Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2000 21:38:41 -0700
From: Mary Ratcliff <editor@sfbayview.com>
Rally for Hunters Point Shipyard Cleanup!
Friday, Oct. 6, 5 p.m., Justin Herman Plaza, San Francisco
(Foot of Market Street, across from Ferry Building - Embarcadero BART Station)

A fire burning in a toxic, radioactive landfill at the Hunters Point Shipyard since Aug. 16 is poisoning this Black neighborhood, where cancer and asthma rates are already some of the highest in the world. The Navy can't put the fire out but plans to wait two years before deciding what to do. During Navy Fleet Week, the people tell the Navy, "Clean up your mess! Remove the toxic landfill now!"

Rally organizers include Community First Coalition, San Francisco Bay View newspaper, Bayview Advocates, Ujamaa, Global Exchange, Communities for a Better Environment, Arc Ecology, Greenaction, Rainforest Action Network, Media Alliance, Marie Harrison for Supervisor Campaign, Mission Agenda, Mission Anti-displacement Coalition, P.O.W.E.R., Literacy for Environmental Justice, Abalone Alliance Safe Energy Clearinghouse and more coming in by the minute.

Buses leave for the rally from Third St. and Oakdale in Hunters Point at 4:30 p.m.

For more information, call (415) 671-2862 and visit www.sfbayview.com and
www.electmarie.freeservers.com.

This week's editorial from the San Francisco Bay View tells why Hunters
Point needs your support:

Rally for Shipyard cleanup
Friday, Oct. 6, 5 p.m., Justin Herman Plaza

Editorial by Willie Ratcliff

Here in Hunters Point, people are sick. Since Aug. 16, when a 46-acre toxic landfill we didn't even know about at the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard burst into flames, hospitals have reported a sharp increase in patients who live in the fire zone. We know now that the fire had been burning for nearly a month before the Navy got around to notifying anyone, that the fire is probably still smoldering underground and that the Navy doesn't know how to put it out.

Babies are sick. Old folks are sick. Nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and life-threatening asthma attacks, the worst they have ever experienced, are the common complaints. The Navy's negligence is killing our people, and I am calling on President Clinton and Vice President and presidential candidate Gore to order the Navy to remove the landfill now! To make sure they get the message, we will rally on the Embarcadero during Fleet Week, when all eyes are on the Navy.

Next Friday, Oct. 6, at 5 p.m., the community and our supporters from around the Bay will meet at Justin Herman Plaza at the end of Market Street, across from the Ferry Building, to rally support for cleaning up the entire Shipyard to residential standards, the goal of Proposition P on the November ballot. Especially since news of the toxic fire got out, support for Prop P is flooding in from all directions. So is support for the rally. In just a day or two of phone calls and emails, organizers have picked up rally endorsements not only from home folks like the Bay View newspaper, Bayview Advocates, the Community First Coalition, Ujamaa and Literacy for Environmental Justice, but from such powerful progressive organizations as Global Exchange, the Green Party, Communities for a Better Environment, Arc Ecology, Greenaction, Media Alliance, P.O.W.E.R., and Mission Agenda and the Mission Anti-displacement Coalition. Remember when we joined the Mission to fight evictions, they promised Hunters Point, "The Mission got your back"?

This is it! This is the showdown we've waited decades for. I'm looking for every single Bay View reader - with family and friends in tow - to come to the rally. To make it easy, buses will be waiting for you at Third and Oakdale at 4:30 Friday afternoon to take you to the rally.

Bring a sign if you can. Tell the world we're rallying for total Shipyard cleanup and removal of the toxic landfill. We're rallying for the jobs and contracts and all the economic benefits that the laws governing cleanup and development of the Shipyard promise us. And we're rallying for all those precious lives we've lost to cancer and respiratory disease. Tell the world we didn't give our loved ones' lives to the Navy, the Navy's negligence took our loved ones' lives long before their time - and we demand reparations.

The Navy has no excuse. Their negligence turned a proud shipyard where our people built the liberty ships that won the war into a filthy Superfund site, one of the 10 most toxic sites in the country. The Navy's negligence created a dump where samples of surface water are testing right now at over 631 times the "trigger lever" or danger point for lead and extremely elevated levels of other heavy metals. The landfill also contains PCBs, pesticides, radioactive waste and plenty of sawdust to keep it burning for who knows how long.

No, the Navy has no excuse. They knowingly put all this poison in a community that is predominantly Black and 90 percent people of color. And they put it, with no protection, in the bed of what was in 1958 a pretty little stream flowing into San Francisco Bay through a pristine inlet.

That stream still flows into the Bay - through what is now the 46-acre toxic landfill, picking up poisons and carrying them out into the Bay to permeate the fish that our people catch every day to feed their families.

