Dr. Ahimsa Sumchai
By Dr. Ahimsa Sumchai, guest editorial
June 26, 2009
Due to the presence of hazardous materials, the Hunters Point Shipyard was placed on the National Priorities List in 1989 and designated a federal Superfund site pursuant to the Comprehensive Environmental Response and Liability Act (CERCLA). Under CERCLA, the U.S. Navy can conduct emergency and time-critical removal actions, called TICRA’s, to expedite the removal of hazards to human health and the environment at the shipyard.
The Hunters Point Shipyard Restoration Advisory Board (RAB) was formed as a result of Congressional legislation under jurisdiction of the Base Realignment and Closure Process. The Hunters Point RAB is an elected body with a volatile history of advocating on behalf of the environmental health, public safety and economic development of the Bayview community. Indeed, meetings of the RAB were held in the community room of the Bayview police station for years despite community objection.
In 2001, monthly RAB meetings were relocated to the historic Diago Mary’s restaurant overlooking the shipyard entrance and the San Francisco Bay. Bartenders at Diago Mary’s were instructed not to serve alcohol to RAB members during fierce debates with representatives of the U.S. Navy, the Environmental Protection Agency, and other state and federal regulatory agencies.
The National Contingency Plan, the regulation that governs the cleanup of a toxic site, establishes community acceptance as one of its nine principal criteria. On November 7, 2000, 87 percent of the San Francisco electorate voted in support of Proposition P, a declaration of policy calling for the environmental cleanup to residential standards of the Hunters Point Shipyard to enable its unrestricted use.
In a letter dated May 22, 2009, Navy representatives announced their intention to dissolve the RAB. This is not the first time the Navy has threatened to take this action. Indeed, whenever a critical impasse had arisen regarding key shipyard cleanup matters, a threat to disband the elected body recognized by Congress as the legitimate organized voice for public comment, dissent and scientific debate, has been made.
“It’s time to sue the Navy!”
– Willie Ratcliff, Publisher, SF Bayview Newspaper
During a Monday, June 22, 2009 press conference inspired by the people’s revolution in Iran, President Barack Hussein Obama affirmed that “those who stand up for justice are always on the right side of history.” Let history in Bayview Hunters Point memorialize the role that environmental justice pioneers like Espanola Jackson, Marie Harrison, Raymond Tompkins, Lynne Brown and Willie Ratcliff have played in fueling the eternal flame of the “green” revolution in southeast San Francisco.
On Monday, June 22, 2009, over two-thousand miles away, First Lady Michelle Obama visited Bret Harte Elementary School in Bayview Hunters Point. Her decision was made with 4 days advance notice and minimum fanfare, according to the 6/22/09 San Francisco Examiner.
What the local mainstream media failed to report is that beginning in January 2009, numerous letters, phone calls, emails and faxes were directed to the White House, top administrators of the federal EPA including Director Lisa Jackson and Federal Facilities Director John Reeder, the Agency For Toxic Substances Disease Registry (ATSDR), and the National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences, urging the federal government to investigate documented exposure of children attending daycare centers and schools within a one mile radius of the shipyard to airborne toxins generated by Navy operations and the negligent activities of the corrupt developer, Lennar Corporation.
Those communications included a list of schools and daycare centers located within a 1 mile radius of the Hunters Point Shipyard as well as a unanimous resolution passed by the San Francisco Board of Education in 2007 calling for a halt to grading and construction activities conducted by Lennar. That resolution garnered full support of the Board of Education despite opposition testimony by Health Director Mitchell Katz and a comical demonstration led by Reverend Amos Brown and the financially invested ministers of Lennar’s Tabernacle Group.
The school board resolution was predicated on testimony by parents, teachers, students, principals, building and grounds personnel and DPH public health nurses who documented an increased incidence of asthma, headaches, nosebleeds and school absences correlated with the onset of Lennar’s grading activities in 2006.
