire island and that part of the bay to radioactive sandblast on the wind. It also means that the buildings near the docks were used as decontamination chambers.
Mare island which received the submarines used in Operation Crossroads. Mare Island would later go on to build 17 nuclear submarines. A lot of movies were filmed at Mare Island, I wonder if the actors know what happened to them.
- Pearl Harbor also in later tests the Naval Air Station cleaned airplanes and there is a public beach right next to it where the radiation washed off to the ocean.
- Bremerton (Puget Sound Navy Base) where one ship the Bayfield was not initially cleaned with fire hosing to wash off the ship and the entire crew was needlessly exposed to enough radiation to hospitalize the crew when they came into harbor.
- San Diego
- Terminal Island which is in LA
- Port Hueneme which is at Oxnard CA
- Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands
- Guam
- Norfolk, VA which still uses a contaminated ship for training.
If you worked at the shipyard, you walked into a barracks building with the H shaped building with an extra section in the middle of the map above, and that is where you ate your lunch, they had the workers wash their hands but they were still contaminated and is probably the principle way the shipyard workers ingested the alpha particles of the plutonium that caused all the cancer in Bayview/Hunters Point area, that sandblast sand got in the wind and blew all over the place, but these barracks are where they washed it off.
Plutonium is one of the most toxic substances in the world, a gram of it can kill around 40,000 people as it gets into your system and lodges in bones and causes cancer all over your body. The last thing you want to do is place people in a building where that stuff existed en masse.
After work they would come into the barracks, take off the work clothes and then shower and make sure they cleaned under the finger nails and other places and a radiation monitor, a Medical officer with a Geiger counter would check to make sure they washed off the nuclear radiation. Then when they got the clean Bill of Health, they could dress into their street clothes on the other side of the shower complex.
Bill of Health, in the Navy, procedures are called Bills, where everything is written down on how to proceed with a step by step analysis of what to do.
I know that Nancy Pelosi sent her son and grandchildren and her staff onto the Shipyard for photo ops, they too will have to be checked for cancer for the rest of their lives.
When the Navy closed the shipyard and handed it over to the City, all of the documents detailing the contamination were in the National Archives and it was assumed that the city read them. Most of it was all written down by the Navy and declassified by 1969.
Why build on a toxic waste site?
Disaster Area 