The existence of the stream and the inlet was news to us. There is no sign of the inlet today - it is filled with 1 million cubic yards of debris - and the fire, when it broke out, was reported as nothing more than a grass fire in an empty grassy field.

Will we get a response from Al Gore? I think we might. According to his campaign website, www.algore.com, he was "one of the first to tackle the issue of toxic waste," and the Superfund law is a "direct result." "As President, Al Gore will continue to work so that people everywhere are not at risk from environmental hazards simply because of their economic status or the color of their skin," the website promises.

And I expect that we'll get the attention of President Clinton, who pays particular heed to issues championed by the Rev. Jesse Jackson. Here's what Rev. Jackson has been working on, as reported in last week's Afro-American newspaper - their website is www. afroam.org - under the headline, "Jesse Jackson Helps Bury Landfill Proposal."

"Intervention from the Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. has helped bury a proposal that would have placed a landfill in a predominately African-American community in Alabama. Jackson had joined Tuskegee University President Dr. Benjamin F. Payton in blocking the plan, which would have resulted in the construction of one of the nation's largest dumps, in Macon County, Ala. The original proposal called for the dump to accept 10,000 tons of garbage daily from 31 states east of the Mississippi River, as far north as Boston. A later plan reducing it to 5,000 was also rejected. According to Tuskegee scientists, such a large concentration of waste material would have had serious effects on the area's drinking water, soil and air, as well as affected the health of residents. Jackson said the matter was not about "Black and White,' but "right and wrong.'"

At several public meetings, the EPA's top representative has told us that the EPA wants the Navy to clean up the most toxic parts of the Shipyard first, especially the landfill. Instead, the Navy has been cleaning the cleanest areas first, planning to turn them over to the City for development of homes and businesses.

Olin Webb of Bayview Advocates agrees that the Navy's priority list is upside down. He says that if the plan proceeds to build 1,800 homes now, while our people remain locked out of the jobs, contracts and ownership, the Shipyard will be gentrified, with other folks living in the homes we should have the opportunity to build and own. And those other folks will soon be as sick as we are, so long as the recalcitrant Navy refuses to remove the landfill. Navy spokesmen still say they won't begin to make a decision about the landfill until April of 2002.

We can't wait. Like the people of Alabama, we intend to win the war against environmental racism. Come to the rally Friday and tell the Navy, "Don't dump on us any more. Remove the toxic landfill now!"

Director, ABCDpac

Since Aug. 16 a fire has been burning in the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, and not just any old kind of fire. What makes this fire so different is the fact that it is in a landfill and a toxic landfill at that. Now as if that alone were not bad enough,  the Navy never told the community that surrounds the Shipyard a word about this fire for over three weeks, a fire that has the potential to harm more than this generation - generations to come.

Tonight Milton Meyer Gym at the top of Hunters Point was filled with neighborhood residents - I’ve never seen our community more powerful - who came out on a mission, saying, “This time they’ve gone too far.” This time there was no doubt in the minds of this once bustling community that it’s time to take a stand - together.

This community, which came to have the highest rate of homeownership in all of San Francisco, is a predominately African American community, where most of the residents came from out of the South looking for and finding prosperity working for the Navy, where everyone who wanted to work could and did - with the Navy.

However, when the government decided to close down the Shipyard, the community was quickly forgotten. The community that had built the liberty ships, the highly skilled workers who had been the life blood of the Shipyard, were now out of work and barred by racism from the majority of other jobs.

Most of this community’s folks never regained the economic balance lost by the closure and the continual disregard for their lives. Still they stayed in Hunters Point, not about to let anyone starve them out of the place they had put down roots, one of the most beautiful places on earth to live.

Now we know that for 42 years, the Navy has been burying toxic garbage in a landfill at the Shipyard that lies within a few hundred yards of the homes of thousands of people. In 1958, 42 years ago, the 46 acres that the landfill covers today was not land at all; it was a beautiful inlet of San Francisco Bay. The toxins in that landfill - one of the main reasons the Shipyard is a federal Superfund site - have been leaching out into the Bay ever since.

Poisoning the Bay is part of the Navy’s pattern of negligence - not to mention the years the Navy employed residents of this neighborhood to work in this landfill - apparently not caring that many of them have died of cancer - and all the thousands of men and women who worked at the Shipyard in and around asbestos and other hazardous materials that we know cause cancer.

To say that this community was outraged that the Navy let this landfill burn for over three weeks before telling anyone is to put it too mildly. These are the descendants of the original Shipyard workers, and they were furious.