In February 2009, the Obama administration EPA announced its plans to monitor the air quality of selected schools in the nation. A request was made by this author to EPA director Lisa Jackson to include Bayview Hunters Point schools in such a program given their proximity to a toxic federal superfund site. Senator Barbara Boxer generated an email in February 2009 indicating her role in selection of candidate schools. Boxer’s staff reportedly met with representatives of the San Francisco Department of Public Health. In a May 18, 2009 letter to Alicia Schwartz of POWER, Boxer reaffirmed her commitment to protecting residents from toxins released into the environment by Lennar’s construction activities.
In a letter dated February 11, 2009, William Cibulas, Jr., Ph.D – Captain, U.S. Public Health Service and Director of Health Assessment for ATSDR wrote:
Dear Dr. Sumchai,
Thank you for your January 28, 2009 email to ATSDR regarding your concern for community residents and children attending one of the schools or daycare centers within one mile of the Hunters Point Shipyard, Parcel A, in San Francisco. You indicate your concern is due to the level of asbestos detected at a community air monitor adjacent to a residential complex on Donahue street between December 28th and December 30th 2008. This letter is sent to confirm our receipt of your petition request and provide information about how your request will be address.
Bret Harte Elementary School, where Mrs. Obama made her first San Francisco appearance as the nation’s First Lady, is one of the schools located within that 1 mile radius of shipyard activities. Located on Gilman Avenue, it houses 350 children aged 5 to 10 years up to 6 hours a day. Bret Harte pre-K houses an additional 215 children aged as young as 3 years old.
Of historical significance, the May 27, 2009 minutes of the Bayview Hunters Point Health and Environmental Task Force document that community scientist and RAB member Dr. Raymond Tompkins reported “an independent sampling of drinking water at Bret Harte School found extremely high lead presence in the water.”
The visit by the nation’s First Lady overlapped with a meeting held between Bayview community leaders and representatives of the Federal EPA on Thursday, June 18, 2009 to discuss the continued exceedences of toxic dust at the shipyard as documented by Department of Public Health on-line air monitoring data and the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD). Between May and June of 2009, five exceedences in asbestos levels triggered action by the Bay Area Air Quality Management District and are documented at BAAQMD air monitor HV4.
Attended by Minister Christopher Muhammad, Restoration Advisory Board community co-chair Leon Muhammad and long time RAB member Marie Harrison, the EPA produced a letter opposing the recent decision by the Department of the Navy to dissolve the Hunters Point RAB.
After clear cutting hundreds of trees from a once beautiful hilltop residential neighborhood, Lennar and its subcontractors leveled that hill – removing 30 feet of earth in a massive earth-moving operation without adequate dust control and without legally required dust monitoring.
In a letter dated August 20, 2007 to Kofi Bonner, Lennar/BVHP, L.L.C, DPH Director of Environmental Health Rajiv Bhatia issued a Notice of Violation (NOV) to Lennar based on inspections conducted that month to verify compliance with the Dust Control Plan. Inspectors observed trucks and other equipment “dumping and spreading soil on the hilltop portion of Parcel A” and witnessed “dust crossing the property boundary to Navy property without effective measures of control and visible dust for over 90 minutes without effective measures of control”.
Despite issuance of a NOV in 2007, the San Francisco Department of Public Health, influenced by its conflict of interest activities with Lennar, elected that same year to omit the posting of air monitoring data from community monitors, HV 9 and 10, when a series of astronomical exceedences in asbestos levels threatened to shut down Lennar’s operations.
DPH representatives argued the exceedences were the result of Navy operations and nearby trucking routes and could not be used to influence actions taken against the developer. Lost in the DPH reasoning was the human health and safety impact the neglected elevations in asbestos posed to the surrounding community and regions down wind of the toxic dust, including West Oakland.
As a result of this decision, and fueled by outrage generated by DPH efforts to conceal asbestos exceedences that occurred during the final weeks of the Lennar funded Proposition G campaign, the RAB voted unanimously in January 2009 to remove long time DPH regulator Amy Brownell from her permanent regulatory seat.
