UNITED FOR A HEALTHY SHIPYARD Press Release

Press conference Tuesday, Nov. 16, 10 a.m., on the steps of City Hall



One story filled nearly the entire front page of the Sunday Chronicle on Oct. 3: “Too young to die” startled San Franciscans with some bad news on infant mortality: “Babies are 2.5 times more likely to die in their first year there (in Bayview Hunters Point) than those in other areas of San Francisco, a Chronicle analysis of 10 years of state data shows.”



That analysis discovered an infant mortality cluster: “Within yards of each other … five families have lost a total of eight babies.” They lived in homes “overlooking the contaminated remains of the now-closed naval shipyard … a Superfund cleanup site where the military once experimented with radiation.”



The Chronicle pointed to this “dumping ground for industrial pollutants” as a likely cause of BVHP residents’ “elevated rates of asthma, diabetes and cervical and breast cancer” as well as infant mortality.



Despite this evidence that the Shipyard is contributing to Third World rates of infant mortality and deadly illnesses, the City continues its headlong rush to transfer Parcel A of the Shipyard away from the Navy, which is legally obligated to clean it up to residents’ satisfaction, and to turn it over immediately to Florida homebuilder Lennar for the municipal bond-funded construction of 1,600 homes.



Alarmed residents will hold a press conference Tuesday, Nov. 16, at 10 a.m. on the steps of City Hall to call on the City to stop the transfer and development of the Shipyard until it is thoroughly clean and to immediately address these dire threats to public health. Later that day, at 3 p.m. in Room 300 of 101 Grove St., they will testify when the Health Commission takes up the issue of the Shipyard Redevelopment Project.



The San Francisco Department of Public Health, according to statements made by its representative Saturday at a Shipyard Citizens Advisory Committee workshop, is unconcerned about the public health threats raised recently by the Chronicle and raised but ignored for years by residents themselves. Residents want to know why the department is ignoring their health and the health of 1,600 more families who, if transfer and development of Parcel A goes forward, will be living adjacent and even closer than current residents to the Shipyard’s toxic, radioactive 46-acre Parcel E landfill, one of the most contaminated sites in the country.



Residents call on the press to remind readers, listeners and viewers that the dangers of failing to remove the landfill are not confined to Bayview Hunters Point. Radiological and other contaminants, airborne and waterborne, threaten the entire Bay Area. Recognizing that area-wide danger, 87% of San Francisco voters approved Prop P in 2000 calling for cleanup of the entire Shipyard to residential standards before any of it is transferred or developed.



Dr. Betty McGee, executive director of the Bayview Hunters Point Health and Environmental Resource Center (HERC), reports back from a Nov. 4-6 conference in New Jersey on “Breast Cancer and the Environment” in a story that will appear in the Nov. 17 Bay View newspaper that “scientists are now speaking up and opening new avenues of research to confirm suspected environmental causation of breast cancer. …



“A combination of government indifference and corporate propaganda has brainwashed people of color into believing that conclusive evidence regarding breast cancer and other illnesses does not exist. As a result, environmental polluters continue to pollute, while communities wait for conclusive and scientific evidence. This rationale is no longer acceptable. The time has come for victims to speak out about what is really going on with our health and what we believe to be the cause. … No more under-the-table deals in exchange for so many illnesses and deaths as a result of community environmental contamination.”



A new report, “State of Evidence 2004: What is the Connection Between the Environment and Breast Cancer,” published Oct. 7 by the Breast Cancer Fund and Breast Cancer Action, details evidence from 21 research studies published since February 2003 that link toxins in the environment, including chlorinated chemicals and radiation found in nuclear fallout from 1950 to 1991, to the 90% increase in breast cancer rates in the U.S. during that period.

The Health Commission is being asked not to adopt the CEQA findings in the Final Environmental Impact Reports for Phase I Development of the Shipyard that purposefully excluded documentation of the radiological hazards on Parcels A and B, including the presence of six radiation-impacted buildings on or immediately adjacent to Parcel A - three of which have not been cleared by the California Department of Health Services - and documented elevated gamma radiation counts on Parcel B.

Residents are also calling on the Navy to follow the EPA’s recommendation to “clean the worst first” and remove the 46-acre landfill. Under CERCLA, the Superfund law, the Navy has already implemented emergency removal actions for smaller radioactive landfills on Parcel E. Now the community is demanding that the Navy conduct a time-critical removal action to excavate the Parcel E landfill prior to the construction of new homes on Parcel A.