Dragon Bites: A Beautiful Day to Be Irradiated
BY MARK ATHITAKIS, JOHN MECKLIN AND JEREMY MULLMAN

SF Weekly
From the Week of Wednesday, June 13, 2025

A Beautiful Day to Be Irradiated

It was a warm, sunny day with a light breeze, and the view from the high ground there alongside Innes Avenue had me squinting across the bay in pleasure. Way out in the pale blue water, shimmering silver reflections played around small whitecaps, creating a light dance that might have had me standing there for hours, just staring, if I'd been sure that, standing there for hours, I would not be inhaling radioactive dust particles.

As it was, I stayed just long enough to hear Saul Bloom, executive director of the environmental group Arc Ecology, an attorney representing the group, and several citizens with reason to be upset explain to a clutch of reporters the latest incident in a gathering scandal that has largely escaped the keen gaze of the city's mainstream press. Bloom, et al., were commenting on an incident that transpired in May, when contractors working on the Navy's cleanup of Hunters Point Shipyard dug into a layer of sandblast grit of the type known as "Black Beauty." Beauty, in this case, is certainly in the eye of the beholders; the grit subsequently was tested, and found to be radioactive at 30 times the background level to be expected at the site.

It's long been known that the Navy sandblasted ships used as targets in atomic bomb tests in the South Pacific at the Hunters Point Shipyard. In fact, in early May, SF Weekly published "Fallout," an investigative series by Lisa Davis that revealed serious mishandling of nuclear material, including contaminated sandblast waste, by a top-secret defense laboratory at Hunters Point.

It's been made abundantly clear that there is community and governmental concern about radioactivity at the shipyard. On May 21, U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi released a letter that she and U.S. Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer signed, asking the Navy a series of pointed questions that seemed to come straight out of the pages of "Fallout."

But the Navy reacted to Black Beauty the way the Navy has been wont to react whenever bad things happen at Hunters Point. "Fallout" and the congressional letter notwithstanding, despite a late-May meeting with community members at which nuclear contamination of the shipyard was a primary topic, when the Black Beauty tested radioactive, Navy officials chose to say not one public thing -- for weeks.

During those weeks, however, whistle-blowers were providing Arc Ecology with evidence about the radioactive incident. So, with a peaceful, sunny view of the bay (and some trenches containing Black Beauty) as a backdrop, the environmental group announced last week that it intends to sue contractors working on the shipyard cleanup, alleging they failed to inform workers and the public about the nuclear find, as required by law. The prospective lawsuit got some (muted) notice in the mainstream press. Whether it got the Navy's attention is doubtful.

The shipyard landfill -- a landfill known to contain many dangerous contaminants, and suspected of containing nuclear waste -- caught fire last summer, sending smoke over a nearby neighborhood for weeks before the Navy thought to tell anyone. Last Thursday, the EPA said it would fine the Navy for its failure to report the fire the crushing total of $25,000 -- or, less than one-fiftieth of 1 percent of the $150 million the Navy has spent studying and cleaning the base since it closed in 1974.
--John Mecklin

http://www.sfweekly.com/issues/2001-06-13/dogbites.html