Tag: radium

LEGACY OF CONTAMINATION. A California Naval base shutters, and contamination lingers decades later/ Reuters

Article Link
Reuters looks into the nuclear contamination of the EPA Superfund site, Treasure Island which is in San Francisco Bay and it is being developed by contractors with close ties to Bay Area politicians. The City put low income housing on the former barracks and houses on the site. People are getting sick. The Navy and the city are trying to cover this up but kids are finding radioactive materials all over the island.

One girl who became ill had a jewelry box her “Treasure Box” with radium painted dials and radioactive beads. [Editors note: Fallout beads]

Disaster Area Editor:
Why would these be on Treasure Island? Treasure Island was the Navy’s Nuclear, Biological and Chemical training school. They are exactly the thing you need to train sailors on how to detect radiation and so they buried these things in the ground for the sailors to find. And that is the only way they could have been dug up by this little girl in her yard or on the playground at her school on Treasure Island.

Most military bases who operated ships and airplanes had radium painted dials and markers used to operate machines, engines etc in no-light situations. When they realized that these markers were radioactive and that they were dangerous, these bases removed them and buried them in the ground, with no care that it might spread the contamination into the water table.

Most EPA superfund sites for military bases have the radium dial markers as one of the things that make it a federal cleanup site. Usually there are others like PCBs (dioxin) and Trichloroethylene (TCE), unexploded ordinance (which is quite common in the Bay Area). You can search for these specific chemicals on the Envirostor website which is the State of California’s Toxic Waste site or on the GeoTracker site which covers California and federal cleanup sites. The Geotracker map shows little squares that indicate a toxic waste location and if you click on them it will show the name of the site.

Radioactive object found near homes at Hunters Point shipyard

Article Link:

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.”

List of Radioactive Fallout elements found at Hunter Point Shipyard in San Francisco

“The Great Majority of Hunters Point Sites Were Never Sampled for Radioactive Contamination
And the Testing That Was Performed Was Deeply Flawed” by Daniel Hirsch, Maria Caine, Taylor Altenbern, Haakon Williams, Devyn Gortner.
CommitteetoBridgetheGap.org PDF file October 2018 Pages 10 and 11.
“The Great Majority of Hunters Point Sites Were Never Sampled for Radioactive Contamination
And the Testing That Was Performed Was Deeply Flawed” by Daniel Hirsch, Maria Caine, Taylor Altenbern, Haakon Williams, Devyn Gortner.
CommitteetoBridgetheGap.org PDF file October 2018 Pages 10 and 11.
“The Great Majority of Hunters Point Sites Were Never Sampled for Radioactive Contamination
And the Testing That Was Performed Was Deeply Flawed” by Daniel Hirsch, Maria Caine, Taylor Altenbern, Haakon Williams, Devyn Gortner.
CommitteetoBridgetheGap.org PDF file October 2018 Pages 10 and 11.

In the report it details how the cleanup decided to remove from the public record the elements that had short half lives under the theory that after so many years they would not be as much of a threat. Not only is this illogical, it doesn’t even begin to conceive of the idea of how half lives work. These elements are present, some of them are made by the other elements as they decay, they do not just disappear after the stated time frame. It is idiotic. and it is reckless. And these elements have to be cleaned up before any housing can be built which is impossible. The best solution is get all of the people away from these areas and figure out a way to stop the elements from polluting further.
Basically the Navy nuked San Francisco and for some strange reason, Pelosi, Feinstein, Newsom, Willie Brown and Kamala Harris have people living on these sites.

Media silent as Navy digs 1,280 radiological objects from Treasure Island

Article Link https://sfbayview.com/2018/10/media-silent-as-navy-digs-1280-radiological-objects-from-treasure-island/
by Carol Harvey San Francisco Bay View; National Black Newspaper October 12, 2018

“In 2014, Don Wadsworth, radiation specialist, a Navy subcontractor and now whistleblower, told NBC Bay Area We Investigate reporter Vicki Nguyen that an object the Navy photographed at 1101 Bigelow Court was a million times above the EPA limits for human toleration. However, in its 2014 Historical Radiological Assessment Supplemental Technical Memorandum (HRASTM), Figure 10, the Navy documents only this photograph of one radioactive object at 1101 Bigelow Court. Despite the Navy’s disclaimer, imagine this radioactive object multiplied 1,280 times. That is the total number of radiological objects Treasure Island Environmental Project Manager cited in March 2018 that the Navy located between 2006 and 2018. At the Hunters Point Shipyard, a single “deck marker” like this one is slowing down or halting a $8 billion development.“

“At the March 2018 Treasure Island Restoration Advisory Board meeting, remediation project manager Dave Clark “recollected” that, between 2006 and 2016, the Navy unearthed 1,280 radiological objects, one for every two residents.”

Article contains many videos relating to the disaster, the last video in particular shows the radioactive lake created in the cleanup and the signs by the Navy warning of the radioactive site.

Media silent as Navy digs 1,280 radiological objects from Treasure Island

Former Contractors Claim Hunters Point Cleanup is Botched

https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/Former-Contractors-Claim-Hunters-Point-Cleanup-is-Botched-259871511.html

High-level technicians claim they documented numerous violations that put public health and safety at risk

High-level technicians claim they documented numerous violations that put public health and safety at risk
By Vicky Nguyen, Liz Wagner and Felipe Escamilla
Published May 19, 2014 at 5:31 PM | Updated at 2:45 PM PDT on May 23, 2014

“Taxpayers have spent nearly a quarter of a billion dollars on the toxic cleanup of Hunters Point, a prime piece of land along the southeastern shore of San Francisco. The former naval shipyard, which was once used as a research and testing lab for nuclear weapons, is now undergoing a renaissance. The city plans to turn the 800-acre site into a development mecca complete with new parks, retail stores and homes.

It is a massive project that’s decades in the making, but two high-level former technicians with intimate knowledge of the remediation effort say the cleanup is being botched and that the health and safety of the public is at risk because of it. Both say they wouldn’t live in or even visit the development planned for the site. In February, the Investigative Unit exposed that current workers also question the radiological cleanup of Hunters Point.”