- [Past Narrator] This is the key.
It is here that the military, and scientific personnel
of Joint Task Force One will conduct the tests
with the atomic bomb.
(rumbling)
- [Narrator] You've probably seen this footage.
In 1946, the United States began testing nuclear bombs
at the Marshall Islands, in the Pacific.
The military detonated a total
of 67 nukes there, over 12 years,
and in the process, they irradiated local island residents,
people involved in the testing,
Japanese fishermen, and even the islands themselves.
But that radiation is still causing problems today,
decades later, and far beyond the Marshall Islands.
It's front page news thousands of miles away.
- Some disturbing new revelations.
- [Narrator] It's let to whistle-blowers,
and angry government hearings.
- Shame on our supervisors!
- [Narrator] To a neighborhood
that feels poisoned by the government,
and to a case of ecological fraud
that sent two people to prison, so far.
- And I can tell when people are lying to me,
and you know what?
My bullshit meter just went off.
(booming)
(introspective music)
- [Narrator] This story takes place about 4,700 miles away
from the Marshall Islands, in San Francisco.
The city today is in the grips of a housing crisis.
The population is growing, land is at a premium,
and new housing is desperately needed,
and one of the biggest new developments is
in an area call Bayview-Hunters Point.
It's a classic gentrification story.
A brand new, expensive development, built next
to an established, lower income,
historically black community.
It's also the site of radioactive waste,
an alleged cover-up, and some criminal convictions.
Less classic.
- I mean, I couldn't believe it.
I really couldn't.
- [Narrator] Chris Roberts is a freelance reporter
who works with The Verge's sibling site, Curbed.
Chris has been reporting on this story since 2016,
when people familiar
with the Hunters Point developments started telling
him the same thing.
- They said, look, you should really look into this.
Things are bad, and they're worse
than they've been reported.
- [Narrator] The controversy stems
from the land the development sits on.
It's the site of a defunct naval shipyard,
at the edge of the Bayview-Hunters Point community.
Decades ago, the shipyard
actually helped created the neighborhood.
- People moved from all over the country
to work at the shipyard,
predominantly African American people.
During World War II, San Francisco's black population grew
by 600%.
Not only did the Navy transform Hunters Point,
Hunters Point transformed San Francisco.
- [Narrator] The shipyard was shut down back in 1989,
and soon after, city officials began eyeing it for housing.
It's been slow going, but the Navy handed the first parcel
of land over to the city in 2004.
And in 2014, a handful of condos
and town homes hit the market,
under the name, The San Francisco Shipyard.
But there's a problem that goes all the way back to this.
(booming)
In 1946, the US detonated a nuke under water
for the first time, to see what would happen
to a nearby fleet of abandoned ships.
The target ships were so badly contaminated,
that officials later called them radioactive stoves,
that would've burned all living things
aboard them with invisible
and painless, but deadly, radiation.
The solution, amazingly, was to tow some
of those ships all the way to the Hunters Point shipyard.
There, they went through a
pretty messy decontamination process.
- Which, at the time, was just a process
of literally blasting the holes
and the decks with a mixture of sand.
- [Narrator] There are different stories
about what happened to the sand after that, but according to
this massive Navy document, the sandblasting wastes were
generally packed up, and pitched, into the sea.
But some irradiated grit did settle elsewhere
on the shipyard land, and that's just from the nuke tests.
There was also radioactive paint left over
from ship building, contamination from fuels and pesticides,
and radioactive materials used
in lab experiments, and that's all on top
of the asbestos that's just naturally in the soil, there.
It's a toxic place, and in 1989, the EPA added the shipyard
to the Superfund list.
Chris has been sniffing out documentation
on all of this, some of which literally comes
out of dusty boxes at the National Archives, in San Bruno.
- This is the first box of six
that I'm working my way through.
I will be here for most of the day, now, today.
(ticking)
- [Narrator] All of the issues surrounding Hunters Point,
the nuclear legacy, this historic community,
the development frenzy, they all build
up to the present day, and then collide.
Cleaning up all that waste is a massive effort,
and the government hired a firm called Tetra Tech EC
to help, but a few years ago, whistle-blowers started coming
forward with claims of botched cleanup work by Tetra Tech.
- A whistle-blower is telling our investigative unit
that he detected radiological contamination--
- [Narrator] And reporters with NBC Bay Area got
their hands on an internal Tetra Tech report
that admitted Tetra Tech workers falsified soil tests.
