Scattered across more than 600 acres in the city’s southeast corner, the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard is in a state of limbo, massive and crumbling, perched at bay’s edge, a relic of our industrial past and resistant to plans to join San Francisco’s future.
When the U.S. Navy was there from 1939 to 1974, with 8,000 civilian workers at its peak, it not only built and repaired ships, but also decontaminated the ones coming home from the Pacific Ocean’s nuclear-test sites. The Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory also conducted experiments there.
The shipyard has been a Superfund site since 1989. Here’s the Environmental Protection Agency’s report:
At many locations throughout the Shipyard, groundwater, bay sediments, and soil are contaminated with petroleum fuels, pesticides, heavy metals (such as lead and zinc), polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), or volatile organic compounds (VOCs) such as trichloroethylene, perchloroethylene, vinyl chloride, and carbon tetrachloride.
Much of the soil at the Shipyard originated from grading and flattening the nearby hills containing rock and soil known as serpentinite. Serpentinite rock contains naturally occurring asbestos and metals such as iron, nickel, zinc, and manganese.
Likely due to the activities of the NRDL, radionuclides such as Radium-226, Cesium-137, and Strontium-90 have been detected in low concentrations in soil and inside storm drains at the Shipyard.
Hand-off from the Navy to civilians, and then to developers, has been delayed. It turns out the main cleanup contractor mishandled contaminated soil and falsified reports. The city wants answers before it allows plans to proceed.
The shipyard also was the source of other people’s contamination: The atomic bomb “Little Boy” that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945 was shipped out (without its fissile components) from Hunters Point.
A tiny parcel of the site has been developed with dozens of townhouses and condos. The rest of it, twice the size of the Mission Bay neighborhood, has yet to be scrubbed clean — except in the promotional material from the developer, which mentions “extensive remediation and revitalization” but leaves out words like “radiation” and “contamination.”
The 12,100 homes and ambitious waterfront plans on the drawing board of famed architect David Adjaye are still years away. While still desolate, however, there are signs of life in the shipyard.
All images by Devon Kelley. Text by Devon Kelley and Alex Lash.
Devon Kelley is a San Francisco-based photographer, focused on urban, documentary, and landscape photography. She has a fascination with unknown or little-known spaces. You can follow her on Instagram here.
Alex Lash is the founder and editor in chief of The Frisc.