In June 2009, emails to Patrick Monk, R.N. and this author, the ATSDR affirmed it’s commitment to “evaluate human exposure to hazardous substances released into the environment and to stop or prevent such exposures to protect public health.” (ATSDR is a non-regulatory, federal public health agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services created by Congress in 1980 by Superfund legislation).
In 1994, ATSDR published a public health assessment for the Treasure Island Naval Station that identified the potential for exposure to hazardous substances from methane pockets in the Parcel E landfill as well as soil, groundwater and airborne contaminants.
In November 2000, the EPA requested that ATSDR evaluate sampling related to the 14-acre Parcel E landfill that burned for six hours on August 16, 2000 and continued to smolder for nearly one month. The Navy, with assistance from the San Francisco Department of Health and city government, attempted to minimize and conceal the Parcel E landfill fire. ATSDR determined that toxins released from the fire cold have caused short-term adverse health effects in people exposed.
In 2007, ATSDR reviewed the evaluation conducted by the California Department of Public Health site assessment investigation of grading operations at shipyard Parcel A. In a letter addressed to Rajiv Bhatia, M.D. ATSDR said: “ATSDR concurs with the essential findings, conclusions and recommendations made by CDPH regarding asbestos and dust levels. There was clear evidence that levels of asbestos exceeded mandated thresholds at both the fence line and in the community. The concentrations of dust could not be interpreted because of the sampling methods.”
District 10 Supervisorial candidate Espanola Jackson announced at a June 18, 2009 community meeting, the EPA prioritized over 600 schools nationwide for the air-monitoring program. No schools in Bayview made the list for reasons grounded in the cruel and inhumane politics surrounding Lennar-led city government efforts to dirty-transfer the shipyard to avoid the public and regulatory input in cleanup to health-based standards required for federal properties on the National Priorities List under CERCLA.
Signaling a new era in environmental enforcement, on June 17, 2009 the EPA accepted a complaint of racial discrimination filed by former RAB community co-chair Lynne Brown in 2004 against San Francisco Redevelopment Agency activities at the Hunters Point Shipyard.
On that same day, the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization released the announcement that for the first time the EPA had declared a public health emergency under CERCLA in Libby Montana where hundreds of cases of asbestos related disease were documented in the years 1979 through 1998 in two towns exposed to naturally occurring asbestos.
The Hunger Site
June 26, 2009 at 4:20 pm
NO MO FILL NO MO
Right on comadre.
My letter to Sue Neurath at CDC in support of your request for investigation into Lennar’s activities.
Dear Sue,
My name is Patrick Monk. I am a Hospice and Home Care RN Case Manager. My practice is making home visits to my patients and caring for their needs and those of their families. At any given time approximately half of my patients are residents of Bayview Hunter’s Point. I am a daily witness to to the ills suffered by so many in the community, many of which can be attributed to, or are at least exacerbated by:-
Decades of exposure to toxins released by the power plants, and now by Lennar;
The fact that the city has routinely used the area as a ‘dumping ground’;
The reality that the city has historically deprived the community of basic health and human services, and economic opportunity.
I am in the neighborhood making home visits at least three days a week. During Lennar’s recent construction activities there was a dramatic spike in incidences of increased respiratory distress suffered by many in the community, particularly children, elders and those who were already medically compromised. I urge you to expedite your investigation into the public health issues raised by Dr Sumchai, and pursue all and any avenues to bring to an end this poisoning of a defenseless population.
The disinformation, denials and cover up perpetrated by the Director of the SFDPH, “Doctor” Mitch Katz, in collusion with our current Mayor, is an absolute abomination. As a medical professional it is my opinion that he should be exhaustively investigated for malfeasence and dereliction of duty. He brings disgrace on the profession that many of us have chosen in order to protect the health and well-being of our friends and neighbors.
We have a codified ‘precautionary principle’ in place in San Francisco. Many of our community ‘leaders’; elected, self-appointed, or bought and paid for; have ignored it.
“Doctor” Katz has compounded his guilt by violating one of the basic tenents of his sworn acceptence of the Hippocratic Oath. “First Do No Harm”.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
It is a matter of Life or Death.
Patrick Monk.RN.