NBC called it an apparent effort to declare the soil free
of radiological contamination when it may not have been.
The scandal has only gotten worse from there.
- Which really turns this case on its head--
- [Narrator] This past May, two supervisors
who worked for Tetra Tech were sentenced
to prison time for falsifying soil tests.
The whistle-blowers, for their part, alleged
that the fraud reached far beyond the two workers.
- Pack your office, and get off my project.
- [Narrator] The Navy reviewed Tetra Tech's work,
and initially found that about 30%
of the sites they checked were suspect.
The EPA did a review of their own,
and their numbers were worse.
- The EPA looked at the report, and said,
actually, we think it's closer to 95% to 97%
of the work done by Tetra Tech can't be trusted.
(phone ringing)
- [Narrator] The Navy told us that, at this point,
they're planning to check all of Tetra Tech's work.
- Well, we're going back to resample 100%
of the areas that they have worked on,
and that's gonna tell us, are these areas clean?
Did we take care of the problem in 2014,
or is there a lot more locations out there,
that need additional work?
- [Narrator] We also talked
to Tetra Tech's public relations person
for the scandal, Sam Singer.
He talked us in circles, put all the blame
for the faked tests on those two supervisors,
and denied just about everything else.
- Okay, but remember, you get to ask question,
but I get to give you my answers, okay?
That's the-- - But they're the same answers
every time.
- [Narrator] Meanwhile, the people of San Francisco have
not taken kindly to any of this.
In May, the city's board of supervisors held a hearing
to discuss the fiasco.
The whistle-blowers spoke their piece,
- From the Navy, like, what the heck happened?
- [Narrator] The public came out in force.
- We need authority, autonomy, or at least equity.
- [Narrator] And Tetra Tech's lawyer stormed
out to jeers from the audience.
- [Audience Members] Bye! Bye-bye!
Bye!
A great year.
- Hanging over all of this is a tricky question.
How dangerous is the contamination at the shipyard?
We talked to the Navy's technical liaison
to the community, Kathryn Higley.
She heads up the School of Nuclear Science and Engineering
at Oregon State University.
She says that radiation risk depends
on a few things, the type of radioactive material,
where it is, and how much someone could be exposed to.
She said that the amount of radioactive material found
on the site is actually pretty low,
and the Navy is confident that the community is safe.
Of course, the scandal complicates those assurances,
and it's put the new neighborhood in jeopardy.
(brooding music)
But there's also the old neighborhood to consider,
the original Bayview-Hunters Point community,
which lost a major employer when the shipyard closed,
and is now stuck next to an EPA Superfund site
that was never fully cleaned up.
- All of a sudden, the shipyard closes,
now you're really paying attention,
and the fathers are starting to get sick,
and you don't know why.
Mothers who worked in that shipyard are starting
to get sick, and you don't know why.
- [Narrator] Marie Harrison works
with environmental advocacy group, Greenaction,
and she was a long-time resident
of the neighborhood before moving inland.
She's watched the neighborhood struggle
with a lot of health issues,
higher-than-average asthma rates,
and problems with lung cancer, and heart failure,
to name just a few.
For Marie, it feels inescapable.
- In Bayview, almost every other person has asthma,
cancer, or something going on.
- [Narrator] The community has a lot more
than the shipyard to worry about.
It's still home to a wastewater treatment plant,
nearby freeways, and lots of other heavy industrial usage.
Connecting all those hazards
to specific health problems can be tricky,
but it's not hard to make some guesses.
- We don't have to be engineers and scientists,
because the one thing I can tell you
for a fact, is that we know what ails us.
- [Narrator] So ultimately, the shipyard revelations
just are not that novel.
The discovery of fraud is vindicating,
but it's not satisfying.
- And they had to wait
until the newspapers' reporters started
to put it out there, whistle-blowers.
There was so much stuff that had piled up
before they finally had to acknowledge
that we were telling the truth.
- [Narrator] For now, everyone involved is settling in,
for more rounds of testing, investigations,
and legal battles, but it's hard
to say if it will be enough,
if the people there will ever really trust the officials
who let them down in the first place.
- I still don't trust you, and you have
not made whole the wrongs that you've done back here.
They're still lurking, like a shadow in the dark.
- There's a lot of history around nuclear weapons testing,
that we didn't get a chance to talk about
in the video, but you can check out the documents, yourself.
We linked to them in the description,
so take a look, it's incredible what's in there.