The Navy, the EPA, the City Health Department, the Fire Department - all of them know that this neighborhood has the highest breast cancer rate in African American women under the age of 50 years anywhere. They can see that every third or fourth child in school has some kind of breathing problem. They know that three Superfund sites are here within walking distance of each other.

They certainly should know from their own and other government literature that this landfill contains some of the deadliest poisons known. But from the attitudes of some of the experts at the head table this evening, one would think that we knew more about what was put there than the Navy.

This community showed up to tell the Navy, the City, Redevelopment and all of the regulatory staff people there that we want the landfill removed and the entire Shipyard cleaned up, and we want it done now - not two years from now, as suggested by Lee H. Saunders, environmental public affairs officer for the Navy.

That was the first bombshell of the evening. Bay View publisher Willie Ratcliff handed out flyers with Saunders’ answer to a question posed to the Navy by our editor: “Is the Navy making plans to remove the landfill? Will it be removed soon?” Answer: “The Navy is addressing the fire as an emergency situation at this time. Evaluation of all potential final remedies will be presented in a Feasibility Study in about the April 2002 time frame. The community will have the opportunity to comment on the alternatives. It would be premature for the Navy to presume a remedy at this time in the process.”

Not only from me, but each and every one in that room said, “No, it can’t happen like that.” Then from the back of the room a voice sounded out saying, “Not on your last dime. You don’t have to live here. We do. We want to stay here - and we want you to get this s--t out of here and get it out now. First you didn’t think enough of us to even tell us that there was a danger until over three weeks later. And now, is the fire still going on?”

From Mr. Richard Mach, the Navy’s environmental coordinator, who by the way is in charge of the Shipyard and all that goes on there, all we heard was, “We don’t know” after he was asked two or three times, “Is the fire out?” It seemed that all night long all we could get out of the experts is, “We don’t know.”  “What are the long term health effects to me and to the children?” Once again, “I don’t know,” said the doctor who heads up the Environmental Health Division of the City’s Health Department.

A mother with a newborn asked how can she care for her baby when she is sick from the fire? She wanted to know would they care for her child if she were to get even sicker. “How about my child, if she gets sick and I am too? Who will care for her or me?” Once again we heard from the Health Department, “I don’t know. I can’t tell you anything because I don’t have all the data from the Navy.”

Ray Tompkins, teacher, scientist, and member of the community health task force, asked, “Who is doing the testing? How, and what method are you using?” The answer was, “The Navy is doing the testing.” Isn’t that like asking the fox to guard the henhouse? No one will believe that the Navy will tell on itself.

“Where is the independent testing?” Answer from the EPA: “We have some of the same testing, so we are.” The more he questioned them, the more it appeared that we would not get an honorable answer. At that point, Mr. Tompkins told the Navy and the EPA that he was sorry but that “if you were in my class I would have to fail you.”

For the rest of the night - the meeting ended after three hours and with many residents still wanting to speak

- there were no real good answers, nor did it look like we would get any. People asked, “Why don’t we and why didn’t we have a first response?” “Do you honestly think that we are stupid enough to believe that the officer on duty, who most likely is a Navy man, did not tell you that this toxic dump was burning until two weeks later? And what happened to him?” “If the fire was not harmful to the community, then why was each firefighter instructed to put on a mask after only minutes of being in this fire?” No answer was given to that. “What about the groundwater, and what happened to all the water that was pumped into the ground?

“Where did it go?” asked Theresa Coleman of Ujamaa Resident Management Corp., “and why didn’t you tell someone? Oh,” she said, “suppose I’m illiterate, you still could have called me or faxed the information to me, and I would have walked my Black a-- all over this hill to tell my family and extended family and this community that you don’t care about.”

All in all, it was a night with very few answers, but it served to unite this community once again, just as it used to be. So thank you all not just for coming out but for doing your own thinking, asking real good questions, taking a strong stand and demanding that the Navy and this City clean up this mess and do it now. You made me feel proud. You showed them that we are still a family and are willing to do whatever it takes to save ourselves.

Thank you, but we’d rather do it ourselves. This means clean it up. The Navy will spend, as they say, as much as it takes. We think that we should have those jobs, and that we should be paid for our work. Now a request to you: Since the experts know very little about what is in the landfill and how dangerous it is, we’d like to talk to people who worked in the landfill. Ask them to call us. Or if they’ve passed on, still give us a call.

Words to think about

Sen. Ted Kennedy said at the Democratic convention, “Let’s not support any policy that benefits the few at the expense of the many.”

We say no to a 2002 feasibility study. Remove the landfill. We know what we want and we know when we want it: NOW!

Email Marie at marie@sfbayview.com, visit her website at
http://www.electmarie.freeservers.com, or call her at (415) 822-8126.